U.S. Water News Online
QUITO, Ecuador -- A lawyer for indigenous groups suing ChevronTexaco Corp. said the U.S. oil giant cheated Ecuador by never fully complying with a government order to clean up toxic pollution in a swath of Amazon jungle.
"The company tricked the government," Steven Donziger told The Associated Press. "There are chemicals like chromium, cadmium, lead and other chemicals, active, and they still affect people and animals."
Donziger said experts on his legal team inspected three toxic holding pools that Texaco was supposed to have cleaned up.
The group's subsequent report, alleging "fraud" by the company, was presented to a judge in Lago Agrio, the Amazon town, 112 miles northeast of the capital, where the case is being tried.
Rodrigo Perez, a lawyer for ChevronTexaco, said "the plaintiff's report lacks foundation because it is based on information from people who are not qualified to measure the impacts on human health and of petroleum operations."
"This document has no value whatsoever," Perez said, adding that the company has "demonstrated that its remediation eliminated the potential risks of contamination."
The ongoing lawsuit, brought by 88 people representing 30,000 poor jungle settlers and Amazon Indians, opened in the rural Ecuador court in October 2003 after a decade of winding through U.S. courts.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled in 2002 that the case should be heard in the country where the damage allegedly occurred.
The plaintiffs want ChevronTexaco to pay to clean up contamination and provide medical care for people harmed by pollution. They estimate the costs could reach US$1 billion.
The plaintiffs allege that Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, chose to cut costs between 1972 and 1990 by dumping 18.5 billion gallons of oily wastewater brought up by drilling into more than 600 open pits and streams in the Amazon jungle.
The company says the lawsuit is unfounded and that it complied with a government cleanup plan from 1995-1998.
ChevronTexaco responded to Donziger's allegations, releasing a statement accusing the plaintiffs of violating court-dictated terms laying out how the scientific analysis should be conducted.
The opinions expressed by the plaintiffs "are irresponsible and seek to confuse public opinion," the statement said.
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