The Dialogue

The Dialogue
Karen; the library will be close in a few seconds and you don’t seem worried.
Fausto; Karen, my dear classmate, I realized that it’s getting dark and it is time for me to leave.
Karen; for the last three days I have seen that you do nothing except think with a pen in your hand.
Fausto; I have been writing the truth and people don’t seem to like it. They have been giving me awful suggestions, - like for example, they have suggested me to open a different email account and send my articles without mentioning my name. Others have called me illiterate, a troublemaker, an idealist, and ignorant. Still others doubt that my years in school and the money that I have invested in education are of any value for me. Therefore I have been hesitant to write again.
Karen; not a good thing to hear that from your own people, save your pen, it is time to leave, let’s walk together and talk, perhaps one day I can write down our conversation and that can be your latest article. But whatever you say, I would like to suggest to be careful in choosing your words and in picking the person who you want to criticize tonight. Remember people judge us not for who we are but for what we say.
Fausto; believe me, I have felt that, but I am not too concerned about it, as long as what I say is true.
Karen; Latin America is an area of your interest; how about if we begin by talking about the Latin American Union? You believe in it, and I assume that is one of the reasons why they call you idealist.
Fausto; correct, I believe in it. It is something that some Latinos have been asking for almost 200 years. It will empower our nations, it will strength our defense, it will energize our dying economy, it will allow us to freely move within the Union, it will help us to solve our endemic social problems; illiteracy, health, unemployment, and poverty.
Karen; that is a noble dream indeed, but seems to me too utopian; I heard that it was the dream of Simon Bolivar, but not body has done anything about it.
Fausto; in the last few years Hugo Chavez has done a lot about it, therefore I disagree with your last statement. Besides Chavez’s efforts, history also shows that on many occasions the union was not only a desire but also a necessity.
Karen; history? Refresh my memory.
Fausto; the dream began with Bolivar in 1826. In 1830, Mexico focused in organizing Latin Americans against the U.S. in order to stop its stretching imperialism. In 1860, Domingo Faustino in Argentina promoted a political-military alliance in Latin America. In 1889, the Pan American Union was created, - its purpose, to expand commerce among the nations. On September 2, 1947 The Rio Pact was signed, - it was an inter-American treaty of reciprocal assistance signed by 22 nations. In 1948, the Organization of American States was created, with the hope that it will bring political and economic cooperation. On May 23, 2008 12 nations officially signed the creation of the Union and the dream of Bolivar was resuscitated once again.
Karen; Not once have those efforts produced the desired outcome. The union is still far from existence.

Fausto; I disagree. Today more than ever it is being accomplished. Latinos have been waking up. We have come to understand that privatization is good for the multinationals, but not for our people. We are managing our natural resources, and we are creating our own financial institutions, therefore we no longer need to depend in the economic aid of the World Bank (WB) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Karen; I still think that the idea is too utopian, especially when the leftist governments have done little to help their people.
Fausto; the leftist government as you call them have produced over the last few years their own consensus. They have strengthened Mercosur, - South America’s most important commercial alliance. They have created the Bank of the South, and eventually a single currency will be used in the whole region. They are promoting Petroamerica, they rightly believe that the energy sector will help us speed up the union.
Karen; working together it is certainly possible to achieve one’s goals, however, in Latin America to ensure prosperity the governments must address poverty, increase productivity, invest in infrastructure, and improve its chronically inefficient institutions.
Fausto; they have been working on it. In 2004 the region’s economy expanded by 5.5%. In 2007, according to Michael Reid, most Latin American countries were better off than they had been any time in the last quarter of the century. In 2008, the Venezuelan economy is expected to grow by 8%.
To make our institutions more efficient, constitutional assemblies in Ecuador, Venezuela, and Bolivia are changing the old bureaucracy, and elected officials are finally working for the benefit of their people instead than for the multinational corporations. Furthermore, according to the United Nations, Venezuela is in its path in eradicating illiteracy. Today the Ecuadorian government is promoting free education for all. In Bolivia, after the nationalization of some natural resources the Morales Government has made financial aid available for young school children, and we all certainly hope that a better economy together with a better education will help us reduce poverty.
Karen; you mentioned nationalization, - that scares me, it scares foreign investment, and it always polarizes a nation.
Fausto; in 2006 Petroleos de Venezuela PDVSA contributed 13.3 billion or 7.3% of the GDP to social programs; compare that amount to the amount contributed when PDVSA was foreign owned and let me know what amount scares you the most. In Bolivia, before Morales came to power, around 18% of revenues from the energy sector were for the state, and the foreign companies kept 82% of the revenues, today those percentages have been reversed, does it scare you that the state now has a higher income? In Bolivia, mineral exports increased from $547 million in 2005 to $1.1 billion in 2006; do you know what percentage of that amount went to the State? 1.5% scary, isn’t it? Should I go on?
Karen; you have not addressed my other two concerns.
Fausto; foreign investment is one of your concerns. Companies from Iran, Russia, the European Union, China and other states have been heavily investing in the region. China for example has negotiated more than 400 investment and trade deals with Latin America, and it has invested more than $50 billion in the region.
Polarization is your last concern, but Karen, be honest with me and look into my eyes when you respond to my questions. Did you really think that there was unity in Bolivia when the indigenous people have been oppressed and discriminated for 513 years? Do you think that unity in Mexico helped the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) hold power for 70 years? Do you think that the Samoza government in Nicaragua held power for so long because there was unity in the nation? Karen, my dear friend, do you really believe that the Isaias family in Ecuador who owned more than 100 companies have been uniting the country? Do you think that in Ecuador we had 19 constitutions because unity allowed us to understand each other? Do you believe that the former owner of Radio Caracas Television (RCTV), or the owner of Venevision Gustavo Cisneros have the same interests that you and I do? Based on their interests, what do you think; have they been polarizing or uniting the Venezuelans?
Karen; in an interrogation like this, it is my constitutional right to remain in silence if I choose to. But you can go on. Now that you mentioned Venezuelans tell me something about the dictator Chavez, the one that calls Bush the devil, the one that recommended that Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice find a husband, the one that calls Uribe, the president of Colombia, peon del imperio.
Fausto; the dictator Chavez as you called him has done more than nicknaming people. For example the dictator has won 12 international recognized elections. I assume that you call him dictator because he closed RCTV, but the same dictator has created more than 270 community radio stations. The same dictator has not prosecuted a single person who participated in the April 11, 2002 U.S. sponsored military coup in more than 6 years. I will go on if you answer me this question. What do you think the dictator did to the owners of the TV and radio stations when on the day the coup, they aired adds as public announcements calling him to leave office, adds that were actually sponsored by the oil industry? And when he came back to power these same stations did not cover such an historic event, but instead aired cartoons for children?
Karen; I don’t have an answer, but I still want you to keep talking.
Fausto; you want me to go on about the dictator?
Karen; not really, it would be good if we can talk about Colombia for example. You know the country has been an example of democracy, it has kept good economic and military ties with the U.S., and it is determined to end drug trafficking.
Fausto; the country that you call an example of democracy is known as the kidnapping capital of the world. In the year 2000 for example, 50% of the kidnapping in the world happened in Colombia. The country, in the 21st century is home to the biggest humanitarian catastrophe on the whole continent. More than 2 million of its 36 million inhabitants have become refugees.
I assume that you were referring to “Plan Colombia” when you mentioned good military and economic ties, but Karen, such aid has been of little value for the poor. Today 80% of the rural population in Colombia lives beneath the poverty line. Uribe, the undeclared president of the Paramilitaries, came to power promising a military solution to the Colombian problems. – What an irony, it would be like you and I devising a plan to eradicate illiteracy by killing everyone that doesn’t know how to read. Uribe calls today human rights defenders cowards and spokespersons of the guerrilla groups. Uribe has violated the agreement set in the “Plan Colombia”. Today, he refuses to extradite paramilitary members who are convicted of mass killings, torture and drug trafficking, and the good neighbor of the north continues to pour its $2.2 million a day of military aid. Today, Colombia receives the third largest amount of economic aid from the U.S. And what do you think thousands of Colombians are doing in Ecuador? Do you think they are spending part of the money on a long vacation in the south of their border? Do you think they were bored and seeking adventure, decided to visit their neighbors?
To address your statement about drug trafficking. To eliminate it, evidence shows that it is better to reduce the demand than to bombard the production lines. It is better to offer economic incentives to the impoverished population than to the military. It is better to invest in social programs and give citizens better living conditions than to buy guns to kill their own countrymen. How much of the almost $500 million a year that the U.S. provides do you think goes to be used in social programs knowing that 80% of that money is for military use?
Karen; I can’t understand why so much money is being wasted and why the U.S. keeps such a close relationship with the Colombian army.
Fausto; that the U.S. has kept a check in the Latin American armies is a long but relatively unknown story my friend.
Karen; be careful with your criticism now.
Fausto; some people believe that the School of the Americas (SOA), now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation has been used by the U.S. to train military killers to maintain an unjust economic system. If we check some historic facts we should be able to agree or disagree with the critics of the School of the Assassins – sorry I meant Americas.
In El Salvador, 19 of the 26 officers convicted of killing Jesuit priests and two other people in 1989 were trained at the SOA. In the same country, 3 of the 5 officers who raped and murdered 4 U.S. women in 1980; 10 of the 12 officers cited for massacre of 900 civilians and 49 of the 60 officers that carry the worst atrocities during the Salvadorian civil war were students of the SOA. In Argentina and Chile, military dictatorships carried out SOA instructions and killed 60,000 people. The same thing happened in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Central America where the good students and in some cases instructors managed to kill 270,000 people.
Karen; I lost my count; there is no point in adding to the list of victims anymore.
Fausto; then perhaps names would be easy to remember; according to many credible sources; General Hector Gramajo, and Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez in Guatemala; General Luis Alonso Discua with Jose Valle and 18 others in Honduras; General and former dictator Manuel Noriega in Panama; the dictators Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri in Argentina; General and former dictator Guillermo Rodriguez Lara in Ecuador; dictator Hugo Banzer in Bolivia; General Juan Lopez Ortiz in Mexico; over 100 of the 246 officers cited for war crimes in 1993 in Colombia are part of the alumni of the SOA. Are you ready to add some more?
Karen; I lost the count again, but your long list tells me that you agree with the critics of the SOA, and you already told me that bad news, is there anything else that does not involve numbers?
Fausto; the good news is that Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and other countries have pledged not to send students again to the SOA.
Karen; is Colombia on the list?
Fausto; no, the “Plan Colombia” is a school that has come to their house with tutors included.
Karen; the dialogue has been interesting although I do not agree with everything you said during our walk. But please try to answer the following questions. The U.S. relations with Latin America have not improved with the end of the Cold War in 1990. Do you think the new U.S. administration will change part of it or continue to be the same? Is there an incentive for the U.S. not to neglect the area any more?
Fausto; I would begin with the last question; by ignoring us for so long the U.S. has given China and Russia the opportunity to invest and have influence in the traditionally U.S. area of influence. But even that being the case, the area is still a big market for the U.S., it exports about $150 billion a year to the south. Finally, the 39 million Latinos living in the U.S. have a purchasing power of $700 billion or 8.5% of the total U.S. annual purchasing power, the hope is that eventually Latinos will have more political influence and manage to draft better policies towards the areas where they came from.
To answer your other question, I have bad news, things seem like they will not change with the new administration. Today the 4 major issues that Latinos care about are not even being discussed; immigration is one, trade is next, Cuba is third, and if the area is of any interest for the U.S. it is doing nothing to protect the 220 million people that today live under friendly governments. The left as you like to call it has already 300 million people under their influence and the number will soon increase if nothing is done.
Karen; our walk has come to an end, should we continue talking even though it is dark?
Fausto; I feel we have talked a lot and that you will have trouble remembering everything.
Karen; don’t undermine my mental capacity, I have a good memory, and I also know that if this conversation was written and people actually read it, you will have increased the number of people who disagree with you.
Fausto; I have always welcomed disagreement and encouraged dialogue.
Fausto Sicha

Poverty and Inequality in Latin America: Some Political Reflections

Structural Reforms in Latin America Under Scrutiny

Globalization and Global Disinflation

Globalisation and the State: Still Room to Move?

Texaco On Trial

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Texaco On Trial

By Eyal Press

This article appeared in the May 31, 1999 edition of The Nation.

May 13, 1999

Like virtually everyone else in San Carlos, Ecuador, Hugo Ureña never imagined that danger might lurk in the shiny black liquid that began appearing in the water near his home roughly thirty years ago. "The creeks and rivers around here were suddenly full of oil," Ureña told me from the front porch of his modest, tin-roofed farmhouse in San Carlos, a small community nestled in the heart of the Ecuadorean Amazon, "and everyone thought, 'oil is good.' Many animals, especially cows, would drink the water and die. And we had no idea why."

Thirty years later, Ureña and 30,000 other Ecuadoreans, including several indigenous tribes, are among the plaintiffs in a billion-dollar class-action lawsuit that the people of the Amazon have filed against one of America's largest oil companies, Texaco. They accuse Texaco of causing vast destruction to the Oriente, a spectacular stretch of rainforest that dips beneath the Andes Mountains to form the eastern half of Ecuador. It's a unique--and potentially historic--case, not only because corporations like Texaco have rarely had to answer to people like Hugo Ureña but because the plaintiffs, convinced there is no way they can obtain justice in Ecuador, are attempting to sue Texaco in a US district court in lower Manhattan, a short drive from the company's headquarters in White Plains, New York. The case, like the current effort to bring Gen. Augusto Pinochet to justice, represents a bold attempt to expand the scope of international human rights law, only this time the target is not a dictator but a US corporation.

Thousands of miles from White Plains, beyond the wild flowers, potted plants and coconut trees at the entrance to Ureña's home, it is easy to make out the most enduring physical monument to Texaco's presence in the Amazon: a large, rusting metal pipeline, built in the early seventies, that cuts across the center of the Oriente. Through this pipeline, which snakes its way across the Andes to the port of Esmeraldes, Texaco, working in partnership with Petroecuador, the state oil company, pumped more than 1.4 billion gallons of crude out of Ecuador--and in the process created one of the great environmental catastrophes of modern history.

According to Judith Kimerling, whose 1991 book, Amazon Crude, first exposed the impact of oil development on the Oriente, the Trans-Ecuadorean Pipeline alone has accounted for oil spills totaling 16.8 million gallons, a figure that dwarfs even the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. On top of this, during its twenty years of operations in Ecuador, which ended in 1992, Texaco discharged an estimated 4.3 million gallons of highly toxic "produced water" per day into the Oriente, ignoring oil industry standards that call for reinjecting the wastes back into the ground. Instead, these viscous byproducts, laden with heavy metals and cancer-causing hydrocarbons, were dumped into hundreds of open, unlined pits that now pockmark the region and have been leaching into local streams and rivers ever since. When the pits threatened to overflow, Texaco simply burned off the excess, sending dark plumes of smoke into the air that would eventually result in what the locals came to know as "black rain."

In Shushufindi, a short drive from Ureña's home, I waded through a marsh of shoulder-high bushes that opened onto one of these pits. The smell of petroleum, sharp and overwhelming, filled the air as I neared the edge of an enormous pool of bubbling black liquid. One hundred feet away fresh water trickled through a creek, but just barely, for a thick bed of black-gold petroleum waste had formed along the banks. The entire Oriente is crisscrossed by these streams and rivers, part of the reason the watershed is home to more than 10,000 varieties of plants, fishes and birds, many of which are now endangered. The tropical biologist Norman Myers has called the Oriente "the richest biotic zone on earth...a kind of global epicenter of biodiversity." In the area I traversed, everything was eerily still, the fish and birds nowhere in sight and the vegetation stained black with petroleum residue.

For indigenous tribes like the Cofán, who were displaced from their land as Texaco carved roads and pipelines through the jungle, the poisoning of streams and rivers has amounted to, in Kimerling's view, nothing short of "ethnocide." For Hugo Ureña, it has meant living with the fear that by drinking the local water, he is literally risking his life. "Everyone around here is dying," he says, ticking off the names of neighbors suffering from chronic skin lesions, headaches and, as in the case of Ureña's recently deceased father, a wave of deadly cancer. Dr. Miguel San Sebastian, who lives one hour south, in the town of Coca, is completing a study of health patterns in Oriente communities affected by oil development. His preliminary analysis of the cancer rate among men in San Carlos indicates that the risk of larynx cancer is thirty times higher than that for men of comparable age in Ecuador's capital, Quito; the risk of stomach cancer is five times higher; and the risk of cancer overall is 2.3 times higher.

Had all this happened in, say, Texas or California, the grounds for a lawsuit would be clear. But can an American company be sued in a US court for environmental crimes committed overseas? Six long years after the Texaco case was originally filed, in 1993, there are no answers yet. In order to sue Texaco in the United States, the plaintiffs must persuade a US court that Texaco's actions in Ecuador constitute fundamental human rights violations that the world should not allow to go unpunished. They must, in addition, convince the court that they cannot possibly obtain justice in Ecuador. If Federal Judge Jed Rakoff, whose ruling on the case is expected soon, accepts these arguments, the impact will be felt not only in White Plains but in corporate boardrooms throughout the world.

The origins of the Texaco lawsuit date back to the spring of 1991, when Cristóbal Bonifaz, a lawyer who lives in Massachusetts but was born and raised in Ecuador, was helping his son, John, also now a lawyer on the case, move out of his college dormitory at Harvard. "John handed me this publication of Oxfam America," says Bonifaz, a handsome, silver-haired man who speaks English in short, staccato sentences with a heavy Spanish accent, "and in it was a paragraph on what Texaco had been doing in the Amazon. 'Here,' John told me, 'this is your country; why don't you go do something about it?'"

Bonifaz proceeded to make a round of phone calls to various people he knew in Ecuador, including numerous government ministers (he was well positioned to do so, being the grandson of a former Ecuadorean president, Neptalí Bonifaz, and the son of one of the country's most celebrated conservationists). "Everyone told me it's not true, it's all lies," Bonifaz recalls. But then he spoke to Manuel Pallares, the brother of his former sister-in-law, who had witnessed the impact of Texaco's oil production firsthand when he spent two years living in the Oriente with the Secoya tribe, now among the parties to the lawsuit. Bonifaz was soon aboard a plane, on his way to the Oriente.

"Once I got there, I was flabbergasted," says Bonifaz. Before becoming a lawyer, Bonifaz had spent twenty years working as a chemical engineer for Du Pont, so he knew something about the byproducts of petroleum production. "I recognized right away that what Texaco was doing--dumping the produced water straight into the environment--is not something that's done anywhere." On his second trip to the region, in 1993, Bonifaz brought along a team of scientists from Harvard who took water samples from thirty-three sites. Their tests revealed polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, crude oil toxins linked to cancer, at levels up to one hundred times the amount permitted in the United States.

Bonifaz was committed to bringing a case against Texaco. The question was, how? As he was well aware, Ecuador's judicial system does not even recognize the concept of a class-action lawsuit and has no history of environmental litigation whatsoever. (The system is also notoriously corrupt; a poll by George Washington University found that only 16 percent of Ecuadoreans have confidence in their judiciary, lower than in any other Latin American country except Guatemala.) It was then that Bonifaz spoke with the Philadelphia-based law firm Kohn, Swift & Graf and learned about the Alien Tort Claims Act.

Passed by Congress in 1789, the ATCA was originally designed to grant noncitizens access to US courts in cases involving a breach of international law, including treaties (the so-called "law of nations")--in part, at least, so that the United States could safeguard its global reputation by holding its own residents accountable for inflicting wrongs on aliens. For much of US history, the statute was rarely invoked, but in the late sixties Peter Weiss, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, stumbled upon it as he was searching for grounds to bring a lawsuit against the US military officers responsible for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Weiss never filed the case, but a few years later he and CCR did bring a successful lawsuit on behalf of the father and sister of Joel Filártiga, who was tortured to death by a Paraguayan police official who later fled to Brooklyn.

Since the Filártiga case, more than twenty successful lawsuits have been filed under the ATCA on behalf of foreigners against human rights abusers who have ventured onto US soil. In 1986 Kohn, Swift & Graf filed a successful suit under the ATCA against the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. When Joseph Kohn reviewed the facts of the Texaco case with Cristóbal Bonifaz, he reasoned that if such suits could be brought against former police officials and dictators for international human rights violations, why not against US corporations, which, after all, enjoy the status of individuals in the US legal system? Shortly thereafter, in November 1993, they filed suit.

Other victims of corporate abuse have since done likewise. In the past two years, the Alien Tort statute has been used to file lawsuits against Unocal (for alleged use of slave labor and forced expulsion of villagers in Burma), General Motors (for alleged collusion in human rights abuses committed during World War II in Nazi Germany) and, recently, a half-dozen apparel companies, which are charged with knowingly benefiting from forced labor in the sweatshops of the island of Saipan.

What's unique--and potentially precedent-setting--about the Texaco case, says Bonifaz, is that it is the first lawsuit to claim that a company's environmental practices so depart from acceptable international standards that they constitute a violation of the "law of nations." Until now, the ATCA has been confined to cases of torture, genocide and other more conventional human rights abuses. But in the Filártiga ruling, Bonifaz notes, the court emphasized that international law is not static but should be interpreted "as it has evolved and exists among the nations of the world today."

In a motion to dismiss the suit, Texaco firmly denies that the law of nations applies to this case, arguing that, unlike torture and genocide, environmental misdeeds are defined differently from country to country. "Environmental debates rage today among developed and underdeveloped nations," Texaco contends. "What some nations prohibit, others encourage, and environmental priorities vary wildly."

Yet while nations do have a right to set their own environmental standards, a growing body of international accords--from the 1972 Stockholm Declaration, signed by more than 100 countries, including Ecuador and the United States, to the 1992 Rio Declaration--identifies the right to a clean and healthy environment as a fundamental and inalienable human right, and prohibits both state and private actors from recklessly endangering "the environmental needs of present and future generations," as Rio states. It's true that enforcement of these conventions has been rare--but not unprecedented. "After the Persian Gulf war," notes J. Martin Wagner of the Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund, which has filed a brief in support of the plaintiffs' claims, "the UN Security Council relied on customary international law to impose liability on Iraq for spilling into the Persian Gulf less than one-quarter of the amount of oil that Texaco is estimated to have spilled in the Oriente, and for having, like Texaco, polluted the air by burning oil."

In April 1994, in what appeared to be a historic ruling, Federal District Judge Vincent Broderick cited the Rio Declaration and other conventions in ruling that he would accept jurisdiction over the Texaco case. One year later, however, Judge Broderick died of cancer, and the case was passed along to Jed Rakoff. A former partner at a New York firm that has represented Texaco in patent litigation (though he did not personally handle those cases), Judge Rakoff, it seems safe to say, is unlikely to be as receptive to the environmental claims in the lawsuit. In a 1991 New York Law Journal essay titled "Moral Qualms About Environmental Prosecutions," he railed at US courts for prosecuting corporate officers for environmental violations carried out by their subordinates--violations that, according to Rakoff, they are often not aware of. "To imprison a morally blameless person in the name of social policy always appears in hindsight as an act of barbarity," Rakoff charged.

There can, however, be little doubt that Texaco was aware that its production methods in the Amazon departed from accepted standards. In a phone interview Texaco spokeswoman Faye Cox insisted that the company's methods, including its dumping of produced water, "adhered to prevailing industry standards.... How you manage produced water is done case by case." Yet in testimony before Congress in 1971--one year before Texaco began drilling in the Oriente--the oil industry's own leading spokesman, Richard Byrd, general counsel for the Interstate Oil Compact Commission, informed Congress that dumping tainted water "into unlined pits is not considered to be an acceptable practice." What's more, according to Bonifaz, "Texaco actually owned several patents on technology that made the reinjection of produced water cheaper. How can the company that owned these patents claim it did not know what it was doing?"

Texaco has justified its actions by noting that its operations were conducted "in compliance with Ecuadorean law" and indeed with the full approval of the Ecuadorean government. Yet Texaco's contract specifically required it to "adopt suitable measures to protect the flora, fauna, and other natural resources, and to prevent contamination of water, air, and soil," an obligation reaffirmed in Ecuador's civil code. And while there is no doubt that the Ecuadorean government, as Texaco's partner, shares responsibility for what happened in the Amazon, there is evidence that Texaco played the preponderant role. Manuel Navarro, a former high-level official at Petroecuador who later founded the country's Environmental Protection Unit, has stated in an affidavit that Texaco "designed, built, and managed all the installations and facilities required to extract and transport the crude oil" and also "trained national technicians and transferred its technology to the Ecuadorean state oil company."

"The fact that Texaco was in partnership with the government of Ecuador by no means releases the company from responsibility," says Arthur Berney, an expert on international law at Boston College. Indeed, in the recent case that was filed against Unocal, which is now proceeding to trial, a US court rejected Unocal's claim that as a mere partner of the Burmese government, the company could not be held accountable for violating international law.

In Texaco's view, even if all of the plaintiffs' allegations were true--which the company vehemently denies--the case should still not be tried in the United States. Like nearly all companies that have been sued in this country for their actions abroad, Texaco has sought to have the suit sent back to Ecuador on the grounds of forum non conveniens, arguing, in essence, that holding the trial in the United States, thousands of miles from where the alleged misconduct took place, would be inconvenient. "The Ecuadorian judicial system," the company explains, "is fully capable of fairly adjudicating this issue."

In late March I traveled to Lago Agrio, an oil town perched on the Oriente's northern edge (where Texaco first struck oil in the Amazon), to inspect the courthouse where the trial will take place if the case is returned to Ecuador. After repeated inquiries, I discovered that there is no courthouse in Lago Agrio. I did find the judge who would be assigned to the case, Dr. Luis Naranjo Jara. A polite, soft-spoken man, Jara works out of a small office on the third floor of a brown cinderblock building off the main road in town, a building that, he informed me, has one computer, no fax machine, no Internet connection and no law clerks to assist with paperwork.

Since Ecuador has no equivalent of a class-action lawsuit, how, I asked Jara, would he be able to handle the tens of thousands of cases that would likely flood his office were the suit sent back to Ecuador? He smiled politely and explained that in such a situation he would have to work "late into the nights." Would the government of Ecuador increase his office's budget if this were to happen? "No," he flatly replied.

"It's very clear why Texaco wants to have this sent back to Ecuador," says Bonifaz, who, as it happens, wrote his master's thesis on the issue of forum non conveniens. Bonifaz points to the affidavit submitted by Dr. Alberto Wray, a noted authority on Ecuador's judiciary and now the government's top legal adviser. Judges in Ecuador, Wray noted, almost never compel witnesses to testify if they don't want to and require all questions to be submitted in writing, which would make it virtually impossible to extract any meaningful confessions from Texaco's officers. In addition, if the company wished to withhold any subpoenaed documents from the court in Ecuador, it could simply do so and pay a paltry $180 fine--whereas in the United States such an action would likely land the company's officers in jail.

Beyond the inadequacies of Ecuador's judicial system, there is another reason, in the plaintiffs' view, the trial should be held in New York. What the plaintiffs intend to prove, after all, is that the decisions that led to the destruction of the Oriente were made not in Ecuador but at Texaco's headquarters in White Plains.

Texaco strongly denies this, explaining that the company "operates through subsidiaries" that "are empowered and held responsible for managing their businesses wherever they are located," as Faye Cox told me over the phone. Yet documents obtained by the plaintiffs' lawyers in the initial round of discovery (allowed by Judge Broderick) indicate that even minor expenditures of $5,000 had to be approved in New York. Bertha Margarita Yepez Silva, an Ecuadorean citizen who worked for Texaco from 1973 to 1989 and was responsible for overseeing issues related to workers' health, says that all the department heads in Ecuador sought authorization virtually "every day" from their Texaco superiors in the United States, for everything from minor expenditures to the enrollment of employees in scholarships for technical training programs. Given all of this, it would be odd indeed if nobody in White Plains knew about--or gave the orders for--the dumping of oil production waste, which, if reinjected into the ground, would have cost the company up to three extra dollars for every barrel that was extracted over the twenty-year period.

Despite all of this, in November 1996 Judge Rakoff dismissed the lawsuit on forum non conveniens and other grounds. The case seemed destined to return to Ecuador. But last October the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in a unanimous decision, reversed Judge Rakoff's ruling, instructing the district court that the lawsuit could not be dismissed until it was clear that an adequate "alternative forum" existed.

In his spacious, wood-paneled office in Quito, Ramón Jamanez, Ecuador's current attorney general, refused to speculate on where the case would eventually be tried. But Jamanez, an amiable, round-faced man who chose his words very carefully when we spoke, did allow that it was no mystery why Texaco wished to have the trial held in Ecuador. "It is true--it is a fact--that the US justice system has more experience with class-action lawsuits and therefore is more likely to bring a powerful lawsuit against Texaco," he conceded. "That is a fact."

That Jamanez should acknowledge as much is a testament to the remarkable grassroots movement that has arisen in Ecuador in the wake of this case. When the Texaco lawsuit was originally filed, some within the Ecuadorean government went to great lengths to have it dismissed. In a letter to the State Department, Ambassador Edgar Terán wrote that holding a trial in the United States would threaten Ecuador's national sovereignty and deter foreign investment (this in a country heavily burdened by debt and deeply dependent on oil exports). Two years later, the Ecuadorean government cut a deal with Texaco on a $40 million cleanup operation and last year signed an agreement relinquishing further claims against the company.

In response to the government's efforts to reach an accommodation, an array of grassroots organizations in Ecuador, including the Frente, an umbrella group representing indigenous groups in the Oriente, and the Center for Economic and Social Rights, based in Quito, have staged a barrage of protests, pointing out that the deal signed with Texaco had no input from local people and covered a mere fraction of the cleanup costs, which independent estimates have placed at more than $600 million for the pits alone. In January, after protesters occupied the attorney general's office and demanded that he support the plaintiffs' right to pursue their claims, Ramon Jamanez sent a letter to Judge Rakoff in which he explained that Ecuador, despite its settlement with Texaco, will fully support whatever decision US courts should reach. When I met Jamanez, he reiterated this pledge and also made note of a measure recently passed in Ecuador, Law 55, which stipulates that once Ecuadorean citizens bring a lawsuit in a foreign domain, Ecuador's courts will not accept the suit on remand. If Judge Rakoff sends the suit back to Ecuador, Jamanez strongly implied, Ecuador will likely send it right back to the United States.

Time, of course, is not on the plaintiffs' side. Six years after the Texaco suit was filed, the people of the Oriente have seen little substantive change on the ground. Down the road from Hugo Ureña's home, I stopped and spoke with Margarita Molina, a thin, brown-haired woman who lives directly across from one of the production sites once operated by Texaco in San Carlos. Sighing, she told the familiar story of pigs and cows dying after drinking water from the pits, and she pointed to the legs of three of her daughters, who were all born with a birth defect that has made them so severely bowlegged they are virtually unable to walk. Strange ailments like this have become common in the Oriente, and the cause, a doctor has told Molina, could well be oil pollution. At the very least, Molina would like to see Texaco pay for providing the region with fresh drinking water, but the look on her face, hard and dejected, suggested she was not expecting the company to be forced into action anytime soon.

Despite how long and undoubtedly frustrating the process of attempting to hold Texaco accountable has been, many of the people I encountered in the Oriente vowed to battle on. "We will fight Texaco till the end," promised Manuel Silba, an organizer with the Frente who traveled to New York this past January with a group of indigenous leaders, their heads adorned in traditional feathered crowns, to attend the latest hearings. The battle against Texaco has clearly taken on enormous symbolic meaning in a country where, as in so much of the world, corporations have routinely done as they pleased. "This case has brought to light the whole problem of corporations using double standards in the Third World," says Paulina Garzón of the Center for Economic and Social Rights, in Quito. Like other activists, Garzón is concerned that the lawsuit could raise false expectations--and meanwhile shift attention away from ongoing problems in the Oriente to Bonifaz and the lawyers--but she says the effect has already been overwhelmingly positive. "Now," she explains, "we find that the first thing companies say when they come to Ecuador is that they are not like Texaco."

Bonifaz echoes this point. "We've already had people from Occidental and Mobil communicate to us that they will not dump the produced water--they're aware this could bring a lawsuit," he says. "The principal issue in this case is that corporations have to stop looking at the rest of the world as a frontier like the old Wild West. If you go to the maquiladoras in Mexico, there are cases of incredible pollution all along the border. How many of them violate the law of nations, I don't know, but the point is that real people live in these countries, and US corporations have an obligation to use the same care there as they do at home. That is what this lawsuit is ultimately about.

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