BP Oil Catastrophe Mirrors Texaco-Chevron Amazon Disaster
A pool of oil in Lago Agrio, an Ecuadorean town in the Amazon where Texaco is accused of having dumped millions of gallons of contamination in local rivers and lakes in order to save the company money. Chevron later purchased Texaco, and has inherited Texaco’s legal troubles
Disaster in the Amazon
By Bob Herbert
June 4, 2010
BP’s calamitous behavior in the Gulf of Mexico is the big oil story of the moment. But for many years, indigenous people from a formerly pristine region of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador have been trying to get relief from an American company, Texaco (which later merged with Chevron), for what has been described as the largest oil-related environmental catastrophe ever…
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Anglo-French Oil Company Perenco Plans Amazon Invasion
A group of Waorani Indians in Ecuador with blow pipes
( Note: At a time when oil is gushing unchecked into the Gulf of Mexico, despoiling one of the richest ecosystems in the Americas, another oil company, Perenco, moves closer to building an oil pipeline through one of the remotest areas of the Amazon, in northern Peru, with the risk of oil workers making a potentially deadly contact with one or more uncontacted Amazonian tribes. Oil workers and illegal loggers have been invading indigenous territories–with often deadly consequences for native peoples–for the last one hundred years–Kim MacQuarrie)
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