- Nigerian activist Ken Sarowiwa, hanged together with
eight fellow Ogoni activists resisting Shell Oil's
destruction of their homeland.

NIGERIA and SHELL and CHEVRON

Nigeria is one of the world's largest exporters of oil; it is also one of the world's poorest countries. Severe environmental destruction is the legacy of 40-plus years of oil drilling by Shell Oil in an area of Nigeria known as the Niger Delta, home to over 14 indigenous ethnic nationalities, including the Ogoni people. Ogoni farmlands were expropriated without compensation, their environment polluted, their communities attacked by the military if they protested. The CIA reports that the Niger Delta has suffered the equivalent of 10 Exxon Valdez oil spills, without ever being cleaned up.

Shell oil company has also supported one repressive Nigerian military regime after another, paying for "Shell police" - Nigerian police officers used to guard oil installations and put down protests.

After resisting Shell's occupation of their lands, nine of the leaders of MOSOP, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, were hanged in 1995, despite pleas for clemency from leaders around the world, including former US President Bill Clinton and former UK Prime Minister John Major.

There is growing evidence that Shell is not alone in accepting extra-judicial killings and other human rights abuses as just another cost of doing business in Nigeria. On at least two occasions Chevron itself has admitted it provided equipment which was used by Nigerian security forces who then proceeded to massacre dozens of civilians. For more details on the Chevron case, see a recent SEEN report. Or listen to Pacifica Radio and Democracy Now's award-winning broadcast on the Chevron attacks.

For updates on the current situation in Nigeria, visit our Nigeria page.

COLOMBIA and SHELL and OCCIDENTAL

Shell and Occidental Petroleum had plans to exploit the Siriri block (formerly known as Samoré), in Northeastern Colombia, for petroleum and were putting pressure on the U'wa indigenous community that resides there to give them access to the oil field. The amount of oil they hoped to obtain is roughly equivalent to 3 months' supply of oil for U.S. markets. Guerrillas in the region are attempting to sabotage this process. Occidental and Shell paid the Colombian military - known for their abusive tactics - to protect their oil installations from the guerrillas. As a result, the U'wa were caught in the crossfire between the Colombian military, a guerrilla uprising in the region, and large, powerful oil companies despoiling their environments. Facing destruction of their rainforest and way of life, the 5000 U'wa threatened to commit mass suicide by leaping off of a cliff if oil exploration continued. On May 27, 1998, Occidental Petroleum Corporation, a US oil company, reportedly agreed to abandon plans to drill for oil in the disputed Colombian homeland of the U'wa. In a deal brokered by the Colombian Ministry of Mines, the Los Angeles-based oil giant will give up its exploration rights in the territory claimed by the U'wa people if granted a smaller tract of land under more favorable profit terms in another part of the oil-rich section of the Siriri block. However, the U'wa and Occidental do not agree on the boundaries of the U'wa ancestral lands. Occidental has said its original drilling plans fall outside the U'wa reservation. But the U'wa, based on recent mapping, consider all of the Siriri block to be within their broad ancestral lands.

Fortunately, in July 2001, Occidental announced that it had failed to find oil at the Gibraltar 1 well site on the tribe's ancestral land, a major victory for the U’wa people and indigenous communities around the world. Nevertheless, Occidental has not withdrawn from the area and is allegedly considering whether to conduct further studies based on seismic testing. For more information, visit http://www.ran.org/ran_campaigns/beyond_oil/oxy.

ECUADOR and TEXACO

UPDATE: ***On August 16, 2002, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit dismissed the case against Chevron/Texaco stating that the cases should be tried in Ecuador, despite a federal law that allows citizens of other countries to bring claims of international law violations in U.S. courts. If the case was tried in the U.S., it wouldl be the first ever filed by foreign plaintiffs in a U.S. court. The plaintiffs are asking Chevron-Texaco to clean up the damage, estimated at close to $1 billion.***

The Oriente region of Ecuador comprises 32 million acres of tropical rainforest--a region rich in biodiversity, including many endangered species. It is also home to 95,000 indigenous people from 8 different ethnic groups. The people and their environment face certain extinction due to oil exploration in the region. Texaco, one of several oil companies venturing in the Amazon rainforest, dumped 4.3 million gallons of toxic oil waste a day into the western hemisphere's main lung during the two decades that it was in operation in Ecuador, and left over 600 open-pit toxic waste sites, according to a lawsuit filed in 1993 by 30,000 Ecuadorian indigenous people who live in the Amazon. The plaintiffs claim that Texaco dumped the waste in open pits and left it there, instead of re-injecting it into the earth, as is done in the US, and is common oil industry practice. This method saved the company $3-4 per barrel, and in two decades Texaco extracted approx. 1.4 billion barrels of oil from the Amazon region. The New York Federal District court where the lawsuit was filed ruled in 1996 that it did not have jurisdiction to try the case in NY and that it should be tried in Ecuador (which was Texaco's position). This ruling was reversed in 1998 and thrown out once again in June 2001.

Nearly 30 years of oil exports in Ecuador have failed to bring the country out of abject poverty. Instead, it has despoiled the rainforests on which millions of people depend for their subsistence. Nevertheless, the Ecuadorian government has granted another US oil company, Occidental Petroleum, the rights to do business there, on the grounds that it will bring much needed economic relief for the government of Ecuador, which is plagued by international debt, much of it owed to international financial institutions, like the World Bank.

The OCP (for its Spanish name, Oleoducto de Crudos Pesados) pipeline will carry crude oil from the Amazon down the Andes to the Pacific Coast, and will require Ecuador to double its oil production. Opponents of the pipeline fear that there are too many risks to such an endeavor, ranging from deforestation (to build roads to access the oilrigs), to threatening fragile ecosystems known for their diversity and indigenous communities along the 300-mile route, to the high chance of spills due to earthquakes, which are common in that region. Several environmental, indigenous and human rights organizations have been organizing peaceful resistance to the pipeline, which has resulted in violent, repressive responses from the oil companies' security guards. For more information, visit http://www.amazonwatch.org

INDIA and ENRON

The Dabhol power project in the state of Maharashtra, India involved the construction, ownership and operation of a 2184 MW gas-fired power plant. It was financed by a series of private and public banks, including the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and the Export-Import Bank of the US. The project (and Enron's $2.9 billion investment in a joint venture with General Electric and Bechtel Corp.) has been the source of controversy in India since 1992.

In 1998, Human Rights Watch conducted a six-week investigation of the Dabhol project and released a report that detailed a series of human rights violations implicated with the project. The report was able to "illustrate an unbroken continuum: the immense influence that Enron exercised over the central and Maharashtra governments; to describe the company's interaction with villagers-whose legitimate concerns for their livelihood and environment were ignored or dismissed-leading them eventually to oppose the project…". Peaceful local protesters were met with serious, sometimes brutal human rights violations carried out on behalf of the state's and the company's interests.

To read the report, visit HRW's website: http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/enron/enron

The project's owner, the Dabhol Power Co., is an independent Indian company, in which Enron, with 65% stake, is the largest of four shareholders. Overwhelmed with financial troubles, on December 2, 2001, Enron declared bankruptcy, casting doubt on the future of the project, which has been sitting idle since April of this year, following a bitter dispute between the State government of Maharashtra and Enron regarding the company's exorbitant tariffs. Now, Enron is trying to sell its stake in the plant, and so far, two Indian privately owned utility companies, and more recently Shell, have expressed interest. In the meantime, over 150 Enron employees in India have been laid off.

BURMA and UNOCAL

Despite international condemnation of Burma's ruling military government, a repressive regime known for its human rights abuses, Unocal together with its French partner, Total, is constructing a billion-dollar pipeline to carry natural gas from offshore fields through southern Burma to Thailand. In their efforts to ensure the pipeline's construction, the Burmese and Thai armies have committed countless atrocities, including extra-judicial executions, the use of slave labor, ethnic cleansing and environmental despoliation. Total and Unocal have refused to meet with the groups whose land is being expropriated to make way for the pipeline.

For more information, visit the Earth Rights website: http://www.earthrights.org.

Return to top