- The environmental damage caused more than half a century of oil activity in Ecuador’s Amazon are multiplying yearly without effective remediation by the government or the oil companies responsible.
- To date, there are 1,107 recorded “environmental liabilities” and another 3,568 sites in the Ecuadorian Amazon labeled by the environment ministry as “sources of contamination.”
- Although Ecuador has been extracting oil since the 1970s, there is a lack of research, data and statistics on the health conditions of the local populations directly affected by these extractions, who are now calling for an urgent investigation.
- State-owned oil company Petroecuador EP has inherited the responsibility for the environmental waste sites caused by Texaco, now part of U.S. oil major Chevron.
ORELLANA, Ecuador — “There’s a pool here,” says Ermel Chávez, a representative of the Amazon Defense Front in Ecuador. Chávez plucks a long branch from a tree, crouches down, and uses it to clear the ground. He submerges the branch by making a hole in the ground and pushing down: 1 meter, 2, 3 meters — 10 feet deep now — and still he continues.
We’re in San Carlos parish in the canton of Joya de los Sachas, in Ecuador’s Orellana province. “There are pools up to 6 meters [20 ft] deep. There’s oil in here,” Chávez says as he pulls the branch out. It’s covered in a gray paste that smells strongly of fuel. A few meters away, cows are grazing.
The Sacha oilfield, awarded by former president Rafael Correa to the Venezuelan state-owned oil company PDVSA, is now under the administration of Petroecuador, the national oil company of Ecuador, and is the largest in the area. San Carlos lies directly in front of the oilfield’s Sacha Sur station.
Among the vegetation here, there are several pits — pools full of oil residue that were once covered with soil. “Fruit trees don’t grow here, and if they do, they don’t bear fruit,” say local community members.
“There is a layer of oil under here. The oil has solidified,” Chávez says, referring to the waste that fills the pools and showing a cacao tree whose growth he says has stagnated. “The problem with this type of contamination is that people generally use water wells here in the countryside,” he says, pointing to the nearest house, an abandoned one-story building about 20 steps away. The family that used to live there had to move, Chávez says, because the water from the well they relied on “is already poisoned.”
The oilfield is a 12-kilometer (7.5-mile) drive from Joya de los Sachas. The road is dotted with groups of workers from Petroecuador EP and several extraction wells that the locals call “dolls” because of their shape. Some are closed and abandoned.