Thank you for an interesting article. Considering the criticisms, my guess is that you meant to write something other than yellow fever?

Regarding location:
“US court case was dismissed on grounds of forum non conveniens” or in other words… Plaintiffs wanted the trail to take place in the US and lost that decision. Chevron fought tooth and nail to have the trail moved to Ecuador.

Regarding health:
The lawsuit in Ecuador is about what Texaco did from 1964 to 1990, when it was the exclusive operator of six oil fields in Ecuador’s Amazon that comprised 378 wells and oil production facilities. To keep production costs to a bare minimum, Texaco chose to deliberately dump more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into Amazon waterways, or 4 million gallons daily on a 24/7 basis for more than two decades. It built and abandoned 916 waste pits filled with toxic sludge, most of which had pipes built into the pits that were designed to drain the waste into nearby streams and forests. These pits will exist for centuries, leaching toxins into soils and groundwater, unless they are cleaned up.

An independent team of 15 court-appointed experts, in a 4,000-page report, estimated damages at up to $27.3 billion for poisoning the Amazon ecosystem in of an area the size of Rhode Island. Of 94 Chevron sites inspected during the trial, 100% showed high levels of toxic contamination in soils – and all of the 378 sites will need to be cleaned up. O’Reilly has only $1.8 billion in cash set aside to cover this potential liability. All of this information is available to Justin – but he doesn’t disclose details that are unpleasant for Chevron.

Texaco was so reckless that it never even kept a list of the locations of its toxic waste pits, never conducted soil or water sampling to determine environmental impacts, and never carried out a single health evaluation of the area. It used the Amazon basin as its trash bin, despite the fact it was home to six indigenous groups that had relied on natural water sources for millennia. In short, Texaco ran what is probably one of the dirtiest operation in oil industry history and it did it in the most delicate ecosystem on the planet. The company simply had to know at the time that its practices ultimately would put people at risk of cancer and death, as they have – and nobody at Texaco did anything about it.

Five separate academic studies, all conducted under a peer-review process, concluded that cancer rates are dramatically higher in the area where Texaco operated as compared to other regions of Ecuador. The court appointed team of experts, using empirical methods used by the EPA in the United States, conservatively estimated 1,401 excess cancer deaths in the region due to oil contamination. Chevron’s one cancer study (which unsurprisingly found cancer rates were not higher) was paid for by the company and conducted by a pro-industry scientist who works for Exponent, a consulting firm whose largest shareholder is a member of Chevron’s Board of Directors. In a move straight out of “Erin Brokovich,” during the trial in Ecuador, Chevron’s large team of lawyers and environmental consultants have refused to drink the local water in the Amazon — even though they claim this water is “clean” enough for the local population.

If the water was in fact so clean than wonder,
Did you drink the water from Mr. Salinas’ “supposedly” clean well?

You can find more information at http://www.chevrontoxico.org

Where you on the same Chevron paid trip as this blogger? Your talking points are pretty similar, hmm where ever could those talking points have been fed from?

Now I direct your attention not to the blog content itself, but to the blog comments.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5480#comments_top

The “oil drum” is by far a bias blog, but the bloggers, energy analysts, and concerned readers on the blog called out the blog post for what it was. A spoon fed blogger that is eating up anything that Chevron put their way on the paid trip to Ecuador.

While I appreciate your transparency (I’ve seen several admissions on other blogs) I think you may be patting yourself on the back a bit too much. Why do you think Chevron is paying for a group of bloggers to be herded around a controlled environment, filtering only what they want you to see? Why, because they know that New York Times, Newsweek, LA Times, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, AP, Reuters, Christian Science Monitor and other established media have all traveled their on their own dime and traveled to sites and communities in the search for something very simple to find…truth. This, unfortunately may be the absolute inverse to your experience and Chevron’s intentions. I don’t question you intention of presenting comprehensive journalism (I’m sure you feel 30,000 community members suffering from pollution deserve no less), I do however question your naivety.

Two last things:
First, on the naivety referred to above.
1. “Chevron buying me an airline ticket, hotel lodging and a few meals has not influenced my independence of thinking. I’m just following the facts as I see them.”

Who do you think choose the “facts” that you saw”? come on now.

Finally, to put your hardship into perspective.
2. “Actually, I came out financially behind on the trip to Ecuador, and risked physical harm, both from yellow fever (for which no vaccine was available) and from the people of the area—we were accompanied by armed guards on the trip”.

Sorry for your finical debt because of Chevron, seems a little cheap on their part. I can relate to braving the yellow fever bug (for which there are vaccinations available at most health clinic. I am happy to line this up for you if you ever return to Ecuador and report unfiltered on the Chevron disaster) but in light of the generations of cancer, miscarriages, and polluted drinking water these communities must endure because of Chevron/Texaco’s operations in Ecuador, I think you got off pretty easy.

Funny how 60 Minutes came away with such a different point of view and yet Chevron didn’t pay THEIR way there. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories.....age3.shtml
How much stock do you really think people are going to put into a post written by someone so clearly shilling for Chevron? What’s next, gonna tell people the Exxon Valdez was really a tugboat with a leaky oil filter? How about the moon landing… faked in Arizona, right?