How oil companies are evil: reason # 3,456
Locals are fighting the good fight against Chevron in Ecuador. Texaco - now owned by Chevron - is being accused of contaminating about 1,700 square miles of Amazon rain forest with toxic sludge and other waste that resulted from drilling for - you guessed it - oil. From the Vanity Fair article:
The pollution consists of huge quantities of crude oil and associated wastes, mixed in with the toxic compounds used for drilling operations—a noxious soup that for decades was dumped into leaky pits, or directly into the Amazonian watershed. The company that did much of this work was Texaco—an outfit with a swashbuckling reputation worldwide. It signed a contract with Ecuador in 1964, began full-scale production in 1972, and pulled out 20 years later. In 2001, Texaco was swallowed whole by Chevron, which by integrating its operations nearly doubled in size. The lawsuit against it in Lago Agrio was filed in 2003, though the legal antecedents go back much further.
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