Word: ecuador
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Texaco has long been a leader in corporate exploitation and environmental devastation, especially in developing countries such as Ecuador and Burma. Although its practices have little effect on Americans except to lower the price at the pump, any responsible citizen of the world should be out-raged at the company's reprehensible outward behavior as well as the racism within...
Texaco completed its pipeline from the rain forest to the Pacific coast of Ecuador in 1972. From 1972 to 1989, 1.4 billion barrels of oil passed through the pipeline. Over those 17 years, 27 spills occurred, releasing an estimated 16.8 million gallons of crude oil into one of the world's biodiversity hot spots and the traditional home of thousands of Ecuadorian natives. Judith Kimerling, a Yale-educated attorney and the author of Amazon Crude, estimates that, even today, 4.3 million gallons of untreated toxic wastes are being released into the watershed every...
Texaco transferred control of the pipeline to the Ecuador state petroleum company, Petroecuador, in 1989. In 1993, a lawsuit was filed against Texaco on behalf of 30,000 inhabitants of the Ecuadorian Amazon, seeking damages of over $1 billion for the degradation of the local environment. Elias Piyaguaje, leader of the Secoya people, described the extent of the damage: "Our rivers have been poisoned. We cannot drink. We cannot bathe. We cannot believe in the future of our existence." The lawsuit is still pending...
Although it has sold most of its interests in Ecuador, Texaco has not been content to leave the developing world alone. In 1991 it became the lead operator in a multinational consortium of oil companies searching for natural gas off the coast of Burma...
...area of Burma across which the pipelines cut is biologically rich and home to many disenfranchised ethnic minority groups. The Tenasserim rain forest is the largest intact rain forest in southeast Asia, home to such endangered species as the white rhinoceros and the tiger. Texaco's track record in Ecuador demonstrates that the corporation is not likely to be a good environmental steward; no independent environmental impact assessments have been conducted in the pipeline region...