cross-posted from: https://suppo.fi/post/9476459

Over a quarter century in the Ecuadorian Amazon, oil giant Texaco (now Chevron) perpetrated an ecological disaster: It dumped 3.2 million gallons of toxic waste, spilled 17 million gallons of crude oil and flared nearly 50 million cubic feet of methane gas. The company also collaborated with U.S. evangelical missionaries to forcibly displace Indigenous peoples from their oil-rich lands. The victims have received no compensation.

Now, three arbitrators have ordered that compensation be paid — by the Ecuadorian government to Chevron. The total: $220 million, according to legal documents made public this week.

The ruling marks the latest twist in a decades-long legal saga that has stretched across continents and consumed millions of dollars in legal fees, all while the local population bears the burden of displacement and high cancer rates from the contamination.

“Our territories, our forests will never be the same,” said Penti Baihua, a traditional leader of the Baihuaeri Waorani of Bameno.

Baihua lived with his community in the forest, uncontacted by outsiders, until the evangelical missionaries Texaco assisted forced contact on him when he was around 6 or 7 in a campaign dubbed “Operation Auca.” Auca is a pejorative term meaning “savage.”

A significant amount of environmental clean up could be done with the $220 million award money, Baihua said, speaking in Spanish. It could also help stop the ever-expanding advance of the region’s oil frontier.

“People who have cancer and other health problems but no money for medicines could get treatment,” he added. “Where will the government get the money to pay? Will it come drill more wells?”

That a major polluter will walk away with hundreds of millions in compensation is possible thanks in part to an international arbitration system known as investor-state dispute settlement. ISDS is embedded into thousands of trade agreements and contracts, endowing foreign investors with expansive rights and allowing them to bypass national courts and sue governments before panels of private arbitrators, many of whom are corporate lawyers.