Having dragged on for four years, the suit may continue for half again as long.
The lawsuit against it in Lago Agrio was filed in 2003, though the legal antecedents go back much further. In 2001, Texaco was swallowed whole by Chevron, which by integrating its operations nearly doubled in size. It signed a contract with Ecuador in 1964, began full-scale production in 1972, and pulled out 20 years later. The company that did much of this work was Texaco-an outfit with a swashbuckling reputation worldwide. The pollution consists of huge quantities of crude oil and associated wastes, mixed in with the toxic compounds used for drilling operations-a noxious soup that for decades was dumped into leaky pits, or directly into the Amazonian watershed.
In a forsaken little town in the Ecuadorean Amazon, an overgrown oil camp called Lago Agrio, the giant Chevron Corporation has been maneuvered into a makeshift courtroom and is being sued to answer for conditions in 1,700 square miles of rain forest said by environmentalists to be one of the world's most contaminated industrial sites.
