Roadside scenes seen through rain splattered car windscreen/Jose pointing out locations on map | Music
| 00:00:00 |
| Jose: This is the Cofan community. It is surrounded by oil wells....oil wells, oil wells....
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Oil fire flames. Jose marking out locations on map | Jose: And here the same- oil wells, oil wells, oil wells. |
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Shot of flames and Jones looking out car window at countryside with open flames burning | Jones: The journey into what's left of the tribal lands of the Cofan people in northern Ecuador takes you over roads deliberately sealed with a black slick of oil sludge. | 00:35 |
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Shots men rinsing bananas. Countryside with open flames burning and shabby community housing. | Jose: We want to say to the companies don't poison our river- but they continue.
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| Jones: When Texaco started drilling 25 years ago, this was pristine Amazon rain forest. Now it's an environmental catastrophe with oil spills worse than the Exon Valdez disaster.
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Flames dissolve to map of South America. Ecuador highlighted on map. Towns of Quito and Coca highlighted on map | Music
FX: Children's voices |
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Dissolve to shots children playing. Girl with deformed legs walks across field/Open field with oil fires burning. | Jones: These are the children of colonists who followed the oil roads into the jungle, looking for new farmland. They live only a few metres from one of the biggest refineries in the Oriente.
| 01:33 |
Veronica and Jure run around oil pump with other children. Veronica and Jure's legs are deformed | Veronica and Jure are cousins. They were not born with these deformities. Their families believe the effects of oil pollution has made them this way.
| 01:52 |
Tilt up deformed leg to Veronica and Jure standing next to Hernando. Shots Jure and Veronica | Hernando: The girls were born normal- they weren't born like that. When they started to walk they were normal and then after three months we noticed it.
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| Jones: No proper medical studies of the children have been done, but a link is suspected between the polluted water and calcium deficiencies in their mother's breast milk.
| 02:27 |
Hernando with Veronica and Jure | Hernando: The doctor said that they also have something wrong with their arms- and their chests are not the same as other children.
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Shots river polluted with oil slick | Jones: One key report estimated in 1991 that the oil operations in the Oriente dumped 4.3 million gallons of waste into the environment each day. Last year a team of researchers from Harvard found toxic contaminants in these water ways, at levels 1,000 times greater than U.S. safety standards.
| 02:53 |
Hernando and children standing in front of polluted water | Hernando: Due to the contamination there are infections. Strange things appear on the skin and there are stomach problems.
| 03::18 |
Shots men walk past open flames and oil polluted river | Music
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| Jones: Manuel Silva is one of the plaintiffs in the ongoing case against Texaco. He represents colonists like the Molina family.
| 03:39 |
Shots river water | Manuel: The contamination goes into the river - all the contamination goes into the Aguarico River.
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Shots Jones and Manuel talking/dripping oil pipes and open fires | Manuel: Yes, this is toxic- and all the Cofan people drink the water. |
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| Jones: He took us to see where the toxic waste from the largest of the refineries at Shushufindi flows out into the river system.
| 04:05 |
Manuel stirs oil slick and points out pollution of river as Jones looks on | Manuel: This is pure petrol. It's very deep. Here there are a lot of diseases- that we can't cure because we don't have the medicines- diseases like memory loss, chest infections, stomach aches, skin infections, skin cancer. Here in Shushufindi it's been happening for 25 years. The petroleum companies have been contaminating our water day and night-contaminating everything. When the contamination touches our vegetation it kills it. The plants here are all dead.
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Shots through windscreen as car travels through forest/Jones looks out car window/Car travelling over muddy roads and thick vegetation | Jones: That fatal quarter of a century since the coming of the oil companies had led to the near extinction of some indigenous tribes.
| 05:18 |
| To find the scattered remnants of the indigenous Cofan people you need to leave the oil roads and go deeper into the jungle, and then upriver.
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Shots Jones and other men travelling upriver in dug out canoe. Jose manouvres canoe | FX: Water
Jose Quenema handles a bat with the same practiced ease he now handles a crowd or a press conference in New York.
| 05:58 |
| As the son of the old Cofan leader, the responsibility fell to him to take up the international campaign against Texaco on behalf of his people.
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| Jose: We used to live here without problems. We had enough animals to hunt. We could fish without difficulty.
| 06:2 |
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Shots hands starting outboard motor/passing river/ Jose and men in canoe/Jones enters thatched hut and sits with family group | FX: Outboard motor
Jose: We lived in the area between the San Miguel River and the Aguarico River. WE were the owners of the whole territory.
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| Jones: That ownership was never recognised by the government of Ecuador.
| 06:53 |
| When the oil giant, Texaco began exploiting rich fields here in 1967 they were free to operate in ways that would have been illegal in the United States.
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| And the results of their negligence are still plain to see.
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Old man with infected eyes | Old lady: Since the companies dumped oil in the river...
| 07:18 |
Woman with family group | ...the fish are inedible...and when you are fishing it all smells of petrol. |
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Shots people in Cofan community | Jones: There are not many of his people left for Jose to represent.
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| When Texaco arrived there were an estimated 15,000 Cofan people living in these communities. Now there are about 400.
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Shots skin rash on arms and legs of child | Woman: This rash appears whenever they have a bath in the river. Pieces of petroleum stick to her. It gives her an allergy and fevers.
| 07:48 |
Shots open flames and thick oil slick on river. Jose shows Jones contamination | Jones: Jose showed us the waste pit at the first well dug by Texaco on Cofan land in the early 1970s.
| 08:06 |
| He says that when it started pumping, the people were given a cup of rice each.
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Jose by contaminated river/Shots oil slick and polluted river | Jose: Since they started this well no-one has received anything. All we've received from Texaco is the contamination of the Cofan people.
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| Jones: There are dozens of pits like this throughout the area, full of oil sludge mixed with water.
| 08:34 |
Jose | Jose: The Cofan people used to have a healthy environment-healthy air, healthy water. Now we have to take petroleum with our air and water.
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Shots children and adults bathing in river/Jose and Jones stand on bridge over river | FX: Water splashing Children's voices
Jones: Even Jose's own family bathe in the nearby streams, and drink its water. They have no choice.
| 09:03 |
| Jose: This is where all the Cofan families bathe and drink. The water is used for everything. We use this water to wash...to cook.
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Old man wearing feathered headdress working in kitchen and garden/Jose, Jones and Jose's father walk through garden | Jones: Jose's father was both the community leader and the shaman. He is skilled in the use of hallucinogenic plants which give him visions of the future.
| 09:29 |
| But he never foresaw the coming of the oil companies. And the illnesses they brought can't be treated by the plants in his medicinal garden.
| 09:42 |
Jose's father, the Shaman, show various plants in garden as Jones looks on | Shaman: This is for stomach pain-for headaches-and also for women, for the pain of menstruation.
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| Jones: He says the companies and the land hungry colonists who followed them are destroying the plants he needs for his traditional medicines.
| 10:09 |
Shaman | Shaman: I would die if the medicine finished. That's why we don't have the colonists come around because they destroy our plants...our medicine. | 10:17 |
Government minister. Fade up on super:
ALVERO BERMEO Minister for Mining & Energy | Jones: As in so many other countries the ideas of the indigenous people and their own governments are in deep conflict.
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| Minister: Neither Ecuador nor Latin America can sacrifice its development in favour of the ecology. The other continents should have that responsibility when it was their turn but now they want to turn Latin America into the only lungs of the world...when in other places they didn't care and still don't care!
| 10:39 |
Shots open flame/oil contamination in town street/man washing oil from car/ oil tanker driving over bridge/shabby town street | Jones: The changes brought by oil and money have even greater implications for indigenous culture, perverting it or just supplanting it.
| 11:23 |
Priest sits on back of moving van and points out oil company buildings | Priest: These are the villas where the people who work for Petroecuador live. They live separately from the others -in villas...villas with air-conditioning, gardens and gaming rooms. Some even have saunas. It's a world apart, the world of petrol.
| 11:47 |
| Jones: Father Juan Carlos works with the local indigenous people as a Catholic missionary.
| 12:08 |
| He's seen the oil town of Coca transformed from a patch of jungle transformed from a patch of jungle.
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Priest sitting on back of van and pointing out various building in town. Shots town street and buildings | Priest: These are what they call the chongos, or brothels. The petroleum people took over these lands as if they didn't belong to anyone. Some of these cultures are already very small.... |
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Priest with river in b/g | ...and in serious danger of extinction-like the Huarani... the Seconi...the Secoya- and even the Quechua are disappearing. There's only a small group of indigenous people left and if no precautions are taken they will disappear. |
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Shots of mountain and forest from plane window/dissolve to map of South America with Ecuador highlighted and towns of Quito, Macas and Tutinentza | Music
Jones: Today a new generation of companies are pushing the boundaries of oil exploration deeper into the Amazon Basin.
| 13:04 |
Shots out plane window/Jones looks out window at forest/plane landing/crowd watching plane land | We are flying to Tutinentza, the central town of the Shuar people in what's known as the South Oriente.
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| The oil companies haven't started operations in Shuar territory yet, but they're about to.
| 13:23 |
| These days opposition to the oil companies is much more organised.
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| FX: Plane
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Shots men unloading plane/crowd looking on/plane on runway | Jones: Representatives of far-flung Shuar communities have come to Tutinentza to talk about the impact that oil mining might have on their people.
| 13:52 |
| Jose Quenema, our Cofan leader from the north has been brought here by a Quito based environmental group to be the key speaker.
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Shots axe chopping wood/men building dug out canoe/Woman and child cooking in hut/Jones drinking from red bowl | FX: Chopping
The Shuar are by no means untouched by modernity. But because of their remoteness, they seem to have absorbed outside influences and still hung on to much of their traditional life.
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| The women still make the mildly alcoholic Chica by time honoured methods.
| 14:36 |
| And it's still considered offensive for strangers to refuse a welcome drink.
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| Jones: How much do you want me to take?
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Pedro drinking from red bowl/Pedro shows Jones little green parrot which sits on his hand | Jones: Our host was Pedro Yampoch, who lives in this compound with his extended family.
| 15:03 |
| When we asked Pedro what he thought about the coming of the oil companies he replied simply by telling us how important the forest is for his life.
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Pedro with bird perched on his arm. Other people look on | Pedro: WE have lots of other birds-the bohin... the toucan... the perdis... We have many different types.
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| Jones: He just wanted us to know about all the birds and animals that live there.
| 15:42 |
Pedro imitates bird sounds as Jones and crowd look on | FX: Bird sound |
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| Jones: And how they all sounded.
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Men hand out plastic toys of animals and arrange them on the ground as crowd looks on/Toys arranged and fire lit under leaves and oil is spilled on ground to demonstrate oil impact | Jones: The destruction of the forest is so unimaginable, so abstract to many of the people here, that environmentalists like Paulina Garcon resort to the crudest of imagery to try and explain what oil mining has done to other communities.
| 16:10 |
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| Jones: But the government, almost totally reliant on oil revenue just to pay the interest on its massive national debt, wants to stop this sort of intervention.
| 16:31 |
Government minister talks as Jones and other man look on | Minister: Definitely, definitely...I think it's an attack on our national sovereignty. There's no doubt at all that there is intervention from foreign groups who are politicised, who've been financing...and generating revolts, etcetera, etcetera to defend interest that do not belong to that community or to Ecuador.
| 16:42 |
Jose talks as group of people look on. Shots Jose and people in group | Jose: Every month someone gets sick. If it's not a rash, it's a mouth or nose infection. Besides the diseases caused by the petrol, the petroleum workers have brought diseases-like measles, tuberculosis, and smallpox. Our medicines are traditional medicines but these new diseases are death to us.
| 17:11 |
| Jones: In the end it is the story of Jose Quenema and his people that has the most impact among these local leaders.
| 17:39 |
| Jose: We have lived with all these problems and I hope that you can unite and say no to petroleum exploitation so you live tranquilly without problems.
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Nun signing with group of children in field/shots children singing and twisting | Singing
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| Jones: If the Shuar do choose to fight the coming of the oil companies, they won't be the first. But their chances of success must be measured against a thirty year history during which time not one community has managed to keep the oil companies off their land.
| 18:14 |
Open flame | FX: Burning
| 18:43 |
| CREDITS:
Reporter TONY JONES Camera GEOFF CLEGG Sound SCOTT TAYLOR Editor GARTH THOMAS Producer ANDREW CLARK
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