Ecology • Health + Safety • Media • Science • Social Good
Paradise Fouled
Berlinger’s new documentary, Crude, is about another kind of monster, this one grimmer and more emotionally scarifying by far. The movie — whose New York run begins today at IFC Center — spotlights an environmental atrocity that, until recently, had gone almost unnoticed by the U.S. media: the American oil giant Texaco’s alleged devastation of a 1,700-square-mile swathe of Ecuadorean rainforest, a “death zone” the size of Rhode Island whose poisoned waters, ubiquitous cancers and mysterious lesions have led some to call it the “Amazonian Chernobyl.”
In 1967, Texaco began drilling in the Ecuadorean Amazon, dubbing the inaugural well and the town that sprang up around it Lago Agrio, or Sour Lake, after the Texas city where the company was founded. The name proved portentous. The class-action lawsuit filed in 1993 on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorean plaintiffs, many of them indigenous people, charged Texaco with intentionally dumping 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste into the Amazon. Imagine a spill bigger than the Exxon Valdez, in the middle of a jungle whose pristine river and abundant wildlife made it the next best thing to Eden — a “paradise” where “life reigned,” in the words of one Secoya tribesman. Although Texaco struck a deal with the Ecuadorean government in 1995, agreeing to environmental remediation of the affected sites, Ecuador claims that the company swept its toxic problems under the rug, simply burying the leaking wells. In 2008, the Ecuadorean government slapped a fraud indictment on two Chevron attorneys (Chevron acquired Texaco, and its legal headaches, in 2001) and seven of its own former officials. Chevron decries the judgment.
A man from the Cofán tribe remembers the arrival of the first Texaco helicopter (“We didn’t know what this beast was called”). Soon, oil fouled the stretch of river his tribe fished and drank from. His first son “stopped developing six months after being born,” then died. His second son started vomiting blood after drinking from the polluted river. “He got sick at 10 a.m. and the next day, at 2 in the afternoon, he was dead.”
The movie ends in the present, with a decision still pending. The American attorney for the plaintiffs, Steven Donziger, believes that Chevron, the world’s fifth largest corporation, is using its practically bottomless legal fund to run down the clock, trying to “sap our resources, sap our will.” Litigation may drag on for another decade, the movie concludes. Meanwhile, Chevron is launching a counteroffensive in the image war, using its YouTube channel to accuse the Ecuadorean judge presiding over its lawsuit of corruption, buying ad space on Google to air a superslick faux-news clip designed to pass as a CNN report, down to the narration by former CNN correspondent Gene Randall.
Crude is, among other things, about the eloquence of images; the power of things beheld. Although Berlinger insists, in the “Director’s Statement” included in the movie’s publicity packet, that “the best way to serve truth is to explore a situation from all sides without overtly revealing the filmmaker’s viewpoint, allowing each audience member to come up with his or her own conclusion about the events they are witnessing onscreen,” the movie’s visual rhetoric is powerful and persuasive. In one scene, Chevron’s defense counsel harangues a crowd, telling its members that the plaintiff’s American counsel is a fat cat, only in it for the money. Berlinger cuts to a blind accordionist nearby, his melancholy wheezing a sly commentary on the windy mendacity of the lawyer’s song, his sightless squint an allusion to the lawyer’s insistence that we turn a blind eye on Chevron’s toxic sins.
An ice-cool Chevron scientist flatly rejects claims that oil production is to blame for the region’s perceived spike in cancer rates. But the lead-in to her rebuttal is a creepy close-up of a duck in a villager’s yard, sick, maybe dying, its webbed feet twitching convulsively. Nearby, a weeping mother tells us about her daughter, gnawed to the bone by cancer. The chickens she’d hoped would pay for the girl’s treatment are dead, killed, she says, by contamination from the oil-production station 10 meters from her house. The camera follows her son into the brush, where he tosses the limp birds unceremoniously into a thicket. Then comes the Chevron scientist, coolly insisting that “Chevron takes those kinds of allegations very seriously,” but that there’s “absolutely no evidence that there’s an increase in cancer death rates.” To be sure, she concedes, “There are people there that are sick,” but “it’s a very poor region.” Cut to a close-up of an investigator pulling a core sample out of the ground. The crowd leans in. In a rubber-gloved hand, he squishes the soil sample; oily muck, black as vomito negro, squelches between his fingers.
Drill, baby, drill. Until you hit the truth.
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By Mark Dery
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