by Peter Maass
Santi, whose impeccable mane of dark hair was tied in a ponytail that fell down his back, was everything the Indians in the Oriente had not been when Texaco arrived in the 1960s. Santi was, to begin with, educated. He’d attended a Catholic high school in Puyo, so he spoke and read Spanish flawlessly. He had visited the Oriente and knew what had happened there. Thanks to groups, such as Amazon Watch, that facilitate foreign travel for indigenous leaders, Santi had visited other countries coping with similar extraction issues, and he’d even visited the United States, where he’d met Chevron shareholders and had spoken to them about the threats to his Amazonian homeland. He’d learned the most important lesson of all—that it is insufficient to just say “no” to oil companies. The rain forest may be a brief paradise for ecotourists who stay two nights and sleep under finely woven mosquito nets, but living there in primitive conditions is tantamount to a lifelong sentence of malaria and malnutrition. Santi’s “no” to extraction must be accompanied by a “yes” to his people’s desire for medicine, education and other virtues of modernity. It is the same in other developing nations—impoverished communities cannot be expected to turn down the seductive promises of extractive development unless there is an alternative.
The next morning, to learn more about Santi’s unconventional war, we flew into the Amazon in a single-engine Cessna.
The Americans who found oil in the Oriente in the 1960s were actually the second wave of petroleum geologists in Ecuador. The first wave, led by a company called Leonard Exploration, arrived in the 1920s and looked for oil in the south. To move their equipment into the frontier region, the company built a highway to Puyo, which at the time was a tiny settlement on the lip of the southern Amazon. Leonard found no oil and was succeeded more than a decade later by Shell Oil, which built an airstrip outside Puyo. Shell also failed to find oil and pulled out in the 1950s, but its mark remains; the Cessna I squeezed into took off from a one-runway airport named Shell.
After just a minute or two in the air, Puyo was behind us. As we flew south, beneath us and around us was the boldest rain forest I had ever seen. This was untouched Amazon, the trees thick and luscious, squeezed together like broccoli stalks to the horizon and beyond. It was a visual incarnation of nourishment, the vegetation forming a blanket of delectable, living green.
“From here, it’s our territory,” Santi yelled over the whining of the engine, gesturing toward a shelf of hills.
What he meant when he said “our territory” was Sarayaku, where modern geologists, with better technology than their ancestors, believe there are vast reservoirs of oil. The old question of who owns it returned to the forefront. According to Ecuadorean law, the indigenous people own the land but the government owns the minerals underneath it. It’s a built-in conflict, because the government needs to use the land to get at the oil. In 1996, the government awarded an exploration concession to an Argentinean company, and after several years of fruitless negotiations with the area’s residents, most of whom were not seduced by offers of cash, the company and the government unilaterally went ahead with seismic testing in 2002.
This was a mistake.
Santi pointed to a river I could barely make out through the dense trees.
“This is where the company tried to set up their headquarters,” he shouted. “Our resistance started there.”
Santi called it a war, but no shots were fired. The oil company used helicopters to drop a team of geologists into a clearing in the jungle. They planned to conduct seismic tests by setting off small explosions underground. Sensors would monitor the shock waves, and the data would help make a map of the underground geology. This is a prelude to drilling. The Ecuadorean military provided a security detail—a handful of soldiers who were dropped into the jungle.
As large as the Sarayaku territory is, outsiders cannot sneak in by helicopter and set up a base camp without someone seeing or hearing the activity. And the people of Sarayaku were ready—they knew of the company’s plans and had begun patrols along their territory’s borders. Within hours of their arrival by helicopter, the soldiers and oil workers were surrounded by spear-carrying Sarayacans whose faces had been daubed with black war paint. The soldiers surrendered without a shot being fired or a spear thrown. They were taken to Sarayaku’s main village. After several days of negotiations, they were released in exchange for a government promise to never let an oil company enter the territory without explicit permission from its people.
This part of the war never ends. Oil firms are not like door-to-door salesmen who, turned away from one house, go to other houses, other streets, other towns. There are a finite number of reservoirs in the world, so oil companies have a limited number of doors to knock on. They keep knocking even after leaders tell them no. It is not an exercise in futility. The campaign for drilling continues because oil companies know that local and national leaders can change or be changed. It is just a matter of finding the right price and offering it at the right time to the right person.
After thirty minutes of flight, Santi’s alternative answer came into view. The Cessna circled over a clearing of thatched huts and dropped to a bumpy landing on a dirt airstrip. I had arrived in Sarayaku, and after unloading my backpack and standing clear as the plane turned around and hopped back into the sky, I was wrapped in the thick heat and vibrant noise of the Amazon.
It was a mile-long hike to the village center. Santi and I walked past small huts built under the canopy of trees, invisible from above. We crossed a shaky footbridge suspended over a furious river, climbed a set of steps carved into a hillside and emerged at the center of Sarayaku. Initially, it was not much to look at—about a dozen huts of different sizes, grouped in an uneven circle around a dirt clearing the size of several football fields. After dropping my bag under the shelter of a hut that had a thatch roof but no walls, I went for a tour with Santi.
Behind the main circle was a school composed of wooden buildings; the instructors were several volunteers from Spain who also ran a small infirmary. The most stunning sight was a row of solar cells. I noticed that one of the shacks contained several computers. In isolated rain-forest communities, such attributes of modernity are rare. There was even an open-air hut that served as an entertainment center of sorts—it held a television and VCR that ran off solar power. Inside, a dozen German students listened to a Sarayaku leader wearing a “Viva Zapata” T-shirt describe the community’s battle against oil companies. I listened too, swatting at mosquitoes. “Even if they give us one million dollars, we don’t want it,” he told the Germans. “Thirty years of oil has not benefited Ecuador. The oil areas have pollution, disease, narcotraffickers and violence.”
Revenues from tourists are a lifeline for Sarayaku. Visitors don’t pay much—the accommodations consist of almost-bare huts that don’t even have mosquito nets, and the nearest chilled drink is more than fifty miles away, in Puyo. But ecotourism constitutes a stream of alternative revenue that makes it possible for Sarayaku to say no to oil extraction. When the village youths got a soccer game going, I noticed that most of them had sports shoes and jerseys with numbers on their backs. In a rain-forest community, these were totems of prosperity.
The noonday heat crushed us. Santi, dressed in a black T-shirt and blue-jean shorts, led me back to the hut where I had dropped my backpack. We lay on the floor because it was a strain to sit up as the humidity and heat reached headache levels. Suddenly a young man rushed past with a bandaged hand—he had just been bitten by a snake and needed an antivenin shot that might be available in the infirmary. If not, he would die, because the eight-hour canoe ride to Puyo would take too long and there were no more Cessnas today. This was life in the jungle, brutal even with the totems of modernity Sarayaku possessed.
As oil prices rise, so do the incentives from companies wishing to drill. Already, Santi told me, oil money was dividing Sarayaku. The leader of a subtribe that wanted to cooperate with the companies had been accused of treason and forced into exile with his family.
A pro-oil tribe that lives between Sarayaku and Puyo refused to let Sarayaku’s obstinate leaders use its rivers for passage to the city. Santi had to ply longer routes or cadge rides on the occasional Cessnas. Even though not a barrel of oil had been brought to the surface in Sarayaku territory, the liquid was causing trouble. All of Ecuador was contaminated by oil.
In 1961, Stanley Milgram conducted one of the most famous behavioral experiments of all time. To measure people’s tendencies to obey authority, Milgram, a social psychologist, asked his human subjects to deliver electric shocks to a person who failed to answer questions correctly. The person receiving the shocks was in fact pretending to be in pain—there were no shocks—but the subjects didn’t know that. Despite increasingly loud screams and pleas from the pretenders, most of Milgram’s subjects complied, administering shocks that seemed to cause extreme pain to complete strangers. “Ordinary people,” Milgram concluded, “can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”
Milgram’s findings have been used to explain a wide range of otherwise perplexing human activities, from the willingness of ordinary Germans to participate in genocide during World War II to the readiness of Enron traders to create energy shortages that caused a painful spike in electricity prices for ordinary people. (In a taped conversation, one Enron trader said admiringly of another, “He steals money from California.”) I had Milgram in mind while interviewing oil executives across the globe. I was interested not only in the relatively few who’d been indicted or convicted of corruption but also in the larger number who woke up every morning, ate a good breakfast, kissed their wives or girlfriends good-bye and headed out to participate in an extractive industry that had a high probability of bringing poverty, violence and dictatorship to the countries they worked in. Milgram provided part of the answer, as did Frank Ruddy.
A section of the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline
If you walked past Frank Ruddy on a street in Washington, D.C., you wouldn’t look twice. Just another silver-haired lawyer with framed degrees on his office walls, you’d think. Ruddy graduated from College of the Holy Cross in 1959, then got a law degree from NYU and a PhD from Cambridge University. From 1974 to 1981 he was a top lawyer in Exxon’s legal department, and after that he joined the Reagan administration, becoming ambassador to Equatorial Guinea. Ruddy was a loyal insider of both the oil industry and the American government. Then he got whacked in the side of the head by a thing called reality.
In most countries, an ambassador is insulated from day-to-day life by a large staff that caters to his needs, by unenlightening contacts with government officials who tell him sweet nothings, and by the expectation that he will hew to whatever line the State Department has established. The opportunity and need for independent thought are not great. But in Equatorial Guinea Ruddy headed the tiniest of embassies, the ministers he met were thinly disguised thugs who could barely read (some were thought to be functionally illiterate), and the country was considered so unworthy of a superpower’s attention (this was before oil was discovered) that nobody in Washington cared what Ruddy did or said. He was on his own.
After serving in Equatorial Guinea for four years he returned to Washington to become general counsel in the Department of Energy, and when the time came to move on from that job, he decided to practice law on his own. He was on track for a snoozy finish to a quiet career when Equatorial Guinea reentered his life. After oil was found, Ruddy realized from afar that Equatorial Guinea had become a worse hell house than before, because Obiang’s theft and repression had only increased. Initially, he watched in quiet dismay as Exxon and other companies, supported by the U.S. government, filled Obiang’s pockets with hundreds of millions of dollars in oil revenues. Then he began to speak out publicly, becoming one of the regime’s harshest critics as well as a skeptic about the corporate way of dealing with the world.
“I am not anti-capitalist, but capitalism can be its own worst enemy,” Ruddy told me when I visited the two-partner law firm that was his obscure (by Washington standards) place of business in 2004. His no-frills office was Dilbertian in its lack of pretense or luxury, with all the charm of a medical waiting room. “It causes things that are horrible and threaten to undermine it, like exploiting the poor. I know some people well in Exxon, and they will say, What can I do? I am a lawyer seventeen layers from the top. Others will say, It’s not our fault. We didn’t elect these sons of bitches. We’re just going to make money and get out.”
These excuses are truths, too. A midlevel lawyer or executive cannot change the priorities of a multinational whose survival depends on access to new oil fields. A corporation is akin to the Milgram authority figure who wears a white lab coat and calmly tells you to turn a knob. As a sweetener, money can be made by doing as you are told. Unlike Milgram’s subjects, who heard and saw the consequences of their actions, most executives do not come face-to-face with the poverty and violence their industry can foment; the closest most of them get to subsistence misery is from the inside of an air-conditioned sedan that takes them from one meeting to another in a foreign city. They could connect the dots if they wished, but it’s easy and profitable not to do so.
“These aren’t stupid people,” Ruddy continued. “Evil is not people with mustaches who look like they’re doing bad things. Evil is done by people in suits sitting in boardrooms making horrible decisions. They do it because it’s worth it.”
Alain wore an impeccable suit, with a silk handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket in a dapper, just-so way. He was French, spoke a handful of languages and carried himself in an elegant manner, as though he had just emerged from the Élysée Palace or the pages of Madame Bovary. Alain was a senior executive at a West European oil company, and his elegant, drawl-free manner was the opposite of the slouching-toward-Riyadh gait of other oilmen. Alain had won multibillion-dollar contracts in the crucibles of oil, from the Middle East to Africa, so he knew the industry and enjoyed being known as knowing it.
We met for breakfast at a luxury hotel in Manhattan and talked about warfare, because the U.S. invasion of Iraq was on the horizon. Alain, who had been to Iraq many times and gave the impression of knowing Saddam Hussein, accurately predicted that Iraqis, though glad to be freed of Saddam, would resist an occupation. But he evoked the likelihood of an anti-American insurgency in passing, as though it would just be the drôle de guerre before the fiercest combat of all began, the one for Iraq’s oil.
For Alain, geology was nearly as sexy as sex itself. He excitedly talked up the physical wonders of Iraq, which has some of the largest reservoirs in the world, with high-quality oil close to the surface and easy to move to seaports. His awe was of the sort Frenchmen usually reserve for discussions about the beauty of the mistresses they possess or desire. Yet it was not just the loveliness of Iraq’s fields that moved Alain’s heart—it was the fact that exploration deals for fields of any promise, let alone great ones like those in Iraq, were rare and getting rarer.
“Iraq has everything,” he said. “It is a must for oil companies to go into Iraq because access to crude is the essence of an oil company. Without oil, what is their purpose?”
Executives like Alain, responsible for winning exploration and production contracts, are the gladiators upon whom oil firms depend for survival. In his voice I heard the pride of a man who’d survived the all-or-nothing combat that takes place in the offices, palaces and bars that are oil’s coliseums. He described the process as a “battle of giants” and a “fight to the death,” because small firms are crushed by larger ones in today’s world. As in ancient Rome, if you finish second you are dead. “It’s a natural war, below the belt,” Alain added with a smile.
He had just raised an issue I was curious about. With the stakes so high, is there anything an oil exec
utive will not do?
Alain was a classic raconteur. A listener savored his words, despite trusting only half of them. He was evasive when discussing the shortcuts his cohorts were known to take. In recent years, executives from his firm had been convicted of bribe making, bribe taking and a multitude of other financial crimes related to illegal dealings in the Middle East, Africa and Europe itself. Some of Alain’s friends were felons. But at the mention of corruption, he expressed the despair of the maligned.
“Even my family and friends think that when I go to Saudi Arabia, I am carrying suitcases of cash to bribe everyone,” he said.
I didn’t need to ask if his family was right. His expression, of the “How could they think that?” variety, invited no follow-ups on the contents of his Mideast valise. I took a shortcut of my own, mentioning that American executives had said the French were the most corrupt. His eruption was so raw that crumbs of the croissant he was eating began shooting across the table.
“That’s bullshit. Do you think ExxonMobil acts like a saint in Nigeria? And Marathon in Gabon? You think they are saints? Bullshit. Look at the corruption scandals you have had, like Enron. Do you think these things do not happen in your oil companies, too? You have men like this in ExxonMobil right now.”
He was so mad that he forgot to proclaim his innocence. After breakfast, one of his aides, who was British, escorted me to the street and listened as I innocently asked whether I should trust the French who said the Americans were the most corrupt or the Americans who said the French were the worst.
“You must check everything,” she advised softly.
On an April morning in 2006, I visited the federal courthouse in Manhattan. After giving my cell phone and digital recorder to a security guard, I rode an elevator to the eleventh floor. There, sitting on a hallway bench, was a distinguished-looking man wearing a pin-striped suit with a white handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket. On his right were two lawyers from Cooley Godward Kronish, a firm that specialized in white-collar crime. Seated on his left were two more people from Cooley Godward. The meter was running on this legal team, probably $2,000 an hour in all, but the well-dressed client could afford to wait.