Indigenous communities continue to deal with pollution impacts in Ecuador

Global Business

A U.S. judge has blocked the payout of a record $19 billion from U.S. oil company Chevron to indigenous tribes in Ecuador as compensation for decades of polluting the Amazon rainforest with oil. As lawyers are fight that decision from Canada to Argentina, the indigenous community continues to suffer. CCTV America’s Gerry Hadden reported the story from the Ciudad Mitad del Mundo, Ecuador.

Indigenous communities continue to deal with pollution impacts in Ecuador

A U.S. judge has blocked the payout of a record $19 billion from U.S. oil company Chevron to indigenous tribes in Ecuador as compensation for decades of polluting the Amazon rainforest with oil. As lawyers are fight that decision from Canada to Argentina, the indigenous community continues to suffer. CCTV America's Gerry Hadden reported the story from the Ciudad Mitad del Mundo, Ecuador.

Native communities affected by the disaster still deal with issues of pollution committed by the Texaco oil company that was later purchased by Chevron. The government of Ecuador also plans more oil and mining operations of its own.

The indigenous people here feel they’ve been ignored for centuries.

“My grandmother used to tell us how before the oil company came, you could roam throughout this area to fish and hunt. And they would drink this water,” Jose Aguinda, a local, said. “Then Texaco arrived and began poisoning people. Some died.”

Ecuador’s young indigenous generation has never known a homeland that was clean. All of that appears as folklore or legend.

“We didn’t know what the stuff was when we were kids,” Aguinda said. “We’d come running out of school and put our hands in the water. It was full of oil. We’d push it away in order to swim.”

Uncertainty reigns over Ecuador’s Amazon. U.S. Oil giant Texaco operated throughout most of the 1960s until the early 1990s. It was bought by Chevron in 2000. However, many old wells remain, as do sludge pits where Texaco dumped toxic run-off year after year.

“They dug more than 300 wells and some 1,000 open pits like this,” local resident Jose Luis Diaz said. “This is what we’ve had to live with all these years, as a country.”