Ecuador keeps up oil cleanup fight against Chevron

Using a tree branch, the weathered farmer probed the edge of a pond that his cattle use for drinking water and soon turned up the smelly black sludge that he says has killed much of his livestock and sickened his family.

"I've lost 30 cows," Garrido said. "I cut them open and their insides are black."

Paying the medical bills to treat his three children for skin cancer has cost him his meager savings.

"Here's the cause," Garrido said, contemplating the dark slime gleaming on the end of the branch.

The contamination at Garrido's farm and hundreds of others in a Rhode Island-sized area here in the Ecuadorean Amazon, is the basis of a controversial, long-running civil lawsuit in which a verdict is expected early next year.

On one side are 30,000 mostly peasant farmers like Garrido who say they are living a health and ecological nightmare caused by careless oil drilling and production methods that contaminated their drinking water and spoiled their lush jungle environment.

On the other side is defendant Chevron, the San Ramon, Calif.-based parent company which in 2001 acquired Texaco, which produced oil here from 1972 to 1990, and which the lawsuit claims polluted a vast swath of the Amazon. Chevron says Texaco cleaned up its share of the spills with three years of remediation work and that the Ecuadorean government absolved it of all future responsibility in 1998.

The oil giant blames Petroecuador for any ongoing spills and for not following through on its share of the cleanup. Texaco was 37.5% partner in the oil field venture and Petroecuador owned the rest.

The Ecuadorean plaintiffs claim Chevron never adequately cleaned up hundreds of oil catch basins and spills of drilling muds that continue to contaminate the groundwater. They claim the settlement with the government doesn't preclude individuals successfully suing the oil giant.

If Garrido and other residents win, the case could set a worldwide precedent: Foreign plaintiffs have never collected for alleged offshore environmental damage caused by a U.S. company, said Ohio State University environmental economist Douglas Southgate.

Last week, U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) toured the area and, shocked by the pollution he saw, wrote a letter he said he plans to send today to President-elect Barack Obama asking that the U.S. help Ecuador with cleaning up and direct "relevant departments and agencies . . . to design a plan to help fix this awful situation."