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The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

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The Poisoning of the Amazon

An oil pipeline runs along the main road through the middle of San Carlos, a small community near the Napo River in the northern part of Ecuador’s Amazon. On the pipeline a slogan is painted: "No More Contamination! We Want Clean Water." There are over 120 oil wells in San Carlos municipality alone. Contamination is widespread, and the town has suffered the highest number of deaths from cancer in the region -- around 15 in the last several years.

San Carlos stands at the epicenter of Ecuador’s polluted Amazon. A couple of miles from the town there is a large Petroecuador refinery with a fenced perimeter. The complex is about a square kilometer in size and it contains big pillbox refineries and two smokestacks which belch great gas flames.

The Advocacy Project visited this complex and saw what is commonly called an "oil pool." It is a big pit, about 20 meters by 40, full of foul black liquid, water and oil waste together. Nothing lives in it. There are hundreds of such pools in the Oriente.

Washing clothes near oil pipelines

The liquid waste from the oil pits leaches into the lakes, the rivers, and the groundwater, leaving petroleum hydrocarbons in every pool of drinking and bathing water available to the citizens of San Carlos.

[Amazonian] rainforests are being destroyed at a staggering rate. According to the National Academy of Science, at least 50 million acres a year are lost, an area the size of England, Wales and Scotland combined. Rainforest Action Network

It is impossible to avoid the oil in San Carlos. Families wash their clothing and take drinking water from the contaminated streams. Cattle drink bad water from the streams or waste pools, and then get sick and die. Barefoot children play on the roads - and the only way they can wash their feet is with gasoline.

Hugo Urena, a San Carlos community leader, explained that it was not always this way in San Carlos. When Texaco first came to the region thirty years ago, people thought the company would bring prosperity - jobs, money, schools and houses. But Texaco took far more than it gave.

San Carlos house

Urena described the impact of oil drilling on his community: "There are four gas burners that burn night and day. The smoke from these burners puts sulfur and other bad chemicals into the environment. There are 12 or 15 oil pools in this area. There used to be more, but some of them have been covered with dirt. We are suffering from head and throat pains. There are children born with birth defects, with migraines, or eye pain. We can’t bathe in the water."

Cancer put San Carlos on the map in 1999, when the University of London conducted an epidemiological study there and made the devastating effects of pollution on this municipality known. The study found higher cancer rates there -- especially stomach cancer, cervical cancer, and lymphoma -- than anywhere else in the region.

San Carlos store

San Carlos is far from exceptional. Vast areas of the northern Oriente have been polluted, and hundreds of other towns and villages have been exposed to the same health hazards.

In spite of the devastation wrought by oil companies there, the people of San Carlos are fighting to preserve what is left of their rich environment, and to develop alternative ways of making a living. Mr. Urena and his colleagues have sought advice from the Amazon Defense Front training in alternative development programs such as eco-tourism.

Sources:

• Affidavit from Dr. Aaron Bannett 
• Center for Economic and Social Rights report, "Rights Violations in the Ecuadorian Amazon,"
• 1999 "Yana Curi" report by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine 

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