Texaco Is No Innocent Abroad

Texaco is not a nice company. Recent revelations about blatant racial discrimination within the corporation as well as the destruction and suppression of evidence have prompted Jesse Jackson and other leaders to call for a nationwide boycott of Texaco. Although a discrimination suit was recently settled for a record $176.1 million, former employees of the Texas oil giant are now being prosecuted for obstruction of justice.

The media has highlighted racial discrimination at Texaco, in part because it directly affects people in America and in part because national leaders have called for a boycott. But the sins of Texaco are much older, and run much deeper, than the recent allegations of racism.

Texaco has long been a leader in corporate exploitation and environmental devastation, especially in developing countries such as Ecuador and Burma. Although its practices have little effect on Americans except to lower the price at the pump, any responsible citizen of the world should be out-raged at the company's reprehensible outward behavior as well as the racism within.

In 1967, Texaco discovered oil in the depths of the Ecuadorian Amazon. A treasure chest of biological diversity, this area is also home to several indigenous groups, including the Huaorani, the Secoya, the Shuar and the Quichua. Under Ecuadorian law, these groups have no rights to subsurface minerals on their land, so the oil was sold by the government without their consent. When the oil company tried to enter the area, its trucks were blocked by irate local villagers. Only with the help of the military was Texaco able to begin drilling.

Texaco completed its pipeline from the rain forest to the Pacific coast of Ecuador in 1972. From 1972 to 1989, 1.4 billion barrels of oil passed through the pipeline. Over those 17 years, 27 spills occurred, releasing an estimated 16.8 million gallons of crude oil into one of the world's biodiversity hot spots and the traditional home of thousands of Ecuadorian natives. Judith Kimerling, a Yale-educated attorney and the author of Amazon Crude, estimates that, even today, 4.3 million gallons of untreated toxic wastes are being released into the watershed every day.

Texaco transferred control of the pipeline to the Ecuador state petroleum company, Petroecuador, in 1989. In 1993, a lawsuit was filed against Texaco on behalf of 30,000 inhabitants of the Ecuadorian Amazon, seeking damages of over $1 billion for the degradation of the local environment. Elias Piyaguaje, leader of the Secoya people, described the extent of the damage: "Our rivers have been poisoned. We cannot drink. We cannot bathe. We cannot believe in the future of our existence." The lawsuit is still pending.

Although it has sold most of its interests in Ecuador, Texaco has not been content to leave the developing world alone. In 1991 it became the lead operator in a multinational consortium of oil companies searching for natural gas off the coast of Burma.

Burma, a country of about 45 million between Thailand and India in southeast Asia, has been under military rule for the past 34 years. The present military junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), killed an estimated 10,000 nonviolent democracy demonstrators when it came to power in 1988. The SLORC has been repeatedly condemned by the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Australia for its rampant human rights abuses and is widely considered one of the most oppressive regimes in the world.

Texaco has drilled several exploration wells in Burma's Gulf of Martaban and is planning a pipeline project to transport natural gas from the gulf across Burma into Thailand. Other oil companies--Unocal and the French company Total--are currently constructing a pipeline in the same area, and although Texaco will probably construct a new pipeline, it will run a similar route and use much of the infrastructure of the Total-Unocal project.

Much like the Ecuadorian Amazon, the area of Burma across which the pipelines cut is biologically rich and home to many disenfranchised ethnic minority groups. The Tenasserim rain forest is the largest intact rain forest in southeast Asia, home to such endangered species as the white rhinoceros and the tiger. Texaco's track record in Ecuador demonstrates that the corporation is not likely to be a good environmental steward; no independent environmental impact assessments have been conducted in the pipeline region.

The pipelines will also pass through areas traditionally controlled by the Karen and Mon minority groups, both of which have denounced the project. One recent report by the Thailand-based EarthRights International and Southeast Asian Information Network suggests that the SLORC's persecution of the ethnic minorities might put the environment at further risk, using "such environmental harms as watershed destruction and deforestation as strategic tools by which to further disempower opponents of the regime."

In order to pacify the area and allow the pipeline to go through, the SLORC has increased its military presence and forcibly relocated thousands of villagers. The SLORC is a partner in the Total-Unocal venture and retains the option of a stake in Texaco's consortium. U.N. Special Rapporteur Yozo Yokota made the connection between SLORC's presence and human rights abuses in 1995, stating that "forced labor, forced relocation, arbitrary killings, beatings, rapes, and confiscation of property by the SLORC are most commonly occurring in border areas where the Army is engaged in military operations or regional development projects."

In addition to the direct impacts of the pipeline, Texaco's investment will provide a large source of income to the SLORC, money that the regime desperately needs to sustain its bloated military. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese woman who has led the pro-democracy movement and won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, has explicitly called for an end to foreign investment in Burma until a democratic government is installed. Democratic elections were held in 1990, in which Suu Kyi's party won 82 percent of the parliamentary seats, but the military ignored them.

Recognizing the problems with investment in such an oppressive country, many other corporations, including oil companies, have pulled out of Burma. Petro-Canada, upon its pullout, described the SLORC as "thugs, criminals and drug-dealers." Texaco, however, along with Unocal, Total, Nippon Oil and most recently Arco, has decided to do business with the regime and continue its tradition of environmental destruction and persecution of indigenous peoples.

So when Jesse Jackson and the NAACP decide that Texaco has made enough progress on issues of racism and discrimination, think twice about returning to your local Texaco station. Texaco's troubles in the media started only a few weeks ago, but the world's troubles with Texaco are much older.

Its media troubles started only a few weeks ago, but its world troubles are much older.