Eugene weekly., August 13, 2009, Page 12, Image 12

Fajardo with indigenous people from the Lago Agrio area by an open-air oil pit
Fajardo’s Fight
U
By Natalie Miller and Camilla Mortensen
gly pits leaking oil scar the
Amazon rainforest of Ecuador,
and once pristine streams ooze
with sludge.
The photos Pablo Fajardo
shows on his laptop sitting in the
small and comfortably worn offi ces of the
Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide
(ELAW) in Eugene are a slideshow of waste
and destruction. The Ecuadorian Amazon
contains 5 percent of all the world’s plant
and animal species and is one of the most
biodiverse places in the world, but not near
Lago Agrio, where the toxic sludge and
wastewater left from years of oil drilling in
the once-pristine forest have killed off fi sh
and wildlife and sickened the people who
live nearby. The environmental damage to
the area around Lake Agrio is so extensive,
it’s been called the “Amazon Chernobyl.”
The effects on the people living in the area
have been called a humanitarian disaster.
Fajardo, who grew up poor and worked
from a young age in the midst of the oil
drilling and its pollution, is the David in
a David and Goliath-esque case pitting
Ecuadorian Indians and mestizos against
major American oil companies. Fajardo
and two fellow attorneys represent about
30,000 Ecuadorians in this class action
suit trying to clean up the oily mess in
their part of the Amazon. They’re tackling
the big money of big oil with guts and
determination more than anything else.
Their case is lengthy and complex and has
generated thousands of documents both in
Spanish and in English.
Fajardo came to Eugene via a fellowship
through ELAW and the Wayne Morse Center
12 AUGUST 13, 2009 EUGENE WEEKLY
for Law & Politics in order to study English
at the UO’s American English Institute. He
spoke with EW earlier this month.
BIG OIL, SMALL COUNTRY
The legal case, Aguinda v. Chevron
Texaco, was fi rst fi led in 1993, 10 years
before Fajardo had his law degree. But
the oily tentacles of the case stretch back
even farther. In 1964, Texaco Petroleum
Company (Texpet) began its oil operations
in the once wild and untouched Lake
Agrio area with full-scale oil extraction
beginning in 1972 — the year Fajardo
was born. Before the arrival of oil
exploration, the sparsely populated area
was home to six or so indigenous tribes
whose main contact with North America
was missionaries. “Texaco is the face
of America,” says Andrew Woods, an
American attorney working with Fajardo
and another American attorney, Steven
Donziger, on the case. “It doesn’t paint a
pretty picture of our country.”
The lawsuit alleges that from 1964 until
1990, Texaco deliberately dumped 18.5
billion gallons of “produced water” into the
waterways of the Amazon. Produced water
is what is brought up along with crude oil
during the oil extraction process. According
to the Produced Water Society, it can
contain dissolved inorganic salts, dispersed
oil droplets and dissolved oil; treatment
and workover chemicals; dissolved gases,
particularly hydrogen sulfi de and carbon
dioxide; and bacteria and other living
organisms. Hydrogen sulfi de inhaled in low
concentrations can cause irritation to the
eyes, nose and throat. In high concentrations,
TAKING ON BIG OIL
Interview with Pablo Fajardo translated by Natalie Miller
it can cause death, according to the Agency
for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
The EPA has not yet classifi ed its potential
to cause cancer.
The case alleges also that Texaco created
open, unlined waste pits and fi lled them with
sludge from the drilling process. According
to the lawsuit, sludge and liquids containing
chemicals like the cancer-causing chromium
6 were discharged into streams and rivers;
waste pits were lit on fi re to burn off oil;
oil-laden sludge was spread on dirt roads to
keep the dirt down and numerous oil spills
contributed to the pollution that has caused
cancer rates to skyrocket in the region. One
study out of the University of London on
the town of San Carlos found that cancer
rates there exceed the average rate by up
to 30 times. The New York-based Center
for Economic and Social Rights found
that hydrocarbons in the waters around the
region at polluted the rivers and streams at
rates between 10 and 1,000 times the level
allowed by the U.S. EPA for acceptable
limits for drinking water.
Woods says Texaco’s practices in
Ecuador were substandard. “The system
was faulty,” Woods says. “We think this is
fairly simple matter of law. The operator is
100 percent liable for any damage caused
by the system.” Questions have arisen over
whether the oil company tried to cover up
some of its damages. An internal memo
from Texaco, dated 1972 and referring to
oils spills in Ecuador, instructs that “only
major events are to be reported” and adds
that “no reports are to be kept on a routine
basis and all previous reports are to be
removed from Field and Division offi ces
and destroyed.”
The case doesn’t only involve Texaco,
which ran the oil concession in Lago Agrio.
In 1974, the Ecuadorian government’s oil
company, CEPE (now called PetroEcuador)
got a 25 percent interest in the oil
consortium, which also involved Gulf Oil.
Gulf sold its interest in the oil fi eld to CEPE
in 1977, and in 1990, management of the
consortium was given to PetroEcuador. In
1993, Texaco’s concession expired, leaving
PetroEcuador in control of the oil fi eld.
Texaco merged with Chevron in 2001.
According to Chevron, the company is not
responsible for the environmental disaster
at Lago Agrio and lays culpability at the
feet of PetroEcuador. According to Woods
and Fajardo, Chevron needs to clean up
the toxic mess it became responsible for
when it acquired Texaco.
PABLO FAJARDO
Fajardo was fresh from law school
in 2003 when he began working as an
assistant for two high-profi le Ecuadorian
lawyers, who at the time were fi ghting
against Chevron. Little did Fajardo know
that shortly after starting his law career
and with nearly no experience, he would
become the lead lawyer in his fi rst lawsuit
— a fi ght costing millions of dollars and
dragging on for more than 15 years.
With such little legal experience, how
did Fajardo wind up as the Don Quixote of
the Lago Agrio oil war? The charismatic
37-year-old mestizo has lived most his life
dangerously close to Texaco’s oil mess in
Lago Agrio. And after years of smelling
burning petroleum, drinking contaminated
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