By Pratap Chatterjee
DALLAS, Mar 3 1996 (IPS)

The chief executive of a Dallas-based oil company had just addressed an Inter-American Petroleum and Gas Conference here, when environment activists handed him a bouquet of roses.

The roses were covered in oil and were meant to symbolise the impact of the Maxus oil company’s drilling operations in Ecuador.

Shannon Wright of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network (RAN) represented activists in the Dallas area Friday, when she handed the roses and several letters to Roberto Monti. The letters detailed concerns about Maxus’ “environmental mismanagement”.

“Maxus’ real leadership is in rainforest destruction, suppression of human rights, and on-going cover-ups,” Wright later told IPS. “Maxus has ploughed its bulldozers through (Yasuni) and Indian homelands in Ecuador and is now polluting the region with crude oil and toxic chemicals.”

The letters call on Maxus to “disclose all environmental records (and) submit to a full and independent environmental audit.”

They refer to an oil concession that Maxus acquired in 1991 in the Amazon forests of Ecuador, in the ecologically fragile Yasun National Park. Since Apr. 1994, Maxus has produced 30,000 barrels of crude oil a day from the area.

Nine indigenous groups live in the western region of the Amazon: the Achuar, Cofan, Huaorani, Quichua, Secoya, Shuar, Siona and the Zaparo. And some 1,500 Huaorani, a semi-nomadic people, live where Maxus has been drilling for oil.

Maxus defends its operations.

“The Ecuador environmental management programme is widely regarded as the best in the Latin American region,” said Scott Jones, Maxus spokesperson. “We are firmly committed to our environmental and cultural programme.”

Jaguars, manatees, anteaters, freshwater dolphins, and otters are among the 120 mammal species, 500 fish species, 600 bird species, and over 4,000 types of flowering plants found in Yasuni, according to environmentalists. The Cuyabeno wildlife reserve of Yasuni has set international records for diversity — with 473 species of trees found in just one sq. km.

Maxus has cut a 160-km road into the heart of this pristine rainforest to lay a pipeline which transports the crude oil from the Amazon to a refinery hundreds of miles away on the Pacific coast.

Wright charges that in the last two years, Maxus has had several oil spills at its wells in Ecuador. Ecuadorean environmental organisations calculate that some 21,000 hectares of primary rainforest have been cleared and 540 streams affected by toxic waste from Maxus’ operations.

In its defence Maxus says that the Huaorani people signed an agreement for oil development on their land in 1993.

But Wright argues that the Huaorani adamantly opposed the project from its beginning and called for local and international support to stop it.

“The Huaorani are legally prohibited from obstructing any oil projects on their land, under threat that the Ecuadorean government will revoke title to their homeland,” says Wright.

“Given these conditions, the Huaorani, as well as other indigenous groups, have found themselves obligated to eventually negotiate with oil companies, as neither the Ecuadorean government, nor in this case Maxus, has allowed the local people to reject the an oil project in their territory,” she adds.

She points out that the Huaorani organisation, ONHAE, which signed the agreement with Maxus in May 1995, organised an uprising against the company, declaring that Maxus had not fulfilled the terms of the agreement.

Patricia Lopez Morenoûa former army general who now heads the state-owned PetroEcuador, defends Maxus.

“The company is doing the best that it can as far as I know,” he told IPS. “I have been to their concession and they have very strict rules. Why, they search you when you enter their buildings and if you have so much as a packet of cigarettes, they confiscate it. That’s how conscious the company is about safety.”

Maxus is not the first company to be accused of environmental destruction in Ecuador. Texaco, which extracted 1.4 billion barrels of oil over 25 years from the country under a joint venture with PetroEcuador, has also been charged with disregard for local peoples and the forests of the Amazon.

Some 30,000 Ecuadoreans have taken Texaco to court in the United States, charging the U.S. company with “callous disregard for the health, well-being and safety” of local people. The have also charged the company with “large-scale disposal of inadequately treated hazardous waste and destruction of tropical rainforest habitats.”

An estimated 26.35 million litres of crude oil spilled into rivers from the Texaco operation. A separate lawsuit has also been lodged against Texaco by Peruvian groups.

“It is true that the standards in the past were lower,” said Lopez. “But we now re-inject 60 percent of the wastes from our drilling and we have cleaned up many of the pools that have been polluted. The army is also under instructions to help any people that may have been affected.”

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