Crude World

by Peter Maass

  This is what is supposed to happen—a company acknowledging and correcting its errors. But Finlayson’s we’re-sorry-and-we’ve-learned-our-lesson narrative has been repeated by Shell executives since the killing of Saro-Wiwa in 1995. My visit to Sangama had introduced me to a fresh example of the company’s dissembling.

  I reminded Finlayson of the army attack, just a month earlier, on King Tom’s village, adjacent to the Soku gas plant operated by Shell. King Tom had told me that Shell provided money, food and other support to soldiers who guarded Soku and who were involved in the assault on his village. I mentioned to Finlayson that this would seem to align Shell with a brutal military attack.

  Finlayson responded quickly.

  “We do not pay for troops, we do not provide any arms or other lethal support. It is not right for commercial companies to do so.”

  Does that mean a ban on “nonlethal” support for troops?

  “We do provide accommodations and we do feed troops when they are protecting our operations. We do obviously request protection where we feel our operations are under threat.”

  It seemed an odd distinction, to pay for everything but the soldiers’ bullets and then deny any responsibility for violence committed by the soldiers. Finlayson knew this was an awkward position for a multinational that wished to be viewed as politically neutral. Like any multinational, Shell would like to be known as a good corporate citizen, not as the funder of military pogroms.

  Finlayson’s hale demeanor had gone somber. I mentioned that King Tom had said that company helicopters had flown into the plant to evacuate workers a few hours before the attack. If Shell had advance knowledge of the attack and had failed to warn civilians who were in the line of fire, its silence would seem to prove, once more, the king’s charge that Shell was an accomplice to the army attack.

  Finlayson selected his words slowly, as though each one was run through a filter before leaving his lips.

  “We had intelligence that government activity was increasing in the area. We had no idea where the activity was going to be, but we knew that the area around the gas plant was at risk. We took the action of protecting our own staff and flying people out. But we don’t know what the military are going to do, we don’t know where they’re going to do it.”

  The Soku plant, which was part of a multibillion-dollar gas project, consisted of high-pressure pipes and tanks filled with flammable and explosive materials—mainly natural gas. It is difficult to imagine that the army would not let Shell know of an imminent attack that would present grave risks to the Soku facility and the workers there. And it is almost unimaginable that Shell would not contact the army to ask about rumors it had heard of military activity that would involve the detonation of a considerable amount of munitions along the fence line of one of the largest gas installations in Africa.

  I rephrased the question.

  “The military did not tell you ahead of this attack to do what you needed to do to evacuate the plant?”

  The voice of Shell replied firmly.

  “No, definitely not.”

  Once it has started, rot is hard to stop, whether in a body or a nation.

  The truce in late 2004 allowed Asari to live openly in Port Harcourt, where he even had a police escort when he went about town. Asari told me it would not last, and that Nigeria would get more violent, sicker. He evoked South Africa when it was ruled by a minority white regime. “I’ve been to South Africa,” he said. “I have been to Soweto. Everywhere I went, I said to South Africans, ‘We can switch positions. Apartheid was one hundred percent better than what is going on in Nigeria.’” Asari was known to wield a fine quote, but his point was germane. Nelson Mandela was freed by his white jailers. Saro-Wiwa, the delta’s emancipation leader, was hanged by his Nigerian captors. And less than a year after Asari warned me that worse was to come, security forces arrested him on charges of treason. His followers responded by occupying oil facilities and warning, in a particularly vibrant statement, of “grave mayhem” in which their enemies would be fed to vultures. A new rebel group announced itself, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), and embarked on a campaign that was far more violent than the one led by Asari. In MEND’s first months, more than sixty Western oil workers were kidnapped. Car bombs, which were all but unknown in Nigeria, were detonated against military and oil targets. To placate the rebels, the government eventually released Asari from jail. The violence continued, fiercer than before. Nigeria’s decomposition seemed unstoppable.

  Until the drillers arrived, the Oriente region of Ecuador was an undisturbed rain forest inhabited by indigenous Indian tribes, mainly the Cofán, Huaorani, Secoya, Siona and Quichua. Tens of thousands of Indians were sprinkled through a lush expanse of trees and streams in an area as large as Rhode Island. No roads penetrated very deeply into the area, so the Indians lived in relative seclusion, except for occasional explorers, who did not all have the benefit of surviving their explorations. But in the early 1960s, the absence of roads did not stymie a new sort of visitor. These were American geologists who used helicopters to drop into the Oriente, and when they found what they were looking for the government awarded Texaco a twenty-eight-year concession to extract the region’s oil.

  The world offers a multitude of environmental disasters created by extractive industries that dig for oil, gold, silver or other minerals. Calling these events “tragedies” may not be right, because the word implies a course of events that went in an unexpected direction, like an early death, a sudden landslide, a plane crash. Mineral ecocides have happened often enough and predictably enough to be cast as the order of things. In countries too weak to control powerful industries that tend to behave responsibly only if they are required to, the invasion of bulldozers and other machines of extraction is a disaster foretold. The unexpected twist in the story of the Oriente is that an unprecedented lawsuit might provide a measure of justice.

  • • •

  Quito, the capital of Ecuador, sits atop the Andes, more than nine thousand feet above sea level. Driving east from the city, one passes a succession of high-altitude valleys that have the stark grandeur of an Ansel Adams photograph, albeit with an occasional llama. The winding two-lane road, with flimsy guardrails that wouldn’t halt a tricycle, descends to the Amazon basin in ill-mannered serpentines. As the terrain flattens, the cloud forests of the Andes morph into a steamy infection of shacks, cattle, farms and people. Curving alongside the highway is a thick pipeline filled with petroleum that is used as an elevated walkway by kids and adults who don’t want to get stuck in the mud along the road. They walk, literally and magically, on a path of oil.

  This is the Trans-Ecuadorian Oil Pipeline System, known by its Spanish acronym, SOTE. More than three hundred miles long, it was built in the 1970s. In 2003 it gained a twin that doubled Ecuador’s export capacity, transporting Oriente oil over the Andes to the Pacific port of Esmeraldas. Ecuador now produces 500,000 barrels a day, with the largest portion of exports going to California. Whether it is irony, parody or farce, one of the most environmentally conscious states in America depends on oil from a region that has suffered a catastrophe to provide it. Ecuadoreans are not amused; the pipelines are used as billboards for graffiti of the anti-imperialist sort, such as “The oil belongs to the people.”

  Oil spill in the Oriente region of Ecuador

  These two pipelines are akin to aortas connected to a network of steel veins that move oil from the wells and processing stations spread over the humid flatlands. The smaller pipelines aren’t underground or routed away from roads and people, as they would be in a richer, better-run country. They rest on rickety pylons one or two feet high and just a few feet—or sometimes inches—from the roads. If you swerve into one of these pipes to avoid a pothole or lose control of your vehicle because you are drunk, you will create an oil spill. (It happens all the time.) Collisions are not necessary to create spills, because the pipelines are old and poorly maintained; they leak constan
tly. Until the 1990s, local residents say the environmental carelessness even involved the spraying of oil on dirt roads, so as to suppress the waves of dust that rose from them.

  In the beginning, there was a misbegotten pioneering ethos. A new world was being carved out of the jungle; this was what progress was supposed to be. Hundreds of miles of new roads perforated the jungle, along with wells, waste pits, pipelines and processing stations. Boom-towns sprang up to house and entertain the thousands of construction and oil workers, and these insta-towns had the typical frontier accessories, including seedy bars, prostitutes and violence of the drunken sort. In a nod to the corporate creator of all these things, the regional capital was called Lago Agrio, which was the Spanish translation of the name of the American town where Texaco was born: Sour Lake. The transformation was accelerated by settlers who followed the oil roads. It is an irony of extractive industries that some of the damage they trigger is caused not by their own pollution but by settlement that is the result of opening up once-remote areas. “When a road is built, the settlers immediately come,” a rain-forest activist told me. “And when they arrive, there is no control on the cutting of trees. That’s how deforestation happens.” Ecuador’s government encouraged this process. To prevent Colombia from invading the mineral-rich region and to relieve overpopulation elsewhere in Ecuador, the government gave land to anyone who cleared the jungle and started farming.

  During extraction, water is pumped into oil fields to force out the crude, and when the oil comes up, so does “produced water”—a constant burp of oil, salt and metals that can include benzene, chromium 6 and mercury. In less spry fields, as much as 90 percent of the liquid that comes out of the ground can be produced water, not oil. Instead of reinjecting the tainted water into the reservoirs or filtering out contaminants—standard practices now, and done in other countries back then as well—Texaco dumped the brew into unlined waste pits or poured it directly into the Amazon’s rivers, according to environmental activists who are suing Texaco. More than 18 billion gallons of waste-water were disposed of in this way, they say, as well as 16 million gallons of oil—far more than the Exxon Valdez supertanker spilled into Prince William Sound. Texaco was lucky, because if you tip oil into Alaska’s waters, everyone knows about it and cares deeply. In the Amazon in the 1970s and 1980s, not so much.

  In Ecuador, Texaco burned off at the surface the natural gas that accompanied the oil when it came out of the ground, just as Shell did in the Niger Delta. As I mentioned earlier, if the amounts are large, as they were in the Oriente, they can be deadly for the environment as well as for the people who live nearby. In the Oriente, the burning of natural gas was so unrestrained and unmonitored that there is no reliable estimate of the amount of toxins released into the air.

  It may not be much of an exaggeration to say that the rain forest was Texaco’s rubbish bin. But that is not the worst part of the story.

  In Lago Agrio I met Donald Moncayo, a leader of the Amazon Defense Front (also known as the Frente). Like any citizens’ group whose name includes the words “Front” and “Defense,” it was a no-frills outfit that operated out of a few chaotic rooms in a two-story building that had a warning sign at its entrance: “Site Under Surveillance.” In case a visitor wasn’t sure who was doing the surveilling, the sign helpfully showed an army tank. The Frente was involved in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Chevron (which completed a merger with Texaco in 2001) and counted among its adversaries not just the American oil giant but the Ecuadorean military, which at the time of my visit had lucrative security contracts with Chevron and other oil companies.

  Moncayo, who was in his early thirties, had been raised in Lago Agrio because his father had gone there to find a better life. As a boy, Moncayo swam in a river that had veins of oil; the locals were unaware of the health hazards of the dark goo that was showing up in their previously pristine waterways. Moncayo worked briefly in the oil industry, which was the largest employer in Lago Agrio, but soon left for the ranks of environmental activists. It was not a lucrative choice—Moncayo now lived in a wooden shack with no running water or electricity, and when I stopped by one day, a very large pig was napping by his front door.

  It was time for my Toxic Tour—this is the term Moncayo uses to describe the inspections he arranges for journalists. You could call Moncayo my toxic guide. We bounced in my rented 4×4 over the red dirt roads that crisscross the feeble jungles around Lago Agrio, trundling past rickety homesteads made of salvaged wooden slats. Most of these shacks did not have water, electricity, glass windows or mosquito nets; they were glorified lean-tos in which people lived their entire lives, deriving no benefit and, in fact, much misery from the oil a few thousand feet under the earthen floors of their homes. They looked impassively at me, another gringo who would come and go.

  Our first stop was a dirt field the size of a soccer pitch that had, at its center, a rusted wellhead. Moncayo said the well had been shut down in the early 1990s. No problem so far. He then led me to a pond fifty yards away that was filled with murky water in which I saw globs of oil. Oil that had leaked into the ground long ago, when the well was in operation, was finding its way back to the surface. Dirt had recently been thrown into the water to absorb the oil, but this was the work of Sisyphus, because it would never end. “Every so often, more oil comes out, and they put more dirt on it,” Moncayo explained.

  We drove on for fifteen minutes, then stopped along a dirt road, where a farmer, Francisco Jiménez, told me an oil tanker truck had jackknifed into a stream adjacent to the road. Because the tanker was too heavy to be pulled out, Jiménez said, the oil had been dumped out of the tanker and into the stream. Jiménez walked to the stream and stuck a shovel into the ground, pulling out a clump of wet earth. The soil was streaked with oil, and the stream, I noticed, was topped with a film of crude. Jiménez told me that Texaco workers came a few days after the tanker accident and put some of the coagulating oil into sandbags, but most of it was untouched, seeping deeper into the ground and into the streambed. The oil-soaked sandbags remained where they’d been filled, just a few yards from the water. The company’s workers could not be bothered to take them away, he said.

  The tanker accident, Jiménez added, happened twenty years ago. The sandbags had been there for twenty years. Yet the pollution was still rising to the surface and was still alive in its unfortunate way. (Because the spill happened long ago and was minor in the grand scheme of pollution in the region, it was not possible to find a Texaco official who could deny or confirm it.) This was a reminder of one of the strange properties of oil: we may hastily bury it in the ground, but it does not disappear. Two things can happen. It may sink deeper, poisoning the groundwater, or it may rise to the surface, poisoning the water there. Or it may do both. We may wish to forget about oil, but oil will not let us.

  To reach our last stop we drove down a dirt road that ended in a sickly, faded-green jungle; something was off. We walked a few hundred yards, pushing through the undergrowth, until we encountered what looked like a small, dark lake. It was actually a large pit filled with oil sludge that had the consistency of cookie batter. Where had the oil come from? It was dumped long ago, Moncayo said. Instead of disposing of spilled oil in an ecologically responsible way, Texaco would save money by pumping it into a tanker truck and driving the truck into the jungle, he claimed. With no one looking, the oil would be poured onto the ground, out of sight and out of mind.

  “What would happen in Texas if there was a spill like that?” Moncayo asked, pointing at the black lake in front of us.

  I said it would be cleaned up, quickly.

  “We’ve been waiting seventeen years,” he replied.

  If a curious mind wanted to know what a major oil company might do without oversight in the developing world, the answer was to be found in the Oriente. And a remedy, in the form of a multibillion-dollar lawsuit pushed forward by a Harvard Law School classmate of Barack Obama’s, could also be found there.

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bsp; When Texaco discovered oil in the Oriente, Ecuador was a deeply impoverished country with a tiny industrial sector and no expertise in oil. It is only a small exaggeration to say that few Ecuadoreans, even the educated elite in Quito, could tell one end of a drill bit from the other. In the Oriente, Texaco’s representatives were dealing with illiterate Indians who did not even speak Spanish, the country’s official language. The first offering from Texaco, in exchange for permission from the Indians to look for oil, was a delivery of bread, cheese, spoons and plates. (The Indians threw out the cheese because it smelled so peculiar.) As in Nigeria and other underdeveloped countries, the foreign oilmen were met by an unsophisticated population that trusted their promises of good things to come.

  Texaco eventually negotiated a contract that was typical in those days. It entered into a joint venture with a state-owned company that had been formed for the occasion; because Ecuador did not have a state oil company, one had to be created. Though it was a partnership, Texaco was the “operator,” meaning it managed all activities. Because Ecuador’s government had almost no expertise in the oil industry, it rarely questioned anything Texaco did. If Texaco said there was no problem dumping produced water into the Amazon, the government went along with it. In the early years of the venture, other than vague rules about respecting the health of the land and the people, Ecuador did not even have environmental laws for the oil sector. René Vargas Pazzos, a former army officer who presided over the state oil company in the early 1970s and was later minister of natural resources, said in an affidavit that Texaco had “complete autonomy” because the Ecuadoreans involved in the industry and in its oversight were either clueless or powerless.