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Bad oil: The Amazon's toxic mess transcript

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MIKE MUNRO: The children of the Amazon see the disaster this way. And what's this?

Child: Petrolio.

Woman: Petrolio.

Zoë Tryon: So, this is petrol. This is crude. This is why these fish are dead, because of the crude oil in the river.

MIKE MUNRO: This is another river?

MIKE MUNRO: We've come to the headwaters of the Amazon to a village in Ecuador to find big oil's dirty secret. And it's an ugly legacy - thousands of square kilometres of the greatest jungle on earth contaminated by decades of toxic oil waste.

Zoë Tryon: That is crude. Have a smell.

MIKE MUNRO: Oh, that is foul. That is just disgusting. No wonder people are dying. And we're with one woman who's determined to make one of the biggest companies in the world pay for what's been done. Her name is Zoë Tryon, and what we find is overwhelming.

Zoë Tryon: It's so sad.

MIKE MUNRO: It's an environmental disaster the US oil giant Chevron is accused of washing its hands of.

Voice: We have a strict quarantine system to protect the integrity of the environment.

MIKE MUNRO: But while Chevron is advertising its environmental credentials in Australia, in the Amazon, it's fighting hardball to avoid paying billions to clean up this toxic catastrophe.

MIKE MUNRO: "We will fight until hell freezes over "and then fight it out on the ice."

Correct.

MIKE MUNRO: How arrogant is that?

It's not arrogant.

That's determination to not be extorted.

MIKE MUNRO: It's still all just about money and profits, for you.

Of course not.

Zoë Tryon: It is like a child having a tantrum. They're not getting what they want, they're not being able to pressurise people and so therefore, they are saying that the whole country is corrupt.

MIKE MUNRO: This is north-eastern Ecuador. The water that runs from the jungle here feeds the Amazon River. A fragile ecosystem that also holds an enormous wealth of oil. In the 1960s, Texaco moved in.

Voice: Venture a winding and dangerous path to the jungles of South America. Then, if the odds look good, take the glorious gamble and drill.

MIKE MUNRO: Texaco, together with Ecuador's national oil company Petroecuador extracted hundreds of millions of barrels of oil. They left a legacy of devastation - billions of gallons of toxic waste dumped in open pits. For decades now, they've been leaching straight into the rivers.

Woman: Speaks spanish.

Zoë Tryon: (translation) We are now living an impossible life. We have no water to drink, no water to bathe in and in the case of the children, we've got so much illness here.

Zoë Tryon: Um, I'm sorry, I'm getting so emotional. It's so sad.

MIKE MUNRO: Anthropologist, aristocrat, activist.

Zoë Tryon: Thank you.

MIKE MUNRO: My pleasure. The Honourable Zoë Tryon is the daughter of a British lord and Melbourne fashion designer Dale Tryon.

MIKE MUNRO: So you know what the situation is?

Zoë Tryon: I know. It's horrible, yeah, it's heartbreaking.

MIKE MUNRO: These days, when Zoë's not in Australia, she's in the Amazon.

Zoë Tryon: Well, Mike, this is one of 956 waste pits left by the oil company.

MIKE MUNRO: Five years ago, she came here and vowed to take the case of Ecuador's Indian tribes to the world. So this is another pit that the oil company never cleaned up?

Zoë Tryon: Yes.

MIKE MUNRO: And again, seeping into the water tables of the Amazon.
She's exposing the toxic waste left during the extraction of the oil, much of it in deep, unlined pits around Indian villages. This is one of those pits and you look at it today and you think it's fine but dig a little deeper and you realise that they are nothing
but big lakes of crude oil up to 3 metres deep.

Zoë Tryon: I'll just show you quite how deep it is. It's pretty deep.

MIKE MUNRO: And of course these pits, right now, are leaking into the Amazon water basin?

Zoë Tryon: Exactly. These are unlined pits. There's nothing stopping the water seeping down into the groundwater.

MIKE MUNRO: What was once pristine, full of wildlife and beauty, has been left for decades in a state of oil-soaked decay. And you don't have to travel far to see the impact on the lives of the people who live around the pits. What's the state of this river?

Zoë Tryon: Well, until 1986, they were dumping toxic waters straight into this river and so, this water is contaminated. Yeah. Yeah. She said "We know that it's contaminated "but what else can we do?" "We don't have anywhere else to go."

MIKE MUNRO: The contamination runs deep and wide.

Zoë Tryon: The oil company just covered it with tree trunks and topsoil.

MIKE MUNRO: And these people bought the land?

Zoë Tryon: These people bought the land, it cost them a year's salary and they were told by the company it was absolutely fine to live here, that they'd remediated and cleaned the land but as you will see, it certainly wasn't.

Zoë Tryon: Mercedes! Ola!

(BOTH SPEAK SPANISH)

MIKE MUNRO: Mercedes' parents bought this land when she was a little girl. Buenos dias.

(BOTH SPEAK SPANISH)

Zoë Tryon: And then, if you see what we've got here.

MIKE MUNRO: Oh, yeah. God. So, at this stage, it's like plasticine. God. Geez, it smells like filling up your tank. It smells like as if you're right at the pump.

Zoë Tryon: Yeah.

MIKE MUNRO: That is just disgusting. No wonder people are dying. The Indians of Ecuador blame oil pollution for an increase in cancers,
birth defects and miscarriages. Mercedes has a shocking skin condition which she says is irritated by the contamination. Dear, oh me. You poor thing. In another village, the chief of the Cofan people lost two sons. His older boy died after one of the toxic pits overflowed into the river.

TRANSLATOR: When he was three, he would go bathe with his mother then, after drinking the water from the river, that caused him to vomit,
got really sick and passed away. We didn't have even have enough time to take him to get help.

MIKE MUNRO: The Cofan was once a tribe of 5000. Today, there are only 400. Before the contamination, they hunted in the forest and fished in the river. Now, they're forced to buy food in a nearby town.

Zoë Tryon: This oil and this waste is contaminating the water and the land and the indigenous livelihoods which they get everything they need from the forest - it's their pharmacy, it's their supermarket, it's everything. It's their hardware store. And this is all contaminated.

MIKE MUNRO: Pinning down just who'll pay for this environmental disaster
is at the heart of an 18-year long court battle. In 1993, the Cofan and other Indians filed a lawsuit against Texaco in the United States, seeking compensation. Texaco argued the trial had to be heard in Ecuador.
By the time it was moved, Texaco had a new owner - Chevron.

MIKE MUNRO: You didn't want to have the case in America initially, you wanted it in Ecuador?

James Craig: I think you're confusing Texaco with Chevron. Texaco is not Chevron. Chevron was not a party to the lawsuit in the United States.

MIKE MUNRO: Mr Craig, we both know that when Chevron purchased Texaco, it also bought Texaco's problems.

James Craig: Well, you're absolutely wrong.

MIKE MUNRO: And we both know the class action was in process when Chevron bought Texaco. And you and I both know that you also bought the class action.

James Craig: Forgive me, Michael, but you're absolutely wrong.

MIKE MUNRO: Chevron's argument that it can't be held responsible was rejected by a court in Ecuador earlier this year. Chevron was found absolutely responsible for cleaning up Texaco's Amazon mess and, to the tune of $US8.6 billion.

James Craig: The Ecuador sentence, the verdict that came out, is an illegitimate sentence, the product of a profoundly corrupted process. It has no applicability in any court that respects the rule of law.

MIKE MUNRO: Chevron has no intention of paying the $US8.6 billion and is appealing the decision. It claims Texaco cleaned up what it was legally obliged to. It blames the state-owned Petroecuador for the toxic waste that was not cleaned up and additional pollution after Texaco left and Chevron rejects any suggestion the toxic lakes are poisoning those living near them.

James Craig: We don't believe that there's an epidemic of cancer or any other diseases as a result of oil.

MIKE MUNRO: Of course, you don't. Of course, you don't.

James Craig: The science doesn't bear it out, so we wouldn't believe it, no.

MIKE MUNRO: No, you were not going to believe it anyway, because you're gonna not pay until hell freezes over, aren't you?

James Craig: Well, we intend to fight this lawsuit as long as it takes.

MIKE MUNRO: And then you're going to fight it on the ice.

James Craig: If that's required, yes. Yeah.

MIKE MUNRO: We're flying 200km south of the contaminated land to a village that did resist — and continues to resist — big oil.

Zoë Tryon: Here we are in the village of Sarayaku in the Kichwa territory and now, we are in the heart of the Amazon.

MIKE MUNRO: Wow, this is unbelievable, isn't it? Hello, Michael.

Zoë Tryon: For me, this is paradise, it really is. This is pristine primary Amazon rainforest and you know, this is what the Cofan territory would have been like 40 years ago.

MIKE MUNRO: Here, there is no contamination. They still hunt in the forest, fish in the river, you can safely swim in the water. Can you - you can drink this?

Zoë Tryon: Yes.

MIKE MUNRO: Beautiful.

Zoë Tryon: And the oil companies want to come here and do what happened there, here.

MIKE MUNRO: Destroy it?

Zoë Tryon: Uno, dos, tres!

MIKE MUNRO: Chevron is the second largest oil company in the United States and now Chevron is expanding operations into Australia's wilderness. Massive gas projects in the Pilbara and this $US25 billion venture on the seabed off WA's Kimberly coastline — right on a migration route for humpback whales and home to turtles and dolphins.

MIKE MUNRO: How can we trust you with our land and our indigenous people when you've done this here in the Amazon?

James Craig: Wherever Chevron operates in the world, it's going to comply with the highest environmental standards, the best practices and it's a company that has a lot of respect for these things so, I mean...

MIKE MUNRO: Really? Forgive me if I just don't get that.

James Craig: Well, you know, that's your opinion.

MIKE MUNRO: Should we trust them?

Zoë Tryon: I'd say absolutely not.