The court’s judgment establishes that Chevron is responsible for polluting the Amazon forest during its 26 years of operations, and for this reason it has to pay over 9 billion dollars in compensation.

The complaint was filed originally by organizations of affected indigenous people and the oil company has already announced that it will appeal the decision since they considered it “illegitimate and unenforceable.”
“The Court has made justice. We know that this is only a part of our struggle, and we will continue fighting until we achieve justice and all damages are reverted. The world needs to know what happened in the Amazon jungle and that we are struggling for life and for justice”, said Humberto Piaguaje, leader of the Secoya indigenous group, according to the Front’s website.

The plaintiffs have experienced difficult times before this decision, but they managed to prove, for instance, that the damage caused by Chevron-Texaco in Sucumbios province is even worse than the damage caused by British Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico, that was largely covered by the media.

The court’s decision also establishes that the US corporation will also have to publicly apologize to the victims of the Ecuadorian Amazon for the crimes committed.

“No amount of money will bring back the lives and repair the damage caused”, said Luiz Yanza, coordinator of the Assembly of People Affected by Texaco.

The Ecuadorian groups know that Chevron-Texaco will soon start a campaign to delegitimize the judicial order.

The first complaint against the oil company was submitted in 1993 to a US Court, but that court decided that the case should be brought to an Ecuadorian tribunal, which started working on it ten years later, in 2003.

Photo:http://www.texacotoxico.org