Crude World (15 page)

It was time for the next act. The buses of Indians and lawyers and students and journalists rolled across town to a military base. Everyone stood outside the gate in a light drizzle, armed with cheap umbrellas. The base commander, Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Narvaez, soon emerged, wearing fatigues and a burgundy beret.

“I do not know about the existence of the letter,” Narvaez told the crowd. His statement was met with disbelief, because the letter was signed by his second-in-command. It was unlikely that a letter of that sort would be issued behind his back.

“I am going to investigate it, and when I find the answer I will meet with you and tell you what is going on,” Narvaez added.

Donziger, sodden but spirited, decided to try something new.

“The Texaco staff is staying here,” he told Narvaez. “There is an agreement.”

This was cast as an accusation.

“There might be,” Narvaez responded uneasily.

Donziger had known for months that Chevron had built a villa at the base and had agreed to give it to the military once the case ended. Donziger hadn’t opposed the deal because Chevron was not popular in Lago Agrio; he’d realized that the company’s lawyers would be safer with military protection. But with more than a dozen news-hungry journalists recording the moment, Donziger suspected that the time was right to accuse the military of being on the payroll of gringo oilmen. He was correct. The accusation made national headlines, and a little more than a month later the Ecuadorean military canceled all military contracts with oil firms and ordered Chevron off the base. The military was also forced to publish the now-discredited contracts, and this was yet another political victory for Donziger, because it showed that Chevron had contaminated the army, too.

Donziger was winning his battle, but it was about the past. What remained of the Amazon—and there was much in Ecuador that was untouched—was in jeopardy. Oil had become too valuable to be left underground, so foreign oil companies were seeking permission to drill in the southern portion of Ecuador’s Amazon. There, another type of activist stood in the way, armed not with a law degree but with a spear.

Driving south from Lago Agrio I passed through a fifty-mile stretch of apocalypse—a mutant panorama of oil fields and gas flares in which crude oozed and burned around me. Oil was also in the melting asphalt under my car, and it coursed through the leaky pipes that curved felinely along the road, inches from my fender. I drove through the town of Coca, where an anemic jungle gave way to the offices of Halliburton, its front gate painted in the company’s by now familiar red and white. I continued farther south, the road turning to dirt as it ascended into cloud forests before descending into Puyo, the gateway to Ecuador’s southern Amazon.

I navigated through Puyo’s narrow streets to a small house on a dirt road in a poor neighborhood where the windows were covered with iron grilles. This was the beyond-modest political office of the people of Sarayaku, an indigenous tribe that lived fifty miles away in the Amazon and was trying to prevent oil drilling on its territory. Inside the
house, the tribe’s president, Marlon Santi, was talking on a shortwave transmitter to his friends in the jungle. When he was done, we went out for pizza.

Santi, whose impeccable mane of dark hair was tied in a ponytail that fell down his back, was everything the Indians in the Oriente had not been when Texaco arrived in the 1960s. Santi was, to begin with, educated. He’d attended a Catholic high school in Puyo, so he spoke and read Spanish flawlessly. He had visited the Oriente and knew what had happened there. Thanks to groups, such as Amazon Watch, that facilitate foreign travel for indigenous leaders, Santi had visited other countries coping with similar extraction issues, and he’d even visited the United States, where he’d met Chevron shareholders and had spoken to them about the threats to his Amazonian homeland. He’d learned the most important lesson of all—that it is insufficient to just say “no” to oil companies. The rain forest may be a brief paradise for ecotourists who stay two nights and sleep under finely woven mosquito nets, but living there in primitive conditions is tantamount to a lifelong sentence of malaria and malnutrition. Santi’s “no” to extraction must be accompanied by a “yes” to his people’s desire for medicine, education and other virtues of modernity. It is the same in other developing nations—impoverished communities cannot be expected to turn down the seductive promises of extractive development unless there is an alternative.

The next morning, to learn more about Santi’s unconventional war, we flew into the Amazon in a single-engine Cessna.

The Americans who found oil in the Oriente in the 1960s were actually the
second
wave of petroleum geologists in Ecuador. The first wave, led by a company called Leonard Exploration, arrived in the 1920s and looked for oil in the south. To move their equipment into the frontier region, the company built a highway to Puyo, which at the time was a tiny settlement on the lip of the southern Amazon. Leonard found no oil and was succeeded more than a decade later by Shell Oil, which built an airstrip outside Puyo. Shell also failed to find oil and pulled out in the 1950s, but its mark remains; the Cessna I squeezed into took off from a one-runway airport named Shell.

After just a minute or two in the air, Puyo was behind us. As we flew south, beneath us and around us was the boldest rain forest I had ever seen. This was untouched Amazon, the trees thick and luscious, squeezed together like broccoli stalks to the horizon and beyond. It was a visual incarnation of nourishment, the vegetation forming a blanket of delectable, living green.

“From here, it’s our territory,” Santi yelled over the whining of the engine, gesturing toward a shelf of hills.

What he meant when he said “our territory” was Sarayaku, where modern geologists, with better technology than their ancestors, believe there are vast reservoirs of oil. The old question of who owns it returned to the forefront. According to Ecuadorean law, the indigenous people own the land but the government owns the minerals underneath it. It’s a built-in conflict, because the government needs to use the land to get at the oil. In 1996, the government awarded an exploration concession to an Argentinean company, and after several years of fruitless negotiations with the area’s residents, most of whom were not seduced by offers of cash, the company and the government unilaterally went ahead with seismic testing in 2002.

This was a mistake.

Santi pointed to a river I could barely make out through the dense trees.

“This is where the company tried to set up their headquarters,” he shouted. “Our resistance started there.”

Santi called it a war, but no shots were fired. The oil company used helicopters to drop a team of geologists into a clearing in the jungle. They planned to conduct seismic tests by setting off small explosions underground. Sensors would monitor the shock waves, and the data would help make a map of the underground geology. This is a prelude to drilling. The Ecuadorean military provided a security detail—a handful of soldiers who were dropped into the jungle.

As large as the Sarayaku territory is, outsiders cannot sneak in by helicopter and set up a base camp without someone seeing or hearing the activity. And the people of Sarayaku were ready—they knew of the company’s plans and had begun patrols along their territory’s borders.
Within hours of their arrival by helicopter, the soldiers and oil workers were surrounded by spear-carrying Sarayacans whose faces had been daubed with black war paint. The soldiers surrendered without a shot being fired or a spear thrown. They were taken to Sarayaku’s main village. After several days of negotiations, they were released in exchange for a government promise to never let an oil company enter the territory without explicit permission from its people.

This part of the war never ends. Oil firms are not like door-to-door salesmen who, turned away from one house, go to other houses, other streets, other towns. There are a finite number of reservoirs in the world, so oil companies have a limited number of doors to knock on. They keep knocking even after leaders tell them no. It is not an exercise in futility. The campaign for drilling continues because oil companies know that local and national leaders can change or be changed. It is just a matter of finding the right price and offering it at the right time to the right person.

After thirty minutes of flight, Santi’s alternative answer came into view. The Cessna circled over a clearing of thatched huts and dropped to a bumpy landing on a dirt airstrip. I had arrived in Sarayaku, and after unloading my backpack and standing clear as the plane turned around and hopped back into the sky, I was wrapped in the thick heat and vibrant noise of the Amazon.

It was a mile-long hike to the village center. Santi and I walked past small huts built under the canopy of trees, invisible from above. We crossed a shaky footbridge suspended over a furious river, climbed a set of steps carved into a hillside and emerged at the center of Sarayaku. Initially, it was not much to look at—about a dozen huts of different sizes, grouped in an uneven circle around a dirt clearing the size of several football fields. After dropping my bag under the shelter of a hut that had a thatch roof but no walls, I went for a tour with Santi.

Behind the main circle was a school composed of wooden buildings; the instructors were several volunteers from Spain who also ran a small infirmary. The most stunning sight was a row of solar cells. I noticed that one of the shacks contained several computers. In isolated rain-forest communities, such attributes of modernity are rare. There
was even an open-air hut that served as an entertainment center of sorts—it held a television and VCR that ran off solar power. Inside, a dozen German students listened to a Sarayaku leader wearing a “Viva Zapata” T-shirt describe the community’s battle against oil companies. I listened too, swatting at mosquitoes. “Even if they give us one million dollars, we don’t want it,” he told the Germans. “Thirty years of oil has not benefited Ecuador. The oil areas have pollution, disease, narcotraffickers and violence.”

Revenues from tourists are a lifeline for Sarayaku. Visitors don’t pay much—the accommodations consist of almost-bare huts that don’t even have mosquito nets, and the nearest chilled drink is more than fifty miles away, in Puyo. But ecotourism constitutes a stream of alternative revenue that makes it possible for Sarayaku to say no to oil extraction. When the village youths got a soccer game going, I noticed that most of them had sports shoes and jerseys with numbers on their backs. In a rain-forest community, these were totems of prosperity.

The noonday heat crushed us. Santi, dressed in a black T-shirt and blue-jean shorts, led me back to the hut where I had dropped my backpack. We lay on the floor because it was a strain to sit up as the humidity and heat reached headache levels. Suddenly a young man rushed past with a bandaged hand—he had just been bitten by a snake and needed an antivenin shot that might be available in the infirmary. If not, he would die, because the eight-hour canoe ride to Puyo would take too long and there were no more Cessnas today. This was life in the jungle, brutal even with the totems of modernity Sarayaku possessed.

As oil prices rise, so do the incentives from companies wishing to drill. Already, Santi told me, oil money was dividing Sarayaku. The leader of a subtribe that wanted to cooperate with the companies had been accused of treason and forced into exile with his family. A pro-oil tribe that lives between Sarayaku and Puyo refused to let Sarayaku’s obstinate leaders use its rivers for passage to the city. Santi had to ply longer routes or cadge rides on the occasional Cessnas. Even though not a barrel of oil had been brought to the surface in Sarayaku territory, the liquid was causing trouble. All of Ecuador was contaminated by oil.

In 1961, Stanley Milgram conducted one of the most famous behavioral experiments of all time. To measure people’s tendencies to obey authority, Milgram, a social psychologist, asked his human subjects to deliver electric shocks to a person who failed to answer questions correctly. The person receiving the shocks was in fact pretending to be in pain—there were no shocks—but the subjects didn’t know that. Despite increasingly loud screams and pleas from the pretenders, most of Milgram’s subjects complied, administering shocks that seemed to cause extreme pain to complete strangers. “Ordinary people,” Milgram concluded, “can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

Milgram’s findings have been used to explain a wide range of otherwise perplexing human activities, from the willingness of ordinary Germans to participate in genocide during World War II to the readiness of Enron traders to create energy shortages that caused a painful spike in electricity prices for ordinary people. (In a taped conversation, one Enron trader said admiringly of another, “He steals money from California.”) I had Milgram in mind while interviewing oil executives across the globe. I was interested not only in the relatively few who’d been indicted or convicted of corruption but also in the larger number
who woke up every morning, ate a good breakfast, kissed their wives or girlfriends good-bye and headed out to participate in an extractive industry that had a high probability of bringing poverty, violence and dictatorship to the countries they worked in. Milgram provided part of the answer, as did Frank Ruddy.