The Devils Excrement

Bryan Patrick

Sacramento Bee

Until now, few people outside of South America have never heard of Lago Agrio, a crime-ridden oil boomtown in Ecuador’s Amazon rain forest, near the Colombia border. A trial began that’s pits California-base ChevronTexaco against 30,000 rain forest residents who allege that from 1971 to 1992 a subsidiary of Texaco dumped massive amounts of oily wastes in the region. Those wastes, they claim caused illnesses ranging from skin rashes to cancer and contributed to the destruction of land inhabited by indigenous cultures. It is a drama that some say has the potential to recalibrate how major corporations do business throughout the region and world. A skeleton of a dog lies next to an oil pump in the Susha oil fields in the Sucumbios region of Ecuador. Many animal have died do to the pollution of the water from the oil. Picture taken Saturday, October 25, 2003.

Bryan Patrick, "The Devils Excrement," in POYi Archive, Item #34473, http://archive.poy.org/items/show/34473 (accessed November 23, 2024).