CAMPBELL: Deep in the Amazon rainforest a shaman begins an ancient healing ceremony. Alejandro was one of the last of the Cofan people to perform this ritual; the young have lost all faith in it. The old ways cannot stop the sickness now spreading across their land.
00:00 SHAMAN: Before the oil companies arrived, people lived well. They enjoyed themselves in the jungle, they were healthy, there were many animals to catch and eat.
00:29 After Texaco came, people who bathed in the river and drank the water got cancer and died.
00:56 CAMPBELL: When Alejandro was a boy, this was one of the most pure environments on Earth. But in the 1960s came the discovery of oil.
01:18 And with it came roads, production plants, pipelines, pollution and some say, the slow poisoning of the land and the people. Indigenous tribes have been devastated since the coming of oil, but now theyve forced a giant US corporation back to answer for what its done. Its created an extraordinary legal rumble in the jungle.
02:09 CAMPBELL: This is what Texaco brought to the Amazon: a massive oil industry sliced into virgin rainforest.
02:17 The company drew on 60 years of experience to show Ecuador how to tap its giant but remote reserves. Texaco didnt just operate the fields. It had a one-third share in them with the state oil company, Petroecuador. Both companies made a lot of money, but the people who live here see a different legacy.
02:26 ROSA MORENO, HEALTH WORKER: Does it hurt when I press?
02:54 GIRL PATIENT: Yes.
ROSA MORENO, HEALTH WORKER: Are you in a lot of pain, darling?
02:57 GIRL PATIENT: Yes.
ROSA MORENO, HEALTH WORKER: Does the pain stop you from sleeping?
03:02 GIRL PATIENT: Yes.
CAMPBELL: Rosa Moreno is a community nurse in San Carlos, one of dozens of oil towns that have sprung up since the coming of Texaco. She treats what she claims is a staggering array of illnesses from contaminated water.
03:04 Girls infected hands ROSA MORENO, HEALTH WORKER: These nails are not healed, theyre infected. Theyre going to fall off again. Look at this: shes full of scabs. She only bathes in the river, doesnt she?
03:19 CAMPBELL: They range from serious skin infections like the blemishes on eight-year-old Carmita, to alarmingly high rates of cancer.
03:45 CAMPBELL: A detailed scientific study of San Carlos, published four years ago, blamed oil contamination for doubling the cancer rate. The victims include Rosa Moreno.
03:53 ROSA MORENO, HEALTH WORKER: When I first arrived I was quite naïve. There was no water or electricity. I had to go down to the river to bathe, to wash my clothes.
04:13 Rosa: And now I have chronic gastritis and have to have an endoscopy every year. Ive had to have four endoscopies to control the cancer in my stomach.
04:43 CAMPBELL: The main cause of contamination residents say, is these toxic pits scattered throughout the oil fields. Texaco dug hundreds of them to store waste. Theyre alongside houses, near streams and rivers where people wash, and close to wells where people drink.
04:51 Luis Yanza, an activist and community leader, says its like being slowly poisoned.
05:14 LUIS YANZA: Because of the smell, which you can smell now, people get headaches, dizziness, and this is especially bad when it rains. This fills up and flows into the rivers and people drink the water and use the water for domestic purposes and for the animals and it makes them ill.
05:54 CAMPBELL: Luis Yanza works for the Amazon Defence Front, a grassroots organisation trying to assess the contamination and mobilise the community to fight back.
06:06 LUIS YANZA: Im always visiting the communities and I bear witness. I see disastrous, alarming situations and sometimes it shocks me because I find myself in a situation where I cant do anything to help.
06:20 Luis: Our comrades, our families, our friends hundreds of men, women and children have died thats a crime. It makes me indignant and it makes everyone indignant.
06:42 CAMPBELL: Many of the indigenous communities he visits, like this Cofan village, can still only be reached by boat. They are caught between tradition and development but have received none of the oil wealth.
06:54 The only tangible sign of the State the village schoolhouse was built long before oil was found. The children here face an even bleaker future than their parents did. Poverty and ill health have worsened since the 1960s. Life expectancy has fallen.
07:11 But the villagers arent seeking money for themselves from Texaco. They just want the company to clean up their land.
07:30 SHAMAN: If they dont clean up the area there will be more sickness and gradually the Cofan will die off.
07:41 CAMPBELL: Despite the efforts of locals like Luis Yanza, this might well have remained just another disgruntled community too poor to sue a US corporation.
07:55 But for the past 12 years a Manhattan lawyer, Steve Donziger, has fought their case in the US courts, the costs covered by a contingency agreement with a New York law firm.
08:07 Now the case has shifted to Ecuador for judgement on a US$6 billion claim.
STEVE DONZIGER: This case represents the first time that rainforest dwellers have succeeded in forcing a major multinational oil company to come to where they live and to face charges in a court of law where the company actually has to submit itself to jurisdiction. Its never happened before.
08:38 CAMPBELL: When Texaco came here in the 1960s it must have seemed unlikely it would ever be called on to answer for its actions. The rainforest was almost uninhabited except for small and scattered groups of indigenous communities.
09:03 The Ecuadorian authorities, with whom Texaco worked, paid little heed to the rights or wishes of the so-called Indians.
STEVE DONZIGER: I think the thought that they could get away with this, because there were very few people living here other than five indigenous groups. There were no roads, there were very few people.
09:26 Donziger: And I really believe they thought they could get away with it, and now 35 years later, its coming back to haunt them.
09:48 CAMPBELL: But the area didnt stay sparsely populated for long. The roads allowed the government to colonise the area with settlers. Tens of thousands moved in to work in the oil fields or farm the land. It was a potential legal nightmare by the time Texaco sold its holding in 1992. But it made a deal with the Ecuador government it thought would protect it from future liability. Texaco agreed to spend US$40 million on cleaning up a third of the contaminated sites.
09:57 Its an extremely technical case but it comes down to this. When the hundreds of drills were dug, the oily mud that was brought up was dumped in unlined pits like this around every drill site. Now, Texaco insists that everything was contained by the clay soil but the local people say cancer-causing toxins leached out into surrounding wells and streams. On top of that, when the crude oil was separated, billions of gallons of leftover water was discharged into streams and rivers that feed the Amazon. Now whether those practices were safe or deadly and who should pay the price, is what this case is all about.
10:37 The case is being fought around the frontier oil town of Lago Agrio, near the Columbian border.
11:28 Judge Efrain Novillo, who never travels without armed guards, is in charge of assessing the $6 billion claim.
11:39 Today the court is in session in a jungle clearing beside an oilrig and waste pit. It is a bizarre coming together of lawyers, guns and money. The opposing sides have their own camps, technical equipment, experts and advisors, all protected by Ecuadorian soldiers.
11:48 RICARDO REIS VEIGA [ON PHONE]: all we are basically getting on. The tour is just starting now. All right... OK.... bye.
12:11 CAMPBELL: Among them are senior executives from Texaco, which recently merged with Chevron to become the worlds fourth largest oil company. Theyre making regular trips from their air-conditioned headquarters to the 46-degree heat of this mosquito-ridden jungle. Its a sight Luis Yanza thought he would never see.
12:16 LUIS YANZA : It gives us a lot of pleasure to see their faces because of what they can say, seeing all this because they left behind all that contamination and they are directly responsible.
12:38 Luis: Therefore, we feel proud to have obliged them to sit down in court to respond to this and to come here to breathe the contaminated air to see the people who have been affected which is irrefutable, convincing proof.
12:49 CAMPBELL: Ricardo Reis Veiga is Chevron Texacos chief counsel. Hes using the companys full resources to fight the case, which could have serious implications for its operations in more than 180 countries.
13:08 Among the experts hes brought in is an expensive PR team doing damage control on the corporations global reputation.
13:22 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: The records will show that we are good corporate citizens and that we will prevail in the end.
13:31 JUDGE: Are the experts here?
13:37 CAMPBELL: Each session begins with a formal swearing in of witnesses. Every word is recorded and transcribed.
13:40 Today the court is inspecting a pit from the original consortium for signs of contamination.
13:49 Chevron-Texacos advocate, Dr Adolfo Callejas, tells the court that Petroecuador is responsible for any pollution. But the opposing lawyer, Dr Monica Pareja, argues it was Texacos decision to use sub-standard disposal methods just to save money.
13:57 DR MONICA PAREJA: Thats an example of the way Texaco did their work in Ecuador.
14:16 Pareja: If they serve as a model Id hate to think how the rest of the oil companies operated.
14:25 CAMPBELL: Didnt Texaco just take advantage of lax third world standards because it was cheaper and they could get away with it?
RICARDO REIS VEIGA: No, absolutely not. Absolutely not.
14:37 Veiga: The technology that we use here and standards of operation that we use here on behalf of the owners of the consortium were the prevailing technology at the time we operated, basically the 60s, 70s and 80s.
14:45 STEVE DONZIGER: No way. You can go anywhere in the United States. You will never see an open-air toxic waste pit like this.
14:59 Texaco knew better. Texaco already was not doing this in all other parts of the world, including the United States, and they knew that if they did this it would create major health problems and environmental problems for years to come.
15:06 PR MAN WITH NOTEBOOK: We have four pits here, two oily pits which we will number number one and two.
15:18 CAMPBELL: Chevron-Texaco insists it has done all the cleaning up it needs to.
15:23 PR MAN: Im standing in the middle of the remediated pit number two and you can see this has been revegetated with grass.
15:28 CAMPBELL: The companys PR team took me to one of the waste pits that Texaco remediated when it left Ecuador. 15:36
PR MAN: And you can see this area, it was tested and it was found to be OK and
15:41 CAMPBELL: But the plaintiffs claim all Texaco really did was hide the problem.
15:46 STEVE DONZIGER: The agreement Texaco signed with the Ecuadorian government is a fraud; its a sham. Basically theyve required Texaco to remediate a certain portion of the pits, the open air toxic waste pits that they left, but they never cleaned it other than to run dirt over the toxic waste pit without first cleaning it out. Thats like treating skin cancer with make up.
15:52 CAMPBELL: Are there any occasions when dirt was simply shovelled over the top?
16:11 PR MAN: No, no, and we have
CAMPBELL: Chevron-Texaco denies the clean up was cosmetic but at the same time it claims the pits werent dangerous to begin with.
16:16 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: Well, the existence of the pits does not pose necessarily a health risk to human beings, thats for sure. The oil is actually contained and theres no exposure per se to human beings and one way to check this is to check the quality of groundwater, and we have done so
16:24 CAMPBELL: Yes, but why did you spend $40 million remediating them if there was no need to?
16:46 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: Because its common practice to remediate and close pits that you have used.
16:50 CAMPBELL: Isnt that because you wanted to prevent the environmental and health hazards?
16:54 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: Its always -- remediation is always about preventing things from the future. Otherwise it would not make any sense.
16:58 CAMPBELL: So there is a future risk? There is a potential, you concede for some sort of health hazard or environmental hazard?
17:05 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: What Im saying is that doing the remediation, as any part of any operation in the world, is part of our policy; its part of the way we do business.
17:21 CAMPBELL: While the lawyers argue, the people are suffering from desperately inadequate medical facilities. Rosa Moreno is the only full time health worker for a community of 4000. She can offer nothing but sympathy for patients like Dona Rosita.
17:30 ROSA MORENO, HEALTH WORKER: Did they do chemotherapy?
17:48 DONA ROSITA: Yes, they did more than that. Ive got bad again. Ive got really bad. I just want to die.
CAMPBELL: She is dying of cancer of the uterus.
18:07 DONA ROSITA: Ive got worse again like here they operated on me before, and they told me my ovaries were bad its cancer and theres no treatment.
18:10 CAMPBELL: Dona Rositas family of settlers built this house 22 years ago and dug a well behind it. Until two years ago, it was the only water they could drink.
18:28 DONA ROSITA: There was nowhere to get water even now there isnt. Now we have somewhere to boil it, but not then.
18:41 We used to have to bring the water, put in lemon and sugar and drink it. It tasted foul and it stank of petrol. It was disgusting that water tasted of chemicals and smelled of chemicals, but we used to drink it weve been drinking it for years.
18:52 CAMPBELL: But Ricardo Reis Veiga argues the health problems could be simply due to poverty.
19:26 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: In reality, most of the studies that have been presented by the plaintiff so far recognise that they could not conclusively link the rate of cancer in this region with the oil production activities.
19:34 CAMPBELL: But you never can, can you, and scientifically its never possible to 100% prove something like that.
19:47 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: Thats correct but I think to allege that oil production activities conducted by Texaco 20, 30 years ago is the cause of a disease that has been alleged by the plaintiffs is not correct either.
19:52 CAMPBELL: The indigenous groups have struggled to retain their culture and identities since the oil boom brought settlement and pollution to their land. They may have a long wait for justice to be done.
20:12 Theres no guarantee that Chevron-Texaco will abide by the courts decision, even if it loses the case and all appeals.
20:28 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: In the event of an adverse decision I would have basically to take a look at the circumstance in which that decision was written and basically make my decision then.
20:37 CAMPBELL: So you cant guarantee that if you do lose you will respect the order of the court.
20:47 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: I would have to see the conditions again.
20:51 CAMPBELL: But to many the fact the case has come this far is already a victory.
20:55 STEVE DONZIGER: This case sends a powerful message to oil companies all over the world. You cannot go into developing countries and use sub-standard technology just because you think these people do not have the money or power to take you to a court of law and hold you accountable.
21:06 CAMPBELL: Whatever happens will be too late for Dona Rosita.
21:28 DONA ROSITA: And there we were, we were innocently drinking the water without knowing. We didnt even know to boil it or anything.
21:36 Dona Rosita: Everything is ruined, its all over. All my organs are finished, and the cancerous ones were taken out. Now, theres nothing.
21:47 CAMPBELL: Like so many others, she can only wish she never came to a poisoned paradise.
22:02 Reporter: Eric Campbell
Camera: Brett Ramsay
ACSProducer: Vivien Altman
Editor: Simon Brynjolffssen
00:00 SHAMAN: Before the oil companies arrived, people lived well. They enjoyed themselves in the jungle, they were healthy, there were many animals to catch and eat.
00:29 After Texaco came, people who bathed in the river and drank the water got cancer and died.
00:56 CAMPBELL: When Alejandro was a boy, this was one of the most pure environments on Earth. But in the 1960s came the discovery of oil.
01:18 And with it came roads, production plants, pipelines, pollution and some say, the slow poisoning of the land and the people. Indigenous tribes have been devastated since the coming of oil, but now theyve forced a giant US corporation back to answer for what its done. Its created an extraordinary legal rumble in the jungle.
02:09 CAMPBELL: This is what Texaco brought to the Amazon: a massive oil industry sliced into virgin rainforest.
02:17 The company drew on 60 years of experience to show Ecuador how to tap its giant but remote reserves. Texaco didnt just operate the fields. It had a one-third share in them with the state oil company, Petroecuador. Both companies made a lot of money, but the people who live here see a different legacy.
02:26 ROSA MORENO, HEALTH WORKER: Does it hurt when I press?
02:54 GIRL PATIENT: Yes.
ROSA MORENO, HEALTH WORKER: Are you in a lot of pain, darling?
02:57 GIRL PATIENT: Yes.
ROSA MORENO, HEALTH WORKER: Does the pain stop you from sleeping?
03:02 GIRL PATIENT: Yes.
CAMPBELL: Rosa Moreno is a community nurse in San Carlos, one of dozens of oil towns that have sprung up since the coming of Texaco. She treats what she claims is a staggering array of illnesses from contaminated water.
03:04 Girls infected hands ROSA MORENO, HEALTH WORKER: These nails are not healed, theyre infected. Theyre going to fall off again. Look at this: shes full of scabs. She only bathes in the river, doesnt she?
03:19 CAMPBELL: They range from serious skin infections like the blemishes on eight-year-old Carmita, to alarmingly high rates of cancer.
03:45 CAMPBELL: A detailed scientific study of San Carlos, published four years ago, blamed oil contamination for doubling the cancer rate. The victims include Rosa Moreno.
03:53 ROSA MORENO, HEALTH WORKER: When I first arrived I was quite naïve. There was no water or electricity. I had to go down to the river to bathe, to wash my clothes.
04:13 Rosa: And now I have chronic gastritis and have to have an endoscopy every year. Ive had to have four endoscopies to control the cancer in my stomach.
04:43 CAMPBELL: The main cause of contamination residents say, is these toxic pits scattered throughout the oil fields. Texaco dug hundreds of them to store waste. Theyre alongside houses, near streams and rivers where people wash, and close to wells where people drink.
04:51 Luis Yanza, an activist and community leader, says its like being slowly poisoned.
05:14 LUIS YANZA: Because of the smell, which you can smell now, people get headaches, dizziness, and this is especially bad when it rains. This fills up and flows into the rivers and people drink the water and use the water for domestic purposes and for the animals and it makes them ill.
05:54 CAMPBELL: Luis Yanza works for the Amazon Defence Front, a grassroots organisation trying to assess the contamination and mobilise the community to fight back.
06:06 LUIS YANZA: Im always visiting the communities and I bear witness. I see disastrous, alarming situations and sometimes it shocks me because I find myself in a situation where I cant do anything to help.
06:20 Luis: Our comrades, our families, our friends hundreds of men, women and children have died thats a crime. It makes me indignant and it makes everyone indignant.
06:42 CAMPBELL: Many of the indigenous communities he visits, like this Cofan village, can still only be reached by boat. They are caught between tradition and development but have received none of the oil wealth.
06:54 The only tangible sign of the State the village schoolhouse was built long before oil was found. The children here face an even bleaker future than their parents did. Poverty and ill health have worsened since the 1960s. Life expectancy has fallen.
07:11 But the villagers arent seeking money for themselves from Texaco. They just want the company to clean up their land.
07:30 SHAMAN: If they dont clean up the area there will be more sickness and gradually the Cofan will die off.
07:41 CAMPBELL: Despite the efforts of locals like Luis Yanza, this might well have remained just another disgruntled community too poor to sue a US corporation.
07:55 But for the past 12 years a Manhattan lawyer, Steve Donziger, has fought their case in the US courts, the costs covered by a contingency agreement with a New York law firm.
08:07 Now the case has shifted to Ecuador for judgement on a US$6 billion claim.
STEVE DONZIGER: This case represents the first time that rainforest dwellers have succeeded in forcing a major multinational oil company to come to where they live and to face charges in a court of law where the company actually has to submit itself to jurisdiction. Its never happened before.
08:38 CAMPBELL: When Texaco came here in the 1960s it must have seemed unlikely it would ever be called on to answer for its actions. The rainforest was almost uninhabited except for small and scattered groups of indigenous communities.
09:03 The Ecuadorian authorities, with whom Texaco worked, paid little heed to the rights or wishes of the so-called Indians.
STEVE DONZIGER: I think the thought that they could get away with this, because there were very few people living here other than five indigenous groups. There were no roads, there were very few people.
09:26 Donziger: And I really believe they thought they could get away with it, and now 35 years later, its coming back to haunt them.
09:48 CAMPBELL: But the area didnt stay sparsely populated for long. The roads allowed the government to colonise the area with settlers. Tens of thousands moved in to work in the oil fields or farm the land. It was a potential legal nightmare by the time Texaco sold its holding in 1992. But it made a deal with the Ecuador government it thought would protect it from future liability. Texaco agreed to spend US$40 million on cleaning up a third of the contaminated sites.
09:57 Its an extremely technical case but it comes down to this. When the hundreds of drills were dug, the oily mud that was brought up was dumped in unlined pits like this around every drill site. Now, Texaco insists that everything was contained by the clay soil but the local people say cancer-causing toxins leached out into surrounding wells and streams. On top of that, when the crude oil was separated, billions of gallons of leftover water was discharged into streams and rivers that feed the Amazon. Now whether those practices were safe or deadly and who should pay the price, is what this case is all about.
10:37 The case is being fought around the frontier oil town of Lago Agrio, near the Columbian border.
11:28 Judge Efrain Novillo, who never travels without armed guards, is in charge of assessing the $6 billion claim.
11:39 Today the court is in session in a jungle clearing beside an oilrig and waste pit. It is a bizarre coming together of lawyers, guns and money. The opposing sides have their own camps, technical equipment, experts and advisors, all protected by Ecuadorian soldiers.
11:48 RICARDO REIS VEIGA [ON PHONE]: all we are basically getting on. The tour is just starting now. All right... OK.... bye.
12:11 CAMPBELL: Among them are senior executives from Texaco, which recently merged with Chevron to become the worlds fourth largest oil company. Theyre making regular trips from their air-conditioned headquarters to the 46-degree heat of this mosquito-ridden jungle. Its a sight Luis Yanza thought he would never see.
12:16 LUIS YANZA : It gives us a lot of pleasure to see their faces because of what they can say, seeing all this because they left behind all that contamination and they are directly responsible.
12:38 Luis: Therefore, we feel proud to have obliged them to sit down in court to respond to this and to come here to breathe the contaminated air to see the people who have been affected which is irrefutable, convincing proof.
12:49 CAMPBELL: Ricardo Reis Veiga is Chevron Texacos chief counsel. Hes using the companys full resources to fight the case, which could have serious implications for its operations in more than 180 countries.
13:08 Among the experts hes brought in is an expensive PR team doing damage control on the corporations global reputation.
13:22 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: The records will show that we are good corporate citizens and that we will prevail in the end.
13:31 JUDGE: Are the experts here?
13:37 CAMPBELL: Each session begins with a formal swearing in of witnesses. Every word is recorded and transcribed.
13:40 Today the court is inspecting a pit from the original consortium for signs of contamination.
13:49 Chevron-Texacos advocate, Dr Adolfo Callejas, tells the court that Petroecuador is responsible for any pollution. But the opposing lawyer, Dr Monica Pareja, argues it was Texacos decision to use sub-standard disposal methods just to save money.
13:57 DR MONICA PAREJA: Thats an example of the way Texaco did their work in Ecuador.
14:16 Pareja: If they serve as a model Id hate to think how the rest of the oil companies operated.
14:25 CAMPBELL: Didnt Texaco just take advantage of lax third world standards because it was cheaper and they could get away with it?
RICARDO REIS VEIGA: No, absolutely not. Absolutely not.
14:37 Veiga: The technology that we use here and standards of operation that we use here on behalf of the owners of the consortium were the prevailing technology at the time we operated, basically the 60s, 70s and 80s.
14:45 STEVE DONZIGER: No way. You can go anywhere in the United States. You will never see an open-air toxic waste pit like this.
14:59 Texaco knew better. Texaco already was not doing this in all other parts of the world, including the United States, and they knew that if they did this it would create major health problems and environmental problems for years to come.
15:06 PR MAN WITH NOTEBOOK: We have four pits here, two oily pits which we will number number one and two.
15:18 CAMPBELL: Chevron-Texaco insists it has done all the cleaning up it needs to.
15:23 PR MAN: Im standing in the middle of the remediated pit number two and you can see this has been revegetated with grass.
15:28 CAMPBELL: The companys PR team took me to one of the waste pits that Texaco remediated when it left Ecuador. 15:36
PR MAN: And you can see this area, it was tested and it was found to be OK and
15:41 CAMPBELL: But the plaintiffs claim all Texaco really did was hide the problem.
15:46 STEVE DONZIGER: The agreement Texaco signed with the Ecuadorian government is a fraud; its a sham. Basically theyve required Texaco to remediate a certain portion of the pits, the open air toxic waste pits that they left, but they never cleaned it other than to run dirt over the toxic waste pit without first cleaning it out. Thats like treating skin cancer with make up.
15:52 CAMPBELL: Are there any occasions when dirt was simply shovelled over the top?
16:11 PR MAN: No, no, and we have
CAMPBELL: Chevron-Texaco denies the clean up was cosmetic but at the same time it claims the pits werent dangerous to begin with.
16:16 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: Well, the existence of the pits does not pose necessarily a health risk to human beings, thats for sure. The oil is actually contained and theres no exposure per se to human beings and one way to check this is to check the quality of groundwater, and we have done so
16:24 CAMPBELL: Yes, but why did you spend $40 million remediating them if there was no need to?
16:46 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: Because its common practice to remediate and close pits that you have used.
16:50 CAMPBELL: Isnt that because you wanted to prevent the environmental and health hazards?
16:54 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: Its always -- remediation is always about preventing things from the future. Otherwise it would not make any sense.
16:58 CAMPBELL: So there is a future risk? There is a potential, you concede for some sort of health hazard or environmental hazard?
17:05 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: What Im saying is that doing the remediation, as any part of any operation in the world, is part of our policy; its part of the way we do business.
17:21 CAMPBELL: While the lawyers argue, the people are suffering from desperately inadequate medical facilities. Rosa Moreno is the only full time health worker for a community of 4000. She can offer nothing but sympathy for patients like Dona Rosita.
17:30 ROSA MORENO, HEALTH WORKER: Did they do chemotherapy?
17:48 DONA ROSITA: Yes, they did more than that. Ive got bad again. Ive got really bad. I just want to die.
CAMPBELL: She is dying of cancer of the uterus.
18:07 DONA ROSITA: Ive got worse again like here they operated on me before, and they told me my ovaries were bad its cancer and theres no treatment.
18:10 CAMPBELL: Dona Rositas family of settlers built this house 22 years ago and dug a well behind it. Until two years ago, it was the only water they could drink.
18:28 DONA ROSITA: There was nowhere to get water even now there isnt. Now we have somewhere to boil it, but not then.
18:41 We used to have to bring the water, put in lemon and sugar and drink it. It tasted foul and it stank of petrol. It was disgusting that water tasted of chemicals and smelled of chemicals, but we used to drink it weve been drinking it for years.
18:52 CAMPBELL: But Ricardo Reis Veiga argues the health problems could be simply due to poverty.
19:26 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: In reality, most of the studies that have been presented by the plaintiff so far recognise that they could not conclusively link the rate of cancer in this region with the oil production activities.
19:34 CAMPBELL: But you never can, can you, and scientifically its never possible to 100% prove something like that.
19:47 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: Thats correct but I think to allege that oil production activities conducted by Texaco 20, 30 years ago is the cause of a disease that has been alleged by the plaintiffs is not correct either.
19:52 CAMPBELL: The indigenous groups have struggled to retain their culture and identities since the oil boom brought settlement and pollution to their land. They may have a long wait for justice to be done.
20:12 Theres no guarantee that Chevron-Texaco will abide by the courts decision, even if it loses the case and all appeals.
20:28 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: In the event of an adverse decision I would have basically to take a look at the circumstance in which that decision was written and basically make my decision then.
20:37 CAMPBELL: So you cant guarantee that if you do lose you will respect the order of the court.
20:47 RICARDO REIS VEIGA: I would have to see the conditions again.
20:51 CAMPBELL: But to many the fact the case has come this far is already a victory.
20:55 STEVE DONZIGER: This case sends a powerful message to oil companies all over the world. You cannot go into developing countries and use sub-standard technology just because you think these people do not have the money or power to take you to a court of law and hold you accountable.
21:06 CAMPBELL: Whatever happens will be too late for Dona Rosita.
21:28 DONA ROSITA: And there we were, we were innocently drinking the water without knowing. We didnt even know to boil it or anything.
21:36 Dona Rosita: Everything is ruined, its all over. All my organs are finished, and the cancerous ones were taken out. Now, theres nothing.
21:47 CAMPBELL: Like so many others, she can only wish she never came to a poisoned paradise.
22:02 Reporter: Eric Campbell
Camera: Brett Ramsay
ACSProducer: Vivien Altman
Editor: Simon Brynjolffssen