Reckoning with Harm: The Toxic Relations of Oil in Amazonia 9781477327777, 9781477327784, 9781477327791, 9781477327807

Citation preview

Reckoning with Harm

reckoning with harm The Toxic Relations of Oil in Amazonia

Amelia M. Fiske

university of texas press    Austin

Support for this book comes from an endowment for environmental studies made possible by generous contributions from Richard C. Bartlett, Susan Aspinall Block, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright © 2023 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2023 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

l i brary o f c o n g r e s s c a t a l o g i n g -in-publicatio n d ata Names: Fiske, Amelia, author. Title: Reckoning with harm : the toxic relations of oil in Amazonia / Amelia Fiske. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023006021 ISBN 978-1-4773-2777-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2778-4 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-4773-2779-1 (PDF) ISBN 978-1-4773-2780-7 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Petroleum industry and trade—Environmental aspects—Amazon River Region. | Petroleum industry and trade—Social aspects—Amazon River Region. | Liability for oil pollution damages—Social aspects—Amazon River Region. | Petroleum law and legislation—Social aspects—Amazon River Region. | Environmental justice—Amazon River Region. | Social responsibility of business—Amazon River Region. Classification: LCC TD195.P4 F575 2023 | DDC 338.2/72809811—dc23/ eng/20230302 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006021 doi:10.7560/327777

dedication Para Donald, y todxs quienes luchan por un mundo post extractivista.

Contents Acknowledgments  ix Abbreviations  xiii A Note on Transcription  xv Oil: A Visual Glossary  xvii Introduction:  Encountering Harm  1 chapter 1.  Building a Life on the Aguarico  27 Chapter 2.  Evidence  73 Chapter 3.  Bounding Harm  103 Chapter 4.  Toxic Exposures  143 Chapter 5.  Touring Toxic Places  179 Conclusion.  Relations of the Aguarico-4 Well  211 Epilogue:  Una Masa Dura  229

Notes  233 Works Cited  243 Index  261

Acknowledgments I have been traveling with this project for more than a decade now, and I am grateful for the time and generosity of the many people who made this book possible, whether through institutional support, collective thinking and theorizing, or individual encouragement and critique. This research was made possible by the support of the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Science Foundation, UNC Graduate School, UNC Institute for Study of the Americas (Mellon Dissertation Fellowship for Latin American Research, Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, Tinker Pre-Dissertation Research Grant), and Mitchell Institute. This work is grounded in my experiences living in Ecuador and would not have been possible without the kindness, generosity, and collective efforts of many people between Lago Agrio and Quito. Kati and Sebastián Álvarez took me under their roof and were my extended family during fieldwork. I am grateful to Kati for her continued friendship, as well as her support of this project and its many offshoots, which continue to bring our lives together. In Lago Agrio, I am greatly indebted to Donald Moncayo. Donald let me follow along as he did his work, and I hope that his unyielding compromiso to making his home a better place for Leonela and the generations to follow will be clear for all who read this book. Mitch Anderson’s acute vision helped me to find the myth in truth, and the truth in myth, in the histories of the Amazon. From listening to Silvio Rodriguez over winding jungle roads to enjoying maitos in the fading heat of the day, time spent with Mitch, Donald, and other collaborators marks some of my dearest memories of life in Lago. The love they put into Ceibo Alliance, Amazon Frontlines, and UDAPT to make the Amazon a better place has left an indelible mark on me. Jorge Mideros spent countless hours answering my questions about the industry and about the past; I thank him for sharing his work remediating contaminated places. Luis Arias delighted me with stories of earlier years and invited me to many an encebollado. Likewise, Shaila Carvajal’s nimble fingers and lovely voice allowed me to imagine life in Lago Agrio in years prior, in both song and image. Mariana Jiménez was patient with my inquiries and generous with her time; thank you for sharing parts of your life with me. Manuel Pallares inspired new branches of inquiry growing out of this research.

 ix

x acknowle dgme nts

Many people and organizations in the Amazon are working to make a better life despite ongoing extraction. I would like to acknowledge the people at the Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía and thank them for their inclusion of me in their work, in particular those involved in the Escuela de Líderes and environmental monitoring: Ermel Chavez, Alba Gonzaga, Liber Macias, Juan Espejo, Luis Yanza, Maximo Gonzaga, Wilmer Meneses, Manuel Zambrano, and many more. In particular, I would like to thank Pablo Fajardo for his support of this project early on and the time he took time to assist me in making connections necessary to conduct this research. I am grateful for the friends who helped make Lago Agrio home, many of whom continue to make life lighter even from afar: Beatriz Romero, Alfredo López, Luz Arpi, Esteban Salazar, Elizabeth Bastidias, Diego Róman, Alfredo Quiroga, Arturo Quiroga, Nicoletta Roccabianca, and Andrea Cianferoni, as well as friends in Quito, in particular Alex Báez and Marie-Pierre Smets. Lindsay Ofrias has been a steady friend and colleague throughout this work, and I am grateful for her continued documentary and ethnographic interventions into extraction. Thanks to Robert Wasserstrom for his attention to historical specificity and help at many earlier points throughout this research. This project began at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where my companions taught me to be accountable for the ways I see the world. Michele Rivkin-Fish’s attention to health and social justice shaped the direction of my studies early on. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld helped me to think extraction beyond Ecuador and pushed me methodologically in ways that I continue to reflect upon today. I thank Barry Saunders for his careful reading, gentle critique, and intellectual generosity. I am grateful for Peter Redfield’s vision and his pragmatism. His appreciation for scholarly lineages and keen insights as a reader has challenged my thinking while reminding me not to take anthropology too seriously. Margaret Wiener has shaped the direction of this project since the beginning. Her meticulous reading has pushed me to write more cleanly and concisely. I remain grateful for her careful interpretation of theory and intellectual encouragement, which have given me bearing over the years. Gabriela Valdivia and Laura Halperin each helped me to consider aspects of this book in a different light. Through classes and writing groups, many colleagues and friends have made this passage a more enjoyable journey: Taylor Livingston, Kelly Houck, Laura Wagner, Caela O’Connell, Angus Lyall, Vincent Joos, Cassandra Hartblay, Diana Gómez, Marwa Yousif, Hyun-joo Mo,

acknowl e dgm e nts   xi

Mike Dimfl, Chris Courtheyn, Ben Rubin, Pavithra Vasudevan, Tomás Gallareta, Eloisa Berman, Ivan Vargas, Paul Schissel, and Dayuma Albán. In particular, Paolo Bocci suffered through many drafts, and Saydia Gulrukh shared the burden when writing became too heavy. Dragana Lassiter has been my companion and accomplice and continues to help me to find the breeze in life. I am grateful for the opportunities to learn from each of them. Following Chapel Hill, life has taken me first to Berlin and later to Kiel. Many people have sustained me and this book as I worked to finish it while many other endeavors began apace. Alena Buyx has been an inspiring supervisor, helping me to navigate academia as a mother and supporting this book in direct and indirect ways over the past six years. I am grateful to her and to Barbara Prainsack for the care they put into supervision and examples they set in building supportive research environments. Workshops on toxicity held by Alice Mah at the University of Warwick and by Thomas Widger at Durham University in 2017 provided generative conversations, and I am grateful to Peter Little, Max Liboiron, Alex Zahara, Camilla Dewan, Emma Garnett, Ernesto Schwartz-Marin, and others at these events whose contributions sparked critical revisions of this project. The Rachel Carson Center at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich gave me the opportunity to exchange with other environmental humanities scholars, and I am particularly grateful for the feedback provided by Christof Mauch, Tony Weis, Roberta Biasillo, Ursula Münster, and Amy Moran-Thomas while I was there. Maron Greenleaf, Sayd Randle, and Colin Hoag all read chapters of this text and provided much-needed interventions on what didn’t make the cut. Elizabeth Roberts provided feedback on a portion of this book sent to her out of the blue. Ayo Wahlberg offered helpful advice for pursuing publishing, and Audra Wolfe and Beth Sherouse sharpened this text with their shrewd editorial skills. Gregory McNamee did the important work of editing the manuscript before publication. Finally, Casey Kitrell believed in the possibility of this book, and I am grateful for his patience with its development and for the anonymous reviewers who offered key interventions and direction for improvement. In 2020, I returned to Lago Agrio to share visual essays depicting the permutations of toxicity that emerged from a collaboration with graphic artist and illustrator Jonas Fischer. During this visit we held a workshop on the use of graphic art in environmental activism. I am grateful for the generative alliance with Lexie Groper and José Luis Muñoz of Amisacho resulting from this trip. Enrique Novas and the Humboldt Association

xii acknowle dgme nts

in Quito hosted a public event showing our work, where Kati Álvarez, Santiago del Hierro, and Vanessita Roa offered public reflections on toxicity in daily life that have continued to shape my thinking as I reworked the material for this book. From my initial fieldwork in Lago Agrio to subsequent transformations of this ethnography and development of a graphic novel, Mike Cepek has been a central intellectual reference for me on oil development and the particularities of this corner of the Amazon. I am grateful to Mike for his insight and continued support, and the example he sets through his ethnographic commitments. My family and friends have extended love and cared for me in the many years of researching, writing, and editing this book. I am grateful to the continued, capacious sisterhood of Dragana Lassiter, Lucy Sommo, Anna Sommo, Elizabeth Sommo, Brittany Peats, Mindy Newman, Katinka Hakuta, Becca Ely, Eliza Hutchinson, Marta dal Corso, and Silvia Balatti. Thanks go to my family for their consistent love and enthusiastic support in this and many other endeavors, in particular my parents, Patty Sheehan and Richard Fiske, my brother, Carson Fiske, and his family, Becky Colman, Zachary Fiske, and Ainsley Fiske. Andrea Ricci has given me his love and helped me to create the space to continue this project amid so many others. Most of all, I am happy to share the wonder with you for our giovanotte, Alba and Livia, who are the suns of my life.

Abbreviations

1040: Reglamento de Participación Social (Social Participation Regulation 1040) 1215: Reglamento Sustitutivo del Reglamento Ambiental para las Operaciones Hidrocarburíferas en el Ecuador (Regulation to Replace the Environmental Regulation for Hydrocarbon Operations, Decree No. 1215) CBPR: community-based participatory health research CEPE: Corporación Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana (Ecuadorian State Petroleum Company) CONFENIAE: Confederación de las Nacionalidades Indígenas de la Amazonía Ecuatoriana (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon) EIA: Estudio de Impacto Ambiental (Environmental Impact Assessment) FDA: Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía (Amazon Defense Front) MAE: Ministerio del Ambiente (Ministry of the Environment) MEM: Ministerio de Energía y Minas (Ministry of Energy and Mines) OPEC: Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries PAHs: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons PRAS: Programa de Reparación Ambiental y Social (Environmental and Social Remediation Program) RAP: Remedial Action Plan SIL: Summer Institute of Linguistics SOTE: Sistema de Oleoducto de Transecuatoriano (Trans-Ecuadorian Oil Pipeline System) TPH: total petroleum hydrocarbons UDAPT: Unión de Afectados y Afectadas por las Operaciones Petroleras de Texaco (Union of the People Affected by Texaco Oil Operations) VOCs: volatile organic compounds

 xiii

A Note on Transcription Throughout the text, I use italics to convey spoken dialogue that I witnessed in situations where it was not possible or would have been inappropriate to use a handheld audio recorder. I have done my best to accurately reconstruct these conversations from detailed notes where I recorded conversations by hand and later translated them into English. However, it is important to me to distinguish these reconstructions from direct quotes that were digitally recorded. Recorded speech is denoted throughout the text with quotation marks. I appreciate the University of Texas Press’s accommodation in allowing me to explore this idiosyncratic use of italics in ethnographic writing.

 xv

Oil: A Visual Glossary Il l ust ra t i ons b y J o n a s F is c h e r

Oil is composed of decaying biomass that has been trapped between layers of sedimentary rock for millions of years. Petroleum forms in these underground pockets as a slurry of crude oil, natural gas, and formation waters. These three components are extracted, separated, and refined to produce diesel fuel, gasoline, jet fuel, asphalt, and thousands of other derivative products, such as plastics, medical supplies, pesticides, paint, Illustration of oil extraction. and more. Oil is not the only product of extraction. Formation water and additional chemicals added to the slurry during the drilling process must be discarded. In earlier decades, mixtures of formation and production waters were dumped into holding ponds or directly into the surrounding environment. Today, these waters are generally injected deep underground through oil wells that have been converted into reinjection wells. In Ecuador, the combustible vapors generated in extraction are burned in gas flares. This generally occurs near production stations or wells. The areas surrounding the flares are covered in fine toxic particulate matter, with the ground speckled with drops of oil and the leaves of trees coated in a black slick. Residents living near flares report problems with toxic rain. When gas flares are not operating properly, they emit methane and volatile organic compounds such as sulfur Illustration of the relationships between people’s homes, farms, and water wells and the infrastructure of oil extraction, in particular waste pits and gas flares.  xvii

xviii  oil: a visua l glossa ry

colombia

pacific ocean

Lago Agrio/ Nueva Loja

Esmeraldas Quito

Sucumbíos Orellana

ecuador Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve

Guayaquil

Yasuní National Park

peru Loja

N

Oil Concessions Texaco Concession Pipeline Andes

Map of Ecuador illustrating the oil concessions in the Amazon region, including the Sucumbíos and Orellana provinces, where the majority of fieldwork for this book took place.

oil: a visua l glossa ry  xix

dioxide. Aromatic hydrocarbons, such as benzene, toluene, and xylene (BTX), are also emitted. During consortium operations, approximately three waste pits were constructed with every new well. Of the 880 pits verified in the Aguinda lawsuit, waste pits were approximately sixty by forty meters (200 × 130 ft) in size and two meters (6.5 ft) deep, dug out of the ground like large swimming pools (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 125). Over time, new waste pits were dug, sometimes resulting in six or seven pits for a given well. Waste pits were not lined with any kind of impermeable membrane, resulting in considerable risk to groundwater.

Cross section of a waste pit with a gooseneck pipe draining into a nearby stream.

The gooseneck (cuello de ganso) pipe was routinely used in consortium operations. One end of the pipe sat in the pit above the level of oil, and the other end of the pipe protruded from the outer bank of the pit. The purported design was to prevent the contents of the pits from overflowing their banks by allowing only rainwater to escape. However, in practice, the gooseneck pipe allowed the contents of the waste pits, including rainwater mixed with toxic chemicals, to drain without any treatment into the surrounding environment. Waste pits with gooseneck pipes were in place for decades and are still found throughout the region today.

introduction

Encountering Harm

On the border where the platform receded into jungle, a flare lurched in the wind, burning the excess gas produced during extraction. A towering orange and black drill revolved up and down in the middle of the dirt platform. Luz Maria leaned against the doorframe of her home, some fifty meters (164 ft) away from the well Texaco had drilled in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 1967, now operated by the Ecuadorian state company. Her father had staked out this land when he arrived with a group of settlers from Loja Province in the late 1960s to colonize the Amazon. After clearing and cultivating different sections of the land, her father divided it into plots and gave one to each of his four adult children. This was the part of the property that Luz Maria wound up with—que me tocó—a total of two hectares (ca. 5 acres) and three waste pits. This land, says her husband, Wilmer, gesturing around him, is her inheritance. Luz Maria and Wilmer describe the boundaries of their property, indicating the locations of old waste pits from Texaco’s and PetroEcuador’s operations, where spills have occurred, and which parts the companies have since remediated and which they have not. She recalls her father’s disputes with different operating and subcontracting companies over areas of his property that they contaminated. Some of the pits on their property, she notes, were just “junk” pits, where workers disposed of old tires and other industrial trash, while others held crude and oil products from production tests and normal operations. Luz Maria’s description of her property is a genealogy not so much of accidents or moments of crisis but of everyday industrial practice. One morning, Luz Maria led me behind her house, and we headed down the side of the bank. Some fifteen meters (50 ft) below, the land turned swampy, giving way in a saturated squish beneath my boots. This part of their property is uncultivated and requires a machete to

 1

2 introd uc tion

navigate. As we arrived at a small clearing about a hundred meters (ca. 330 ft) from the back side of her home, she told me that this was their fifth attempt to dig a water well. I peered over the side. The well is not deep, she noted, but at least the water is relatively clear. The other wells, all closer to their home, also quickly filled with water, but with a coating of oil on the top. When they pulled up the plastic bucket, the water carried the definitive smell of hydrocarbons. Luz Maria and Wilmer scouted new locations in search of clean water. She hoped they were lucky with this last spot; while potential well sites were plentiful, there is no divining rod for clean water. The pair has lived in this location for about five years after moving from the center of Lago Agrio. Luz Maria likes it. The air is fresco, and life is not as loud and chaotic as it is in the city. On the other hand, We are living closer to danger, and everything here is contaminated. She recalled the time a few years earlier when she was pregnant with their young son, who was strapped to her back as we walked. Suffering from ongoing headaches and stomach pain, she sent Wilmer to talk to the PetroEcuador workmen who maintained the well and the gas flare directly in front of their house. Wilmer asked them to stop running the gas flare temporarily, at least during the remainder of her pregnancy. Nonetheless, the company continued its operations. The gas was biting, she recalled, just flowing out of the flare. Wilmer interjected, describing how some days the flare would go out on its own and the gas would leak, hanging low over the platform and saturating the air. Instead of waiting for the company workers to arrive, he had improvised a method to reignite it with a lit stick. The fumes of a functioning flare were preferable to the slow intoxication of leaking gas. Circling our way around the property, we came to the opposite slope behind their home. Wilmer hacked through the brush, searching for the gooseneck pipe, shaped like a slanted capital letter S. As at other sites, one end of the pipe sat inside the pit, and the other protruded through the bank, which allowed rainwater to drain and prevented the pit contents from overflowing. Once full, the pit on their property was covered over, but the open end of the pipe still emerged from the mound of soil and gravel heaped on top. Locating the pipe, Wilmer cut the grass to expose the surrounding area, just twenty-odd meters (ca. 65 ft) downhill from their home. Sludge slowly trickled out of the pipe’s open end, discoloring the matted vegetation beneath. Wilmer stuck the tip of the machete into the earth beneath the pipe and held up a clump of soil tinged with the black traces of oil for my inspection. This, he said with a flick of the wrist, is a slow but certain death.

i ntrod u c tio n   3

How do people such as Luz Maria, Wilmer, and their small son encounter harm? At times harm occurs in the nausea that overwhelms Luz Maria as she steps onto the well platform or in their protracted search for clean water to drink, cook, and bathe in. In other moments, harm appears in the telltale rainbow gleam of old oil hovering on the edges of riverbanks or in the indignity of cows, birds, or beloved dogs found floundering in waste pits. For some it lingers in the memories of physical suffering, such as when Luz Maria was pregnant, or in the layers of accumulated resentment toward the companies that operate without regard for the many lives in their midst. Each of these encounters with harm, at once singular and charged with its own significance, is deeply entangled with the history of settlement and oil extraction in this place. Harm is multiple, shaping daily life in ways that are acute and cumulative, personal and shared, past and present.

Harm Is a Relationship Ecuador began commercial oil production in 1972 under a joint venture with Texaco, Gulf, and the newly formed state oil company, the Corporación Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana (Ecuadorian State Petroleum Company, or CEPE, which later became PetroEcuador). In 1977 Gulf left the venture, and the consortium consisted of Texaco, which owned a 37.5 percent share, and CEPE, which owned a 62.5 percent share. Throughout twenty years of extraction, Texaco drilled 339 wells and built eighteen production stations, unearthing an estimated 1.5 billion barrels of crude (Kimerling 2006a, 449–450). The companies’ unchecked disposal of crude oil and production waters into waste pits and local waterways and their regular burning of crude byproducts resulted in extensive environmental contamination and serious health problems for Indigenous and largely mestizo settler communities (San Sebastián 2000; San Sebastián et al. 2001; San Sebastián and Hurtig 2004b; Kimerling 1991; Beristain, Páez Rovira, and Fernández 2009). In 1993, following the expiration of a twenty-year contract, a class of thirty thousand Ecuadorians brought a lawsuit against Texaco, Aguinda v. Texaco, for extensive damages to the environment and human health. Since Texaco’s exit, oil operations have proceeded and expanded under other companies, including PetroEcuador. In 2011, the Provincial Court of Sucumbíos fined Chevron (which purchased Texaco in 2001) $9.5 billion for “gross negligence” and extensive contamination (Zambrano Lozada 2011). As oil extraction began, thousands of colonos (settlers) from Ecuador’s southern and highland regions poured into the ancestral territories

4 introd uc tion

of the Cofán, Waorani, Siekopai, Siona, and Shuar Indigenous nationalities.1 Settlers followed the oil access roads in search of land to claim, staking out plots and turning forests into farms. As settlers branched out across the region, they built houses and farms next to roads, pipelines, and well platforms while operations expanded apace. Today many residents cross pipelines just to reach their homes. Others dry their laundry on pipelines or tie animals to them to graze. In some cases, settlers arriving after companies had covered over waste pits, including Luz Maria and her family, built houses directly on top of old crude, industrial trash, and drilling muds. Most pits were not lined, frequently overflowed, and slowly leached chemicals into the surroundings over decades. Harm is manifest in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It is evident, persistent, and unrelenting for those living alongside the oil industry. At the same time, harm is often slippery, its presence difficult to confirm or discern. How do we know harm when we see it? Is it enough to bring our nose to a bucket of well water or squish oily mud between our fingers? What of corporeal memories, when a pang in the gut or a tightening of the lungs reminds us of moments of sickness and loss registered only in the flesh? Is harm’s origin in the inheritance of contaminated property? Or is it in the arrival of the first settlers, such as Luz Maria’s parents, searching for a better life for their families but at the same time participating in state-sponsored colonization that displaced Indigenous nationalities from their ancestral territories? Maybe harm began when the Ecuadorian government ceded land to oil companies, granting permission to drill decades before, or in the very definition of land as resource and its subterranean contents as potential profit. Harm from oil has been, and continues to be, the subject of great dispute, in part because of the decades-long Aguinda lawsuit, but not only because of that.2 There is neither expert nor public consensus about the nature or extent of damage that results when hydrocarbons and the chemicals used in oil production enter bodies and the surrounding environment, or about the ways in which oil operations change and intersect with political, social, and community dynamics. While scientists and regulators have established that particular chemicals are toxic to humans and other life forms in surrounding ecosystems, oil operations bring a complex array of political, economic, social, and environmental changes that affect how populations encounter toxic substances and how oil companies and state regulatory agencies address polluted sites. As a result, in a place such as the Ecuadorian Amazon, questions of accountability for harm in legal cases, scientific studies, and public assessments

i ntrod u c tio n   5

of extraction often hinge on parsing which changes are reverberations from oil operations and which result from other processes, such as settlement or a lack of adequate healthcare infrastructure. In the process, the very nature of harm from oil repeatedly comes into question. Throughout this book, I follow the ways that different actors reckoned with harm. These range from the rhetorical means lawyers used to argue that pollution was evident (chapter 2) to expert practices involved in environmental regulation (chapter 3) and techniques for digging up buried crude for visitors on “Toxic Tours” (chapter 5). Some of these practices speak directly to past operations under the CEPE-Texaco consortium, while others deal with ongoing oil operations by the Ecuadorian state and other companies. All are significant interventions into the consequences of extraction: lending harm weight, making it visible, legible, or countable in different forums. These practices turn samples of soil into objects that can speak for contamination across two provinces or delimit what does not count as damage—including on contentious issues such as deforestation or human health. These interventions determine past accountability and influence debates over the manner in which companies should exploit oil in the future. My intention in exploring these practices is not to bound or define harm as one thing or another but rather to show how the relationality of harm from oil extraction emerges through these interventions. Harm is both a relationship and an animating feature of relationships in this place. Since oil seeps beyond bounded events, bodies, and environments, I trace the relations that appear through different efforts to make harm manifest. In the process, I illustrate how drawing clean lines or “cutting” the relations between processes such as colonization and oil development, past and present experiences of pollution, or corporeal and scientific registers of toxicity can have the perverse effect of obscuring the wide-ranging, aggregate effects of extractive violence. Cutting relations results in truncated, technocratic understandings of harm that fail to encompass the pervasive, intergenerational transformations that oil has wrought on lives and land throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon, an argument I develop further by considering the communities around one well, the Aguarico-4. When the relations of oil extraction are minimized as “impacts” or as isolated effects of industry, government experts, lawyers, and scientists can mobilize such narrow understandings of harm to justify the continuation of extraction, because the benefits of sustaining the status quo, they argue, outweigh the (seemingly limited) costs of oil. Harm emerges through associations that bring chemicals and bodies

6 introd uc tion

into relation, linking industrial operations to the rhythms of daily life within the particular context of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Harm from oil operations is about the sticky materiality of crude and the vulnerability of human and nonhuman bodies as much as it is about the political and economic relations that make and sustain life—in Ecuador and beyond— in the present moment. Efforts to address harm have been consistently confounded by narrow, often technocratic understandings of evidence, toxicity, and responsibility. Building on collaborators’ attempts to contest state and oil company insistence that the harm in question is controlled and principally chemical in nature, I show that refiguring harm as relational is necessary in order to grapple with the possibilities for life alongside extractive toxicity in the present. A relational approach to harm calls for a reckoning with past unremediated contamination while pushing for broad forms of accountability that extend beyond legal and regulatory understandings of where harm begins and ends. Relations show us why other ways of understanding harm matter and why we need to think about harm differently in order to contemplate what comes next when living in a toxic world (Nading 2020).

Why “Harm”? The words we choose to describe what has occurred in the Amazon are significant. Farmers and residents of the region spoke often of “daño” (harm) while environmental officials and oil workers tended toward value​-neutral, technical terms such as “impact” or “environmental liability.” I have chosen to enter these conversations through the term “harm” because it reveals the strongest sense of relationality between those who pollute and those who are harmed by pollution; the relationality of harm is a means of rejecting the normalization of pollution as simply part of the extractive status quo.3 Officials working for the Ministry of the Environment and oil companies spoke principally of “hazards” or “dangers” (peligros), “risks” (riesgos), and “liabilities” (pasivos). The former two terms were usually spoken of in the conditional—for example, If the pipeline bursts, it would be a hazard to the cattle in the area. Importantly, hazards and risks can be categorized and mobilized in official documents and policies to address potential incidents, such as in the extensive binders the director of a toxic waste–incineration facility once showed me. A familiar scale of colors ascending from red to green predicted the degree of relative safety or danger for those handling toxic materials. Implicit

i ntrod u c tio n   7

in such guidelines is that if everything goes as planned—if the pipeline does not burst, the well functions as expected, and the waste combusts at the proper temperature—the presence of the hazard is not a problem. Yet, irrespective of whether things go as planned, and they rarely do, as a massive fire at this very incineration facility the following year would demonstrate, the very presence of toxic substances is a problem. Environmental protection written in the conditional ignores the extent of the harm of that has occurred in this region since the 1960s. Some officials used “environmental liabilities” to describe harm that had occurred in the past and was still unresolved. Pasivos ambientales are an economic technique of evaluating harm from oil and mining operations (Russi and Martinez-Alier 2003). According to a government program dedicated to environmental and social reparation in oil producing areas, pasivos are “the result of the combination of damage and the time in which it remains in the environment or the society without being fully repaired” (Programa de Reparación Ambiental y Social 2011, 4). As Pati, an environmental consultant, explained to me during an audit of an old oil field, pasivos are old forms of environmental harm that exist on a site. Defined with a specific legal, bureaucratic sense of accountability for damages, pasivos operate within the assumption that once an oil company has paid for the farm animals lost or cleaned a spill site, the liability for that harm is over. A pasivo has a clearly delimited beginning (e.g., the day a truck carrying toxic water tipped over) and end (the point at which officials determine that the spill in the forest is sufficiently cleaned up, the surrounding area remediated, and any compensatory damages paid). After that point it is no longer a pasivo. The term leaves no room for memories of what it was like for families in the area who lived without water for that period of time or who still believe the soil to be contaminated. It also restricts conversation to the terms defined by the Ministry of the Environment regarding what constitutes damage and corresponding remediation and compensation. Politicians, environmental consultants, and oil company workers alike frequently used the word “impact.” At times, they were making specific reference to objects of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA), while at other times they used “impact” to refer to the consequences of oil production more generally. Impacts, as mobilized in the EIA, are discrete, value-free, measurable descriptors that allow for an ostensibly neutral evaluation of a potential project. Impacts are a predefined form of assessment that help solidify particular effects of oil development as important in relation to environmental regulation (such as deforestation

8  introd uc tion

of a planned well platform) and others as irrelevant (such as whether a family will be able to sleep with the noise of the planned operations) (Fiske 2017a). Impacts are manageable by design—there is no potential impact that does not also have a corresponding technical solution (Li 2009, 2015)—and thus largely function as a bureaucratic tool that enables further extractive activity. During environmental inspections and audits, I observed that there was often slippage between the technical use of “impact” by regulatory officials or company representatives and the much broader meaning of the term when residents of the area spoke of the range of changes wrought by oil production. The residents, activists, oil workers, and environmental officials I worked with invoked a continuum of germane terms when discussing the results of living in a contaminated place. The term “damage,” both in a legal sense of damages and in a personal sense of affliction, often emphasizes loss, whether financial or property related, or personal injury. “Injury” evokes similar understandings of loss but is generally oriented toward the experience of bodily harm or a violation of an individual’s or a community’s rights, such as the right to live in an uncontaminated place. “Injury” often implies that someone or something has committed a wrong against another; not only has one’s property, animals, or physical health been hurt, but the sustained injustice is also unfair or morally wrong. The relationships in which harm occurs are distinct from understandings of “misfortune,” which invokes chance, or where harm results principally from poor circumstances and there is no party responsible for the damage. “Injury” is also different from notions of “risk,” which imply a future-oriented calculus of decision and uncertainty in which it is possible to control and compensate for the many dangers resulting from industrialized activities (Beck 2009). The term riesgo (risk) was noticeably absent from conversations with residents about life alongside the industry, even with people who lived in situations that I considered precarious or “risky,” for example, in a house located just a few feet from an oil pipeline. Finally, the term “harm,” most broadly, includes physical or emotional damage, injury, and suffering. Harm in the contexts I consider involves an intent to cause injury and a relationship between two or more parties in which one has violated a tacit or explicit code of action or expectation. The interlocutors I worked with clearly expressed this concept of relational violence, insisting that companies like Texaco knew that oil production was harmful to the environment and human health but did nothing to protect those who were building their homes

i ntrod u c tio n   9

near active industrial sites or using the rivers for cooking, bathing, and travel. In this sense, harm is also a conceptual space that implies morally charged obligations between perpetrators and victims. Of the various terms I encountered in the field, “harm” best captures the relational injustice that has occurred with the arrival of oil. More than property damage, loss of farm animals or crops, or personal injury and suffering, “harm” evokes the strongest sense of connection and culpability in causing damages. The term insists that after a half-century of operations, the ensuing contamination in the region was not accidental but the product of broader structures of power and profit producing toxicity. My engagement with the term “harm” is an argument to resist normalizing the pernicious consequences of oil extraction through terms like regulatory “impacts,” in which the broader benefits of extraction are mobilized to justify the ensuing pollution. A relational approach requires neither absolute certainty nor a causal relationship between two entities at a specific moment in time in order to address harm. Rather, relationality involves contemplating multiple relationships at once, within the broader context of how extraction began and the historical and structural dynamics that have shaped encounters with oil. These relationships are important because while there is overwhelming evidence for environmental damage wrought by oil operations across the globe,4 it is often exceedingly difficult to generate the kinds of proof required to demonstrate corporate or state accountability for specific instances of illness and disease, or other lived moments of harm (Jephcote et al. 2020; Brown 2007; Fortun 2012; Langston 2010; Nash 2007). Taking a relational approach leaves room for matters of doubt and disagreement over specifics, without discounting that harm has occurred. This marks a critical difference from how debates over harm in the Aguinda lawsuit have played out, as I discuss further in chapters 2 and 4. Although clearly linked to other notions of hazard, liability, impact, and damage, the concept of harm is not a matter that the responsible parties can easily resolve through payment or manage through contingency plans to justify future extraction. The relationality of harm leaves open the possibility for suffering or loss to be incalculable, such as the pain that comes with a miscarriage after bathing in a contaminated river. It offers the possibility of tracing the multiple histories involved in making harm from oil, of both colonization and industrial development, of state and foreign oil companies, of individual and collective losses, that reach back through decades and into the future.

10 introd uc tion

Relations and Obligations Oil pollution in the Ecuadorian Amazon has been addressed in an iconic legal battle, documentary films, numerous scientific studies, advocacy work, photographic and artistic works, journalistic and scholarly writing, and more (e.g., Kimerling 2006a; Barrett 2014; Berlinger 2009; Dematteis and Szymczak 2008; Cardoso 2012; Langewiesche 2007). In fieldwork, I found that official forums, such as legal actions and regulatory practices, focused on isolating the effects of a particular industrial incident (such as a routine spill) or practice (such as road oiling, pit burning, or gas flaring) on human health or a specific environmental concern (such as water quality, deforestation, or animal diversity). That is, regulators have privileged specific “impacts” over others, assiduously defined in order to be discrete, measurable, and therefore manageable. The work of bounding harm in science, regulation, and law takes considerable effort, for example, setting maximal limits of compounds that are demonstrably dangerous to human and animal health, devising specific protocols for sampling soil and water, or deciding which criteria to include and which to exclude. Yet these efforts to isolate singular incidents, pathways, or effects were routinely troubled by complexity, whether from the lengthy history of oil operations by different companies, the multiplicity of potential forms of exposure, or differing understandings of where industry ends and other forms of life begin. Each of these interventions was deeply contingent on situated histories of knowledge and practice that were neither “natural” nor universal. I routinely witnessed moments where people living in the region described forms of harm that did not officially “count” but mattered very much to them, their families, or their neighbors. In these conversations, the focus was not on the effects of a lone chemical but rather on the connections—both obvious and obscured—between toxic substances and health; between everyday industrial practices and the streams, soils, people, and animals in their midst; between oil companies and a specific political economy that permits the accumulation of profit in some places and waste in others. More than being simply moments of denunciation, these were conversations that illustrated how the relations of harm both enabled and constrained everyday life alongside oil.5 In the pages to follow I offer an ethnographic exploration of harm from oil as a complex of relations and not the result of discrete pathways of toxic chemicals that can be isolated as individuated “impacts,” an approach that I will argue is critical for understanding the effects of the

i ntrod u c tio n   11

oil industry on life. Refiguring harm as primarily relational is important on a number of levels. First, considering harm relationally is a means of disavowing the exclusions, both epistemological and ontological, inherent in dominant explanations of how chemicals act in the world. As others have shown, understanding the world through Western science often excludes a host of concerns, lives, and ways of living (Liboiron 2021; de la Cadena 2010; Haraway 2007, 2016; Latour 1993). The very processes of visualizing, extracting, and transporting natural resources can obscure the problems of those suffering the health consequences of that extraction (Wylie 2018). Second, technocratic explanations of harm produce narrow understandings of responsibility for pollution, which are an insufficient basis for acting on the scope of harm that has occurred across a region and over generations (Petryna 2002; Fortun 2001; Nash 2007; Nixon 2011; Boudia and Jas 2014). Thinking harm relationally refutes the notion that the effects of the oil industry are best understood from a detached, supposedly objective, position, what Donna Haraway has called the illusion of the “god trick.” Approaching harm relationally refuses any fixed vision of what harm “is” but instead insists that we each need to be accountable “for what we learn how to see” (Haraway 1988, 583). As a mother, writer, and researcher living in Germany, I am also implicated in these relations and the critical question of what should be done about ongoing forms of harm. Relationality does not just reveal how harm is produced; it forges connections between harm and each of us. Relations—uneven and contingent on where each of us stands in the world—imply different degrees of responsibility for the matter of oil extraction and to those harmed by it, whether in the past, present, or future (Liboiron et al. 2021; Liboiron 2021; Hoover 2017; Wilbur, Small-Rodriguez, and Keene 2019).6 That is, while as consumers of oil and oil derivatives we are each undoubtedly in relation to the harm produced through oil extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon, these are not the same relations as those of oil executives or investors who have made specific decisions about how extraction will proceed or provided the financial capital necessary for industry investments. Relationality can help scientists, politicians, researchers, bureaucrats, and consumers to forge concepts of accountability that are appropriate for addressing the extent of toxic harm in the present. Toxic chemicals have infiltrated biological and social life across the globe. As the historian Brett Walker has argued, we are living in the “age of toxicity” (Walker 2011, ix), where the problem of toxicity is no

12 introd uc tion

longer a question of individuals interacting with rogue chemical particles but rather a radical change in what it means to be human; we are now co-constituted by the toxicants of the twentieth century (Murphy 2008, 2017). Toxicity has become at once extraordinary and utterly commonplace.7 In the social sciences, the first decades of the twenty-first century saw a significant turn to all things “toxic.” I am deeply indebted to several strands of this work, specifically science and technology studies (STS) and decolonial scholarship, which understands toxicity as fundamentally relational (Liboiron 2021; Murphy 2008, 2017; Hoover 2017), and a body of work in anthropology that some have called “chemo-ethnography,” in which chemicals have become ethnographic territory (Shapiro and Kirksey 2017; Nading 2020). This work has shaped my thinking as I researched, wrote, and revised this book. To live in the Amazon is to live alongside, underneath, and submerged within oil production and its infrastructure, marking widespread transformations of space, practice, and exchange in everyday life in the past half-century. The toxic substances that interlocutors encountered in their everyday lives were rarely “pure” crude, but byproducts such as the bitumen Indigenous residents recalled seeping through the soil in the Amazon or on the coast of Santa Elena (Cepek 2018; Sovacool and Scarpaci 2016). What most residents encountered were toxic composites, or chemical mixtures, composed of “natural” substances entangled with synthetic and industrially produced additives, admixtures of potentially poisonous components necessary to continue extracting the life-sustaining fuel of the contemporary moment.8 Oil production thus exists as a hybrid form of toxin and toxicant: it is a natural resource, but it attains its toxic potency only through the production, consumption, and fabrication of chemicals of the twentieth century that bring it to the surface of the Amazon forest at historically unprecedented scales and intensities. As the anticolonial STS scientist Max Liboiron defines them, toxicants differ from “natural” toxins not only because of their human-made genesis but also because of their “mass tonnage [and] wide economic production and distribution processes” within a political economy premised on profit (Liboiron 2017b). I intentionally use the term “toxicant” to draw attention to the forms of labor, production, and consumption that have brought the people living in the Amazon into a daily, unavoidable relationship with oil. I focus in large part on the toxic substances that oil production generates. While harm is not only about toxicity, many of its historical, material, and symbolic relations are linked to the toxic substances used

i ntrod u c tio n   13

in extracting, processing, and transporting oil. This is in part because those toxicants cross boundaries from the plastic industrial membranes installed to contain the contents of waste pits to the fleshy ones covering human bodies. The movement of toxic substances throughout environments—​in soil, water, and air—and in bodies of organisms— across skin or the blood-brain barrier—is one of their distinguishing features. In the process of doing so, they not only trigger changes in bodies, environments, and human experiences but also forge new material, social, political, and historical connections. In other words, toxicants create and animate relations. Toxicants effect changes that are unanticipated and forceful. Identifying, measuring, and demonstrating exposures to toxic substances outside of the laboratory, however, pose a problem: combinations of chemicals, changes in industry practices, the dispersion of chemicals throughout air or water over time, the movements of people between jobs and daily activities, all make tracking the effects of toxic substances in the world exceedingly difficult. Contemporary methods of toxicology are rarely able to demonstrate causality between individual toxicants and human harm, and even less so for “cocktails” of toxicants (Goldstein and Hall 2015; van der Schalie et al. 1999; Langston 2010; Boudia and Jas 2014). While scientists have shown that toxic substances play an important role in acute and chronic diseases, many of the precise relationships between exposure and disease remain elusive because of individual variation, the cumulative effects of multiple toxic substances, and the complex interplay between genetics and environment (Wild 2005; Miller 2013; Nash 2007). As scholars have demonstrated, dominant modes of addressing pollution’s effects, such as regulatory science and law, have proven unsatisfactory for stemming the wake of postindustrial toxicants in our lives (Boudia and Jas 2014). Often rendered as technocratic concerns by regulators and industry engineers, these problems will not simply disappear with better tools or more knowledge of how toxic chemicals operate in a given environment. Historians of science and STS scholars have argued that one of the dominant ways of understanding toxicants is as chemical structures: isolated molecules with specific, identifiable properties and pathways. In her call for anticolonial feminist tactics to take on toxicity, Michelle Murphy describes how technoscientific approaches that portray chemicals as “discrete entities, as isolated molecules, often represented through abstract structural diagrams” have supplanted approaches that foreground complexity and entanglements between the living and nonliving

14 introd uc tion

(2017, 495). Such explanations for how toxicity manifests are largely incompatible with accounts that track how matters such as sexuality, race, gender, or coloniality shape chemicals’ effects on bodies and the irrevocable ways that toxicity is unequally embodied in and entangled with surrounding environments (Agard-Jones 2014; Murphy 2008; Nash 2007). For instance, questions of why and through what processes industrial waste affects some bodies but not others (Auyero and Swistun 2009), or how pollution becomes an externality, even a profitable one (Ofrias 2017), have been systematically divorced from questions of how toxicity is generated or how toxic exposures occur. I illustrate the importance of the vernacular within scientific understandings of toxicity, such as in chapter 4, where I build up an understanding of toxic exposure from the perspectives of those affected by oil contamination. Understandings of toxicants as “chemicals in white space” (Murphy 2021), along with a host of other assumptions derived from specific ways of understanding and describing the world, such as the generalizability of the bounded, “average” body (Nash 2007), the manageability of pollution (Mitman, Murphy, and Sellers 2004), the calculability of risk (Fortun 2012), or the overreliance on models of environmental hazard (rather than the explicit recognition of the limits of modeling; cf. Tsing 2004), have coalesced into taken-for-granted ways of imagining, speaking about, and acting on toxicants. These dominant modalities for understanding and managing toxic substances have been mobilized (even in inadvertent ways) by oil company representatives, regulators, and lawyers to marginalize voices that have insisted on more-than causal, not-yet-verified effects of toxicants and to obscure the political and economic structures that allow some to produce and profit from pollution in the first place.9 Feminist STS and decolonial approaches to toxic chemicals as complex relations, rather than as discrete molecular entities, rest on the idea that relations are never universal (see Liboiron 2021; Murphy 2021; Hoover 2017; Lamoreaux 2016). That is, the relations of harm in the Ecuadorian Amazon are always situated within a specific time and place and among specific individuals, collectives, and social, political, and economic structures. In this book, I consider relations from the minute, such as ants congregating near a gas flare, to larger matters, such as settler farmers and Indigenous communities living alongside the industry and the practices of national and international oil companies, environmental regulatory constructions, scientific and activist traditions, courtrooms and legal structures, and colonial and extractive histories in the Amazon

i ntrod u c tio n   15

region. Relations are not properties of molecular entities, individuals, industrial products, or social, political, or economic structures, but they are what produce those objects to begin with.10 For some decolonial scholars, the “situatedness” of things like relations and research is not only about intellectual specificity but is first and foremost a matter of enactments of ethical obligation. Taking up plastics in Newfoundland in Pollution Is Colonialism, Liboiron argues that toxic pollution is the result of the ongoing violence of colonial land relations, illustrating how such relations are both reproduced and hidden from view through assumptions in environmental science and industrial infrastructures (Liboiron 2021, 5–7). Focusing on how scientific methodologies—​ whether sampling, writing, or reading—are already grounded in relations with the land, Liboiron shows that relations can help shift from asking “How much?” when it comes to pollution, to asking “How?” and “Why?” about pollution’s violence (Liboiron 2021, 85). Liboiron’s work has been central to my thinking about why relationality matters in the context of harm from oil production in the Amazon. Perhaps most important for this text, Liboiron’s writing on relations and obligations has helped me think about why the specific understandings of bodies, chemicals, places, and extraction that emerged in my fieldwork matter and what these frictions with dominant ways of assessing harm might show us about the practices of science, law, and activism surrounding oil contamination.11 Finally, relations are unequal. Most simply, those living in the Amazon do not have the same relationship to the oil industry that I have in conducting research or writing this book. The same is true from a global perspective. As environmental justice scholars have repeatedly shown, while toxicants might be a universal problem, their distribution and burden are never borne equally (Harrison 2011; Bohme 2014; Brulle and Pellow 2006; Bullard 2001; Checker 2005). Poor health and industrial waste traverse preexisting contours of position and power, including race, class, and gender, and social and political economy. Indigenous communities have long lived alongside sites of contamination and extraction within the violent broader history of settler colonialism (Estes 2017, 2019; Powell 2018). Poor communities of color have historically and repeatedly borne undue burdens of toxic waste and environmental racism (Checker 2005; Pulido 2000; Commission for Racial Justice 1987). As Elizabeth Hoover and other critical environmental justice scholars have pointed out, unequal relations with toxicants are not accidental but rather by design (Hoover 2017, 11).

16 introd uc tion

Just as some have borne the most pernicious consequences, others have reaped the material benefits of oil extraction. Polluters have been continually shielded from legal accountability for the forms of toxic harm they produce, a matter that undergirds this entire book (Mark­ owitz and Rosner 2002; Michaels and Monforton 2005; Oreskes and Conway 2011). Yet benefits are not limited to the obvious form of power and financial gain for corporate executives or government officials but also encompass the direct and indirect ways that oil extraction enables life in the contemporary moment across the globe. Many people I worked with, while critical of the toxic harm brought by oil, were not necessarily opposed to oil extraction. Some saw oil as a necessary evil, while others hoped for cleaner forms of extraction, and many noted that they had worked in transport companies, security, or remediation crews in the industry. One particular anecdote highlighting these complexities stuck with me: an oil company representative was known for deliberately drinking the water from gooseneck pipes protruding from waste pits. As the story went, he did this to demonstrate his conviction that the water in the waste pits did not pose a problem for human health. The man later died of throat cancer. Whether or not this account is true, it points to the complex relations of an industry that so many are dependent upon and the futility of understanding harm as linked to individual positions either in support of or opposed to the oil industry. Relations with oil both sustain and alter life at the same time, but not in the same ways or to the same degree.

Uncertainty and Harm to Human Health In the Amazon, scientific investigations have sought to certify the relationship between environmental contamination from oil and harm to human health. These studies have demonstrated elevated morbidity rates and rates of miscarriage, dermatitis, skin mycosis, malnutrition, and mortality higher in communities with oil production than in communities without oil activity (San Sebastián and Hurtig 2004a); increased risk of miscarriage for women living in communities close to oil activity who are routinely exposed to chemicals that significantly exceed internationally accepted levels (San Sebastián, Armstrong, and Stephens 2002); a relationship between the incidence of childhood leukemia and living in proximity to oil activities (Hurtig and San Sebastián 2004b); higher rates of physical symptoms among women, such as tiredness, sore throat, headache, red eyes, ear pain, diarrhea, and gastritis (Hurtig and San

i ntrod u c tio n   17

Sebastián 2005); and excessive cancer rates in the village of San Carlos, Orellana, which is surrounded by more than thirty oil wells and the Sacha Sur pumping station (San Sebastián et al. 2001; San Sebastián 2000). More recently, a 2016 survey solicited by the Unión de Afectados y Afectadas por las Operaciones Petroleras de Texaco (Union of the People Affected by Texaco’s Oil Operations, UDAPT) and conducted by the Clínica Ambiental (Environmental Clinic) interviewed 1,579 families living in areas formerly operated by Texaco. The study found that the three oil fields with the highest frequency of cancer patients per person were Sacha (9.8%), Parahuaco (8.8%), and Lago Agrio (8.3%). Women were disproportionately affected, representing two-thirds of all cancer patients, most between the ages of thirty and fifty-nine (UDAPT 2016, 2). Among settlers, the most common cancers were uterine, stomach, lung, liver, and breast. The most recurrent cancers among Indigenous nationalities were stomach, lung, uterine, colon, and skin cancers (UDAPT 2016, 3). Rates of cancer were highest for those living within five hundred meters (about a third of a mile) of contamination sources; however, even those families who had intentionally moved farther way from active extraction sites reported being affected by the contamination of the rivers (UDAPT 2016). In addition, various academic investigations have examined how ongoing oil extraction and environmental contamination have affected the psychosocial health of young people living in the region and the complicated relationships between extraction and violence, precarity, poverty, racism, and environmental degradation (Solíz Torres, Cepeda Vélez, and Maldonado Campos 2019). Despite this body of work, proving the effects of toxic contamination remains a struggle in the face of extractive industries, in Ecuador but not only there. Certifying the precise effects of toxic exposures on human health, whether through epidemiological, laboratory, or proxy studies, is a notoriously difficult endeavor, not least for the entrenched corporate and state investments in a political economy that privileges extraction over human and environmental health (see also Hecht 2014; Langston 2010; Nash 2007; Nading 2020; Wylie 2018; Brown 2007).12 Industry-sponsored studies have sought to undermine assessments of the relationship between oil and harm in Ecuador (Kelsh, Morimoto, and Lau 2009; Kelsh, McHugh, and Tomasi 2008; Sever 2005). These disputes are part of a broader narrative in which scientific expertise on the effects of extractive industries is increasingly suspect. As other scholars have demonstrated, industry actors often mobilize disagreements over specific findings to create the perception that no consensus

18 introd uc tion

exists (Markowitz and Rosner 2002; Oreskes and Conway 2011; Nixon 2011) or to insist on “high-proof” positions of certitude on contested environmental matters (Edwards 1999; Sismondo 2017). As shown in Flammable, the study of a community living in an industrial waste zone surrounded by one of largest petrochemical compounds in Argentina, “toxic uncertainty” is not just a response to contradictory scientific evidence around diverse health problems but also the result of confusion intentionally created by corporate and state actors (Auyero and Swistun 2009). Relatedly, in detailing the many obstacles that people living next to gas wells in the United States face in making the health effects they have experienced legible in scientific and legal forms, Sara Wylie has shown how the protection of fracking companies’ intellectual property has engendered a new form of petroviolence, rendering widespread public health threats from chemicals structurally impossible to track (Wylie 2018, 20). Wylie details how scientists and regulators have worked to ensure industrial investments rather than the health of those living in the areas where extraction occurs. Since purchasing Texaco in 2001, Chevron has maintained that where harm has occurred, it was the fault of the state company, PetroEcuador, which has owned and operated the areas formerly managed by Texaco since 1992 and has also caused numerous spills and other environmental problems during its tenure (Chevron 2007). Chevron has pointed to inconsistencies and alleged corruption in the legal process of the A­guin­da v. Texaco lawsuit (Barrett 2014), which is akin to arguing that procedural problems effectively negate decades of oil operations characterized by total disregard. Approaching harm relationally means considering experiences of harm within the structural relations of inequality of the place in which it was produced and enabled, such that harm is not dismissible on technicalities. A relational tack means understanding the uncertainties that come with living in a place of extraction as matters that compound lived experiences of harm rather than matters that undermine those experiences. Through the daily encounters of people living in this region with contaminated streams, riverways, soils, and air, uncertainty about how oil harms life is always in tension with the utter obviousness of contamination from oil operations. Uncertainty surrounding harm from oil might mean being unsure if one’s cacao trees are being affected by the nearby spill or questioning if a company is being honest about its remediation efforts and laboratory results. Uncertainties might also mean wondering if the air your family breathes is making them sick due to the gas

i ntrod u c tio n   19

flare across the road or if a cancer was caused by the proximity of one’s home to oil operations. Uncertainty in the face of contamination is also a form of harm—the violence that comes with not knowing if a daily activity is making you ill, and even if you could be certain, not having any alternative. Yet, for all of the uncertainties that come with living alongside oil extraction, harm is also manifest in clear, recognizable ways. For every question or dispute about how oil filters into the crevices of bodies and environments, there are obvious examples of contamination and its effects—water that smells of oil, homes built on top of unremediated waste pits, documentation of past spills, and waste pits on fire. As the medical and environmental anthropologist Alex Nading (2020, 210) writes, “Toxicity is often smelled, tasted, and felt by people living ‘downstream’ more readily than it is seen from the detached vantage point of industrial engineers,” or, in this case, lawyers, scientists, environmental regulators, or politicians. This book tacks back and forth along this course, following the ephemeral, uncertain nature of harm with all its controversies and contingencies, and at the same time allowing for the utterly obvious materializations of harm in daily life to emerge. My intent is not to resolve this tension. Instead, I seek to illustrate how the measures, standards, and expectations used to understand and verify harm are too narrow to meaningfully capture the depth and breadth of the many changes to life that extractive industries bring. In doing so, I hope to push for ways of understanding harm that do not hinge principally on boundaries, whether in the form of contractual limits of accountability for environmental injustice, proof of causality for toxic substances in extractive environments, or contrived expectations of objectivity without recognition of every actor’s situatedness. Relationality is central to reframing harm to confront the pervasive effects of contamination in the past and to rethink the possibilities for life alongside this contamination in the future.

Slow Violence and Temporality Oil operations make the news most often in the form of the spectacular. Perhaps the uncontrolled gushing of the Deepwater Horizon rig’s undersea wellhead in 2010 comes to mind, or the “oil rivers” of the Niger Delta. Life in the Amazon has certainly been punctuated by moments of crisis: a rising tide of oil along the Aguarico, the moment when the town of Shushufindi had to evacuate after the industrial waste facility

20 introd uc tion

Figure 0.1. A child walks across a soccer field located on top of an old waste pit that residents say extended the entire length of the field. Soil cores taken on this visit confirmed the presence of crude a few yards beneath the surface at various points on the field. Work on the Guanta-8 well occurs in background. The homes visible beyond were built by the Programa de Reparación Ambiental y Social (Environmental and Social Remediation Program, PRAS) for families who were displaced due to contamination. Photo by the author, 2012.

caught on fire, or the immediacy of a family carting five-gallon water jugs on their motorcycle after realizing that the oil of a nearby spill had seeped into their well. But more often than not, daily life with oil tends toward the quieter, creeping onslaught of industrial pollution. The face of extractive industries today is typically far more mundane, and ever more insidious, than spectacular moments of environmental disaster. A slow spill has its own power, one that is not necessarily weaker than an eruption. In considering the rhythms and relics of contemporary ecological crises, Rob Nixon advances the concept of “slow violence” to conceptualize the kinds of environmental calamities that remain out of public view. Instead of an immediate, explosive, sensational event such

i ntrod u c tio n   21

as a gushing oil rig, slow violence is “neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (Nixon 2011, 2). Whether a product of global warming or industry, slow violence lacks the conventional drama necessary to be newsworthy, because it is not bound to a single event, place, time, or body. “Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded” (Nixon 2011, 3). Nixon’s argument points to looking beyond the plastic booms or absorbent powders thrown on rivers to contain oil emergencies. It is a way of refusing the crisis-oriented logic of the present. A focus on crisis in the news or in research can actually contribute to stabilizing particular realities, such as persistent environmental contamination, rather than interrogating the conditions that allowed another spill or explosion to occur, such as a political economy based on extraction (Masco 2016). Thinking about harm through relations requires moving away from a focus on a singular event to attend to the continuation of normative, institutionalized forms of violence that characterize life alongside extraction (Simmons 2017). In the Amazon, this means responding to the damage oil companies have wrought within normal operations that have not triggered institutional or widespread public response. Slow violence repudiates the limits of containment and the acceptance of toxic permeations. In regard to relationality, the lens of slow violence is helpful for reconfiguring understandings of harm that are event focused, temporally limited, and body bound. As with Luz Maria’s inheritance of contaminated land from her father, industrial pollution does not end or go away when a company closes a well for inactivity, when a concession changes hands, or even when remediation is deemed completed and the majority of contaminated biota is trucked off to another site. The fumes causing Luz Maria’s headaches while pregnant or the seemingly inevitable skim of iridescent hydrocarbons on the surface of the water in failed wells point to the ways that the toxic substances in oil extraction span generations, lodging themselves in bodies and the crevices of homes, farms, and lives. Slow violence brings harm from oil production fifty years ago into the same frame as harm today, despite relationships that may be diffuse or difficult to trace. The temporality of slow violence invokes both relations that travel

22 introd uc tion

back in time and those that extend into the future. Luz Maria is in an unwilling relationship with the oil flare operating outside her front door, one that extends from the past through memories of her father’s struggles with the company as an early settler and into the future through the uncertainties about how it may have affected her child when in the womb or how it might affect her family in coming years. Relations contemplate harm across scales, including relatives of prior generations, industrial pollutants present in home and work environments, the political, economic, and social structures of past and present, and even the epigenetic information passed along to following generations (Lamoreaux 2016, 200; Hoover 2017; Wylie 2018, 83). In this sense, oil companies and the Ecuadorian state have forged relations of harm through decisions to deliberately pollute the soils and rivers of the Amazon over the past half-century, but relations are also made through the decisions on extraction and remediation yet to come: “For if the past of slow violence is never past, so too the post is never fully post: industrial particulates and effluents live on in the environmental elements we inhabit and in our very bodies, which epidemiologically and ecologically are never our simple contemporaries” (Nixon 2011, 8). The temporal violence of harm includes environmental regulatory politics of containment and management of pollution in which no one questions whether extraction should even occur in the first place (chapter 3), as well as ongoing legal struggles in which companies like Chevron use a politics of deferral and dissection to push responsibility onto others and further into the temporal horizon (chapters 2 and 5). Attention to the quotidian does not exclude those moments where oil extraction has led to tragic spectacle, both in Ecuador and elsewhere. But this book and the ethnographic work that informs it are oriented toward the pervasive, slow-moving, composite forms of harm over the past half-century rather than moments of punctuated alarm. After decades of oil extraction in the Amazon, stories and experiences of toxic harm accrete, and it is difficult to distinguish singular moments of hazard. Through an intentional attunement to the temporality of relations, I follow how harm manifests fluidly across boundaries—whether epistemological, material, or temporal—in an effort to engage more deliberately with legal, scientific, activist, or other lineages that inform how harm is defined and delimited. Continuing to think of chemicals as isolated molecules—whether in time, space, or bodies—is another form of slow violence.

i ntrod u c tio n   23

Ethnographic Research The field research for this text took place over twenty-seven months between 2011 and 2013. Throughout this time, I lived in the city of Nueva Loja, commonly known as Lago Agrio, located about twenty-five kilometers (15.5 mi) from the Colombian border in the northeastern corner of the Amazon. The city marks the site of the first exploratory wells drilled by the Texaco Company, from which they first struck “black gold” in 1964. Lago Agrio, which translates as “sour lake” in English, was reportedly baptized as such by Texaco workers who named it after Texaco’s hometown of Sour Lake, Texas.13 Lago Agrio was the judicial seat of the Aguinda v. Texaco lawsuit throughout the 2000s and has figured in many subsequent news reports and documentaries and been a site of environmental activism around oil. Based in Lago Agrio, I conducted research throughout the provinces of Sucumbíos and Orellana. These two provinces comprise the original oil concession operated by the consortium, and they are the most heavily exploited area of the Ecuadorian Amazon. I participated in a range of activities that brought me from Lago Agrio down the length of the Napo River to the border with Peru, as well as to the cites of Shushufindi, Sacha, El Coca, and Tarapoa and communities in between. I sought out individuals living outside of urbanizing areas, most of whom were settler farmers, to understand their experiences living alongside oil operations. I spent time with them and their families and went on walking tours of their farms, where they shared memories of their early decades in the Amazon, experiences working for oil companies, or their participation in meetings of the plaintiff organization for the Aguinda case. I interviewed participants and observed the work of environmental organizations, in particular the Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía (Amazon Defense Front, FDA) and Selva Viva (Living Jungle), both of which were affiliated with the plaintiffs at the time, and participated in the monthly Escuela de Líderes (Leadership School) run by the FDA. Through time spent with these organizations, I connected with individuals who were active in environmental organizing. I spent considerable time with one of these activists, Donald Moncayo, observing as he led “Toxic Tours” for groups of students, journalists, lawyers, and visitors. In the latter half of my fieldwork, I worked with Clearwater, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building water treatment systems for Indigenous and settler communities affected by contamination.14

24 introd uc tion

From the intimacy of homes and spaces of learning and advocacy, participant observation also took me to technical and expert spheres. To understand how environmental regulation of the industry operates, I sought out local government officials, technicians from the Ministry of the Environment, and officials based in Quito and joined them on site visits to oil spills, inspections of routine operations, and community meetings where they presented Environmental Impact Assessments. I spoke with former oil engineers in Lago Agrio and Quito to learn how oil operations have changed over time. I interviewed chemists, biologists, and engineers employed by environmental consulting companies, many of whom had previously worked in the industry, and discussed how they documented and measured changes in forest cover, bird populations, and human health in the region. I also accompanied these individuals as they did their work, such as measuring heavy metals in the fatty tissue of fish or collecting soil samples, to track how they made contamination palpable in scientific and regulatory registers. I spent time in laboratories to understand the technical processes of testing for hydrocarbons in soil or water samples and interviewed technicians about the processes of remediating an oil spill. Most names in this account are pseudonyms, with the exception of public figures whose identity would have been impossible to conceal. In cases of quoted interviews with such individuals, I received their permission to use their names. In most examples, I have changed or omitted locations or characteristics to protect the identities of the people with whom I worked. Most fieldwork does not make it into ethnographic writing; I recognize the partial nature of selecting the examples that I used in this text and my role as the author in crafting this story. On more than one occasion, I have felt the weight of responsibility that this implies. Once, while talking with a woman with whom I worked regularly, I asked for her feedback on my chapter drafts. Don’t worry, she replied, I don’t need to read it. I already know this story. Yet, for all of my efforts to faithfully recount the accounts shared with me, this book will never be her story. I am keenly aware of my debt to many generous Ecuadorian interlocutors, as well as the necessarily partial retelling of my account. Finally, it is important to close with what this book will not do. I will not deal in great detail with the history and legal claims surrounding allegations of fraud in relation to the Aguinda case. This is in part because much of the journalism and documentary work on oil in Ecuador has centered on the Aguinda v. Texaco lawsuit. This work has focused on the legal and technical inconstancies, or even instances

i ntrod u c tio n   25

of fraud and wrongdoing on behalf of the lawyers in the case, at the expense of understanding the totality of damage done to this place. My approach differs. Rather than rehearse debates within this case over corporate responsibility and wrongdoing, I focus on the questions of what constitutes harm, why answering this question has proven so difficult, and why this matters.15 Through the lens of relationality, I ask a different suite of questions about harm that cannot be engaged within the terms of regulatory science and legality alone. My intent is to focus on the “primacy of larger truths” (Lovell and Lutz 2001) within the entangled history of how oil development has occurred in the Amazon. To focus on only the legal case at the expense of the daily encounters, including toxic exposures and violence, would be to neglect the most pressing features of harm from oil production. That said, given the lawsuit’s duration and international notoriety, it is impossible to write about oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon without taking the Aguinda case into account. I review it in chapter 2. The lawsuit and its legacy undeniably shape investigations of harm, contamination, oil, and the environment in this region. In fieldwork I found that current employees of oil companies, state regulatory agencies, or private laboratories were often previously involved in or had been affected by the lawsuit. On more than one occasion, people offered it as a counterpoint to present-day “cleaner” oil production. Many people I worked with were still actively participating in some activism in relation to Aguinda. Many others—farmers, oil workers, engineers, and more—had moved on from the lawsuit or turned their attention to other work. For some, there were too many far more pressing issues with ongoing contamination, disputes with new oil companies, or the daily struggle of getting by to closely follow the vicissitudes of the lawsuit.16 Finally, matters of harm, while absolutely central to Texaco’s history in the region, are much broader than one company’s actions alone. The most telling example of this is the number of times that many of the sites in this book have changed hands between operating companies, including the Ecuadorian state, as recounted in chapter 3. This book addresses harms that cannot be contained by one company, one concession, or one bounded period of time.17 Thus, while this book is not about Aguinda, the specter of the case looms over the text, in large part because of the complicated ways that past harms continue to reach into the present.18 A project that asks us to reconsider the very nature of harm runs the risk of undermining the painful, lived realities of individuals and communities that oil has harmed. The scholarly work of “opening up” harm

26 introd uc tion

holds the potential to be misused by entities such as oil company representatives who wish to assert that their company is not responsible for specific damages. While I hope to complicate assumptions about harm from oil, I also aim to show that both Chevron and the Ecuadorian state are deeply complicit in this history. This statement should not be read as “siding” with the corporate arguments of Chevron to evade responsibility by blaming the Ecuadorian state for pollution that occurred during the same period or after Texaco left. Unlike the Aguinda v. Texaco case, anthropological perspectives can hold more than one actor accountable at once without diminishing the claims against either. I fully support efforts to hold private and state oil companies responsible for their past and present wrongdoings. The burden of proving or disproving harm needs to be shouldered by the corporate and state actors invested in oil’s continued extraction, not by those living in its wake. A relational approach to harm insists on holding Chevron accountable for the harm produced as a result of Texaco’s operations while also insisting on the accountability of the Ecuadorian state for past and present operations. A relational approach calls for an understanding of socioenvironmental responsibility and collective acts of reparation, remediation, and justice that include—but go far beyond—any single oil company’s actions.

chapter 1

Building a Life on the Aguarico

The Aguarico River. Agua, or water, that is rico: rich, fertile, delicious, exquisite, alive. Running eastward, the river snakes down from the Andean highlands for 240 miles. Originating at the far eastern edge of the Parque Nacional Cayambe-Coca (Cayambe Coca National Park), the river opens across the lowland plain of Sucumbíos Province before joining the Napo River along the present-day Peruvian border. Here at its midpoint, in the year 1960, the Aguarico is wide and tanned, with broad sandy banks. South and inland from the Aguarico, about thirty kilometers (18.6 mi) downstream from the present-day city of Lago Agrio, was a wide, flat swamp. Most of the year, black, stagnant waters from the rains that came each January, February, and March filled the swamp. The still water sat protecting the morete palm trees, their spiky green tops rising straight out of the water, one of the few palm species that thrive while submerged. Hanging beneath was the sweet, scaly fruit—deep red chestnut color on the outside, pungent orange beneath—prized by monkeys, macaws, and people alike. The monkeys and macaws were not alone in this swampy paradise. Anacondas lurked in the morete roots while squirrel monkeys clamored overhead. Verdant, wet, and alive, the place trilled with insects, crawling and cutting, eating and pollinating. White-lipped peccaries rooted below, competing with tapirs for treats hidden in the warm mud. The vegetation was dense, heavy, saturated. Located within the overlapping territories of the Cofán and Siekopai Indigenous nationalities, this was a good spot to find food. People knew it as a pantano de cacería (hunting swamp). The swamp spread through the lowlands over several kilometers inland from the river’s banks. Then the land rose up a steep, fifty-meter-tall (165 ft) embankment, creating a small hilltop above. Here, raptors rode the air vents, ready for a stray movement below.  27

Figure 1.1. Amazonian riverways. Photo by Mitch Anderson/Amazon Frontlines.

The Entangling of Life and Oil The Amazon is often presented as the epitome of nature, the “lungs of the world,” a wild frontier where Indigenous people live in timeless harmony with the forest. A place of wonder, the Amazon has been imagined over the centuries to hold answers to questions about the origins of humanity or the salvation of the future in its natural abundance. The northeastern corner of the Ecuadorian Amazon does not match these fantasies. Pipelines run alongside roads that oil companies built for exploration. Gas flares light up the immense industrial complexes of the processing stations at night. Wells and waste pits are scattered throughout the jungle. After more than fifty years of oil production here, oil activities and infrastructure have become a part of life, a routine feature of the landscape. This corner of the Ecuadorian Amazon is characteristic of transformations that have been occurring across the region, in which the oil industry has been a public flashpoint since the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s. Describing responses to the destruction of Amazonian forests in Brazil decades ago, geographer Susanna Hecht and journalist Alexander Cockburn wrote, “What imbues the case of the Amazon with such passion is the symbolic content

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   29

of the dream it ignites” (2010, 1). Oil in the Amazon arouses horror in part because of the perceived unnaturalness of oil operations in a place that is synonymous with nature. Despite fantasies of wilderness, the Amazon has long been a cultivated place, built by worldmaking practices far before the advent of oil, with a rich material and semiotic history (Hecht and Cockburn 2010; Hecht 2013; Raffles 2002). The current formations of extractive industries in the Amazon—principally oil, but also African palm plantations and illegal timber cutting—continue a pattern of short-term profit and foreign interests that date from the seventeenth century (Fontaine 2007, 251). But while the Amazon has never been an ahistorical natural frontier, the interconnected processes of oil extraction and settlement nonetheless changed the region in unprecedented ways since the 1960s. Transforming what was once rainforest, the state and the oil industry directly and indirectly enabled the configuration of roads, settlements, and fields of cacao, yuca, and plantain across Sucumbíos and Orellana provinces. Today, cacao fields and cattle are next to oil wells and pipelines. Schools are a short distance away from oil flares. Roads curve endlessly, accompanied by the tangled web of oil pipelines that converge and split off down smaller roads, designed with industrial efficiency in mind. Families and new settlers learn to accommodate the pipelines, leaning boards against them to create makeshift bridges as they cross from their front door to the road. Others appropriate them for their heat, laying wet laundry on the hot pipes under the midday sun. Sometimes the pipeline makes a convenient place to tie a grazing animal or spray the letters of a political slogan. It is within this fabric of place that oil and life have unfolded, and it is not possible to understand harm without tracing how this place was made and the implications that process has had for oil development and its toxic sequelae. During my time in the field, I was often party to conversations over whether a particular effect—deforestation, declining crop yield, contaminated soils, higher rates of ovarian cancer—was due to the oil industry. These debates were not only a source of discussion among my friends and people I interviewed but also one of expert discernment in the Aguinda lawsuit and among technicians from government ministries. Yet, as I spent more time living in the region, I increasingly felt that such arguments missed the point: oil and settlement have grown together, such that daily life for people living in Sucumbíos and Orellana today is knotted with the industry. As settlers expanded, they built houses and planted crops next to wells, platforms, and stations; as operations

30  recko ning with ha rm

expanded, they built well platforms, roads, and pipelines next to homes, farms, schools, and towns. Today it is impossible to pull the threads of settler colonialism and extraction apart from the other. The interconnected processes of agricultural settlement and oil development transformed forests and murky swamps into a site of major industrial production and a place that has featured prominently in environmental and political struggles in international media. That settlement and oil development forged this place in conjunction has important political and legal significance. Debates over the consequences of oil production, whether focused on deforestation, road construction, pollution, the loss of Indigenous lands, or health problems hinge on questions of causality, boundaries, and responsibility. These are tangled matters that resist efforts to isolate the domains of nature, settlement, and industry. Part of what shapes contemporary controversies over harm from oil in the Amazon today are the relations between disorganized practices of industrial development and everyday life. I draw on the voices of settlers, oil workers, and Indigenous residents alongside written accounts to track the making of this region, known as the Oriente, since the 1960s. These narratives offer a sense of the encounters that shaped the first three decades of a largely unregulated industry, while also providing background to understand both the Aguinda lawsuit and contemporary tensions around oil. I rely principally on firsthand accounts that offer a sense of what life has been like in this place: the sickness or death of a child, a farmer’s attention to their fruit trees, or outrage over the loss of farm animals after they drank polluted water yet again. People offered such accounts to me in response to my questions about life in the region; however, I also draw on more informal conversations and observations with interlocutors while touring their farms and attending community meetings, as well as participant observation in workshops led by local NGOs. These stories offer a sense of the emerging relations between arriving mestizo settlers, Indigenous inhabitants already living in the region, oil company workers, forests and riverways, machinery, and political and economic interests, all of which played a role in making the Oriente under the shadow of the CEPE-Texaco consortium’s many oil rigs. Both the Aguinda lawsuit and controversies over the oil industry interrogate actions in the past, such as why and how inhabitants were exposed to industrial operations. Accounts such as these by individuals who witnessed or worked in the industry are in dispute. The speakers in this chapter are aware that their stories figure within a contested field

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   31

of environmental controversies. Their insistence on the truth of their experiences with contamination, despite their knowledge that others might contest them, is clear. Emeregildo, a Cofán elder and environmental activist, concluded his account of the pollution that drifted down the Aguarico in the 1960s by telling me that if the oil companies were to arrive today for the first time, the Cofán would be prepared to document everything. But years ago they did not have cameras, GPS, or the foresight to imagine the extent of the changes to come: “We don’t have evidence,” he notes, when describing how oil development began. Compared to the present possibilities for everyday documentation with smartphones, cameras, drones, social media, and more, much of what the oil industry did along the Aguarico and throughout the region escaped public documentation. There are ample sources, however, to show burning waste pits, aerial photos of waste pits covered over, early documentary video of oil running down the river, public admissions by former Texaco officials of rampant contamination and dumping, and much more. Today, Emeregildo’s reflections are informed by years spent watching a painful legal battle to prove what he and others have lived through. In response to techno-scientific and regulatory-legal forums that privilege expert knowledge over personal experience, part of my commitment in this book is to give weight to accounts that are otherwise sidelined from official forms of knowledge production about harm.1 The Aguarico-4 well is located about thirty minutes by car outside of Lago Agrio along the Aguarico River. Accounts from individuals who worked in and observed the industry in its early years are remarkably consistent. This suggests that the consortium used standardized operating procedures for drilling wells and performing maintenance during the first two or three decades of oil operations in Ecuador, which the proceedings of the Aguinda lawsuit also confirm (Zambrano Lozada 2011). Oil production and agricultural colonization proliferated alongside each other. Two groups of settlers constituted the first colonists in Lago Agrio. Most were from the province of Loja, although many had already left Loja to farm in Manabí prior to setting out for the Oriente. Many of the individuals from whom I draw in this chapter knew one another. People talked about what it was like to make a life in this region. They often refer to a belief in God, the importance of livestock and farmland, struggle and just occupation, and their total ignorance of the oil industry upon their arrival. It is important to read these accounts with an eye toward how the present influences how we tell stories of the past; nostalgia for an ideal Amazonia of years gone by is tangled with narra-

32  reckoning with ha rm

tives of improvement, of racialized understandings of colonization and nature, of longing for a purer, cleaner time before oil. In reconstructing the history of the Amazon in relation to contemporary debates over harm and oil, it remains critical to recognize the centrality of settler colonial dynamics in how the Amazon has been imagined by state actors and individual settlers, which enabled the extensive appropriation of territory from Indigenous nationalities living in the region.2

Texaco Arrives Spring 1974, Santa Cecilia. Previously a community of just over one hundred people, mostly Kichwa and Cofán families, Santa Cecilia had turned into a hotbed of oil activity over the ten years since the arrival of Texaco. With the completion of the pipeline to Esmeraldas in 1972, Ecuador became an oil-producing country. Santa Cecilia was a frenzy of oil company employees and soldiers, nearly all men. They had cleared a length of 1,500 meters (4,920 ft) through the jungle to put down a landing strip next to the Santa Cecilia military base. At the time, this was the third-busiest airport in the nation, with 110 flights arriving each week from the Shell airport in Puyo, as well as Quito (Gallego Coto n.d.). Large Ecuadorian military planes arrived, hauling oversized oil equipment, food, and settlers, facilitating the journeys of those who had ventured from the highlands and the coast in search of land. A helicopter took off from Santa Cecilia. Exploratory studies conducted in the 1920s by the Leonard Exploration Company, in the 1940s by Shell, and in the 1960s by Texaco (Petroecuador 2009) made it seem likely that there was an area of oil reserves trapped deep underground just southwest of the Aguarico River. After striking oil in 1964 with the exploratory Lago Agrio-1 well, Texaco and the consortium were expanding operations a decade later. The helicopter hovered over the treetops at the selected point of perforation. Rappelling down on ropes, workers were swallowed up by the dense canopy. They landed with machetes and axes in hand as the drone of the helicopter faded. Over the next few weeks, work proceeded day and night. The men felled trees, cleared brush, and created a space for a heliport. They leveled the top of a hillside, revealing a square of red clay amid a forest of green. Workers set out to find the closest water sources, hiking down the hillside through the morete swamp to reach the banks of the Aguarico River. The work clearing the land continued over the next few months. As helicopters brought more equipment, workers cleared a platform

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   33

for a well. Once it was clean and ready, helicopters dropped off the perforation tower that mechanics would later assemble over the point previously selected via seismic assessments as geologically optimal for the well. Off to the side of the clearing the company set up campers, organizing the site around spatial distinctions of overlapping corporate and racial hierarchies. The best campers were reserved for the gringos, with slightly less comfortable campers for Ecuadorian professionals, one for the manual laborers, and—in the words of one oil engineer now living in Quito—“small plastic tents for the most miserable of all,” who did the dirtiest, hardest work. All told, a site like Aguarico-4 would have had between twenty and forty workers living onsite during preparation and drilling. Engineers and professionals were most often foreign, with Ecuadorians doing the physical labor: cutting down forest, clearing brush, carrying heavy equipment. In the process, this spot on the Aguarico quickly became cosmopolitan, with workers arriving from the United States, Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia. Helicopters landed several times a day, so many that some people I spoke with claimed there were more helicopters buzzing through this area during the early years of development than there were during the Vietnam War. The oil workers were not alone. As anyone who has spent time in Amazonia knows, a healthy forest is anything but quiet: the shrieks of monkeys, the clicking and humming of insects, and the calls of birds keep the ears singing. But the helicopters, drills, and chainsaws brought a degree of clamor to the region that was extraordinary. The newness of the noise is present in Emeregildo’s memories of Texaco’s arrival when he was six years old. Emeregildo lived in a Cofán community just downstream from what would later become Lago Agrio. The area surrounding Lago Agrio along the Aguarico River had long been Cofán territory, bordered by the Siona and Siekopai. The Cofán had never seen helicopters—metal birds, as he described them—or heard such incessant racket over the treetops. Sitting with me on the fourth floor of the courthouse alongside Via Quito in Lago Agrio, Emeregildo recounted the stories of this encounter. Drawing a pointed parallel to our position above the center of town, he noted that from the height where we were seated we would have been aloft in the forest canopy that covered this place in his youth. The Aguarico was the primary source of water for drinking, cooking, and bathing, as well as transport for Emeregildo’s family. Once, he described a trip that families from his village made during 1964 when Texaco arrived to drill the first exploratory well in their territory. As

34  recko ning with ha rm

the helicopters flew overhead, they hid in the jungle, unsure of what the “metal birds” could be. A few months later, a black slick came down the Orienco River, which connects to the Aguarico. Emeregildo’s family lived along the banks of the Orienco, and they watched as the oil continued flowing downstream. He described it as “thick and broad,” noting how not only did they not know then what oil was, but at the time many Cofán people spoke only A’ingae and would not have been able to voice their complaints to the officials in Spanish. As time went on, ordinary tasks like gathering water to drink, cook, or bathe became difficult. “When we went to get water, we would clear away the oil that was sitting on top of the water,” he recalled. “During this period, we didn’t have the custom of boiling water. So we got it directly from the river and drank it.” The oil proved a sticky plague. Marking everything that crossed its path, the banks of the river soon became black. Oil coated the stones and his family members’ feet as they walked along the river. “Anything that it touched it stained. . . . We would try to wash it off with water, but it doesn’t come off. We’d try with sand [scratching his arm vigorously to demonstrate] and still nothing. And that’s how we lived. It stained the canoes, the paddles, everything was slippery.” At this point, he remembers, his dad and brothers suggested searching out the origin of the black stuff. Arriving at the Lago Agrio-1 well, they found a previously forested area now emptied of green, with a dusty camp set up. Offered a meal by the Americans, Emeregildo recalled their distaste for the unknown canned goods they were given. Upon leaving, the Americans handed them gifts of diesel, cheese, and panela (unrefined cane sugar). Carrying the packages into the forest, Emeregildo and his family inspected them to discern which were edible and which were not. The unfamiliar smell of the cheese meant it was discarded. They took the diesel to the missionary stationed in Dureno, where the missionaries informed them it was useful for making flares to see at night. They incorporated the panela into drinks. Footage of these early Texaco operations shot by Scott Robinson and Michael Scott in the 1968 film Sky Chief offers a glimpse into the fervor that Emeregildo and his family would have encountered as they walked out of the forest and into the space that Texaco had cleared near Lago Agrio-1. Over an expanse larger than several football fields, a plane landed on a roughshod runway with the horizon of jungle against a gray sky. Frenetic activity ensued: engulfed in a cloud of dust, workers discharged immense sections of pipeline like disarticulated guts from the

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   35

belly of the plane, metal clanged as a tractor dumped the pipelines onto a waiting flatbed truck, and a helicopter swooped in to drop off a bundle of empty oil barrels over the top of an enormous storage tank waiting for crude. This is a frontier scene at its finest, full of cowboy hats and sweat and papers signed with a flourish by company managers. The sheer size of the industry dwarfs the workers struggling to move the pieces of its infrastructure into position. So often when contemplating oil, we find ourselves up against a beast already in place, its tentacles securely drilled, affixed, and stretching over lengths of depth and distance. Sky Chief and accounts by people like Emeregildo offer a glimpse of the industry before it was established, before it was taken as a given way of structuring and ordering life, back when a future with oil in Ecuador was not yet so certain. In the film, a Cofán family has set up camp on the border of the site. A man notes with trepidation the changes he has witnessed, translated from A’ingae to English and Spanish by the film editors: “I am afraid of the white man and what they’re doing. I’ve been over there [to see the activities], but I haven’t seen it all. I’ve ridden on the airplane. It’s fun.” Babies swing in hammocks while women cook over a fire on the edge of the forest, and the beginnings of the industry rumble beyond them. The speaker says that they have come to find out what is going on; they’ll stay a bit longer to see all that is happening. In retrospect, we know that this man and his family, along with Emeregildo and his account, are on the cusp of a transformation far greater than they could ever imagine. This is the slippery slide of oil that came to reshape life. Emeregildo described the changes: After that, we weren’t able to stay [where we were living] because everything was stained and the oil spill never stopped. Day after day. And so the people said, “Well, we’d best abandon this place.” So we abandoned it and went to what today is the Cofán Dureno community. The company started first with well Lago Agrio-1, and from there went to Parawaku, and then to Atacapi, and then to Dureno-1. And you have to imagine, the Orienco River and the Aguarico River were full of oil spills.

The changes in the river were immediately observable, the food drawn from the river also tainted with the traces of the industry growing upstream. Daily routines began to change in response to the contamination. He continued:

36  recko ning with ha rm

The banks of the rivers had white rocks, and sticks that the women would collect for firewood. But now they were stained with oil and the food [that we cooked over the fire] had a different smell; the smoke changed the food and it smelled of oil too. So, from then on the women stopped gathering wood on the beaches and went to look for branches in the forest. Because everything smelled awful. But the children would still go and swim in the river, drinking the water, and then afterwards they would get sick: stomach pain, spots on their skin, rashes.

For anyone who has been to parts of the Amazon with active oil production, scenes like these are not difficult to imagine. While I was living there, the telltale danger tape cordoning off an area around a stream and the iridescent slick glinting on the surface of a stream in the forest were common sights. Yet, in the years following the moment that the first crude thundered out of the earth like an explosive geyser, in Sky Chief, we see that early industry was also characterized by small spills and everyday contamination. Here, caught on camera, black globules swirl into the water under the grumble of machinery, gray water running over slimy river rocks. Families drank directly from the rivers and used the water for cooking, bathing, washing, and transport with no knowledge that it was harmful to their health. There were no barriers—material, regulatory, or symbolic—between what oil operations discharged into the river and what Indigenous people and early settlers took into their bodies. In contemplating the ensuing controversies, one of the most important things to resurrect within this history is that the people living in Amazonia during the early decades of the industry had no understanding that oil and the chemical compounds used in its production were toxic to human health. The connotations that come to mind today when we hear the word “crude” were not present for Indigenous or settler families. Moreover, state and industry officials, who presumably had access to this information, made no effort to inform those arriving and building their homes and lives within oil’s reach, nor did they take any significant regulatory action to curtail the effects of an industry that they already knew to be harmful to human health and the environment in other places.3 Emeregildo described the painful lived experiences of coming to understand what the industry would mean for the Cofán: The women would drink the water and then afterward they would have miscarriages. The women were all surprised because before this had never happened to Cofán women. But after the [initial spills], then

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   37

two, three, four years later the women started having miscarriages and babies with malformations. Sometimes the women would give birth early and the babies would be poorly formed. We didn’t know what was happening, or why this was happening. I had been through twelve years of school, so they took me to Limoncocha [to the Summer Institute of Linguistics missionary center] to study as a health promoter in order to prevent the diseases we were experiencing, because we were seeing different kinds of diseases. I studied for a year as a health promoter and was trained. And so I came back to the community with information—​that we needed to boil the water [before drinking], that we needed to dig wells [for water] in order to prevent these diseases. And since then the people have been changing their lives, because before this we just collected water from the rivers.

The Cofán began taking precautionary steps. They sought assistance from others, such as the missionaries, to address the previously unknown threat that was infiltrating their territory. Yet these steps were not sufficient to protect the Cofán and others from bodily harm following repeated exposures to oil; when surrounded by industry, boiling the water will not mitigate the effects of toxic contamination.4 As Emeregildo recalled, By the time I was sixteen years old, the Aguarico was completely contaminated. I was married, and my wife, she didn’t listen to me when I said that we had to boil the water. When she was out by herself, she’d drink the water [from the rivers]. She was pregnant. And when she gave birth to the baby, the baby didn’t develop the way it should have. The baby was six months old, but really tiny. I took the baby to Limoncocha for treatment, and they weren’t able to do anything there. They took the baby to the Hospital Vozandes in Quito, and it was there that my first child died. After that I had another child. That child was born fine because I had said, “We have to prevent [sickness], we have to do things this way” and [my wife] took care of herself and didn’t drink the water without boiling it. And the baby grew well for three years. He could walk, swim, and one day I took him to the river so that we could bathe. I thought that it was okay for him to bathe in the water, but while he was in the river he swallowed some water. By the time we got home he started to vomit. He vomited and vomited until finally he was vomiting blood, and he died within twenty-four hours. He was three years old.

38  recko ning with ha rm

The region had long been the object of missionary intervention, beginning with the Jesuits in the 1600s. Capuchin priests, their order expelled from Ecuador, took up residence in Colombia on the other side of the Amazonian border in 1896, where they enjoyed extensive authority over the Caquetá and Putumayo regions during the rubber era (Wasserstrom 2014, 531). In 1914, concerned about the proposed political boundary between Ecuador and Colombia, Capuchin missionaries reorganized the Cofán into a settlement near the San Miguel River, where they undertook a “civilizing” project that included planting crops and establishing schools; they also encouraged the Cofán to abandon their traditional housing arrangements (Cepek 2012b, 8). The Summer Institute of Linguistics/Wycliffe Bible Translators (SIL) in Limoncocha marked a later chapter in the history of missionary projects with the Cofán. Through a contract with the Ecuadorian government, the SIL built airstrips and a base camp in Limoncocha and agreed to provide education, health care, and other services to Indigenous communities (Wasserstrom 2014, 539). As the buzz of the industry continued upstream, Emeregildo recalls, members of his community turned to the SIL missionaries for help, asking questions about oil, education, healthcare assistance, and health promotion programs. So, after that the people were saying, “What are we going to do?” And some Cofán people from Colombia came to Ecuador and told us that these oil spills were a form of contamination. And another compañero [companion] who had studied and participated in the meetings of the CONFENIAE [Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas de la Amazonía Ecuatoriana, Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon] also brought us information telling us that we shouldn’t drink this water, that we shouldn’t get the oil on us, that all of this was an oil spill. But where could we go to demand that they not dump the oil directly in the rivers? We started to collect rainwater and dig wells for water, but the rain was also contaminated because of the smoke that came from the gas flares that were lit in those days. When it rained, it came down black. This was even worse, this was direct [exposure]. And so that’s how we lived. Not just my family, and not just the Cofán people, but also the Siona and Siekopai peoples, all of us who lived in the Amazon suffered. And then people started studying to be able to learn Spanish and they would participate in meetings, and we decided that we weren’t going

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   39

to accept the entrance of the company. But by this time twenty years had already passed. The contamination is always the same. The oil spills are the same. Because the waste pits they build that are fifteen by twenty meters [49–66 ft] or so, when it rains, where does the oil go? Well, it overflows and spills into the streams. And the streams, where do they go? Into the Aguarico River. Even today this happens. [But today] it’s not like it was here before. Before, the lizards, capybaras, ducks, anything that lived in the river would be the color black [from oil]. Black lizards. Black capybaras. The ducks died because they weren’t able to fly. The oil would stick to them. And if you killed the animal, you’d find when you went to eat it that the flesh inside would be stained black from the oil.

Animals black with crude, staining their entrails, wafting out of their flesh when roasted over the fire: oil permeated the lives of Emeregildo and his family. Yet at the same time, Texaco’s arrival was difficult to comprehend for those living in the region. Exposures have been protracted over decades. It is useful to recall the sense of strangeness Emeregildo described by which the company entered their lives—through funny-smelling cheese, noises, bizarre flying contraptions, and oozing substances that even permeated the innards of animals—and to try to conjure this sense of distance from what contamination looks, smells, and feels like.5 Listening to Emeregildo, I tried to imagine what it would mean to encounter a spill like those that flowed down the Aguarico decades ago, in a river he had known since birth, just outside his home. How might our approach to harm today change if we were to confront crude flowing downstream as though it were our first encounter with oil? Things have not always been this way. Imagining a first meeting with oil is not an effort to return to a pristine fantasy of the Amazon. Rather, I open with these accounts to try to imagine these encounters through the eyes of one who has never seen oil before. Visualizing this place anew as trucks rumbled in and out on newly built roads, while others distributed old crude behind them to keep the dust down, or pipes discharged waste into the rivers, allows us to untangle the givenness with which oil pervades and structures life in the Amazon today. Oil wrought changes not only in bodies of water, animals, humans, soil, and air but also in how people imagined the possibilities of life in this part of the Amazon, both subtle and overt ways of enabling and constraining the everyday.

40  recko ning with ha rm

Drilling a Well: AGUARICO-4 These moments marked the beginning of oil operations in the Amazon. Following success at the first wells near Lago Agrio, Texaco expanded exploration southward into the forest.6 As camps opened and oil began to flow, crews built accompanying access roads, including one connecting Santa Cecilia to the camp in Lago Agrio; others branched out to new camps from there.7 The Aguarico-4 well is in a relatively small oilfield just north of the much larger Shushufindi field. Texaco ultimately drilled ten wells here and built one production station just up the hill from Aguarico-4. Like every consortium well, Aguarico-4 was given an abbreviation, carved into a signpost made from a section of metal pipe, painted yellow, and mounted at the end of the access road: AG-4. Oil activity took place at great speed. It took less than a week for workers to assemble a drill tower for a new well, a hulking four-cornered rig several hundred feet high powered by an immense motor. As the motor rumbled to life, the drill punctured the clay earth. The initiation of drilling, also called “spudding,” began at Aguarico-4 on June 25, 1974. Over the following months, the drill rumbled downward to reach a pocket of decayed biomass sandwiched between layers of sand and rock. One day, when the drill plunged below 2,895 meters (9,500 ft), oil pounded out of the top of the well, shooting thirty to forty meters (98–131 ft) into the air. The ground below was bathed black. These are the moments that oil engineers and national newspapers in Quito reported with joy—the anticipation of tapping into liquid prosperity underground, the hunt for black gold, and the sheer thrill of success. Upon confirming that oil was trapped thousands of feet beneath the earth, the site became a nest of activity. Oil workers ran tests to determine the quantity of crude and the volume that a particular well would likely produce. Other workers dug pits off to the sides of the well platform. Texaco constructed three pits at the Aguarico-4 well. As crude spilled out of the well, it traveled through pipes into the pits for twelve, twenty-four, or sometimes forty-eight hours at a time. These were production tests to judge the well’s promise and calculate productivity. On July 19, 1974, construction of the Aguarico-4 well was officially completed (see also Chevron 2014). In the span of a few months, the place that, at the beginning of this chapter, was alive with the cutting, trilling, and continual buzz of insects and birds, the snorting of wild boar, and the silent gliding of snakes was transformed into an industrial zone. This was now a space of ownership and regulation, linked indel-

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   41

ibly to political dreams of prosperity from as near as Santa Cecilia and Quito, to as far as Sour Lake, Texas, and San Francisco, California. With the initiation of production in October 1975, the promise of black gold had once again been manifested in the Amazon. Once Texaco had confirmed that a well was productive, they needed a way to get the crude slurry off the hilltop overlooking the Aguarico and out to a separation station, where it could be pumped into different tanks and separated into its parts. With the urgency typical of the oil industry, Texaco needed to build a pipeline from the well to the station. Today pipelines are such a defining feature of the landscape, with sometimes several dozen running along a road, that it is difficult to imagine the region without them. But back in the early decades of exploration and drilling, pipelines had to be built, segment by segment, to connect jungle findings with faraway stations and ports. Luis, a former oil engineer who had been one of the first Ecuadorian engineers to work for Texaco in this area, and who was familiar with the Aguarico oil field operations, sat with me in his Quito office and patiently explained how the pipes were installed: So, what happens? With the desperation of those that are in charge of the money, they don’t want to just know that there is oil there. They want to sell it. They want the money. So, in the beginning, without much planning, the wells [are connected by pipeline] directly to the station; that’s why you get that macaroni [of pipelines] alongside the roads. Produce, transport, sell. The most logical solution is to build a pipeline that unites one well with another so you don’t have as much pipeline. But this was the pattern, the model that the señores [of Texaco] left behind and afterward the Ecuadorians said, “Ah, this is the logic of how things are done.” But it is not logical. Common sense is not the most common of the senses.

Building a pipeline was quick—three, four, maybe eight days later, depending on the distance, and it was finished. With the zeal that comes with the knowledge of oil primed for sale, nothing could detain the crews. Workmen toiled day and night building pipelines. “If a tree hindered them, the tree went down,” says Luis. “There was no such thing as obstacles. In the petroleum mentality, you can’t think of obstacles. Let’s see—if we need a bridge built, the bridge must be built. ‘Bring in the iron, bring in this or that,’ and boom! The next day you have a bridge.” There was no time for thinking ahead, for debate or delay.

42  recko ning with ha rm

According to the engineers I interviewed, in the case of the Aguarico-4 well, the pipeline was most likely completed in less than two days. Situated in the center of the earthen clearing, the well connects to a pipeline that runs in a straight line to the perimeter of the platform. From there, the pipeline runs alongside the access road to the Aguarico Station, about three kilometers (ca. 1.9 mi) from the well itself. Once the well was hooked up and running smoothly, activities on-site became more routine. Workers collected their tools, packed up campers and equipment, and moved to the next well. The well began to quiet down, save for the constant rumble of the generator. The trash that had accumulated over the course of the five or six months while workers had been living on-site was left in the forest or dumped into the waste pits. As Donald, an environmental activist and son of settlers to the region who will join this story in the following chapter, once commented to me while standing on the platform of the Aguarico-4, these waste pits are the archaeological remains of the industry. Now the pits are often overgrown, with organic matter and trees blurring their edges. Once your eyes adjust to the shadows of the forest, you learn to find these rectangular shapes in the bushes and distinguish the buried and unburied logics of the industry. In the pits, one can find the remnants of wrappers and tins of food eaten by workers decades ago, the animals that have fallen in and died when they couldn’t be rescued, the wastes of crude and production chemicals. These are the artifacts of twentieth-century extraction. After the well’s construction was complete, one man would stay behind as its caretaker. He might work twenty-two days straight and then leave for eight days of rest in Lago Agrio or travel back to Quito, Santo Domingo, or wherever he was from. Some worked thirty days straight with fifteen days off. These rotating shifts remain typical in the industry. Should something go wrong with the well, the caretaker was there to radio his superior at the station. Mostly he spent his time “looking at the jungle and birds,” says Luis. Boredom abounded. Once a day, a production engineer would bump down the dirt road in his company pickup to check on the well. Like anything done frequently enough, checking the wells became second nature. According to Luis, being an oil engineer was not unlike being a doctor: “You know the well. It is your patient, you have to check his pressure, temperature, production.” With practice, one could tell by touching the pipeline coming out of the wellhead how the well was doing. If it was hot, it was producing properly. If it had cooled down, it might be a sign that something was wrong, that perhaps the well needed maintenance work or cleaning.

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   43

After the initial flurry of activity, what remained at the Aguarico-4 site a few months later was the platform, the bright red wellhead to signal that the well was in production, and the caretaker in his small tent. Workers had built three waste pits. One contained crude oil from the production tests; a second contained a mixture of crude and muds from well maintenance; and a third had stored water during drilling and contained a comparatively minor amount of residual oil. Workers had left various other waste items, chemicals, and unused materials in the pits. In the pit used for production tests, a cuello de ganso (gooseneck) pipe had been installed, the same kind described by Wilmer in the introduction to the book (see p. xix). The S-shaped pipe was designed to prevent the contents of a pit from overflowing the banks when it rained. Because heavy rains are common in the Amazon, the idea was that as water collected on top of the crude oil in the pit, the excess water would drain through the tube and out the other side of the bank. In theory, the pipe was designed to keep the crude in the pit and allow only the water to drain out. However, in practice, contaminants from the pit mixed in with the water that ran through the pipe. Here on the Aguarico, the gooseneck pipe in the pit located directly in front of the platform was never removed after production ended. Instead it remained, slowly oxidizing, while runoff water from the pit continued to drain down the bank of the hillside into the swamp below. This pipe and many others like it came to figure as a central point of contention in determining responsibility for contamination in the area: plaintiff lawyers later argued that Texaco’s implementation of gooseneck pipes indicated that the infrastructure of sites like Aguarico-4 was designed to pollute (Donziger 2010). In 1976, two years after Texaco drilled the Aguarico-4 well, the swamp below the platform began to fill with oil. Farmers living nearby recall that a thin gloss of oil sat on top of the still water. The overhanging leaves cast a hazy shadow against the light. When any human or animal stepped into the muddy stream below, bubbles would rise to the surface, breaking open into a slow rainbow slick. Six years after the Aguarico-4 well was drilled, people recall, the morete palms began to die. By 1986, after about ten years of production, the engineers were disappointed. The well had let them down. No matter how much they coaxed the oil below through “workovers” where they removed and replaced tubing to increase production, the oil would not flow. One day in September, they made the decision. After the well had yielded 730,071 barrels of oil, 173,898 cubic feet of gas, and 73,775 barrels of water, the motor rumbled to a stop, the supervisor’s tent was dismantled, and the

44  reckoning with ha rm

valve on the wellhead was cranked to a close (Contraloría General del Estado, 2015: 18; Chevron 2014). Relative quiet overcame the platform. Grasses crept in, and la dormilona (the sleepyhead, Mimosa pudica, known as shameplant in English), with its ferny leaves and shy flowers that retreat into a small ball if brushed by a passing animal or errant human, took over the eastern side of the platform. The Aguarico-4 well retreated into the background, its traces remaining in rusted pipelines and papers stashed in Quito offices. The artificially flattened square of the platform with the accompanying three pits, a scab at the end of a bumpy dirt road in the jungle, began to heal itself. Low growth took over the banks of the pits; leaves, seeds, and other debris blew onto the surface of the oil that remained, slowly decomposing into a fine dust. Vines from the canopy extended downward, reaching the surface of the crude. The oil on the surface lost its luster. New growth sprouted. Trees fell. Ever so slowly, the forest began to regenerate around the three pits. Rains came, and filled the pits, sitting on top of the heavy crude. Farmers continued to traverse the segunda linea, a path leading from the platform’s corner into the forest where settlers had claimed additional agricultural plots. As they passed through, they swung machetes to defend the path from new growth. Donkeys dragged out heavy loads of plantain, lumber, cacao. As their parents continued on ahead, children snuck through the heavy brush to stand on the edge of the pits, poking branches through vegetation to pull up matted clumps of crude and decaying leaves. And down the hillside below, beneath the well platform, sat the swamp. The saínos (peccaries), tapires (tapirs) and pavos (turkeys) no longer came as they used to. But once again, the familiar noises of the forest returned.

Settling Eden As oil extraction began, thousands of settlers poured into Lago Agrio and the surrounding area from Ecuador’s southern and highland regions.8 People followed the oil access roads in search of land to claim, staking out plots along the road and turning forest into farms. This migration has given shape to life in the region. The towns and small cities that have grown up follow the contours of roads laid down to connect wells. Thus, the very design of built areas is closely intertwined with the logic of extraction. People built houses next to wells, platforms, and stations, which often meant they had to cross pipelines to reach their front doors.

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   45

Figure 1.2. A home located next to oil pipelines. Photo by the author, 2012.

In some cases, settlers arriving later found flat, cleared spaces next to abandoned wells and elected to build their houses on them; such spaces were old waste pits, covered over and left unmarked by the oil companies. Some people told me that they did not know there was a waste pit below but simply thought they had found a nice, flat space. Others said that they knew but did not realize that buried waste pits could affect their health or crops. I visited many such families, and together we would watch as Donald pulled up samples of crude buried only a meter or two beneath their homes with an auger, or soil corer. Old crude often finds its way to the surface. In spite of fences, security, and physical as well as bureaucratic boundaries, distinctions between industrial and residential spaces are blurred as a result of how the region was dually settled by industry and farmers. The proximity of settler and Indigenous communities to unregulated industrial operations during the first decades of oil development exacerbated health and social problems. This has had important repercussions for disputes over harm—for instance, how to decide which forms of harm can be scientifically or legally traced to a particular industrial operator, and which are due to settlement or other processes. Whether in

46  reckoning with ha rm

an Environmental Impact Assessment, the Aguinda lawsuit, a scientific study, or a political campaign calling for corporate accountability, the relations forged between the oil industry and settlement in this region give shape to harm today. Understanding the place-making processes of oil development and settlement as fundamentally relational challenges various scientific and regulatory conceptualizations of oil’s effects as limited to, for example, the hectares of forest cleared for platforms, the kilometers of roads built when drilling new wells, or the time frames of legal contracts. Relationality embraces the conjoined history of the historical transformations that have created the region today, within the broader project of the Ecuadorian government to facilitate the settlement of land that was previously out of their political reach. These relations have resulted in the loss of territory for Indigenous nationalities through settler land claims and oil company contamination alike. Relations take shape through various proximities to the industry, whether in terms of the physical closeness of houses to wells and pipelines, the ever-creeping lines of deforestation and retreating wildlife, the many possibilities of residents’ exposure to flares and contaminated rivers and streams or the soil that retains the chemical histories of the industry today. A small house sits on the corner between the road leading out of Lago Agrio and the access road to the well behind. A border of slender trees creates a living fence around the house. An old Texaco barrel, sliced lengthwise, serves as a water trough for the chickens, dogs, and other animals wandering about. Throughout Sucumbíos and Orellana I often found oil barrels reincarnated as trashcans, cut in half to hold animal feed, or rusting in the forest alongside an abandoned well. The fading letters index companies no longer present; even the intimate spaces of homes and farms are steeped in the industry. Gonzalo’s property extends back from the main road, through which the access road to the closest well cuts. This land has been the site of disputes with oil companies for years, whether over spills or buried waste pits. Gonzalo is the father of Luz Maria, who built a house on top of one such pit. Here at his home, the sedimented layers of history that have made the region are all present: well platforms, gardens, toxic waste pits, gooseneck pipes, hopes for a better life, the ire that lingers from past disputes with the “company men.” The Ecuadorian state offered colonists like Gonzalo fifty hectares (ca. 125 ac) of land through the Agrarian Reform and Colonization program on the condition that they would make half of their claim “productive”

Figure 1.3. A home just off the edge of the well platform of an active oil well. Active wellheads are painted red, reinjection wellheads are painted green. Photo by the author, 2012.

Figure 1.4. Many people in the region must cross bridges over the pipelines on a daily basis in order to reach their homes. A combination of pipelines, the smaller of which run from individual wells, is typical along the roads throughout the region. Photo by the author, 2012.

48  recko ning with ha rm

by planting crops or cattle ranching. Although advertised as “vacant” lands (tierras baldías), this place was never empty of life; rather, the region is the ancestral home of the Cofán, Waorani, Siekopai, Siona, and Shuar nationalities. In the following years, the government also granted large land allocations to commercial agriculture to establish oil palm plantations and livestock ranches, contributing to the rapid and largescale displacement of Indigenous nationalities and the transformation of native lands (Wasserstrom and Southgate 2013). The rain had picked up, thundering across the zinc roof, with a curtain of water streaming over the open door. Slots of light fell through the wooden slats of the walls where the planks did not meet. A machete leaned in the corner next to symmetrical bowls made from the calabash tree (also called mate, or arbol de las calabazas) that were full of chicken feed, with laundry strung overhead. The tangy, fermented smell of drying cacao filled the house. Reporters and investigators had come in search of his testimony before; Gonzalo and his wife were not surprised when I stopped by a few days earlier with a neighbor to ask to speak with them. Gonzalo’s wife arranged plastic chairs to face each other across the cleanly swept cement floor. Gonzalo was one of the first colonists to build a homestead in Lago Agrio. Arriving at the end of 1969 from Loja, he chose a plot of land along one of Texaco’s exploratory wells. In the decades that followed, he and his wife raised a family and worked the land. When Gonzalo first arrived, Texaco was stationed at Santa Cecilia. The company had begun explorations and was beginning to build the main camp and station that now stands at the eastern entrance to Lago Agrio. Well, I come from the province of Loja. I came looking for land, because there wasn’t any where I was from. In the period of President Velasco Ibarra, many came to colonize the Oriente. These were vacant lands; they didn’t have an owner. The only ones who were here were the gringos—Texaco was here. They had started to explore for oil, but they still weren’t extracting oil. We arrived when the oil camp was just being finished. . . . [Texaco] was just beginning to build the road from Santa Cecilia in order to move the things they had [to what is now Lago Agrio]. I came here with another compañero blindly; we arrived without knowing where we should look because no one could tell us anything. The gringos didn’t understand us, and the Indígenas even less so. They didn’t say anything; they were like shadows—that’s it. We would ask something, and they wouldn’t say anything.

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   49

The principal routes to Lago Agrio in the early 1970s were via military cargo flights from Shell to Santa Cecilia or by traveling through the southern Amazon from Shell to Puyo, Tena, and then up the Napo River. When the earliest settlers arrived in Santa Cecilia, they followed the Aguarico River downstream or cut through the forest where the military and Texaco were building a road from the base to the oil camp. Other settlers struck east from the Andes, thinking they would find opportunities to work in the industry. Although Gonzalo arrived earlier than this rush of workers, he referred to a policy that took many seeking work by surprise: in order to get a position working in the oil company or for a contracting company, one had to apply in Quito (Viteri Toro 2008). Contrary to popular lore, the oil industry was not interested in a wave of new arrivals in search of employment in their Amazonian operations. Many settlers described their arrival in the Amazon as a way of fulfilling destiny, claiming they were led there by God. For highland farmers, the jungle landscape was as unfamiliar as a new country. They were unaccustomed to Amazonian animals, the forest was dense and overwhelming and the heat oppressive, and haunting stories about savage tribes and jaguars filled their imaginations. Describing Indigenous people as “shadows,” as Gonzalo did, reflects the predominant racism and settler entitlement to this place, one in which Indigenous inhabitants were not seen as having any preeminent claim to the land or as fully human. Instead, his account renders them as mute forest dwellers. Colonists told me stories of arrival that centered on struggle and perseverance, marked by both fear and wonder at the new place that was to become home. In these accounts, Indigenous people often emerged as vaguely scary threats to their settlement project, another feature of jungle life they had to overcome. Gonzalo and his partner in exploration continued, lost in the jungle and growing increasingly disoriented. Late in the day they heard a motor in the distance. Confused, they thought perhaps they had gotten turned around and were mistakenly heading back toward Santa Cecilia, where they had begun. The motor continued until up ahead they saw a light like a mirror flashing through the jungle. The gringo saw us coming from far away along the path, saw that there were two of us. But since the path was full of mud and we were all wet and without shoes, when we were about twenty meters [66 ft] away he took out his pistol and pointed it at us, saying that we could be aucas!9 So that’s how we arrived. He said, “Where do you come

50  recko ning with ha rm

from?” . . . And I said, “We have come in search of Lago Agrio.” And the head guy, the Mister, he said, “Wait here, I’m going to come back. If we can get the motor to run we can give you a ride.” And then he tried once more, and all of a sudden, the motor turned over. As though it had been waiting for us to arrive. A coincidence. And that’s why I tell you—when you have faith in God, God will help you.

Caramba! Gonzalo clapped loudly at the chickens poking at his feet and they scattered to the corners of the room. He continued to recount how company workers brought him and his companion to the Aguarico River. There they found fellow travelers who had preceded them in a canoe camped out on the banks. The next day they set off through the jungle to find the center of what is now Lago Agrio. Around the time that Gonzalo was trekking through the forest, another group of settlers had also set off in search of Lago Agrio.10 One of the leaders of this group was Jorge Añazco Castillo, a trader who had spent years traveling in the Amazon. Añazco was active in the founding of Lago Agrio and in subsequent efforts to establish Sucumbíos as an Amazonian province in 1989. He compiled his experiences in an autobiographical account entitled Sucumbíos: The Fifth Amazonian Province (2008). The tone of the story of his arrival overflows with the sense of providence typical of settler origin stories. For Añazco, it was clear that God had intervened to secure the fate of the righteous settler: Man goes in search of his destiny. His ideal is to work wherever. God has marked his fate, like he did with Moses in the beginning of the centuries. He will be responsible for bringing his people to the Promised Land. He is certain, full of faith and hope on the designated route. He passes along rough roads bordering frightening precipices, navigating along rivers that mark borders, until he reaches the Amazon, that region of magical beauty, with ancient trees that shelter the traveler affectionately, to protect him from sun and rain. (Añazco Castillo 2008, 3)

Drought had forced thousands of farmers from Loja to leave their homes and search for land. Many had settled in El Carmen, in the coastal province of Manabí, where other families had subsequently joined them. At the invitation of a friend, Añazco had traveled to El Carmen to meet with a group of farmers from Quilanga. It was early May 1969. Largely from a generation younger than Añazco, the farmers were concerned about the future. They spoke of the problems the drought had brought

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   51

and of the many families that had been forced to migrate elsewhere. Between songs on the guitar, Añazco recounted his experiences traveling through the Amazon as a merchant, which was “an unknown and distant world” for his listeners (Añazco Castillo 2008, 131). In a meeting at the home of Erasmo Rojas Martín, who later became one of the founding settlers of Lago Agrio, the dream took root: “Thus, between drinks, the project of colonization of the NorOriente was born, the place where oil had burst forth and there were millions of hectares of vacant lands that would accommodate thousands of campesinos who had no land to farm” (Añazco Castillo 2008, 131).11 The group began to organize. Recording their meetings for posterity, they wrote down the objectives for their colonization project, which they provisionally named the “Loja Colony.” They outlined the names of the farmers who would make the journey, nominating a small group to make a reconnaissance trip to the region before bringing their families. The plan was to travel to the airport in Shell and arrange a flight with the Ecuadorian air force, which ran cargo flights to the military base in Santa Cecilia. The air force, apparently in part due to Añazco’s efforts, had received the official blessing to support and encourage settlement along Amazonian borders. After various trials and changes to the plan, in early December a group of about two dozen individuals left for Shell by bus. Añazco had been named their leader, and they had fifteen hundred pounds of supplies among them. In his autobiography, Añazco described the collective exhilaration as the group took off that clear morning for the Amazon. From the air we could observe the stunning scenery, made up of virgin mountain ranges and rivers that were playing hide-and-seek beneath the jungle. I was aware of the excitement of my friends, as they were taking on the challenge of the unknown. As the plane devoured the horizon, they contemplated, perhaps for the first time, the breadth of the jungle and the quantity of virgin land where they could each have their own parcel, in order to make a living for their family. They knew that they were the first group of organized colonists, ready to found a town in the oil-producing sector of the NorOriente. (Añazco Castillo 2008, 138)

The group landed on the tarmac built by the Texaco-Gulf consortium at Santa Cecelia, next to a provisional administrative complex. One of the settlers, Josefina, now a woman in her seventies, sat with

52  recko ning with ha rm

me in 2012 in the courtyard of one of the first hotels in Lago Agrio, which she and her husband opened on Via Quito. She described the moment of arrival as though they had descended from Noah’s ark. Exiting the air force plane, they set foot in lands so green they believed only God could have sent them to live there and prosper. Looking back at this moment nearly four decades later, her pride and satisfaction in their collective efforts in settling Lago Agrio were evident. We landed, got off the airplane, and the only thing we saw was sky and forest. Nothing more. But thanks to God, this was such a beautiful first impression that he gave us, it was as though God said, “Here will be where you will live, and here you will stay forever.” So that’s what we did. The Colonel welcomed us; he treated us very well and let us stay the night there [at the base]. They had some crops growing there like plantain and yuca, and he gave us some food to eat. I think we stayed there for two or three days. We rented a big canoe, and we paddled downstream, until we arrived at the place [where] we stopped on the Aguarico, where the slaughterhouse is today. There is where we built some shacks, out of large bijao [Calathea lutea] leaves from the forest.

Despite the enthusiasm, their project was not easy. The forest was overwhelming from the perspective of their small makeshift campsite, the threats were numerous, and the future was unknown. We were afraid to sleep in the middle of the jungle, in the middle of the forest. I was worried sick about my children. I was terrified of the tiger, of the wild animals.12 I was so afraid that I had carried with me some mosquito nets from Santo Domingo in order that my children wouldn’t get bitten by anything. . . . My oldest child was ten, and . . . the youngest child I brought was one year old—still breastfeeding. . . . I would cry, cry, and cry because I was worried about my youngest. Like any mother, I tried to cover them up so they wouldn’t get wet at night. I said to God, “If my children die here, what do I do?”

From these initial encampments, the settlers began to orient themselves in relation to the center of Lago Agrio and Texaco’s ongoing construction and exploratory wells. In the 1960s, Lago Agrio consisted of a couple of chozas de paja (straw shacks) along a dusty road leading from the oil camp. Much of the area in town was swampy and wet. Neither the state nor Texaco wanted anyone to settle near the oil camp.

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   53

Representatives from both entities actively encouraged settlers to move to the other side of the Aguarico, where they had sketched a provisional urban plan, away from the industry. Arriving settlers ignored them. As more settlers came, tensions grew over the land they claimed alongside the growing oil industry installation, at times erupting into clashes with the military, which was protecting consortium developments. Patricia, a settler who arrived in a later round of migration, described the conflict: So we started to complain, but they said that this land belonged to the state. That this property belonged to Texaco because they had bought this land. And the people started to say, “No, we’re not going to leave here just because.” And even more [settlers] started to arrive instead of people leaving, even though they wanted us to leave. Because how were we going to leave? If they take away our Oriente, our territory, where are we going to live? The majority of us were from the southern borders, and we came because of the drought. There was a tremendous drought in Ecuador. The animals looked like skeletons. They didn’t have anything to eat or water to drink. So we came here trying to survive, to give life to our children. To have a life for ourselves and to be able to raise animals.

As Gonzalo tells it, following a few days of camping out on the Aguarico, they headed to Lago Agrio and began to look for land. The guidelines of the Instituto Ecuatoriano de Reforma Agraria y Colonización (Ecuadorian Institute for Agrarian Reform and Colonization, hereafter IERAC) stipulated that each farmer could claim fifty hectares (ca. 125 ac) of land, 250 meters (820 ft) along the road and 2,000 meters (6,560 ft) long, half of which had to be made productive. IERAC also required Indigenous groups already present in the region to establish their claims to land through the same process as the settlers. This led to widespread deforestation and rapid expropriation of ancestral lands, which were quickly occupied by settlers while the lengthy and disputed process of titling was resolved (Wasserstrom and Southgate 2013). Many settlers felt that access to farmland was their right as Ecuadorian citizens, leading to struggles over land rights and usage. As Gonzalo described, After that, we started to look for land and orient ourselves a bit because the gringo [at Santa Cecilia] didn’t have any idea what was along the Aguarico. And we could tell that they didn’t want us to take up land there [where Lago Agrio is today]. They were telling us that they weren’t

54  reckoning with ha rm

responsible for what could happen because this was a petroleum zone where they were going to be putting in a lot of installations and tanks and all that. The processing station was already there, those huge [storage] tanks too. . . . The compañeros that came with their wives were the salvation of all of us because they were able to work in the shacks [in town]. They gave them work, and [the women] brought us food. And since this was jungle, as you know, you would see all kinds of animals here, agouti, deer, wild pig. All of this was jungle. There were curassows and there were chickens. We lived off of all of this. But after a month of being here, [the food] that we had brought with us ran out. The butter, the salt, the sugar, all of it—there was nothing left.

The first year was particularly hard. Once the road between Lago Agrio and Santa Cecilia was completed, it was possible to buy supplies at the military base. Groups of settlers would regularly send someone on a military flight back to Shell or Puyo to buy provisions. Several individuals described their delight upon finding patches of yuca, plantain, and other edible plants growing in the forest in the first months. They had stumbled upon gardens grown by Indigenous families, which some settlers assumed to be signs of divine favor. Others recounted with gratitude the help of the military, which initially gave them food. Many described a sense of solidarity among settlers as they collaborated in finding work, sharing food, watching children, and protecting one another. These feelings were juxtaposed against Texaco workers, whom they often portrayed as being egotistical or unkind to settlers. Gonzalo continues: The gringos worked day and night, and it didn’t take even another month before they finished the road to Santa Cecilia. And so then we went on foot to Santa Cecilia, and there you could get just about anything you wanted—plantain, yuca, salt, butter—the army would sell it all to us. . . . And then from there we’d carry it all back on our shoulders because the men who worked in Texaco were selfish, they wouldn’t even give us rides. We’d be carrying these heavy loads all bent over; we would be suffering. Some people who came here wound up suffering, they’d leave [the Amazon] crying. They’d go back in the airplanes that Texaco had; they’d take them back to Quito as though they were sick men. I think in the end there were about twenty of us who wound up staying here. I don’t know if we were brave, or if we

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   55

were—well, I don’t know what we were—but we couldn’t leave. We were here to stay.

Once their husbands found work, women like Josefina and her sister, who was married to another man in the group, began working for the oil and contracting companies washing laundry in the rivers. Little by little, Josefina and her husband managed to put together money to build a house out of cane. Soon they opened a small store. One of the contracting companies would allow Josefina’s husband to travel with them free of charge. He would buy food and other items in Quito and Guayaquil to bring back to Lago Agrio for the store: “food, work boots, clothes, any little thing.” Commerce was growing rapidly as more and more settlers arrived. One settler described his sense of commitment to making a life in the Amazon, despite the many challenges. Here, as in other accounts, the beginnings of disagreements with Texaco and CEPE workers begin to surface, reflecting their positions of power and access to resources such as land, food, and vehicles relative to mestizo settlers and Indigenous people. I never thought about leaving. I said to myself, “I’m going to stick it out. If I die here, I die here.” Texaco wouldn’t even give us one step to be able to enter into their camps. Puhhhh. Treated us like we were dogs. And we lived like that for a year until we were able to start cultivating the land. We grew corn from some seeds that we were able to get from the Indígenas, and the corn grew quickly and soon we had new corn. After that we grew plantain, yuca, it grew quickly, and within a year we had production. But the hunting, hunting was our salvation. We started to have a life here. And I have to tell you: well, the things that were good were good, but the things that were bad were really bad. Yes. Throughout this area this was the territory of . . . a savage tribe here. And we would say to ourselves, “What if we encounter one of them one day and they kill us?”

The decision to stick it out is a centering thread through settler tales. The density of the forest or the ferocity of the animals might have inspired fear, but it also signaled promise. The suspicions of mythical “savages” abound; these references occupy space principally through the otherwise palpable absence of Indigenous communities in settler accounts. Settlers were awed by the area’s beauty, in fear of the jungle’s excesses, and determined to make a life for themselves. As Gonzalo told me:

56  recko ning with ha rm

I’ve been here forty-one years, here in this spot. [When I arrived] I saw this wellhead in the middle of the jungle, and I didn’t know what it was. . . . After two or three months the road [from Lago Agrio] made it out to where I am now. So, for me, the road was a huge relief because I had to walk out by foot to get back to town. Lago Agrio at this point was just a couple of shacks made out of straw. It wasn’t like it is now. It wasn’t the town that it is now—a city. It was just straw shacks.

The Velasco Ibarra government (1968–1972) continued to promote the “empty lands” that awaited colonists in the Amazon, and colonization proceeded with haste. The CEPE-Texaco consortium opened new camps, and access roads cut through the jungle creating branching links throughout the forest. This is true not only around Lago Agrio but also of the region more broadly: farmland and residential spaces are thoroughly intertwined with pipelines, wells, and stations. Settlers followed the advances of oil, claiming land alongside the roads and well platforms. Joining together, settlers formed cooperatives that allowed them to obtain official land titles from the state. Yet the contemporaneous expansion of oil and colonization was often in tension. As Añazco notes, many settlers were motivated by a desire to provide for their families. They believed that they had the right to occupy the land and that settlement was beneficial to the Amazon and, by extension, the nation. These are narratives of improvement, of bringing civilization to the jungle, which stand in stark contrast with the settlers’ sentiment that the oil industry was not motivated by concerns for the greater good. While many respondents recalled the excitement that surrounded the clamor and promises of development brought by oil revenues they heard about in the news and political speeches at the time, they remained critical of company tactics on the ground. As Añazco recounts, “The advance of oil represented the power of technology and money, the ambition of accounting for barrels of oil and transforming them into dollars that would fatten the bank accounts of the companies and of the government. The advance of the settlers meant the conquest of this vital space [espacio vital] needed to survive as a human being, as a family and as a society” (2008, 168).

Lago Agrio Grows In a region historically part of trade circuits from the Andes to the Putumayo and the Peruvian Amazon, the growing population of Lago Agrio

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   57

began to attract more traders. They ranged from established merchants to people who came on a whim to see whether they could sell clothing and other goods on the burgeoning frontier. One such individual was Lupe, an accomplished seamstress with her own business in Quevedo, who struck out for Lago Agrio in 1980 with two suitcases filled with clothes, jewelry, purses, shoes, and perfume to try her luck. She described her joy at seeing the pipelines for the first time while descending the bumpy, winding road over the Andes on the Zaracay bus. This, she told me, was a sign that they were heading to the land of oil that she had read so much about in the newspapers. Many years later, sitting in a house that doubled as her workshop, with two miniature dogs fussing about her feet, Lupe looked out at the bustling street as she recalled what it was like to arrive in Lago Agrio: I went walking through what was the center of the city, and I sold my merchandise. There was only one store. And so, I went down the Avenida Colombia, and I met Mr. Rivas, a trader, who had a wooden house, a big shop. I went in and he bought a gold bracelet from me, rings, earrings, gold chains for him and his wife, and he said to me, “Señora, stay here in Lago Agrio! Business here is good!” And I said, “Yes, but I just came to see how things are here.” And he said, “Go further down the street where there is a chongo [brothel].” And I said, “What is that?” “That’s where the women are. Ask for permission to go in and you’ll see you’re going to sell all these clothes you brought.” And so, I went to this chongo, called El Boricua [the Puerto Rican]. I talked to Mr. Villanueva, the owner, I asked for permission, and then Americans, Colombians, Brazilians, Cubans—lots of beautiful women came out—from all different countries, right here in Lago Agrio.

Lupe’s delight in retelling this story was evident. The arrival of striking, international women to the Amazon was a sign of the place’s cosmopolitan nature in her eyes. Upon leaving the chongo, with her nowlighter suitcases, Lupe waited by the side of the road for a ride. To her surprise, a truck passed by with a man she knew from her childhood in the highlands. Stopping to pick her up, the man and his friend showed her around town: “So I found them out here in the Oriente! They took me back to town, they carried my stuff, showed us around the oil camp, because it was something really exciting to come here and see all of the wells.” Here, oil infrastructure was the sign of something greater at work—a movement, a development, the mark of the growing economy

58  reckoning with ha rm

and what was to come. Struck by the contrast between Lupe’s account and the reactions of visitors I met upon seeing the often rusted and complicated maze of the industry’s infrastructure today, I asked her again about her first reaction to the early wells and camps. She was insistent: “Oooo. Very exciting! It was very impressive! This was the first time I had seen this here in our country—all the gringos. And so around 8:00 pm, when Mr. Altamirano left me where I was staying, he said to me, ‘Tomorrow you should go to Coca, because you’ll sell even more there.’” Delighted with the success in selling her wares in Lago Agrio and in the other major oil hub, Coca (officially Puerto Francisco de Orellana), Lupe returned to Quevedo inspired. She began to travel frequently, working in her tailor shop for a week and then making trips to Lago Agrio to sell the clothes she had made. Gradually she began to spend more and more time in Lago Agrio. Every week new settlers arrived, and business was good. The central street, Via Quito, had several bars where people would gather to drink, gossip, and sell things. The colonization of the jungle and arrival of the industry meant a moment of opportunity, not simply for the oil industry itself but—as the legend went—for anyone willing to go out on a limb and put down a new restaurant, hotel, brothel, or laundry service or just open up a suitcase of goods inside a bar. Lupe seized the moment: You know in the center of town, where the Avenida Amazonas meets Via Quito? In these times, Mr. López had a bar where people came to buy drinks—strong drinks, like aguardiente [cane alcohol]. The Indígenas would come to drink there. And Mr. López said to me, “Look, you go around selling gold jewelry, well, the Indígenas here sell gold. But don’t go asking them how much they have or how much it costs. Give them a pile of five-dollar bills, and they’ll give you the little tube made from a turkey vulture feather—that’s where they carry the gold.” 13

This was a place where different worlds met and profit could be made. Products became available that many people had never seen before in this part of the jungle, including alcohol, machinery, and new clothing. And so I would buy gold from [Indigenous people]. I would always go and buy. And then when I had gotten together a good amount, I went to Guayaquil to a company that bought gold. I bought a lot of gold. I would buy it from them cheap because they didn’t know

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   59

what it was that they were selling. With the gold that the Indígenas were selling in these times, they would just drink [the money away]. They’d be walking around with their spears, with their ears and noses pierced—in their traditional clothes. So I got used to life here, and I stayed here in Lago Agrio.

In addition to the growing service industries—pipeline and maintenance companies, restaurants, laundries, hotels—economies of alcohol and sex trailed close behind oil development. In Lupe’s stories there are traces of the peripheral economies that shaped the town and the interactions between Indigenous people, oil workers, traders, and settlers. A growing market economy and different notions of value and exchange began to emerge, seen also in the increasing interest in panning for gold in surrounding rivers. The chance to take advantage of the situation— settlers and oil workers in need of various goods, the availability of land, or Indigenous people unfamiliar with the monetary value of gold—gave the city a sense of precarious possibility, at once auspicious and abusive, which it still retains today. The chongo Lupe described still exists on the way out of town on Via Colombia; now there are several others next to it. From the very earliest stories about this era and the arrival of oil, people mention the ever-present sex work, telling of shacks erected for sex workers near even the most remote oil wells and camps in the forest. Oil workers named wells after the favorites: Joan, Fany, Miriam, Sonia, Dorine. The most famous women had stations named for them, such as Mariann Vieja. Bars popped up on Lago Agrio’s streets, their oversized metal doors pulled down to expose their patrons only from the knees down, the smell of stale beer fermenting again in the heat of the day. Today, as you enter Lago Agrio and other surrounding towns, the peeling walls of the casas de citas (brothels) are covered with painted murals of jungle scenes, depicting oversized plantain leaves that obscure the larger-thanlife bodies of exoticized red- and blond-haired women. In these murals, a hypersexualized nature lies in wait to be conquered. Lago Agrio grew rapidly. The roads were still dirty. The oil companies covered them in crude, often also at the request of locals, to keep the dust down. This practice resulted in an impossibly sticky mess whenever it rained. As time went on, a hospital was built, yet basic services such as electricity remained scant. In order to run her tailoring shop, Lupe would cut all of the cloth during the day so she could maximize the four available hours of electricity in the evening to run her sewing

Figure 1.5. “El Refugio: Un paraíso para vivir” (The Refuge: a paradise to live in). A sign advertising lots for sale is located on the road leaving Shushufindi heading toward Jivino Verde, where settlers and speculators cast their dreams with the die of the oil industry. The sign faces the road, and behind it a well platform with an active wellhead is surrounded by houses and other industry infrastructure. Photo by the author, 2013.

machines. Others described frustration with the lack of public works, such as paved roads, water, and social services, and the absence of basic supplies in the hospital and other facilities. More settlers arrived, the city expanded, but services did not develop apace. Strikes were frequent: residents protested their political and economic marginalization by blocking roads, taking over public spaces, and making demands in reaction to what they considered to be the state’s abandonment of the Amazonian provinces. Many settlers were unhappy about a petroleum politics dictated by the political and economic interests of the government without, in their view, due respect for the people who were completing a patriotic duty by colonizing the territory. In 2001, political organizing formalized in the creation of the Asamblea Biprovincial de Sucumbíos y Orellana (Biprovincial Assembly of Orellana-Sucumbíos, ABP), which led multiple successful strikes that gained the attention of oil companies such as Repsol, Petrobras, and Occidental and the government. The organizing by the ABP resulted, among other demands, in the transfer of 16 percent of corporate income tax revenues to the two provinces (Wilson 2021).

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   61

Discontent remains, although the reasons for it have changed. When I asked interlocutors about life in the Amazon, they often offered variations on a refrain of: All of the country’s wealth comes out of here, and what do we have to show for it? One day while walking on the outskirts of Lago Agrio, I came upon graffiti on a wall to the same effect: “Sucumbíos petrolero y su pueblo pordiosero” (Sucumbíos produces oil and its people are beggars). Indignation at the low level of state investment in the region is common. Today, the Amazon remains one of the poorest areas in Ecuador. The census of 2011, during the time of my research, found 59 percent of the population in Sucumbíos living in poverty, making it the poorest province in the region, with twice the percentage of poor people as in the nation as a whole (Ministerio de Coordinación de la Producción, Empleo y Competitividad 2011). The level of unmet basic needs (necesidades basicas insatisfechas) in Sucumbíos was estimated to fall between 71 percent (López 2010, 34) and 82 percent (Espín 2009, 20) at that time. This means that on the whole, basic standards for housing, sanitation, education, and minimum income were not met. As a taxi driver once noted with derision as we passed the former Marco Vinicio Iza Hospital in the center of town, It wasn’t a clinic; it was a pigsty. By 2015, the population of the Sucumbíos province was over 176,000, with many people living in rural areas. Thus, while dramatic changes have occurred since settlement began, threads of disgruntlement from earlier decades remain. While much of the country’s wealth emerges from the depths of the Amazon, the region has not seen the promises of black gold materialize in the form of state investment and improved quality of life, as many settlers had hoped.

Wilting Lime Trees After a few years, the first settlers began noticing some of the environmental effects of oil extraction. Because daily life was so intertwined with industry, they were quick to observe the oil floating down the rivers and the clouds of smoke coming from the burning waste pits. For those whose property contained wells, this pollution was particularly obvious. While telling me the story of his farm as we walked through his property, Gonzalo moved quickly between describing his fruit trees and industrial practices. His frustration at how things proceeded in the early years was evident decades later. The contrast between the elation of arrival and subsequent defeat in the face of growing contamination was plain:

62  recko ning with ha rm

We started to feel the effects of contamination when we started growing plantain and yuca and fruit trees, like lime. And so when they started to extract oil . . . there were some huuuuuge pits, some twenty meters [66 ft.] long. And it was in those pits that they dumped and burned the petroleum, and it was as though the land was on fire. You couldn’t leave your clothes to dry outside because the clothes would be covered in ash. And in the water, we started to see this black scum on top. You had to be very careful. Sometimes the river would run with oil. And that was how we lived.

As daily rhythms became more routine, with crops laid and houses built, life shifted to accommodate the industry’s presence. Practices like leaving laundry outside to dry, which would not have been a problem in Loja and the southern regions settlers came from, soon became untenable next to the gas flares and oil stations of the Amazon. Swimming and bathing in the river were also precarious propositions. I tell you, after about two years of this, that’s when the productivity we had started to drop. . . . The corn, the yuca . . . the limes started turning black on the trees. . . . Nothing produced like it did when we first had arrived. During this time, they covered the roads with pure petroleum and rocks from the river. And this would turn into something like pavement. . . . And in Lago Agrio, they covered the main streets with oil in order to keep the dust down.

These descriptions, read through the lens of the present, demonstrate obvious harm. Yet for many settlers it was not initially apparent that something was wrong. We didn’t know anything about contamination. I tell you that we didn’t know anything. . . . We weren’t afraid because we didn’t know that it was bad. Because nobody said anything. Now people complain and ask, “Why didn’t anyone complain before? The gringos were here, why didn’t people complain then and defend themselves?” Nobody said anything. Why? Because there were Ecuadorians who were bosses, engineers, and all that, and in this time period they made a huge amount of money. So it didn’t matter to them that the rest were suffering the consequences of contamination.

Settlers repeatedly described to me how their farms no longer pro-

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   63

duced like before. Claims connecting the loss of land productivity to industrial operations are, of course, subject to dispute. Indeed, oil is not the only source of malady here. The lack of basic services such as water provision, sewage treatment, and waste management in the region for the first several decades of oil development, combined with the effects of African palm cultivation and the routine use of pesticides in agriculture as well as chemicals for fishing in the rivers, has created a situation in which there are many possible threats to environmental and human health in the area. On more than one occasion, employees of the Ministry of the Environment and oil workers described to me their aversion to campesinos, whom they saw as more interested in monetary compensation than in remediation of environmental damage wrought by a spill on their land. Some people I spoke with attributed what they understood to be contrived requests for compensation to a history of paternalism inherited from the early decades of oil under the consortium. Others wrote it off as economic self-interest. Still others argued that what farmers called a loss of productivity from contamination was actually the result of intensive farming in inappropriate soil conditions. I raise these issues not to undermine individuals’ losses but to sketch the arena in which accounts by people like Emeregildo or Gonzalo circulate. Claims about polluted water or declining productivity because of contamination from extractive industries cannot be glossed over as simple conflicts reducible to interests or bias (Li 2015). Rather, what individuals remember about early decades in the Oriente reveals how different actors have experienced harm as tangled within the hopes of building a new life, the loss of older ways of life, the interests of the Ecuadorian state and Texaco, and uncertainty over the effects of this new industry on their bodies and the surrounding land, water, and air. Just like the forms of expert knowledge that speak to questions of toxicity, exposure, and causality in subsequent chapters, the voices of Indigenous people, settler farmers, activists, and oil company representatives are also interpretive, critical, and partial. As industry expanded along with state-sponsored colonialism, discontent grew. Residents’ complaints were not limited to observations of contamination alone but show the complexity of how daily life and the oil industry fed off one another. In recognizing the historical contingency of all knowledge claims (Haraway 1988), these early experiences in the region complicate contemporary efforts to draw unambiguous lines between the residential and the industrial, or between which harms are a consequence of industry and which arise from settlement practices.

64  reckoning with ha rm

Figure 1.6. The market in downtown Lago Agrio. A new, covered market was built a few years later. Photo by the author, 2011.

Un Par de Chozas Today, what was once un par de chozas—just a few shacks, as early settlers of Lago Agrio described it—is now a significant city in the Amazon. Most of the small cities and towns spread throughout Sucumbíos and Orellana are connected by roads originally built for oil operations. Lago Agrio, Coca, and Shushufindi mark urban hubs that link to surrounding areas. Outside of the towns and cities, the principal source of income is farming, especially of cash crops such as cacao, African palm, and plantain, as well as fish farming. Permanent positions working in the oil industry are hard to come by, but an extensive network of secondary or supporting industries exists in the form of restaurants, parts suppliers, hotels, and security and transport services that serve the oil complex. At five in the afternoon, the second of two daily flights from Quito heads east to Lago Agrio. As it drops through the clouds, the Amazonian

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   65

basin forest spreads out below. It is an immense green through which fibrous brown rivers with sandy banks wind their way. As the plane descends, palms become visible, along with the red earth of roads cutting through the forest and cleared lots with trees felled like matchsticks. The flight attendant announces the approach to Lago Agrio. Small clusters of zinc-roofed houses dot the main road, and soccer courts and speed bumps come into view, growing in density until the plane is cruising over the town. Lago Agrio emerges so suddenly out of the trees that it takes me by surprise. Descending over the town center, the plane flies directly over Via Quito, with taxis, street vendors, and foot traffic visible below. If you happen to be standing in the street below, it flies so low you can spot the bolts on the belly of the plane. The end of the tarmac borders downtown and the oil production station built by Texaco. Because of the airport’s proximity, no building downtown may be taller than four stories. At the time of the airstrip’s construction, no one imagined that the city would grow to this extent in the following decades. As the plane nears the ground, huge oil-storage tanks materialize, stacked like giant metal coins across the lawn. The gas flares behind them burn orange, becoming more visible as the light fades. A long fence borders the road, behind which rows and rows of pipeline pieces sit, rusted and stacked like lumber. The sky is a soft blue-gray, and the air smells warm. Steam rises from the asphalt following the afternoon rain; a deflated windsock sits in stillness. Through the trees, one can glimpse the rig of a nearby well. Outside the airport, taxis idle as they wait for passengers. Drivers for oil companies pick up their passengers in oversized silver pickup trucks. The road out of the airport curves past oil wells on either side before entering town. By six in the morning, store owners have thrown up the heavy metal rolling doors of shops, and water sloshes against the sidewalks as they clean the floors and ready themselves for customers. They set out bolón con huevo frito (a fried ball of mashed green plantain, often mixed with cheese or chicharrón, served with a fried egg) or the petrolero combo (an oversized serving of steak, egg, and yuca or plantain over a mound of rice) for breakfast, along with jars of instant coffee. The plastic tablecloths are sticky in the humidity. Oil workers, readily identifiable by their work boots and matching jumpsuits or full denim uniforms emblazoned with company logos and reflective tape, fill the tables. The morning news runs at full volume on the TVs overhead. Outside, company pickup trucks line the sidewalk. Uniformed kids, hair neat and slicked into place, make their way to school. Adults hurry to work in security companies or

66  reckoning with ha rm

workshops cutting glass, or they might wash and repair clothes. Vendors roam the streets selling wobbly towers of brooms, announcing a sale on ripe mangos from the back of their circling pickup truck through a loudspeaker, or pushing carts stacked with boiled quail eggs. Afternoons are hot and slow, the parks populated by young novios sitting in the shade. Families of three and four zoom by carrying groceries and schoolbags on motorcycles. Taxi drivers carry their soccer uniforms and cleats in the trunks of their cars, ready to drop work at four when the game starts. As you walk down the street, shouts come from the ecuavolley courts—an Ecuadorian version of volleyball—squeezed between houses, surrounded by crowds of spectators, kids, food vendors, and stray dogs. As dusk falls, the roasted plantain vendors roll out their carts. The yuca bread seller returns for his afternoon route, zigzagging around potential buyers while shouting pan de yuca, pan de yuca, pan de yuca y café! punctuated by his metal whistle. Women set rolling carts outside of karaoke bars and grill chicken. The sounds of praise echo from evangelical churches and bible studies; as one neighbor once commented to me, For every brothel here, you’ll find two evangelical churches on the same block. On weekend afternoons, the parks and central plaza fill with families and kids sticky with ice cream. Others pack up for a day on the banks of the Aguarico, spending hours racing in and out of the cold, fast water. The banks of the river are piled with crates of beer, roasted chicken or plantain, and salsa a todo volumen. On other days, frequent downpours make a good excuse to wait at home. The streets fill with inches of standing water in minutes, the thunderous noise on zinc roofs drowning out conversation. Roosters crow at all hours. In the relative calm of evening, the strains of men drinking too much beer waft down the street; the melancholy sound of old boleros and the chintzy twang of bachata fill the corners. Oil and its formations—pipelines, wells, drills, equipment, refineries, noise, lights, money, work rhythms—are so ubiquitous that they even pass unnoticed. The pipeline along the road, rusted and covered with matted weeds, is part of the landscape. It is something people drive by, walk over, and repurpose every day. The roads are full of industrial traffic: trucks carrying oversized loads of pipeline or separation tanks, and company pickups. The metal signs that mark the entrance to roads leading to wells, the rumble of a gas flare behind a home—all are part of this place. Conflict has shaped life in northeastern Ecuador and southern Colombia: the rubber boom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   67

oil beginning in the 1960s, and coca cultivation punctuate this history. In the early 2000s, the Putumayo department, just over the border with Sucumbíos, became a center of social and armed conflict and the US-led war on drugs. Fumigations resulted in widespread ecological destruction (Sánchez-Garzoli 2008), a technique that many argue was meant to displace people (Gill 2004, 186) and led to devastating social fragmentation, violence, and insecurity. Starting in the early 2000s, displaced Colombian refugees began arriving in Ecuador in significant numbers, many of whom now live in Sucumbíos province. When I conducted my research, an estimated 95 percent of all refugees in Ecuador were Colombians who had fled violence in their home country and arrived between 2000 and 2007. Many of the people whom I came to know while living in Lago Agrio worked for nonprofit aid organizations, the majority of them university-educated Ecuadorians originally from Quito, Guayaquil, or Cuenca or foreigners from European countries such as Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. Today, Sucumbíos is also a site of significant state and nonprofit intervention in response to food insecurity, domestic violence, drugs and arms trafficking, and a growing refugee population.14 Sucumbíos has the highest homicide rate in Ecuador, second only to the coastal border province of Esmeraldas (Espín 2011). The population of Lago Agrio has lived through periods of intense violence. Once, while I was walking home with friends who grew up in Lago Agrio, they began to describe a topography of the city previously invisible to me. Pointing to buildings that carried debts from drug money, they told stories of neighbors who came into wealth too fast, a sure sign of illicit activity. In some cases the neighbor was subsequently killed, and the building remained unfinished, carrying the previous owner’s debt as part of its resale price. As children growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they were accustomed to seeing hired hit men arrive on agile imported motorbikes, stop at the curb, and pull out semiautomatic weapons. Via Colombia, the principal road leading north to the border about twenty​-fi ​ ve kilometers (15.5 mi) away, remains an infamous dumping ground for the bodies of people who had been murdered. According to common lore, dozens of remains appeared each morning along the road leading from the San Miguel bridge during the particularly violent 2000s. While the birth of the city and the advent of commercial oil production in Ecuador were tightly linked, today the relations of the city and the effects of extractive histories are far more complicated. Often the first association made with Lago Agrio in the news, on the

68  reckoning with ha rm

Internet, or in conversation is with oil. It is reputedly rough and dirty, a city marked by industry. This association is also because of the A­guin­da case, in which journalists have described it as home to industrial calamity. Take, for instance, this description of the city in a popular travel guidebook: This seedy, gray town pulses with the life of the oil industry, a chaotic market, dusty streets, thick traffic and gritty bars. The first oil workers nicknamed Lago Agrio “bitter lake,” after Sour Lake, Texas, the former home of Texaco, which pioneered local drilling. The city’s official name is Nueva Loja, although no one calls it that. Locals settle for “Lago.” Certain realities exist here, including a high amount of prostitution and crime related to the nearby Colombian border: take care at all times, especially after dark. Lago is mainly visited as the entry point to the spectacular Reserva Producción Faunística Cuyabeno (Cuyabeno Reserve), which offers some of Ecuador’s best wildlife-spotting opportunities. (St. Louis et al. 2012)

While onlookers often portray the city in these terms, settlers’ accounts point us elsewhere. Where outsiders see only grit and noise, inhabitants see the product of struggle and triumph: the work farmers did to build lives in a new land, laboring against the odds in a foreign place of overwhelming nature and booming industry. Where some might see chaos, settlers see productivity and a flourishing economy. And where settlers see dreams realized, people like Emeregildo see the forests of their youth felled, ancestral lands turned into pasture, and the rivers polluted. I was once sitting with Ana, the wife of a trader who worked in the Putumayo and one of the first settlers of Lago Agrio. Large banners emblazoned with the image of her late husband and his accolades in settling the province hung overhead. We were on her patio, surrounded by carefully trimmed orchids, with a pet monkey busily eating guavas nearby, watching the afternoon traffic pass in clouds of dust, horns and boys shouting the arrival of buses. I asked her to tell me about the changes she had seen in the city since she and her husband first claimed a plot of forest here. Their land has now been incorporated within the boundaries of the growing city. Her satisfaction was evident. “Yes,” she said, gesturing broadly to the left and right, “Lago Agrio is at the center of everything. Over here, the road leads to Colombia, to the Putumayo; this way it goes to Quito. Over here the road goes to Coca, and that way to Nuevo Rocafuerte. It’s very well positioned!”

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   69

Over the past fifty years, lives have taken shape along with the oil industry. Despite being the point of origin for the nation’s first commercial oil production, journalistic accounts often describe it as a peripheral industrial frontier where Eden fatefully met industry. The lives of those who make this place home are occluded by imaginaries of catastrophe. Yet this is a place where life goes on, with, because of, and even in spite of oil. For many settlers who watched the chozas de paja grow into a bustling city, Lago Agrio is anything but marginal, and much more than an industrial zone. For the settlers who shared their stories with me, the Amazon is a place of new beginnings, not of failed extractive logics. Lago Agrio remains a source of pride and potential. The face of life alongside oil is found in these quotidian experiences of settlement and displacement, of legal disputes and sickness, heroic narratives and erasures of life that preceded the industry’s arrival. This chapter opened on the banks of the Aguarico River, following how the Texaco-CEPE consortium transformed a swamp into a site like the Aguarico-4 well, as part of an industrial region now marked by environmental conflict for the past half century. The oil industry and the project of state-sponsored settler colonialism directly and indirectly enabled the current entangled configuration of roads, residential areas, and fields of cacao and yuca fueling everyday life and oil operations in inextricable ways. Colonization of Amazonian forest occurred at the hands and machetes of settlers and oil companies alike; roads built through the jungle by an oil company, at the explicit request of the Ecuadorian state, were not meant for oil alone but facilitated the movement of hundreds of thousands of settlers. This history, as we see through the tales settlers recount of making lives and growing crops alongside wells and pipelines, has important implications for how people now live in relation to contamination in this region. The oil industry and state-sponsored settlement have grown like twisted strands of yarn plied together, each enabling the evolution of the other. As a result, the ensuing industrial contamination—the countless spills, ruptures, and explosions and the slow leaching of chemicals into air and ground—occurred in a place that was the ancestral home of Indigenous nationalities and part of a larger colonization project. Fast-forward three decades, following the entrance of multiple other oil companies, including handing over consortium operations to the state oil company, to the beginning of the Aguinda lawsuit. It was at this point that lawyers took up the task of demonstrating specific relationships of causality, intention, and negligence in connection to Texaco’s

70  reckoning with ha rm

activities, and in which the many overlapping forms of habitation and toxic coproduction gained new legal significance. Important political, scientific, legal, and regulatory matters hinge on the distinctions drawn between settlement-generated changes and industry-generated changes. The stakes involved in distinguishing between the effects of settler colonialism and the effects of industry are significant, because in parsing two processes that occurred in tandem, the effect is often to restrict the “impact” of oil development to the platform itself while ignoring the broader context—including the political, economic, and structural inequalities—that oil development generates. For example, in the Aguinda lawsuit, the independent expert Richard Cabrera alleged that Texaco’s practices had caused deforestation (Cabrera Vega 2008).15 In response, a team of experts prepared a report for Chevron to dispute this claim by analyzing satellite images to determine the extent of deforestation resulting from settlement as opposed to industry (Bjorkman, Southgate, and Wasserstrom 2008). Drawing on work by economist Sven Wunder, they argued that while oil, mining, or timber industries are often faulted for deforestation, in Ecuador, the Texaco-PetroEcuador consortium had cleared only 4,415 hectares (ca. 10,900 ac) for platforms and infrastructure, amounting to a mere 1 percent of the forest in the total area of the original consortium concession. In contrast, using the same images, settlers were responsible for felling 241,000 hectares (595,000 ac) of forest by the year 2000, equivalent to 54 percent of the same area (Bjorkman, Southgate, and Wasserstrom 2008, 5–6). As these calculations show, settlers have definitively transformed the Amazon. The authors rightly point to the role of the Ecuadorian government since the nineteenth century in encouraging settler occupation of “vacant” lands in the Amazon, and specifically requiring the roads built by Texaco to be open to everyone, including merchants and settlers. Yet, as Emeregildo, Gonzalo, and Lupe make clear, the lines between industry and settler lives are blurred—the responsibility of the Ecuadorian state in promoting settler colonialism, which resulted in the loss of Indigenous territories, need not negate the substantial role of the oil industry that occurred in conjunction with settlement. Oil’s reach extends far beyond the limits of the platform. The ways these processes grew together has critical implications for how we understand and chart toxicity, assign legal responsibility, demarcate “impacts” in regulatory documents, and determine what harm is and how it has occurred. It is impossible to understand controversies over past and present oil operations without understanding harm as a product of the entangled

build ing a lif e o n th e agua r ico   71

relations of settlement and oil development. If we approach harm as emerging from these specific natural-industrial relations that made the northeastern Amazon, it is possible to shift attention away from discerning strict notions of causality or of moments of toxic exposure. Instead, we can attune to relational processes of slow violence (Nixon 2011) without needing to parse precise limitations between the industrial, the residential, and the natural in making harm from oil.

chapter 2

Evidence

On the road leading from the center of Lago Agrio to the Aguarico River, we pulled off to the right onto the deserted platform of the Lago Agrio-15 well. Part of the El Progreso neighborhood of the Nueva Loja Parish, the site was drilled in 1970 by Texaco, and production began in May 1972 following completion of the Sistema del Oleoducto de Transecuatoriano (Trans-Ecuadorian Oil Pipeline System, or SOTE). Texaco closed the well sixteen years later, in March 1988. Two years later PetroAmazonas took over the site. Over the course of its lifetime, the well’s official record reports a total of 1,223,284 barrels of oil produced and approximately 300,000 barrels of production waters, a toxic byproduct of extraction.1 The well lay in the middle of the platform, with a large, cleared area just beyond. Remediation workers had partially excavated the site, leaving a wall of red mud that formed the far boundary of the open space. A spill had occurred alongside the waste pit, which workers had since remediated (Pit 2B in court records; Zambrano Lozada 2011, Annex E, 37). The exposed walls of the pit were the terracotta red of Amazonian soils, layered with fill that workers had brought in. I was with Donald Moncayo, a local activist who was working with a group associated with the plaintiffs of the Aguinda v. Texaco lawsuit, the Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía (Amazon Defense Front, FDA). Donald had been asked to accompany two photographers from the United States and a small crew of assistants. The group was working on an effort informally called the “Pit Project,” which sought to document the persistence of contamination from Texaco operations in waste pits across the former concession. We crossed the cleared area to the far bank, shuffling through inches of standing water. Here and there a glint of oil drifted on the water’s surface.

 73

74  reckoning with ha rm

Figure 2.1. Members of the Pit Project inspect the partially remediated platform of the Lago Agrio-15 well. Oil continues to leak from the bank of the excavated soil visible in the background. Photo by the author, 2012.

Several feet above us, a black stain crept down the bank of earth. Donald kicked his boots into the mud to scale his way up the eroding wall. Reaching the spot, he plunged his shovel into the bank where the stain was seeping. With each cut into the caked orange earth, more black sludge emerged. Donald narrated for the group below as he shoveled. The exposed walls have been washed by the rain, but the soil underneath has not. PetroEcuador dug this pit during remediation work a few years earlier, but the project failed to encompass the entirety of the contaminated soil, and leaching continues. Without an impermeable lining, which should have been installed during the creation of the pit, the oil migrates, centimeter by centimeter, breaching the boundaries where the pit used to lie. From the bottom of what used to be a waste pit filled with several meters of crude oil, production waters, and industrial byproducts, I looked up at the walls of stratified mud, clay, and oil. As though we were standing in the middle of an archeological dig, the horizons of soil above marked the layered history of industrial operations: of companies arriving and leaving, of remediation efforts and their failures of toxic

e vi d e nce  75

containment and removal, of legal trials and the continuing persistence of crude oil in these soils. Donald held out a chunk of caked black earth for the group’s inspection. His presentation of this sample, documented and indelibly framed by GPS coordinates, and accompanied by his narration, mobilized the evidence of particularity—this well site, this pit, this shovelful—to show the contamination still present in the Amazon. This chapter deals with evidentiary practices and how they relate to legal renderings of harm in the Aguinda lawsuit. While the mud Donald held out for our inspection on the Lago Agrio-15 site was clearly contaminated, the qualities that rendered it evidence of harm for the Pit Project do not easily translate into other registers of evidence. Throughout my fieldwork, these tensions surrounding harm continually surfaced: what was evident for people living in the Amazon did not align with legal definitions of evidence.

The Consortium On February 21, 1964, the Ecuadorian state granted more than one million hectares (2.5 million ac) to Texaco, which was later reduced twice to the 497,301 hectares (1.23 million ac) that formed the Napo Concession (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 92). In October 1965, Texaco and Gulf delegated their work to a subsidiary company, Texpet, which executed operations under Ecuador’s supervision. In March 1967, one of Texaco’s exploratory wells near what is now Lago Agrio hit the legendary black gold. National headlines declared, “Oil gushed in the East!” Oil exploration continued with fervor. In 1972, Ecuador began commercial oil production under a joint venture between the newly formed state company, Corporación Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana (Ecuadorian State Petroleum Company, CEPE), and the Texaco and Gulf Companies of the United States. Texaco was responsible for the design, management, and control of the consortium operations from 1972 to 1992. By 1972, the 503-kilometer (313 mi) SOTE pipeline was finished, connecting fields in the Amazon to the recently completed oil refinery in Esmeraldas on the western coast. The pipeline’s construction and the roadway accompanying it completed the route between Quito and Lago Agrio, greatly facilitating the movement of settlers seeking land into the Amazon’s northern regions. All told, the processes of oil development and state-sponsored colonization brought well over 300,000 colonists to the Amazon, who claimed more than 4.5 million hectares of land (11 million ac) (Sawyer 2004; Wasserstrom and Southgate 2013; Lucero

76  reckoning with ha rm

2008).2 In the years between 1964 and 1994, approximately one-fifth of the forests in the Oriente region were cut down due to colonization enabled by governmental policies, for a total of 2.1 million hectares (5.19 million ac). Indigenous nationalities retained only a small portion of their original territories (Wasserstrom and Southgate 2013; Southgate, Wasserstrom, and Reider 2009, 2). Over the course of twenty-eight years (1964–1992), Texaco drilled 339 wells, built eighteen production stations, and extracted an estimated 1.5 billion barrels of crude (Kimerling 2006a, 449). Texaco led the consortium and operated unhindered by regulations it followed in the United States that were designed to protect the health of oil workers, residents, and the environment. During this time, spills from the SOTE resulted in approximately 16.8 million gallons of crude being released into the surrounding environment (Kimerling 2006a, 457). In addition to accidental spills, contamination was also by design: within consortium operations Texaco deliberately dumped an estimated 19.3 billion gallons of production waste (also called oil field brine) into the surrounding environment without treating it, despite contemporaneous industry standards that recommended disposing of toxic waste via reinjection wells (Kimerling 2006a, 450). Some estimate that by 1993, more than thirty billion gallons of toxic waste and crude oil were discharged into the soil and water of the Oriente (Hurtig and San Sebastián 2005, 800). In other cases, Texaco built waste pits without impermeable liners to prevent waste from seeping into the surrounding soil; workers lit overflowing waste pits on fire or simply covered them over with dirt. When Texaco conducted remediation, efforts were minimal and utterly inadequate. The twenty-year contract designated Texaco as the consortium’s operator in the Napo Concession, the name of the oil block that the company operated.3 Texaco, as the technical manager and executor of the consortium, was in charge of the design, construction, installation, and operation of the infrastructure and equipment necessary to explore and exploit petroleum. Designating one actor in a consortium as operator was standard industry practice of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). During most of this period, Texaco owned 37.5 percent of the consortium and PetroEcuador owned 62.5 percent. OPEC designed agreements such as these to promote national development of oil reserves: ideally, foreign companies would develop oil fields with existing technology and then turn them over to the budding state company after twenty years.4

e vi d e nce  77

In the years following the consortium’s formation, Ecuador raised royalty and tax rates on Texaco earnings from 44.4 percent to 87.3 percent by the mid-1970s. In 1977 Gulf Oil left Ecuador, and PetroEcuador bought Gulf’s shares, giving the state a majority stake of 62.5 percent, which it retained for the rest of the consortium’s contract (Barrett 2014, 25). Texaco’s share remained 37.5 percent. Luis Alberto Aráuz, the former general counsel for CEPE and author of Ecuadorian Oil Law, estimates that the Ecuadorian government made $23.5 billion (including royalties, taxes, and sales) and Texaco $1.6 billion during operations (Aráuz 2009, 428). Chevron maintains that Texaco made only $490 million after taxes from a $25 billion venture (Patel 2012, 10). Although those involved dispute the exact figures, it is clear that political and economic elites captured most of the wealth (Aráuz 2009; Barrett 2014). In 1993, following the contract’s conclusion and Texaco’s exit from the country, a group of lawyers filed a lawsuit against Texaco on behalf of thirty thousand Amazonians (Aguinda v. Texaco) living in the concession area, the land granted by the state for oil development. Asking for reparations for environmental, health, and cultural damages, the lawsuit brought unprecedented international attention to the region. One year before the suit’s initiation, in June 1992, Texaco’s contract had expired, and all fields were turned over to PetroEcuador. Following Texaco’s departure, Fugro-McClelland and Woodward-Clyde Consultants performed environmental audits to document the state of the concession. Texaco then entered into negotiations with Ecuador to reach a remediation agreement. Based on these audits, the government drew up a list of sites and a $40 million plan for environmental remediation for 37.5 percent of the sites identified as contaminated, corresponding to Texaco’s ownership in the consortium. In 1995, Giovanni Rosanía, then deputy minister of Energy and Mines and a former employee of the Texaco-PetroEcuador consortium,5 signed a “Remedial Action Plan” (RAP) with Texaco, making the company responsible for remediating 133 well sites and seven spill areas. The remaining contaminated sites, more than two hundred of them, were designated as PetroEcuador’s responsibility. Texaco negotiated the terms of the remediation, setting 5,000 total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) for soils as the limit, fifty times more toxic than US standards at the time and five times more toxic than those in Ecuador. The agreement did not specify any action on contaminated waterways or provide for treatment costs for people affected by contamination (Barrett 2014, 56–58). The remediation proceeded over the course of the next three years.

78  reckoning with ha rm

The final act of the agreement, signed on September 30, 1998, by the Ministry of Energy and Mines, PetroEcuador, and the Texas Petroleum Company, stated that the Ecuadorian government agreed to free and absolve Texpet of any further liability relating to the environmental impacts resulting from the consortium’s operations. This agreement would later prove a major point of contention in the Aguinda lawsuit, in which Chevron would maintain that the entire lawsuit was invalid. Ultimately, in his 2011 judgment, Zambrano ruled that the release did not exclude the possibility of Texaco’s liability to third parties, such as the plaintiffs (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 31–33). Although approved by the state, many did not accept the remediation work as sufficient. Lawyers, scientists, and activist groups insisted that the cleanup was both inadequate and fraudulent. In addition, on many sites within the concession, no action had been taken at all because they belonged to PetroEcuador. The remediation was conducted largely by subcontractors, a list of which was included in the RAP. However, companies not included on the list were also contracted. Some of these subcontractors had PetroEcuador officials as silent owners or had other obvious conflicts of interest (Kimerling 2006a, 497–500). Administration of the $40 million for remediation was so badly mismanaged that a large portion of the funds was diverted into the pockets of unqualified sham companies. Upon reviewing the report of the remediation process, William Subra, a US-based chemist and expert on remediation of oil fields, commented to Judith Kimerling, a prominent attorney and academic who has written extensively on the case, “They really did not do much” (Kimerling 2006a, 502). During fieldwork, people often showed me crude oil and chemical byproducts that remained in the soils and streams of sites remediated under the RAP in order to demonstrate that the remediation was a farce.

The aguinda v. texaco Lawsuit On February 14, 2011, at the Provincial Court of Justice in Sucumbíos, Judge Zambrano offered his decision in María Aguinda et al. v. Chevron Corporation. The decision came after eight years of litigation in Lago Agrio and eighteen years after the initiation of the suit (Kohn et al. 1993). Filling 189 pages of block text, with every odd page meticulously initialed for legitimacy, the sprawling document summarizes more than 200,000 pages of court records. Zambrano found Chevron liable for contamination totaling $8.6 billion in damages. The ruling marked the

e vi d e nce  79

largest civil penalty awarded in history. In a twist unknown in US law but recognized by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Zambrano ordered the amount doubled if the defendant did not publicly apologize to the plaintiffs as a gesture of moral redress within two weeks of the sentence.6 Chevron did not apologize. The Aguinda case has made the Oriente region famous. The original complaint, signed by seventy-six Indigenous and mestizo farmers on behalf of an estimated thirty thousand “similarly situated” people living within the concession between 1972 and 1992, was filed in New York in 1993 by Cristóbal Bonifaz, an American lawyer of Ecuadorian heritage.7 The plaintiffs accused Texaco of “wanton, negligent, reckless, intentional” acts that produced “property damage, personal injuries, increased risks of cancer and other diseases, and .  .  . resulted in the degradation and destruction of the environment in which the plaintiffs and their families live.” The plaintiffs charged that these effects resulted from decisions made for “economic gain to dump unprocessed oil into the environment, and thereby to expose plaintiffs and the class to toxic crude oil, and to benzene, toluene, arsenic, lead, mercury, hydrocarbons and other toxins, knowing that such substances were toxic to humans” (Kohn et al. 1993). The damages fell into three broad categories: environmental harm, harm to human health, and cultural harm. Cultural harm (daño cultural) was later eliminated. Specifically, the plaintiffs sought “the elimination and removal of contaminating elements that continue to threaten the environment and the health of inhabitants. . . . The reparation of the resulting environmental damages, in accordance with article 43 of the Environmental Management Law” (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 2). In initial proceedings in New York, the court focused on a jurisdictional dispute over whether the United States was the appropriate site for the lawsuit. Texaco argued that the case should be tried in Ecuador because operations had taken place there, while the plaintiffs asserted that because the company had made operational decisions in the United States, New York was the proper location. Chevron denied that the lawsuit was based in fact, rejecting claims that the company had caused any damage, committed civil crime, or could be held guilty of malice or negligence. Once litigation began in Ecuador, the company deferred responsibility to TexPet,8 denied that Chevron had any obligations as Texaco’s successor, contested efforts to apply environmental legislation retroactively, and rejected the legal claim that the plaintiffs formed a common class. The following year, US Federal Court Judge Rakoff pro-

80  recko ning with ha rm

nounced Ecuador the appropriate forum for the lawsuit under forum non conveniens, on the grounds that the case had “everything to do with Ecuador and nothing to do with the United States” (Kimerling 2013, 246). In 2003, the plaintiffs filed the Aguinda complaint in the Superior Court of Justice in Lago Agrio. Marching behind a banner stretching the width of the street that read Justicia Ya! Texaco Basta! (Justice Now! Enough with Texaco!), Indigenous and settler leaders from the plaintiffs raised their fists and chanted as they made their way to the courthouse. Supporters behind them held homemade signs, carrying messages from affected communities, calling for action, and admonishing Texaco.9 At the courthouse, people watched as the plaintiffs held up a banner that read Amazonía libre de ChevronToxico (The Amazon free of ChevronToxico) as Ecuadorian Special Forces troops stood by. Located on Via Quito, the main road through Lago Agrio that leads to Ecuador’s capital, the courthouse is less than a mile from the state oil camp that Texaco originally built in the 1960s in Cofán territory. The courthouse shares the four-story building with a variety of shops. The facade is covered in reflective windows obscured by low-hanging electrical wires, and the courthouse presides over a jumble of motorcycles, vendors selling roasted plantain, honking horns, and vallenato music. Inside, Judge Alberto Guerra opened by addressing the courtroom. Behind him, a mural of an Amazonian Lady Justice filled the wall, her right hand brandishing a double-edged sword, while her left sustained the scales of evidence. Knee-deep in a river, her gaze is matched by a subtle smile, the bucolic jungle backdrop diminished by her towering presence presiding over the courtroom. Unlike other representations of the goddess, no blindfold covers her eyes.10 Instead, she scrutinizes onlookers as a fiery sun sets behind her. In this lawsuit, the passage of time has played a crucial role. By the time litigation began in Lago Agrio, more than ten years had passed since Texaco had stopped operating in Ecuador. The Chevron Corporation acquired Texaco in a $45 billion merger in 2001, making it the fourth-largest oil company in the world at the time. PetroEcuador’s continued oil operations on former Texaco sites further complicated matters, since it was now necessary to demonstrate not only the presence of contamination but also that the contamination had resulted from operations under Texaco and not from subsequent companies. Ecuador had also passed new environmental and industrial regulations, and international standards had changed significantly since the time of

e vi d e nce  81

operations under the consortium. The court declared that norms specified by current regulations (including parameters for acceptable levels of contamination on industrial sites) could not be applied retroactively.11 There was no jury, and no verbal testimony. The case began with a presentation of statements by both sides and then proceeded to a phase called judicial inspections. During judicial inspections, the courtroom became mobile: the judge, lawyers, technical experts, and administrative staff traveled to 122 former Texaco sites (wells, production facilities, spill sites) across the concession, among them the Lago Agrio-15 site that opened this chapter. Both parties nominated sites for inspection in front of the judge. Technicians from both sides took samples of soil and water, which each party later analyzed. Judicial inspections constituted most of the fact-finding portion of the trial. Once this phase concluded, a panel of court-appointed experts reviewed the results from both parties. While this was the intended design, the actual proceedings were far more convoluted. Ultimately, only 54 sites were inspected out of the 122 proposed because the process took too long, and the plaintiffs petitioned the judge to conclude the inspections and move to an appraisal by an independent expert. The resulting Technical Summary Report (2008) by engineer Richard Cabrera Vega was eventually thrown out after Chevron alleged inappropriate collaborations between Cabrera and the plaintiffs’ team. Zambrano did not consider the Technical Summary Report in the Aguinda ruling. In 2011, the court found Chevron guilty and fined the company $9.5 billion. Following an extensive appeal process in Ecuador, the ruling was subsequently upheld by the highest level of Ecuadorian courts. Despite this landmark ruling, the case has not yet concluded. Chevron no longer has any holdings in Ecuador, and thus the Aguinda sentence could not be executed there. As a result, the plaintiffs have taken the case to countries where Chevron has operations (such as Argentina, Canada, and Brazil), seeking a ruling by a third-party court to claim the financial settlement. Yet this process has proven difficult: for example, in 2018, a Canadian court ruled that Chevron Canada is separate from Chevron USA and thus could not be required to pay for the sister company’s toxic legacy. Allegations of fraud and wrongdoing by both parties have plagued the twenty-year legal case. Following the sentence, Chevron has continued to use what activists have described as “scorched earth tactics,” including suing the former plaintiff lawyer Steven Donziger in 2011 under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) for $32.3 million in legal fees (Barrett 2014). In 2014, Judge Kaplan

82  recko ning with ha rm

concluded in Chevron’s favor that the Aguinda ruling had been arrived at through a fraudulent legal process and was “illegitimate and unenforceable,” and that the “decision was obtained by corrupt means” (Chevron Corporation v. Steven Donziger, et al., No. 11-0691 2014). Donziger appealed, arguing that Kaplan overstepped the legal bounds of the RICO statute. In 2016, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s ruling that Donziger and his team cannot collect the $9.5 billion judgment in the United States (Fisher 2016). The RICO lawsuit is a clear example of a Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation (SLAPP), in which corporations seek to silence communities that have suffered from environmental pollution. In SLAPPs, corporations employ charges such as racketeering or fraud to intimidate, silence, and bankrupt those who attempt to hold corporations accountable, often in relation to environmental concerns (Pring and Canan 1996; Hilson 2016; Weyler 2018; American Civil Liberties Union n.d.). Following the RICO case, Chevron has continued to pursue Donziger, and in 2021 he was found guilty of criminal contempt and professional misconduct (Paz 2021; North 2021, 2022). Since 2006, Chevron has also pursued international arbitration at the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, alleging that the Ecuadorian government interfered in the judicial process and thus violated a bilateral investment treaty between the United States and Ecuador. In August 2011, the international arbitration panel awarded Chevron $96 million and issued an order for Ecuador to suspend enforcement of its judgment in the Aguinda case. Following appeals, in January 2016, the court ruled that Ecuador was indeed bound by the US-Ecuador bilateral investment agreement; Ecuador appealed but the decision was ultimately upheld. Ecuador then paid Chevron $112 million (the original award plus interest) for the contract dispute, while remaining in disagreement with the ruling. In 2018, the Hague court found Ecuador liable for “denying justice” to Chevron by allowing the courts to issue the Aguinda judgment against the company and indicated that no other countries should enforce the judgment either. The tribunal did note in 2015, however, that the settlement between Chevron and the Ecuadorian state did not prevent residents from suing over contamination in the future (Business & Human Rights Resource Centre n.d.). The RICO decision, and the rulings by the Permanent Court of Arbitration, have both significantly complicated the process of executing the Aguinda sentence for the plaintiffs. As of this writing, whether the plaintiffs will ultimately be able to collect the settlement remained uncertain.

e vi d e nce  83

The Ecuadorian government owns all subterranean hydrocarbon reserves in the country. As both operator and regulator, the state has a predetermined investment in oil. Although Ecuador is a small oil producer both regionally and globally, oil’s importance to the national economy is significant. Ranking fifth within Latin America, twenty-eighth globally for oil production, and nineteenth for total oil reserves, Ecuador exports around three-quarters of its oil production (Worldometer 2016). At the time of fieldwork (2011–2013), petroleum constituted 53 percent of total exports (valued at $13 billion), with 61 percent of that oil going to the United States. In the years since, petroleum has dropped to constitute about a third of exports (valued at $7.8 billion in 2019) (Observatory of Economic Complexity 2022). At present, 68 percent (68,196 km2) of the Amazon has been zoned for drilling, with approximately half constituted by new blocks awaiting bids in the southern Amazon (Lessmann et al. 2016). State-led oil companies account for approximately 80 percent of national production, with international companies such as Repsol, Eni, Tecpectrol, and Andes Petroleum making up the rest (US Energy Information Administration 2017).12 Over the past decade, oil and mining projects have been increasingly run through loans from the Chinese government (Gill 2015). Conditions on the loans require that Ecuador invest a portion of the loan in projects with Chinese company involvement and to repay debt in oil, such as with the 2016 Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric dam (Casey and Krauss 2018). In part a result of the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020, the price of crude oil fell dramatically, prompting the Moreno government to try to renegotiate debt payment terms in response to the loss of oil revenue (Reuters Staff 2020). Concerns over the future of oil in the Amazon remain linked to a broader set of geopolitical divisions over the role of extraction in relation to the Ecuadorian state.

In Search of the Representative Sample The morning that we visited Lago Agrio-15, the well site was quiet; however, this pit was not new to audiences. Some six years earlier, this site featured in the judicial inspections of the Aguinda lawsuit. Tracing the site’s history in the court record, I learned that on 8:30 a.m. on March 16, 2006, Dr. Germán Yánez Ruiz (the president of the Superior Court of Justice of Nueva Loja), lawyer and secretary Liliana Suárez, plaintiff lawyers Pablo Fajardo and Julio Prieto, and defendant lawyers Adolfo Callejas Ribadeneira and Alberto Racines also gathered on this site,

84  recko ning with ha rm

along with members of the technical teams (Zambrano Lozada 2011; see accompanying trial documents, Cuerpo 921, pages 101 and 119). Transcripts of the judicial inspections form a substantial portion of the court record, full of tedious arguments between the lawyers, repeated at multiple inspection sites. Pages are crowded with documentation: crooked photocopies of the passports of technical experts, historic documents from the state or PetroEcuador’s record of operations, hazy photos of sites at the time of Texaco’s operations, and aerial images charting forest cover and industrial movements from the Geographic Military Institute. As was typical of judicial inspections, the visit to Lago Agrio-15 opened with an assessment of the site and verbal observations by the president of the court. Judicial inspections had been occurring for almost two years at the time of the Lago Agrio-15 inspection, ever since 2004. Described as more “theatre” (Tavares 2011) or “circus” (Barrett 2014) than legal proceeding, the inspections were attended by media, food vendors, environmental activists, security forces, and Chevron supporters, in addition to lawyers, technical teams, and the judge and his assistant. In early inspections, plaintiff technicians donned white Hazmat suits complete with facemasks to take soil cores and samples. The jungle heat made wearing such attire untenable, and they were later abandoned. Arguments by the lawyers went on at length, making for long days beneath the equatorial sun. When residents were present for inspections on their land, their comments were summarized in the court proceedings. On this site, the attorneys were engaged in a dispute over the appropriate way to take samples. At each site, the well platform, waste pits, and surrounding fields, streams, and forest all figure into the site’s industrial zone. Given the simultaneous growth of oil development and colonization, no clear distinctions exist between what is industrial, residential, or natural. Thus, the first task of the group in each inspection was to determine the relevant area of survey. The representatives for each side inspected the area, using their prior knowledge of operations, including where waste pits had been located or where spills had occurred. This process required the knowledge of individuals living in the area while the well was operating. Otherwise, a team assessing a site aided only by old maps or aerial images could easily miss spill areas or even old pits, which were covered over with dirt and the slow creep of the forest. By selecting and sampling locations named by both parties, the judicial inspections sought to characterize and understand oil’s impact upon the concession at large. The concession’s size of more than a million acres presented a

e vi d e nce  85

significant challenge for those seeking to determine what had happened within it. Thus, sampling involved extrapolation based on the presence of hydrocarbons at particular sites and the total area to characterize the impact of Texaco’s operations over twenty years. Disputes over where and how to sample occurred throughout the judicial inspections and illustrate the case’s technical arguments over how to include contextual information—for example, historical knowledge of a place that has been altered by oil operations—within scientific and legal procedures. The inspection at Lago Agrio-15 gives a sense of how samples came to represent a site, as well as the relationship between samples and the entire concession to produce legal evidence. Zambrano also excerpted part of these proceedings in the final ruling (2011, 102–104; the full record of this judicial inspection is included in Cuerpo 921, pages 101, 119–101, 145), thus providing a historical record of the conversation that took place on one of the sites I visited during the Pit Project. By comparing it to my encounters with some of the same places during fieldwork, I illustrate how disputes over context illustrate the centrality of relations in harm, even in legal domains. Singular, decontextualized pieces of evidence were not enough to apprehend the harm that the court was assessing. It was only through the judicial labor of drawing different forms of evidence into relation with historical documents, expert perspectives, and hypothetical standards of a “good” oil company that an assessment of harm began to emerge. To recount these moments, let me conjure an image of the group of lawyers and the judge standing on the well site, likely with a small white tent erected nearby for shade, and a collection of augers, shovels, plastic bags, and other implements for soil core sampling. Supporters of each party, onlookers, and press formed an audience, listening as the lawyers made their cases to Judge Yánez. Disputing the procedure for taking samples, plaintiff attorney Pablo Fajardo addressed the judge, noting that Chevron’s technicians often took samples out of context, such as outside the boundaries of the pit. “With what objective?” he asked rhetorically. “To say that there is no contamination. Logically, if I take a sample from the top of that hill, no evidence of contamination will ever be found. The sample should be taken from the site where the pits are so that it can be known if evidence of hydrocarbons currently exists.” Fajardo continued, critiquing the preferred sampling practice of the Chevron team, a process called composite sampling. “They [the defendant] take a sample in the pit, and two other samples out of the pit, and then by homogenizing the samples, at the end these types of evidence are

86  reckoning with ha rm

diluted or considerably diminished.” For Fajardo, mixing samples from different places on the same site, including from where one would not expect to find contamination, is a technical apparatus to reduce the levels of pollution detected on the site: “These are small tricks in the technical part that are being implemented in order to detract, diminish, and make it appear before the court that contaminating elements do not exist, when this is not true, Mr. President.” For the plaintiffs, a representative sample would be a sample taken from locations where one would expect to find contamination, such as downhill from a pit or spill site. If found, the presence of hydrocarbons would indicate that products from oil exploitation had migrated from their original position and, by extension, contaminated the environment surrounding the pit. This sample would thus be representative of the contamination present because it captures crude and its byproducts in places they should not be. The defendant’s attorney, Adolfo Callejas, responded by stating that the task at hand was to procure a representative sample of the site. The site they were on, he noted, was quite large, and the sample should represent its entirety. He defended their approach: “This is not a trick. It is a system.” He went on to indicate that the defendant’s sampling plans were submitted and approved previously and that composite sampling techniques are in widespread use around the world, “because it is a scientific way to do it. The other [technique] is just a fishing expedition for what they call here, incorrectly, contamination, and is the mere presence of hydrocarbon residue.” Callejas rejected Fajardo’s argument that the defendants were trying to trick the court by reducing the amount of contamination present in their samples. He reiterated their undertaking: answering the question of whether oil had migrated beyond its bounds on industrial sites. Arguing that people are too quick to assume that contamination has spread, Callejas implied that characterizations of the contamination in the region trafficked in hyperbole, mistakenly “turning this into an environmental disaster zone, that has no comparison in the world, according to what is said with great ease of the tongue, but without a single test, because up until now it has not been possible to demonstrate in these Judicial Inspections that this is the truth.” For Callejas, representation was achieved through a composite sample, in which soil from different locations at the same site were mixed together to get a result that speaks to the area as a whole. A representative sample would not reflect the most contaminated spot on the site, but rather average the entire site—from the spot uphill from the pit, where there could logically be no migration of toxic compounds, to

e vi d e nce  87

the area downstream. The result of drawing from both contaminated and noncontaminated sites is a lower total indicator of contamination. For Fajardo, however, this approach of “homogenization” is a ploy to obscure the presence of contamination by diminishing the overall levels of hydrocarbons measured. At stake in these disputes over testing protocol is the truth of the individual data point, and the ability for it to represent a larger set of concerns: contamination across the concession, the responsibility of a given company for that contamination, and the broader suite of harms associated with that contamination over many years. For the defendant the particulars are only meaningful in their aggregation. Thus the ability of a specific sample to demonstrate contamination is tightly linked to what each party contends about sampling and representation prior to initiating testing, and to both sides’ knowledge of the industry and the specific site. In other words, neither sampling approach is scientifically incorrect, and both are representative. Yet, the two approaches do not seek to represent the same object. What becomes clear from this one sampling dispute on the Lago Agrio-15 site is that interpretation of the physical environment and what specific results might mean is built into the very design of sampling. The accumulation of samples to be rendered facts in legal proceedings is a political process from its start. Such disputes were not limited to Lago Agrio-15; debates about sampling procedures occurred across the inspected sites. In the judicial inspection at the Cononaco-6 well, for example, Callejas again objected to the idea that the plaintiffs could use their prior knowledge of where to sample on the site. Callejas called the plaintiff’s approach a fishing expedition: “They throw a hook and see where there is a piece of crude, and they make that out to be representative of the entire area. This is deceit, Mr. President [of the court], this is a lie, this is a farce. In all practices of sampling, one tries to get a sample that represents the entire site, in its surface, in its width, in its length, in its depth” (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 103–104). In industrial areas such as this well site, contamination is not equally distributed. Someone familiar with the industry could predict, in general, which areas would likely be more contaminated. By contrast, someone familiar with a particular site—as the plaintiffs often were, since they were in touch with the property owners and farmers who lived near the wells—could point to areas where past spills had occurred or where overgrown waste pits lay. Their selection of sites was informed by this accumulated, collective experience and historical knowledge

88  recko ning with ha rm

of how operations unfolded. Judgmental sampling, the approach that Callejas called a “fishing expedition,” is an established methodology for assessing contamination. Max Liboiron provides a clear example of how judgmental sampling makes sense when assessing pollution: “If someone thinks their oil tank is leaking, they don’t grid off their entire yard and randomly select some grid points to sample. This approach might miss the tank entirely but would represent the overall lawn quite well. Instead, they sample around the tank, and often only around the tank. In quantitative research design, that is considered a biased sample. And that’s fine in science, so long as everyone knows that’s how the count is organized” (Liboiron 2021, 147). Whether judgmental, random, systematic, search, or transect sampling, there are a range of approaches based in good scientific practice (“Soil Sampling for Environmental Contaminants, IAEA-TECDOC-1415” 2004; Pennock, Yates, and Braidek 2007). The point is that the sampling approach and what it seeks to represent through the samples need to be transparent. Callejas’s argument presumes that blind testing or standard testing (i.e., testing the same set of points on every site, or the random grid in Liboiron’s example) would be more representative because it is perceived to be more objective. In fact, neither the plaintiffs’ nor the defendant’s proposed testing procedure was “site blind” or preinterpretive. In both cases, the teams employed prior knowledge of the industry and the individual sites to decide where to sample, based on what they sought to illustrate. In the case of demonstrating harm from oil production, nature does not speak for itself. Lawyers, technicians, and scientists are engaged in a set of complex transformations that are necessary in order to turn soil samples into data that can index a state of affairs. None of these parties acts without motivation, prior knowledge, and personal context. Such movements between the site, the sample, and efforts to create representative evidence show how values reside in the facts themselves (Mol 2002). Allegations by the attorneys of trickery and “fishing expeditions” allude to the high stakes of technicalities, including, for example: where technicians take samples, how many samples technicians take, the processes by which laboratory scientists analyze and evaluate them, and the ways that the attorneys contextualize them in relation to the concession. The details of such technicalities are not marginalia in this story. Following ethnographer and philosopher Annemarie Mol, the “technicalities themselves, in their most intimate details, are technically underdetermined. They depend on social matters: practicalities, contingencies, power plays, traditions” (2002, 171). The procedure for

e vi d e nce  89

collecting samples profoundly affects the evidence of harm that emerges from each site. Making legal evidence is a matter of coordinating consequential technicalities. Ultimately, the judicial inspections of the two pits on the Lago Agrio15 site confirmed that the soil was contaminated with barium, benzanthracene, benzopyrene, cadmium, naphthalene, pyrene, and TPH in excess of Ecuadorian standards. The water was also found to be contaminated with benzopyrene, cadmium, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in excess of Ecuadorian standards (Fajardo Mendoza, Prieto Méndez, and Sáenz M 2011, 33). Yet the stakes of the legal disputes over representative sampling apply far beyond this specific site alone and become readily apparent when the sampling results from the judicial inspections are compiled. Technicians for both parties took a tremendous number of samples over the course of the lawsuit. Scientists tested samples for TPH, BTEX (benzene, toluene, xylene), PAHs, and heavy metals, such as mercury, cadmium, lead, zinc, chromium 6, and barium. Chevron experts submitted approximately eight times more results than the plaintiffs, a total of 50,939 results derived from 2,371 samples. By contrast, the plaintiff technicians submitted 6,239 results derived from 466 samples (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 99). Here it is possible to see Fajardo’s objection to “homogenization” at work: the greater number of samples submitted by the defendant, including many uncontaminated samples, resulted in a lower overall average of contaminated sites. For total petroleum hydrocarbons, 10 percent of all the results submitted presented ranges exceeding 5,000ppm of TPH, which is five times the limit of 1,000ppm in Ecuador and fifty times the limit in the United States. A total of 10.3 percent of samples fell between the ranges of 1,000 to 5,000ppm of TPH, and 79.7 percent results were under 1,000ppm TPH. When these results are examined with respect to the submitting party, the sampling differences become apparent: of the results Chevron provided, 88.2 percent were beneath 1,000ppm. By contrast, the plaintiffs submitted 17 percent of the sample, of which 62 percent showed contamination over 1,000ppm TPH. That is, while Chevron submitted around five times as many samples as the plaintiffs, nearly 80 percent of their samples showed lower levels of TPH (under 1,000ppm). The plaintiffs, on the other hand, found that well more than half of their samples were contaminated in excess of 1,000ppm TPH.13 The results from the two parties present two dramatically different portraits of the extent of contamination across the sampled sites. While an abundance of data resulted from the judicial inspections,

90  recko ning with ha rm

Figure 2.2. The Shushufindi-61 waste pit. Fallen trees and other debris accumulate on top of the swimming pool–sized pit of old crude oil. Photo by Mitch Anderson/ Amazon Frontlines.

what these data indicated about harm was far from self-evident. Beyond disputes over the veracity of individual data points, the arguments between Callejas and Fajardo point to controversies of a different kind: what allows a sample to constitute evidence of the state of contamination across the concession? Representation emerges in the judicial inspections, not as a feature of the evidence itself but as a highly fragile ontological achievement in which values, context, and contingencies are constitutive in the making of evidence.14 The “representative sample” remains an elusive and contested achievement that ultimately had to be allied with other genres of evidence in order for Zambrano to reach a conclusion in the lawsuit about whether and what harm had occurred. It is tempting to explain away the differences in the soil testing as the deep-seated motivation that oil companies have for minimizing past damage, and to assume that the defendant’s samples do not show contamination simply because they cheated the system. Indeed, there is demonstrated proof of widespread corporate efforts to exclude and

e vi d e nce  91

occlude evidence of harmful industrial practices (Oreskes and Conway 2011; Markowitz and Rosner 2002; Michaels and Monforton 2005). Yet to disregard the controversies over environmental sampling and testing as only matters of bias would be to miss an opportunity to examine how legal and scientific systems, and standards of evidence and responsibility, characterize the harm that results from oil operations. Such an exploration does not deny the existence of concerted efforts by oil companies in Ecuador, the United States, and other places to cover up corporate wrongdoing. However, it is an invitation to look further into why demonstrating harm and holding oil companies accountable is so profoundly difficult—even when abiding by accepted standards of scientific testing and legal processes. It also illustrates why decontextualized forms of evidence do not speak to harm that has occurred over decades, that has emerged out of an entangled landscape of settlement and oil development. A close look at the debates in the Aguinda case show that scientific evidence depends on relations, from the positionality of those doing the sampling to historical standards for contamination or a farmer’s intimate knowledge of industrial operations in this place.

Finca Contaminada . . . As in many parts of this region, the vegetation is so thick that you cannot see more than a few feet in front of you. Birds sing above our heads, one with a song so clear, each note is like a stone falling into a pool of water. The river winds around a shady bend. In the forest it is cool, though one can perceive the midday heat waiting in the humidity. In the distance, a chainsaw runs. Passing along the adjacent field, the cows lounge, eating without hurry. Vegetation advances quickly, easily covering the industrial legacies left by the wayside. But for those who live here and know how to read an industrial landscape, the slight indentations of the former pits, or memories of the platform that was once here, are indications of what lies just out of sight. At the top of the hill, the shadow of the lone oil drill slants downward, pointing to homes, soccer fields, schools, and farms. On another May morning, the Pit Project team had arrived at the home of Geraldo, a plaintiff in the Aguinda lawsuit. An old well formerly operated by Texaco, subsequently turned over to the RioNapo company, and later passed to the state oil company sits about twenty-​ five meters (80 ft) from his home. Geraldo takes us with him to survey the property. Passing under a barbed wire fence, we stand on the bank of

92  recko ning with ha rm

what some neighbors say was an old waste pit. Others disagree, saying that it was never a pit but simply the site of many, repeated spills. After so many years, and so many companies, it is hard to say. Donald digs down with the auger to sample. Pulling the soil up, the entire length of the sample is visibly contaminated with crude oil. As someone with extensive experience sampling contaminated sites around the region, Donald argues that this likely was a pit. A spill, he says, would rarely have such a deep profile of contamination. Geraldo watches silently. As the discussion continues among group members about where spills occurred on this site, he takes out his machete and begins to hack away at the ground with swift, horizontal cuts. Chunks of burned crude split off the blade, pliable like hard taffy. Crouching to inspect the chunks with the others, I realize that the entirety of the hill we are standing on is covered in old, charred crude oil. The extent of this dried hydrocarbon covering is hard to capture in fieldnotes or photos. None of these sites were tested in the lawsuit, Geraldo says, but there are old spills and pits everywhere here. I look down the hill toward the rest of the community. Soft in the sun, but hard and flaky in the shade, the earth seems to be covered in an old moss that has turned to asphalt over the years. A growing group of neighbors has joined the conversation, recounting more and more spills. My fieldnotes are a mess of equivocations, trying to note the order of the spills and competing versions of the layered histories of chemicals and soil beneath us. The group moves on in search of a specific pit that, unlike the one we just sampled, is indicated on the site map we have brought with us. At the edge of the pit’s bank, someone has posted a sign: Finca contaminada . . . por Texaco, RioNapo . . . Desde 1976 . . . (Contaminated farm . . . by Texaco, RioNapo . . . Since 1976 . . . ). What would make a representative sample here? Scratching off layers of asphalt into sampling bags, or digging down with a soil corer across a transect? Would the samples be representative of Texaco’s activities? Of RioNapo’s operations? Of PetroEcuador, or the companies that followed? This place was not tested in the lawsuit. If it had been, the neighborly debates over precise dates and operators presiding over different spills would have taken on new stakes. Each claim would need to be carefully dissected, verified by historical documents, and correlated with samples submitted to laboratory testing, in order that the contamination on the tip of the machete or the soil corer could be linked to a given company’s activities. How could any samples represent the layers

e vi d e nce  93

of extractive violence that have transformed Geraldo’s land? As the open-ended ellipsis on the finca contaminada sign suggests, the relations between these spills and the companies that followed defy such precise associations. This land was contaminated not by one company but by many. Geraldo and his neighbors traverse this hilltop every day. They farm the land nearby. Their children swim in the rivers farther down the road. They are already in relation to this crude, regardless of what it can be legally or scientifically said to represent. Truth is often assumed to lie in individual data points. Soil testing is conducted to provide a clear answer to the question, “Is this particular spot contaminated?” Yet, what individual samples can tell us remains deeply contested. In the Aguinda case, the issue of a “representative sample” for assessing the extent of contamination was particularly significant because the area under dispute was so large. Allegations of contamination did not involve a single industrial site but rather dealt with the transformation of a region over two decades. In the sentence, Zambrano determined that it was not necessary to inspect every hectare in the concession to arrive at an accurate assessment. Testing the entirety of the concession would have been impossible for reasons of time and money and the extent of samples it would imply. As soil scientists Dan Pennock and colleagues make clear in the opening of their primer on soil sampling, the point of sampling is to enable the characterization of a particular site rather than to know that site in its entirety. Providing an example of a ten-hectare (24.7-ac) field, which would contain 100,000 one-square-meter soil pits, they note that “sampling of the entire population would be more of an unnatural obsession than a scientific objective” (Pennock, Yates, and Braidek 2007). The entire concession could not be completely known within the context of a lawsuit, nor should it be necessary to characterize every inch of the concession in order to determine responsibility for contamination. Ultimately, soil samples alone were not sufficient to confirm or negate the presence of contamination within complex histories of extraction. In this case, historical and anecdotal materials, along with the samples, site inspections, statements from farmers, and written expert testimony, were also required to assemble sufficiently contextualized evidence of harm.

Overcoming Contradiction A small house sat on the corner of a street leading away from the center of town in Lago Agrio. Guarded by private security outside and two

94  recko ning with ha rm

small dogs, at the time of fieldwork, this was the Amazonian home of the plaintiffs’ legal team. The office was also home to an immense quantity of documentation from the case. A small room held copies of the legal files of the case: around 2,500 files, each containing a hundred pages. Stacked from floor to ceiling, the packed cabinets were ominous. At times when I was in the office, visitors arrived who were sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ case. Someone from the team might offer a brief tour of the office, taking the visitors into the room holding the files. In these moments, the sheer quantity of documentation of tests, inspections, and legal exchanges indexed the extent of wrongdoing in the case. In the lawsuit, however, the production of documentation in itself was not sufficient. The numbers generated through judicial inspections did not lend themselves to a singular explanation of the state of the concession or of Texaco’s operations. One genre of evidence could not answer the questions posed to the court, despite a shared assumption that laboratory tests would help reveal the truth. To determine the degree of contamination across the concession, attorneys had to call upon other forms of evidence—images, site inspections, numbers of pits recorded in historic documents—objects just as fragile as the samples that helped to address the question of harm in the case. Zambrano’s ruling is not a repository of uncontested objects or a pronouncement of ultimate truth, despite the weight it carries in this case. The sentence draws particular relations between specific histories, soil samples, political priorities, natures, bodies, and political and economic assumptions, and excludes others. The sentence also has a regulatory function in relation to evidence. It invokes legal conventions to police what constitutes reliable evidence, contextualizes individual genres of evidence in relation to others, decides when a sufficient amount of evidence has been reached, and evaluates what makes the objects presented compelling.15 The “fact-finding” portion of the lawsuit did not produce a clear picture of the extent of contamination in the concession’s soils and waterways. Pronouncing the differing results “untrustworthy” (2011, 112), Zambrano questioned why the defendant’s results showed relatively low levels of contamination while other studies, completed by court-appointed experts as well as plaintiff experts, demonstrated far greater levels of pollution. Zambrano argued that the quantity of samples collected enabled him to treat them statistically rather than as an accounting exercise. That is, even if some results were false or disputed, these discrepancies should not impede an overall assessment of contamination in the concession. In other words, while individual data points might

e vi d e nce  95

diverge, Zambrano maintained that the results pointed overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the concession was generally contaminated. Thus, while the fifty-four judicial inspections could not cover every hectare, the court could extrapolate to “deduce the foreseeable results in the rest of the sites not considered in the sample” (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 106). In order to move from individual samples to an overall assessment of harm, it was necessary to establish that Texaco’s operational practices were consistent across the concession and throughout their contract, a challenge given the geographic spread of the operations. Citing an abundance of samples, ninety-seven expert reports, and the widespread presence of TPH in sampled sites, Zambrano argued that it was reasonable to infer from the sampled areas that the consortium’s various oil fields were all similarly contaminated (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 106). Establishing consistency allowed the court to calculate the quantities of contaminated space by referring to existing records. Historical aerial images taken by the Geographic Military Institute enabled the location of 880 waste pits on record. Drawing on these images, in combination with documents from PetroEcuador, the court calculated that a total of 7,392,000 cubic meters of soil were contaminated within the concession.16 By extension, Zambrano concluded that surface drinking water suffered a “considerable impact” from the dumping of at least 16 billion gallons of formation waters. Constant filtrations from the pits would also have affected groundwater sources (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 125). The process of extrapolation enabled the court to calculate large numbers that would have been impossible to achieve by visiting and sampling each and every hectare of the concession. Establishing consistency regarding Texaco’s operating practices allowed the court to characterize the extent of harm within the concession; historical records provided critical context for disputes that occurred over individual sampling results. Ultimately, Zambrano drew on nonnumerical, documentary evidence to move beyond the differences in environmental sampling. For example, the court found a letter written by a Texaco official that acknowledged the company was dumping waste into the surrounding ecosystem during its twenty-year operations to be particularly telling. The March 2007 letter, from Rodrigo Pérez Pallarez, a legal representative of Texaco at the time, to Xavier Alvarado Roca, president of Vistazo magazine, declared that “15,834 million gallons were dumped between 1972 and 1990 during the entire period of operation of the Texaco Consortium” (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 112–113, 166). For Zambrano, Pérez Pallarez’s positionality as a legal representative of Texaco lent the state-

96  reckoning with ha rm

ment credibility, presumably because he would have had full knowledge of Texaco’s operations and an incentive to protect the company. The author’s authenticity as a historical witness was thus not questioned. Texaco’s operational practices, such as depositing crude oil on roads to keep down dust, were widely known by residents throughout the Amazon. As Pérez Pallarez’s public admission of dumping indicated, Chevron did not dispute many of these practices. Texaco dug pits without liners, inserted gooseneck tubes to facilitate drainage from the pit and prevent total overflow, routinely burned pits to dispose of crude waste products, and covered roads in oil. What Chevron lawyers did dispute, however, were the consequences of those practices for human health and the environment and the comparison of standard operations in 1972–1992 to present-day standards. One of the tasks posed in the lawsuit was to determine if, given the standards at the time, Texaco was at fault for certain operating choices, such as constructing unlined pits, using gooseneck pipes, and dumping production waters from the 1960s to the early 1990s. When Texaco arrived in Ecuador in the 1960s, environmental regulations were minimal. However, since 1971, the Law of Hydrocarbons included provisions calling for operators to adopt necessary measures to protect flora, fauna, and other natural resources, and avoid contaminating soil, water, and air (Steyn 2003, 262; Kimerling 2006a, 433). Throughout the time that the consortium operated, Ecuador amended the law several times and included a requirement to turn over plans to the Ministry of Energy and Mines that would detail how natural resources would be protected and adverse impacts mediated. Amendments required compliance with national environmental laws, such as the 1972 Law of Waters, the 1974 Law of Fishing and Fishing Development, and the 1976 Law for the Prevention and Control of Environmental Contamination (Kimerling 2006a, 433). Many people I spoke to maintained that the government rarely enforced these regulations. When it did levy fines on Texaco, they were so minor that they did not constitute any significant deterrent. In this regulatory vacuum, Texaco effectively set its own environmental and operational standards (Kimerling 2006a, 436). It was not until the early 2000s that Ecuador developed comprehensive environmental regulation for the oil industry. Determining historically specific standards posed a problem. As Zambrano noted, the experts came to contradictory conclusions about the existence of environmental damage in their reports (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 94). To overcome diverging understandings of Texaco’s conduct,

e vi d e nce  97

the judge followed a precedent from the First Chamber of the Civil and Mercantile Old Supreme Court concerning how to determine fault retrospectively. Invoking the hypothetical entity of a “good oil company,” Zambrano calibrated reports of Texaco’s procedures in comparison with the company’s knowledge and capacity at the time of its operations (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 81). Citing the unresolvable differences between the two parties’ experts on the “same historical moment,” the judge drew on a 1962 text published by the American Petroleum Institute in Dallas, the Primer of Oil and Gas Production, to ascertain historical standards for oil operations. Given that the text was published prior to the start of Texaco operations in Ecuador, the judge asserted that it can be assumed with “complete certainty” that the text is “objective, impartial” and “closely reflects what could have been expected from an ‘average good oil company’” at that time (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 81). Notably, a Texaco official, T. C. Brink, wrote a chapter entitled “Special Problems,” which warned about the need for taking precautions in dealing with the products of oil operations. Zambrano interpreted this to mean that Texaco officials were well informed of the risks posed by oil drilling and its byproducts, such as production waters, since these were discussed in the text. As with Pallarez’s admission, the position of Brink as a former Texaco employee proved essential for the validity of the document and its inclusion as evidence in the case. Zambrano mobilized the text to establish historically specific industry knowledge of the risks of oil extraction. Historical documents proved critical in evaluating the oil company’s behavior. Zambrano quoted a letter of March 21, 1983, from the governor of Napo Province, Ney Estuipiñan Recalde, to engineer Rene Bucaram, then general manager of Texaco, as evidence that company officials were aware that their operations were contaminating the concession. Describing the “citizen clamor” over the “grave damage that is being caused in the sector of Shushufindi due to the contamination of waters, rivers, and streams from the spilling of hydrocarbon wastes by the workers of the CEPE-Texaco Consortium,” Estuipiñan Recalde asked the manager to take measures “to avoid the continuation of these damages, which will not escape your illustrious judgment, because they will eventually have incalculable repercussions for the ecosystem, and in particular the agricultural sector” (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 80). It is clear that Texaco had the knowledge and technical capacity to dispose of production waters by reinjecting them deep underground as early as 1974. Accounts demonstrate that the company did not use suf-

98  recko ning with ha rm

ficient care in handling formation waters and that officials had ignored warnings such as the one by the governor of Napo, allowing the judge to infer that the company had not behaved as a hypothetical “good oil company” of that time. Zambrano concluded that the company had the ability but not the will, likely due to the added expense, to invest in reinjection technology (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 161–166; Barrett 2014, 88). These are some examples of how, in the ruling, Zambrano connected distinct domains, natures, and scales; flattened differences in samples, standards, and times; and contextualized objects in order to respond to questions about responsibility, contamination, and the behavior of a “good” oil company.17 The ruling draws aerial images, PetroEcuador records, historical letters to Texaco officials, public admissions from Texaco officials in media, and texts written at the time of operations into relation with contested soil sampling data. No evidentiary form stands alone; neither numbers nor letters sufficed to answer questions about harm under Texaco’s operations. Yet drawing connections between genres of evidence allowed Zambrano to make assertions about truth and wrongdoing.

Evident but Not Evidence Leaving Taracoa, we take the “old road,” one of the first roads Texaco built when it opened operations in the Yuca oil camp. Two cows trot in front of the truck as overhanging branches and grasses whack the sides of our vehicle as we bump along. The road is narrow, cut through the surrounding green, just wide enough for one vehicle to pass, with a mound of overgrown asphalt down the middle. Ramón, who works with the plaintiffs, stops the truck. This, he says, as we walk around to the front of the truck, is how Texaco made roads. This is an environmental liability. At some points, the tracks of the road have been worn away, but the degraded midline of crude persists. There were more than six hundred kilometers (375 mi) of unpaved roads throughout the concession (Kimerling 1991), upon which workers routinely applied crude oil to keep dirt down until the end of the 1990s. We continued to make our way out of the community. The forest opened to reveal an expansive cleared slope. Our other companion, Jaime, also a plaintiff and a resident of this community, waved his hand in the direction of the valley below. The grass rippling across the valley was a different hue of green than the hilltops. This is the only thing that

e vi d e nce  99

will grow here now, he says. The pipeline used to pass over this area, and there were spills all through here. The whole area is contaminated. It is deceptively green. If someone who lived here had not told me, I never would have had reason to suspect that the soils were contaminated. But to a trained eye, the difference of color, the changes in the grass, the knowledge of spills in the past, indicate the chemicals beneath. The company might be gone, but contamination endures. For individuals living here, the hardened base of the crude paths and shades of green still speak to Texaco’s legacy. Standing on the slope, I am reminded that what is evident depends on position. While in some places contamination is obvious, in others I need to be taught how to locate it. Some months later, I was on a tour of sites in the Amazon run by Chevron representatives, which I will describe in more detail in chapter 5. People in the Amazon frequently refer to the practice of dumping crude on dirt roads as a feature of early Texaco operations. A wellknown image has circulated over the years of the first signing plaintiff in the lawsuit, Maria Aguinda, with her then young children standing barefoot on the Via Auca in front of her home, the road sticky from fresh crude (Dematteis and Szymczak 2008). Others told me how the streets of Lago Agrio would become an impassable mess whenever it rained, fresh crude staining feet, shoes, and clothes as people made their way about town. A journalism student in the group posed a question about the spilling of crude oil on the roads to the Chevron spokesperson. This is a very common practice, he responded. It is called “road oiling” in English. He continued, describing how before a road was asphalted, oil was applied to keep the dust down. He went on to note that the municipal authorities specifically requested the application of degraded crude to the roads. One doesn’t spill oil just to spill oil, because oil is a product that is sold. . . . If it has affected the health of people, I don’t know, but it hasn’t been proven in court. Harm is evident in the traces: the remnants of decades-old sunbaked crude cutting through the jungle or the shades of green that mark distinctions between the grasses that grow in areas affected by old spills. These traces reveal the actions of a company that is no longer present. Such traces are not objects of evidence in a courtroom, however. Without formal processes of scientific and legal inscription, they cannot speak to whether decaying crude on the roads has harmed human health. For Ramón and Jaime, as we overlooked the valley that day, however, there was no need for such translation—the status of these traces as evidence of Texaco’s responsibility has never been in question.

100  reckoning with ha rm

Evidence/Evident “Evidence” is a multivalent term. Evidence operates across several registers, ranging from the graphic, to the visual, to the experiential. What counts as evidence depends on the genre: scientific evidence, medical evidence, and legal evidence mobilize distinct objects and expectations. Yet even within a single field, “evidence” often serves as a catchall term for a variety of material and rhetorical forms that must be drawn together to support a particular conclusion; consider the submission of expert testimony, documents, and laboratory results in a single court case, or the use of laboratory results, images of pathology, and symptoms reported by the patient in a medical diagnosis. A close look at evidentiary practices shows that evidence is never simply “collected” but rather actively produced (Barad 2007; Mol 2002; Haraway 1988; Latour 2004). During fieldwork, I often visited farms that had old spills, some partially remediated, some not at all. Using a hand or a stick, the owner would turn over a clump of clay or mud and offer it to me to smell. The smell of oil, that telltale scent that we all know from filling a car at a gas station, is a reasonable indicator of the presence of oil vapors.18 Yet soil that smells of petroleum to the human nose is not scientific or legal evidence until it has been sampled according to specific procedures, submitted to a series of laboratory protocols, evaluated, compared to other samples, and interpreted for the court by an appropriate expert. By the end of this chain of transformations, the initially telling feature of that soil—the smell—is no longer relevant. Making evidence requires a great deal of coordinated effort that extends far beyond the collection of naturally existing objects. Along the way, specific relations that give shape to harm for those who live in the region, that are informed by the smell or taste of water or the feel of charred soil beneath a machete, are obscured or erased. Yet for those presenting the soil on the end of a stick, or in an outstretched hand, the soil is already evidence, in the sense that it is evident, of contamination. Following the historian and philosopher of science Simon Schaffer, this sense of the evident refers to the “rhetorical sense of vividness, a gesture which refers to the immediate appeal of the fact itself” (Schaffer 1992, 328). The blackness of crude or sensations of nausea convince through their viscerality. Bodies and their senses are instruments of perception in this latter sense of evidence. The production of legal and scientific evidence exists in tension with sensorial obviousness when someone offers you well water tinged with the smell of oil

e vi d e nce  101

and asks, Would you drink this? For a farmer with a spill on her land, who had seen her livestock suffer health problems, the relations between the pigs, the spill, the soil and water, and the broader industrial and historical context in which they were living renders harm evident. Yet in legal or regulatory interventions, each of these relations is queried, its elements abstracted until even the broader picture of what has occurred through oil extraction in this place becomes suspect. Forms of evidence never exist in isolation but must be drawn into relation to larger assemblages to speak to a particular claim. This requires placing distinct objects, standards, scales, and histories in the same frame. Numerous techniques, coordinations, manipulations, values, investments, and relationships are necessary for a soil sample to become evidence of harm. Ultimately, legal evidence in the Aguinda lawsuit was produced through associations in the ruling that pulled expert testimony, historical documents, maps, laboratory samples, and aerial images into relation with one another. This is the work of contextualization: coordinating and excluding, interpreting and extrapolating, in order to move from disputes over specific samples to broader claims of wrongdoing. Many might assume that the numbers should suffice to settle questions of responsibility and establish truth in relation to environmental pollution: Is the soil or water contaminated or not? Within this commonsense view, numbers are assumed to be a purer, or more objective, means of assessing harm than anecdotes, photographs, lived experiences, or autobiographical accounts. If the numbers are not conclusive, the logic goes, then perhaps there is a problem: there is not enough data, the data were collected incorrectly, or their interpretation is wrong. The endless requests to collect more data through sampling are made not necessarily with the intention of revealing an objective truth but rather as a tactic to delay an already expensive and arduous process. Yet the sentence shows that no singular genre of evidence—including the numbers or soil and water samples—sufficed to answer the questions put to the court regarding Texaco’s operations. It also shows that more evidence does not necessarily lead to clear answers. Evidence is often expected to be incontrovertible. Suggestions that evidence is contingent, or not completely self-evident, may be marshaled to argue that the claims made on its basis are not valid. A close reading of the sentence resulting from the Aguinda lawsuit reveals some of the labor necessary to produce facts that speak beyond the immediate present, a work of contextualization inherent to all forms of knowledge pro-

102  recko ning with ha rm

duction. Evidence is not conclusive in the abstract, idealized sense that we expect it to be. Samples are every bit as contingent and dependent on associations as letters from former officials, or standards of “good” behavior for oil companies. The open, contingent nature of evidence demands a reconsideration of how we hold oil companies accountable on the basis of legal standards of evidence. The claim that all facts, and by extension, all knowledge claims— including the evidence in this case—are produced through contingent associations runs the risk that readers may interpret this to mean that claims are merely fabricated. Yet destabilizing the idea of the pure scientific sample found in nature as an object that is evident in and of itself allows us to recognize the need for a broader appreciation of what constitutes evidence of harm from oil production. The presence of contamination in this place is, as people like Donald, Geraldo, Ramón, and Jaime have shown, already apparent. Approaching harm relationally offers a way to acknowledge and explore these tensions, without expecting different registers of evidence—legal, scientific, personal, public—to be compelling in the same way, or by the same standards. To be clear: relationality is not an argument against evidence-based processes, the practices of good science, or the validity of legal forums for adjudicating damages. Instead, it offers a way to approach the many objects and experiences that speak to harm amid an extractive landscape that do not fit within official forums for making sense of that harm.

chapter 3

Bounding Harm

The poster was plastered to the wall of a bus station. The text was jubilant: ¡Al fin! Los beneficios del petróleo son para la Amazonía . . . el petróleo del Ecuador en manos de los ecuatorianos! (Finally! The benefits of oil are for the Amazon . . . Ecuadorian oil in the hands of Ecuadorians!). The image was divided into two sections. On the left was a grayscale depiction of dripping oil tanks, with an oil flare blazing above a sad child gazing at a river so dirty that the fish float lifeless on the surface. A makeshift bridge led to a dilapidated house. On the right-hand side of the poster, the very same place had been transformed. Brightly colored tropical birds flew overhead. Happy children played next to a river so clean that the fish jumped in delight. A couple strolled over a bridge that led them to a village equipped with a health center, a school, and the office of the Ministerio de Desarrollo Urbano y Vivienda (Ministry of Urban Development and Housing). Government institutions were present, cars and airplanes suggested the ease of mobility, and Ecuadorian flags waved in the breeze—all while the oil industry operated almost unnoticed in the background. The vision of this poster shows harm as a thing of the past. Contamination, once a problem, has been contained, and the Amazon and its relationship with oil has been transformed through state investments. The previously misplaced profits garnered from oil, as the title portends, are now being returned to the communities from which oil emerged. One must no longer choose between a clean environment or development; in this image, citizens of the Amazon can have it all. With the emblems of what was then called the Ministerio de Recursos Naturales No Renovables (Ministry of Nonrenewable Natural Resources), the Secretaría de Hidrocarburos (Secretary of Hydrocarbons), and the Revolución Ciudadana political movement of President Rafael Correa endorsing the

 103

104  reckoning with ha rm

poster in the corner, the vision that the state promotes of the contemporary oil industry in the Amazon is one in which harm of the past has been transformed by a burgeoning industry of management, regulation, and reinvestment such that oil now benefits all Ecuadorians. How does the Ecuadorian state define harm, and more important, how does it seek to prevent harm within the context of ongoing oil production? Oil extraction operates within a contested political economy that is shaped by competing articulations of extractivism (Riofrancos, 2017). At the same time, figurations of Amazonia as a critical form of cultural patrimony have increased as the ecosystem faces mounting threats. In this context, environmental regulation has emerged as a central tool of the state to justify contradictory projects of extraction and environmental protection and to distinguish contemporary extractive regimes from those that characterized the beginning of commercial oil development in the country. Within a political economy centered in large part on oil extraction, regulatory activities by the Ministry of the Environment produce particular ways of understanding and acting upon harm. Harm from oil emerges as a matter that is circumscribed by time, place, and effect and rendered manageable by the everyday bureaucratic practices of witnessing public hearings, certifying the completion of inspections, and scrutinizing spill responses. The relations of harm are truncated by prescriptive notions of “impacts” or the administrative boundaries of oil company responsibility. Regulatory techniques are not designed to contemplate multiple, expansive, and cumulative registers of harm. The regulatory control of toxicants in the past half century has been dominated by a technoscientific framing based on modernist understandings of objectivity, control, and causal relations (Murphy 2017). The specific combination of science and law within the regulatory science invoked by the Ministry of the Environment to protect health and safety has been the principal forum through which the effects of industrial contamination are assessed and adjudicated. Relying heavily on practices of limiting toxicants to specific thresholds and containing pollution within material boundaries (Liboiron 2016a; Boudia and Jas 2014), environmental regulation in Ecuador is operationalized in large part through Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA), contingency plans, audits, public hearings, and extensive documentation. This regulatory apparatus, driven largely by the findings and format of the EIA, is not unique to Ecuador (Li 2009). Part of a broader shift in regulating contaminating industries since the 1970s, this strategy has made major gains in reducing global pollution burdens. In this

bo u n d i ng h a rm   105

sense, regulatory approaches to containing the spread of toxicants have worked, albeit within the limits of their own logic. However, the growth of industry and demand for extractive materials underscores the continued problem of stemming the proliferation of toxicants (Li 2015; Lerner 2010), and the persistence of toxic substances beyond human timescales (Gray-Cosgrove, Liboiron, and Lepawsky 2015). Specific toxicants repeatedly proved damaging to human health and the environment decades before regulatory practices limited their use (Brown 2007). Corporations have actively suppressed, denied, and obfuscated knowledge of harm (Markowitz and Rosner 2002). Nonetheless, regulatory science has retained a key position within public debates, playing an essential role in toxicant identification, characterization, and governance (Boudia and Jas 2014). For Ecuador, these fundamental contradictions—the dual mandate of the state to both extract and protect, the gains in environmental protection compared to decades ago, and the continued failing of regulatory science to stem the tide of toxicity in extractive environments in the​ present—lead to friction in regulatory work. These tensions emerge in the everyday enactments of regulatory science in the Amazon: the perfunctory quality of oversight when local ministry officials cannot effectively monitor all oil operations in their region, the insistence on regulatory objects and standards that do not align with community concerns, the delimitation of harm in audits that disregard the cumulative effects of layered histories of operations, or the routine overflow of contamination from the material and administrative boundaries meant to contain it. The relations of the everyday, unbounded effects of oil development constantly confound even the most well-intentioned regulatory efforts to define, contain, and prevent harm within an extractive state.

A Brief History of Oil Regulation in Ecuador The romanticism of the poster tacked to the bus stop notwithstanding, oil operations today are indeed dramatically different from those that characterized the time of the consortium. For the first two decades of oil production in Ecuador, a “gentlemen’s agreement” informally governed the industry and provided minimal oversight of everyday operations. Effectively, this meant that Texaco, as the operating partner, was free to design and run the industry as it saw fit, including using practices such as road oiling, unlined waste pits, and lighting waste pits on fire, which have since been outlawed.

106  recko ning with ha rm

In 1971, the Law of Hydrocarbons instantiated the need to protect the environment and prevent contamination; however, the law was insufficient to enact any kind of inclusive regulatory protection for the communities, animals, rivers, and surrounding areas. Likewise, the production contract between Texaco and Ecuador (1973) also required Texaco to employ “suitable measures” to protect environmental resources and prevent contamination of the environment. Other laws enacted in this period included the Law of Waters (1972), the Law of Fishing and Fishing Development (1974), and the Law for the Prevention and Control of Environmental Contamination (1976), which all included general language about protecting the environment and controlling pollution (Kimerling 2006a, 433–434). In the first decades of oil extraction, the Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM), which had a vested interest in the development of extractive industries, was responsible for overseeing the environmental consequences of the oil industry and failed to enforce the laws of environmental control. Government involvement in the oil industry was led by the MEM and PetroEcuador, which did not have units dedicated to environmental concerns until 1984 (MEM) and 1990 (PetroEcuador) (Kimerling 2006a, 435). Texaco, as well as other oil companies, largely ignored the existing regulation. In 1982, the Law of Hydrocarbons was amended to require companies to submit plans and projects to protect natural resources to the MEM, as well as to require operational compliance with Ecuadorian environmental laws and international practice (Kimerling 2006a, 433). By the early 1990s, the tide began to shift. As international concern for the environment grew with events such as the United Nations Earth Summit in 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol, momentum was also gathering in Ecuador around the Aguinda lawsuit. The Ecuadorian government replaced the “gentleman’s agreement” in 1992 with Ministerial Agreement No. 621, and subsequently supplanted that in 1995 with Environmental Regulation, Executive Decree No. 2982. A year later, in 1996, Ecuador established the Ministry of the Environment and gave it full responsibility for environmental management (Decreto Ejecutivo No. 195, published in the Suplemento-Registro Oficial No. 40, October 4, 1996). The present-day institution is the foremost environmental authority in the country, responsible for ensuring a clean and ecologically balanced environment. When the Law of Environmental Management passed in 1999, it introduced concepts of sustainable development into Ecuadorian law (Steyn 2003, 229). A nascent form of environmental consciousness was

bo u n d i ng h a rm   107

taking shape within the government. In response to the deficiencies of the 1995 regulation, the Subsecretary of Environmental Protection (then a subdivision of the MEM) developed the Regulation to Replace the Environmental Regulation for Hydrocarbon Operations, Decree No. 1215, in 2001. This regulation still provides the rules by which companies must operate and manages the environmental consequences of industry. Regulation 1215 marked an era of unprecedented documentation for the oil industry in Ecuador. Borrowing heavily from the US Environmental Protection Agency’s policies, Regulation 1215 implemented the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA),1 Environmental Management Plans, and Environmental Audits as the principal mechanisms of regulatory control, creating along with them an accompanying industry of environmental services. EIAs are required before each phase of hydrocarbon activities and include an environmental diagnostic that characterizes the area under study for operations, including physical, biotic, socioeconomic, and cultural aspects; demographics; and an inventory of infrastructure, service stations, other productive activities, archaeological sites, and more. Environmental audits must then be conducted every two years, in order to assess compliance with the Environmental Management Plan proposed in the EIA and national regulations. The Environmental Management Plan follows the diagnostic assessment, outlining the processes, technologies, design, and operation of the project, with their potentially negative environmental impacts, and plans for prevention and mitigation. Subsequent contingency plans detail training for workers, occupational health and safety, community relations, and rehabilitation of affected areas. The last component is the monitoring plan, which defines the follow-up, evaluation, and monitoring of environmental and community relations. In accordance with the Social Participation Regulation 1040, representatives from the oil company must make a public presentation of the EIA, in conjunction with the environmental consulting company, to the affected community. Passed into law in 2008, 1040 guarantees the right of communities to be informed of any activity that may affect the area in which they live, “ensuring respect for the collective right of every inhabitant to live in a healthy environment that is ecologically balanced and free from contamination” (Reglamento de Participación Social 1040, Art. 3). The authorities from the Ministry of the Environment are required to record the community’s response to the EIA and Environmental Management Plans following the public presentation (socialización) of the project or planned operations. The oil company

108  reckoning with ha rm

must turn in two copies of every study—one in print, one online—to the Subsecretary of Environmental Protection of the Ministry of the Environment in Quito. If the company receives no response within ten days of turning in the study, it can assume that the response is favorable. Oil regulation today functions within competing visions of extraction and environmental protection. Rafael Correa’s tenure as president (2007–2017) during the time of my fieldwork was part of a trend of progressive governments that came to power through alliances with social and Indigenous movements in South America, including Hugo Chavez in Venezuela (1999–2002; 2002–2013) and Evo Morales in Bolivia (2006– 2019). Responding to a crisis of neoliberalism in the 2000s, this wave of charismatic, populist leaders denounced export dependency, enclave economies, and the power of foreign companies (Gudynas 2009a; Lyall and Valdivia 2019; Kennemore and Weeks 2011). Correa’s tenure has been defined as a form of “techno-populism,” merging expertise in economics with shrewd rhetoric about ending poverty for Ecuadorians through strong opposition to neoliberal policies. Correa is known for his promises to return oil revenues to the people through state-led investment in prominent public works projects and social welfare programs (de la Torre 2013; Lu, Valdivia, and Silva 2017). Historically high prices for oil during the beginning of Correa’s tenure enabled many of these alluring promises to fight the “pathologies of poverty” (Fiske 2017b). Over the course of his time in office, Correa’s stance toward the environment grew more complicated. For instance, while expanding extraction by the state oil company and building up the mining sector in the southern Andes, Correa also proposed novel environmental initiatives, such as the campaign to protect the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) block of the Yasuní Wildlife Reserve in the Amazon. The initiative, which began in 2007, sought to combat climate change by leaving 850 million barrels of heavy crude oil in Amazonian subsoil in exchange for 50 percent of potential revenue (valued at $3.6 billion) from the international community (Larrea 2009; Larrea and Warnars 2009; Vallejo et al. 2015; Finer et al. 2009; Rival 2010). At the same time, the sustained commitment to development through extraction was evident with the completion of major infrastructure projects, such as a bridge over the Napo River in Coca, or on billboards along the roads enumerating the dollars invested in a particular public works project with celebratory slogans such as “¡El petróleo construye caminos hacia el desarrollo!” (Petroleum builds roads to development!). Then, in 2013, President Correa announced his decision to end the Yasuní-ITT initiative. Anticipating outcry against drilling in one of the most remote

bo u n d i ng h a rm   109

portions of Amazonian jungle, Correa assured the public that by using appropriate techniques, oil operations would affect less than one thousandth of the park, or “menos del uno por mil,” a calculation likely taken from an environmental impact assessment (Fiske 2017b). Around the same time as the Yasuní-ITT launch, in 2008, the Ecuadorian government codified the rights of nature in the constitution amid growing commitments to plurinationalism (Acosta 2009a; Acosta and Martínez 2011; Gudynas 2009b; Becker 2011). Debates over the future of resource extraction and the promotion of national sovereignty took on renewed fervor, particularly those shaped by critical discourse on extractivism (Riofrancos 2017; see also Burchardt et al. 2016; Gudynas 2009a, 2011a). The following years saw Ecuador’s evolution from a “petro-state” to a progressive, yet pro-extraction, state. Correa openly supported the plaintiffs in the Aguinda v. Texaco lawsuit and maintained an international environmentalist posture, while at the same time moving to criminalize anti-oil and anti-mining protests, furthering national commitments to extraction, and demonizing both those who were traditionally right-wing and environmental activists (Davidov 2013; Lu, Valdivia, and Silva 2017; Lyall and Valdivia 2019). Today the Ecuadorian state is both regulator and operator, with different government bodies responsible for ensuring the successful extraction of oil and the protection of the environment and human health. Regulatory action is limited not only by matters of personnel or investment, but also by the dual mandates of a relatively progressive, yet nonetheless extractive state. Over the course of approximately six months, I followed these contradictions as I accompanied government officials from the Ministry of the Environment as they went about their daily work: registering spills, checking on normal operations, evaluating soil samples of remediated waste materials, supervising routine pressure checks on pipelines, conducting public presentations of EIAs, supervising environmental audits, or attending to farmers who came in with complaints regarding oil operations on their land. Along the way, I sought to understand how harm emerges in quotidian regulatory responses and how the state seeks to prevent future harm while ensuring ongoing commitments to drilling.

Fieldwork Frictions Advancing extraction in the Amazon with one hand and policing the industry with the other has created significant conflicts of interest for the Ecuadorian state. Ministry of the Environment officials worked closely

110  reckoning with ha rm

with oil companies, and with PetroEcuador in particular. These were not two groups playing a regulatory game of cat and mouse, but more like colleagues from different departments of the same large company; indeed, PetroEcuador and the Ministry are both key state institutions. Ministry officials were friendly with many of the oil engineers they worked alongside, spending hours together riding in the same pickup trucks, sharing meals, and sometimes doing favors for one another. These were casual professional relationships with jokes, banter, and flirtations. There was also interchange between the two groups; for example, I later learned that one ministry engineer I had worked closely with was looking for a job with PetroEcuador. My ethnographic fieldwork with the Ministry of the Environment was full of friction, given my personal and political commitments concerning extraction. After explaining my project and receiving permission to observe ministry activities from the local director, I began arriving regularly at the ministry’s office in the morning during my fieldwork. Some days I would sit and listen to farmers who arrived to file complaints related to the oil industry with the engineers. Often this involved questions regarding requests for remediation and compensation for damage from spills on their property, such as ruined cacao trees, or for chickens or dogs that had been run over by company trucks. In other cases, these conversations involved ongoing disputes with the company, such as promises made to communities for specific forms of investment (computers, a new covered soccer field) that the company had not yet fulfilled. Most days were filled with site inspections. On these days, generally an oil company engineer would pick up the ministry engineer and me for a routine site inspection (the oil companies have far more reliable access to the pickup trucks necessary for these inspections than the ministry representatives). We would travel together to the site. Conversation in the cab might include a discussion of the task, the latest dispute between an oil company and a community, or politics or sports. Following the inspection, the oil workers would often bring the engineer and me to the oil company canteen to eat lunch together. The ministry officials with whom I spent the most time were men in their late twenties and early thirties. All had moved to the Amazon to take job assignments, with the possibility of relocating to a new post somewhere else in the Ministry of the Environment within a few years. As I observed their work on-site inspections, they explained their role or the specifics of what the company was doing; these discussions were usually confined to technical descriptions of the science and legality of the

bo u n d i ng h a rm   111

work of regulation. Beyond that, the engineers seemed more interested in talking about current events or the prior day’s soccer game than in the socioenvironmental and politico-economic aspects of the oil industry. Knowing my deep-seated concerns about industrial operations, one engineer in particular often tried to reassure me that the contamination we were witnessing was under control, painting stark contrasts between the oil industry today and that of the past. People living in the region were keenly attentive to the evident camaraderie between regulators and operators. Once, I was standing with a group of settler farmers waiting for the ministry to arrive to inspect a small spill from a roadside pipeline. As the oil company truck rolled to a stop and the ministry engineer exited the passenger side, the farmer next to me sighed and said pointedly with a motion of the chin: Mira, vienen conversando (“Look, they come talking,” in the sense of negotiating with one another).2 The lack of even symbolic boundaries between those extracting oil and those ensuring regulatory compliance undermined regulatory legitimacy for many people living in the region. One cannot, as I was often told by farmers, be juez y parte, both the judge of whether wrongdoing has occurred and also party to the case. Others, when showing me unremediated spills on their land, would sigh and say it was not worth reporting to the ministry because it was too much of a hassle and unlikely to amount to anything. In a place like Lago Agrio, little goes unobserved. About a year into my fieldwork, someone who worked with local environmental groups commented that they had seen me out on a site inspection of a well with people from the ministry. They wanted to know what the ministry had been doing and why I was along. For some activists, it was hard to understand why I would also spend time with state officials, who they thought worked too closely with the oil companies. After about six months of participant observation with the ministry, one morning I was sitting in the back of a double-cab pickup on a site inspection with the local director and two other technicians. The ministry officials began to discuss a rumor of corruption in PetroEcuador. A technician turned to look back at me before turning to the others with a pointed look, saying deliberately, I’m not going to say anything else. After that visit, doors at the ministry began to close. When I subsequently inquired about the following week’s schedule, there weren’t any more inspections planned or the trucks were always full. At a later point, Mauricio, one of the technicians I had worked with frequently, called to invite me to come into the office. Shuffling through piles of paper on his desk, he started

112  reckoning with ha rm

to tell me how they had received a directive from the ministry’s Quito offices prohibiting local office employees from giving interviews with outsiders. He told me that outsiders had gained access to ministry databases and there was growing concern about “infiltration.” As a result, it was no longer possible to observe the ministry’s work in the region. Several months later, I was observing the work of some scientists employed by an oil company laboratory. Oscar, one of the laboratory scientists, pulled up in a truck to the ministry office on an errand while I waited in the cab. After spending several minutes inside, Oscar returned to the truck and turned to me with a grin: So, you’re well known by the Ministry! I told him how I had spent several months observing with their technicians. Well, they told me to watch what I say—that you work with the FDA! (Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía). He laughed, pausing for dramatic effect. Oscar himself had previously worked on environmental monitoring in connection with the plaintiffs in the Aguin­da lawsuit and personally knew many of the people I worked with at the FDA and other environmental organizations. The conversation then turned serious. The ministry officials were friendly with his supervisors at the oil company. If they chose to, they could make trouble by calling and saying that he was working with people associated with an environmental activist group in the area. Not wanting to cause problems for Oscar, we agreed that it would be better to end my observations in the laboratory. We continued to communicate about the role of environmental science in ascertaining harm from oil over the following months. There is a profound conflict of interest for the Ecuadorian state in both extracting oil and regulating that extraction, which is borne out here in the everyday alliances of ministry officials and oil company workers. Regulation, like science, is made possible through contingent forms of camaraderie and alliance building, relations that help construct the highly polarized space of the Ecuadorian Amazon in which harm unfolds. My own experience working with the Ministry of the Environment helped clarify the deep-seated mistrust voiced to me by residents in the region about the legitimacy of the ministry as a regulatory body. This is the delicate terrain of participant observation in which individual alliances and trust intersect with broader structures of power and extraction. The regulation of harm is both made possible through and constrained by the interpersonal relationships of the ministry, oil companies, and environmental consultants. These relationships occur within the broader priorities of an extractive state and give shape to the limited forms that harm takes in official forums.

bo u n d i ng h a rm   113

Bearing Witness to Regulatory Process We left Lago Agrio on the interprovincial road that rounds the airport. The sky was filled with black smoke, languidly diffusing from the gas flare of the Lago-34 well. The jungle is a hazy gray silhouette behind the flare. Just outside of Lago Agrio, a new “gentleman’s” day club was in midconstruction, the high scalloped cement wall painted in alternating shades of pastel: El Crucero del Amor (The Cruise Ship of Love). Cows grazed. Kids were leaving school, siblings heading home hand in hand alongside the narrow turns of the road. I was with Mauricio, an engineer from the Ministry of the Environment, en route to two public presentations of EIAs. Originally from Quito, Mauricio was in his late twenties, with an unassuming demeanor. When conflicts arose on site visits or in meetings with farmers who came to his office to file denuncias (official reports of complaints), he was quick to find ways to smooth things over with a joke or assure people that he would find a way to resolve things. Todo bien. Tranquilo, he would intone. I often observed with him, as he was the most open of the ministry engineers to my presence and made a point to invite me in advance to site visits. He offered explanations of the practices we were witnessing and was critical of the way oil operations had been run in early years under the consortium. We passed Dureno and headed out toward the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve, home to more than two thousand square miles of tropical rainforest. The road east is impossibly curvy, a line originally laid down to facilitate entrance between oil camps, which, decades later, is now a regularly trafficked route into the Putumayo. Heavy rains often remove entire cross sections of pavement that then remain untended for months, or years. Multiple pipelines accompanied us the whole way, one occasionally branching off to a well or a separation station. Over the years, more and more colonists have arrived, clearing forest and putting down crops of cacao, yuca, and plantain in the swampy fields. Their cooperatives suggest the dreams and illusions of their founders: El Triunfo, Paz y Bien, La Estrella del Aguarico, La Libertad, Unión y Fuerza, Rey de los Andes (Triumph, Peace and Wellbeing, The Star of the Aguarico, Freedom, Union and Strength, King of the Andes). Other signposts are less optimistic—Pozo Maghogany, Pozo Secoya (Mahogany Well, Secoya Well)—reminders of what these cleared fields once were and who once lived here. The road to Tarapoa is lined with the promise of productivity, of trees and lives gone by. Arriving in Tarapoa,3 a town formed around oil about forty-five

114  reckoning with ha rm

miles east of Lago Agrio, the statue of a larger-than-life Indigenous man, complete with an oversized belly and blowgun, greeted us at the first roundabout. The statue’s height dominated the town, matched only by a permanent fixture of a metal Christmas tree. The center of Tarapoa is three blocks long, lined by a collection of two-story wooden houses in various stages of continual improvement and disarray, likely since the beginning of oil exploration in the late 1970s. Uncertain where the town we are headed for is located, Mauricio stopped for directions in front of a shop that sold protective gear for oil industries: hard hats, reflective vests, full bodysuits, yellow boots. Whooo, the man said as he elongated his chin in the direction we came from. It’s back there. A ways away. You won’t make it on time. Mauricio thanked him and turned the truck around: Nah, we’ll be alright. We just have to sign something. There were two meetings scheduled that required the presence of the Ministry of the Environment for the presentations of EIAs, both at 4:00 p.m. Because there were only three engineers who worked at the local office of the ministry, they were often overstretched, especially given how long it takes to travel across the rough roads of their jurisdiction’s province. We backtracked several miles to find the first meeting. The school was located down a small gravel slope from the road. People were sitting around waiting for the meeting to begin, lined up in plastic chairs. Old sheets had been tied against the bars on the windows in an attempt to deter the afternoon heat. The meeting was led by Andes Petroleum, a Chinese oil company, along with the environmental consulting firm they contracted to do the EIA, the mayor, and representatives from the municipal government of Tarapoa and the Ministry of the Environment. Someone directed us to sit up front near a small table where a copy of the EIA sat next to several large bottles of orange soda, to be shared at the conclusion of the meeting. The EIA was a burdensome document, several hundred pages in a four-inch-thick binder. Mauricio placed it on his lap and flipped through some of the chapters to show me the contents. The Andes Petroleum representative fiddled with the projector while the municipal government official came over to greet Mauricio. Mauricio informed him that we would need to leave soon because we had another commitment. No problem, the official said. We’ll start soon. The Andes Company Man, the official title of the oil company representative,4 began by handing out a clipboard and asking everyone present to sign, to register their presence at the meeting. If you have any questions or problems, please write them down for later. The rep-

bo u n d i ng h a rm   115

resentative from the municipal government stepped to the front. As you know, this meeting is to discuss the EIA for the expansion of the landfill, which is to be conducted by Andes. He indicated the presence of the Ministry of the Environment while the Company Man circled around taking pictures. The contracting company is here too, and they are going to explain the procedure to you. Afterward, we’ll have an open forum where all of you, the beneficiaries of this project, can voice your opinions, state your concerns, and ask questions while the Ministry of the Environment is here. The Ministry is here to be a witness to this project and meeting. On behalf of the municipal government, while we have many other obligations, we want you to know that this project is a priority for us, and that is why we are present here. Community by community, we are moving forward in Tarapoa. Mauricio stood to address the group. The purpose of this meeting is to share the EIA with you and to fulfill our obligations under Social Participation Regulation 1040 in these projects. This is so that the beneficiaries understand the work plan and can convey their concerns and questions. As he sat, he signaled to the mayor that we needed to move on to our next engagement. The representative from the municipal government thanked the Ministry of the Environment for participating and asked Mauricio to please sign the company’s form stating that he witnessed the presentation and the concerns of the community. As we made our way out, the Company Man began the PowerPoint presentation on the project. My intention in retelling this encounter is not to find fault with individual actors such as Mauricio. Individuals work within the structural constraints of their institutions; if one technician is given two meetings scheduled for the same afternoon, each a significant drive from the other, then it is not possible for that person to meaningfully perform their job duties. For environmental regulatory agencies to fulfill their mandate, they must have the personnel, resources, and necessary institutional independence from the industries they regulate. When the government ministry charged with witnessing company compliance with regulation does not have the time to be present for mandatory meetings, enforcement blurs into tacit approval of the proposed projects. Harm takes shape in this case largely through the absence of the regulatory body, where the work of witnessing by the state was limited to a perfunctory confirmation that the obligations of community participation had been met via the meeting. Any discussion of potential impacts or community concerns was limited to whatever the Andes Company

116  recko ning with ha rm

Man recorded and filed in their report to the ministry; the ministry officials were not present to witness any responses, reactions, or concerns of community members. Instead, with all of the appropriate boxes checked and forms signed, company obligations to the community affected by the proposed project were confirmed as fulfilled. Potential harm was rendered manageable through the completion of bureaucratic procedures in which the act of publicly presenting the information is what mattered, regardless of the content or the response.

Regulation That Is Both Rigid and Flexible Despite Mauricio’s best attempts to hurry through the first meeting, it was now well past 5:00 p.m. as we made our way to the second presentation. We passed through Tarapoa and took a dirt road farther east in search of the next community meeting. These roads are only marked by signs at the forks that list the wells to the right and the wells to the left, a labyrinth of one-lane dirt oil roads cutting through the jungle, known only by their well endpoints. Periodically, we pulled over to let another oversized tractor-trailer truck pass us. It was the end of the workday, and the oil camps were closing for the night. One truck passed empty, another overloaded with pipelines, another with a disassembled drill. People made their way home as the light fell, shoulders heavy with plantain branches. The whole area was swampy, marking one of the distinguishing ecological characteristics of the area. To facilitate colonization, the state helped settlers cut long drainage canals through recently cleared forest to make the land arable. The canals are overgrown but unmistakable for the distinctive even lines they cut through the fields. Taking advantage of the wet fields, settlers have since planted rice. The area felt like a soggy savannah, low, grassy, and conspicuously open. We passed a ceiba tree with its iconic silhouette, seemingly too magnificent for even the most ambitious settler to cut. It stood alone in the field, with huge sloping roots that spanned fifteen to twenty meters (50–65 ft) across and a thick straight trunk opening into a large canopy at the top. Long vines trailed from the upper branches, reaching almost to the ground below. The tree was immense and spectacular, its magnitude amplified by the cleared fields around it. It was after 6:00 p.m. but still humid despite the growing equatorial darkness. In the casa communal (community center), close to a hundred people filled the room, seated in lines of school desks, with others lean-

bo u n d i ng h a rm   117

ing against the walls to listen. The air languished, trapped between the cement walls and the zinc ceiling. A group of representatives from the oil company, along with the environmental consulting agency, were up front. There has been oil activity here since the 1970s. The EIA under consideration assessed the prospective construction of eight proposed wells, an oil platform, pipelines, and access roads in an already established oil camp that borders the reserve. Members of a community of just over two hundred people, all those present had sat through more than an hour of highly specialized information regarding the potential impacts and siting of the project. We had arrived in time for the question and answer period. One of the company representatives was operating a recorder, running up and down the aisle between questions. He inevitably arrived after each person had begun, interrupting the speakers and asking them to begin anew. Señor, please, first state your full name clearly into the recorder. An older man from the community rose, dressed in a faded denim work shirt embroidered with the name of a drilling services company, string loops in place of the buttons long since lost. He leaned heavily on the chair in front of him. Thank you to the Señores from the company, the Señor from the Ministry of the Environment, and the Señor of Community Relations for coming to our humble town. My question has to do with the following: in the new [2008] constitution, there is a distance for how close a platform can be from a town center, or a school, or a house. What is that distance? The engineer indicated that now that the Ministry of the Environment representative had arrived, he would answer questions relating to regulation. Mauricio stood. There is no prohibition on realizing these activities. The Ministry of the Environment requires monitoring, follow-up, and of course prior consultation, as you all know.5 Another community member stood to clarify the question. But there’s no rule that you can’t put a well right here in the middle of the community? Mauricio: Not within five hundred meters [1,640 ft] of homes. The Andes engineer cut him off. Make sure this is recorded. The engineer paused deliberately, waiting for the man with the recorder to make his way to the front. No such thing exists. There is no set limit. What does exist is the area of influence—for example, we could put the well 250 meters [820 ft] from the school as long as we can guarantee the noise won’t reach “x” decibels during the day. Anything below “x” decibels is permitted. But there is no table or rule that says the site must be a certain distance from a school or a town center. Mauricio nodded. That’s correct. There’s no set

118  recko ning with ha rm

limit in the regulation because the conditions for each site are different. The regulation does not rely on standard conditions.6 Another community member stood: What about the families affected by the widening of the road? Obviously, it will be widened, and some of us live less than three meters from the road. The only presenter not outfitted in the all-denim uniform of the oil industry stepped up. He was the Superintendent of Community Relations for the company and was this community’s primary contact through the rest of the drilling and operations. Well, obviously this is a process. There are permissions, and there is the negotiation. Once the project is approved, then we’ll talk about these concerns—such as widening the road. We are getting ahead of ourselves with these sorts of adjustments [ajustes]. We’ll deal with them when the time comes. Once, of course, we have your permission to start. Discussion turned once again to the issue of allowable distances from drilling sites. People from the community wanted a set limit. One person tried again: Even if this isn’t in the regulation, maybe the Señor from the Ministry of the Environment has suggestions for this? Maybe that it would need to be at least 500 meters from the platform to the nearest house, you know, so that we can try to maintain good relations between the company and the community? Because you can hear the noise from the drill from at least a kilometer away. You can hear it perfectly clearly. And if you take into consideration that here there are houses all along the road, the noise is going to be unbearable. So maybe, just so that there are good relations between the company and the community, you could consider moving the platform? Or at least not running the drill at night? He sat. The Andes engineer was visibly tired of the subject: Your comments will be included in the EIA. This will only be an option if it is technically possible to move the platform. The focus here is geological, and generally speaking you can’t move a platform from the selected site. It would require additional analysis and would have to be approved in Quito. Sometimes you can move it within a radius of 250 meters. The same man stood again. But my house is right there. We all know what the effect will be. The community relations official stepped in. There are two or three alternatives, so please, you all need to read the EIA first before we continue discussion. If there is something possible that we can do to adjust the distance, we will . . . The engineer cut off the community relations official. The first interest of the company regarding this platform is to extract hydrocarbons. Then we will get to the other

bo u n d i ng h a rm   119

concerns. The EIA lists the permissible limits, please inform yourselves. We will take two more comments. The room was silent. Kids played outside, while the occasional chicken wandered through the door. The community relations official stood again, as though seeking to appease by filling space. He charged the community with assuming responsibility for understanding the EIA. The EIA has been available in the school for the past week. It is there for you to read and look over. There will be someone there from Andes to pass your comments on. We also have posted it online, so that people can look at the EIA and make suggestions that way. Here is my email address so that you know how to reach me if you have comments or questions later. Outside, a few houses were lit up by a single bare bulb visible through the open windows. The community was dark. I wondered how many people had sufficient access to the internet to be able to locate, download, and comment on this document posted on the Andes site. Perhaps a few had some limited data on their phones. I backtracked in my mind through the trip here to the last place I might have seen an internet café: it was at least an hour away by car. Mauricio stepped in. These are all strategic points here. The community, all of you, are part of the monitoring system. If you see wastes or drilling muds being discharged, you have to let us know at the Ministry of the Environment. The relationship here is between the ministry, you the citizens, and the company. The community relations man made a motion to conclude. On the web it’s all laid out clearly in the EIA. All of the operations will be monitored, and reports will be submitted to us and to the ministry. We’d like to end the meeting now. This presentation has been completed in line with the Constitution and Regulation 1040 that regulates this process of social participation. The EIA will be available for another week on the web. Please email me your comments. The engineers packed up their laptop and projector, and the room filled with the echoes of people talking and scraping chairs as they stood to leave. Mauricio greeted the community relations man and engineer as we stepped outside. Estamos bien? he asked. They shook hands. Todo bien. Back in the truck, it was dark out as we began the long drive back to Lago Agrio. Mauricio said that this meeting was suave; it went smoothly. The community did not resist the project, so things would proceed without too much trouble. From here, he said, the company would record the community’s concerns, possibly make a few changes to the plan, and then submit it to the Quito offices. Then the ministry would approve the EIA and the work plan. The platform would probably not be moved.

120  recko ning with ha rm

The concerns of the people living in this community seemed to have dissipated into the darkness as we bumped down the road. According to Mauricio, a large part of the Putumayo canton is located within the boundaries of the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve. This meant that the area should fall under the category of a “sensitive ecological zone,” dictating that oil companies must comply with stricter limits on their operations to protect national patrimony; however, Regulation 1215, he says, has to be flexible, both flexible and rigid at the same time, because the conditions are different on every site. So, while there were no strict limits for things such as distances from schools or homes, there were strict limits for permissible levels of noise, or TPH in discharged water or mud. By fulfilling these limits and complying with the periodic monitoring required by the ministry, the company demonstrated that it complied with state standards for operations. “It’s a limit of tolerance that is in harmony with the community, nature, and the activities undertaken by the company,” he recited in the darkness of the truck. For people in these communities, the concerns they raised in the meetings had to do with how well they would be able to sleep at night due to the incessant noise of the operations, the potential for disrupting the community by displacing houses or situating operations too close to the school, and the possibility of contamination. But these concerns did not match regulatory assumptions. Instead, company officials, with the help of the ministry, answered their questions in technical terms that pivoted around what the environmental regulation would allow. In other words, if the environmental legislation technically permitted something, then officials gave this permission as an answer, even if it did not address the concern the community raised. In this format, harm was only recognizable if it matched official understandings of damage within the established limits of Regulation 1040. In writing about the origins of modern theories of environmental pollution, Max Liboiron points to the Streeter-Phelps equation, which tracked the conditions and rates under which waterways could purify themselves of organic pollutants in order to advance a universal theory of pollution (Liboiron 2021, 3–4). Terms like “assimilative capacity” or “allowable threshold” emerged in relation to this theory and have come to form the premise of many contemporary understandings of pollution.7 The advancement of allowable threshold theories of pollution makes specific choices about which individual variables are relevant, while ignoring others, such as the smell, fish health, or the “swimmability” of a river (Liboiron 2021, 49). This was evident in the EIA presen-

bo u n d i ng h a rm   121

tation, where concerns like the noise from a drill translated to something requiring regulatory intervention only if the noise could be shown to be over a given level of decibels. Accompanying concerns, such as a family’s ability to sleep well at night, were excluded. Other community concerns, such as good relations between the company and the community, have no such regulatory translation; as such, they were dismissible by both the ministry and the operator as irrelevant for the proposed project. In the public presentation of the EIA, harm was limited to predetermined, verifiable impacts in which the question of harm was not at stake until it reached a given limit. Understandings of harm derived from a lifetime alongside oil operations were rendered inconsequential through the regulatory processes of social participation. Although tabulated and calculated separately in official documents, people living alongside oil extraction never experience impacts like roads or noise in isolation but rather as part of a broader historical process of extraction. As the EIA hearing proceeded, officials continually minimized the community’s concerns, calling them “adjustments” to be worked out later and noting that they were secondary to the geological conditions of extractive priorities. As the legally recognized evaluation of continued or new oil operations, the EIA sets the terms through which the Ministry of Environment assesses extractive projects and their consequences. What might seem like concerns about minutiae—“x” decibels, or the project’s official boundaries of influence—have a profound effect for those living alongside industry. EIA-identified “impacts” become the object of negotiation that replace other cumulative, lived, uncountable harms to those affected (Fiske 2017a). In the process, the relations of harm are “cut” or truncated in an effort to divorce, for example, noise below a given limit from the disruption of life next to an active drill.

Limits of Responsibility I was waiting with José, an environmental engineer, at the Ministry of the Environment for the representative from PetroEcuador to pick us up for the day’s audit. Originally from Santo Domingo, José had been working in the Amazon for several years. His father also worked for the ministry, and he hoped to transfer to a different department as soon as possible. He seemed largely agnostic regarding my presence on site visits, frequently avoiding detailed explanations of the tests that the ministry was running or ending conversations by promising reports on the datos (data, detailed information) upon returning to the office that were never

122  recko ning with ha rm

Figure 3.1. Community members hired by PetroEcuador use power hoses, nets, and other makeshift tools to dislodge oil from a decades-old spill. The floating boom visible in the image was supposed to separate dirty from clean water. Some workers wore masks to prevent breathing in the fumes, while others did not. Photo by the author, 2012.

forthcoming. He was most animated when engaged in (often seemingly unwelcome) flirtation with the female engineers from the oil companies. When Pati from PetroEcuador arrived, we made our way to the edge of town, where the PetroEcuador camp began. Originally built by Texaco, the PetroEcuador camp occupies a large tract of land adjacent to Lago Agrio. Oil from the surrounding camps arrives here to be processed before being pumped over the Andes. To our right sat enormous storage tanks, stuck in the grassy field behind a barbed wire fence. They dominate the border of Lago Agrio, enormous hulks soldered together, with rust outlining the bolts and edges. These are some of the monuments of metal that launched Lago Agrio onto the map of Ecuador. We pulled into the PetroEcuador station, passing first through security that registered the truck number, driver ID, and details of all passengers.

bo u n d i ng h a rm   123

The buildings were low and white, lined with blue trim with state logos on the sides. Everything was meticulous. Orderly hedges surrounded the office buildings and a collection of dorms for workers that resembled 1970s roadside motels. Workers who were in supervisory or managerial positions stayed in the PetroEcuador dorms while on duty. They returned to Quito on their week off. Everything had its place: lines of identical, numbered trucks parked in reverse outside the office; workers in jeans with reflective tape, topped with denim shirts embroidered with company logos, hard hats in hand. A flip chart on a billboard denoted the number of days at this facility without an accident: 14. Pati pulled over so José could run inside to drop off a document from the ministry. Just beyond the administrative area began a mess of pipelines, valves, connections, boilers, and separation tanks, a system of rigid order camouflaging an industry always hovering on the brink of potential chaos. José returned from his errand, and we left the camp, pulling out amid the company trucks, tanker trucks, trucks hauling stacks of pipelines, Petrolera buses arriving from Shushufindi and Coca, and the occasional cart of a fruit vendor. Leaving Lago Agrio, we turned off the main road and bumped up a rough dirt road lined with cacao trees and fields cleared for cows to graze. Farther down, in the center of a clearing that was succumbing to the surrounding grasses, was the red head of an old well, cordoned off by rotting wooden boards. We were late, and the environmental consulting team brought in from Quito to conduct the audit had already begun earlier that morning. Pati wanted to know what they had done so far. Paúl, an engineer from the environmental consulting company, held up a glass bottle of amber-colored water that they were in the process of labeling. We took this 150 meters south of here on the river, he offered as a preemptive answer to their questions. The consultants were a team of five, armed with a GPS and cameras, knee-high rubber boots, and zip-off safari-style pants. The area was open, bordered by trees and filled with matted grass. Sampling equipment, plastic buckets, and heavy cases for tools were laid out at their feet. We stood in the overgrown shadow of an industrial zone, now silent. Pati turned to me. This is a prior audit, she explained. It is an audit required by law before an oil camp is turned over to a new operator. Bellwether previously operated here until the year 2000; then it was turned back over to the state company. While José appeared bored by the technical procedures of the audit, Pati was engaged, taking notes and volunteering explanations of what the consultants were doing.

124  reckoning with ha rm

Bellwether Exploration Company, specializing in exploratory technology and based out of Houston, Texas, has since left Ecuador. This camp, a collection of six wells and their accompanying platforms and waste pits, was abandoned. The purpose of this audit was to determine the state of the camp prior to its reversion to state ownership. The conditions in which Bellwether left operations, the extent of reconditioning completed, and the presence of waste pits and waste products on site all must be documented, and soil, water, and other biotic features tested and analyzed. The prior audit establishes the former operator’s responsibility for contamination before the camp is turned over to a new operator. In other words, it was in PetroEcuador’s interest to document all possible harms in order to avoid responsibility for contamination that did not occur under their tenure. We crossed under the barbed wire fence that surrounded what used to be the oil platform. It was full of low, scrubby brush. In one corner, the team began to screw an auger, a tool for collecting soil cores, into the mud on the edge of a depressed area. It looked to be about ten meters (33 ft) wide by fifteen meters (49.2 ft) long. The center of the area was soggy, another indicator of a prior pit. As the consultants screwed the auger into the ground, José, Paúl, and Pati all took pictures to document the audit. Over the past decade since this site was an active oil camp, the jungle has gradually reclaimed parts of the platform. Vines climbed over fences, and heaps of mud and gravel piled up by machinery formed smooth grassy hills that protruded out of the otherwise flat space. The visual tracks of oil were slowly receding. About twenty centimeters (8 in) down, the auger hit a thick plastic liner. Paúl and Pati discussed whether this was a single piece of plastic that workers laid down when covering over the waste pit or if it might indicate that the entire pit was lined. The consensus was that it was likely just a superficial cover. The group used their knowledge of both past and present industry practices to make sense of these buried legacies. The consultants took care to ensure that if there was a liner on the bottom of the pit it would not be broken in the process of the audit. Clearing away the mud that kept falling into the hole, they used a machete to make a six-inch cut in the heavy black plastic below. The auger entered easily, bringing up mud tinged with black. Does it smell? Paúl asked, picking up a piece of mud. Marcia, another technician, came over, wrinkling her nose. They reviewed which tests for hydrocarbons they would need to run, laying samples out on black plastic and scooping them into plastic bags labeled beforehand with the date, depth, and

bo u n d i ng h a rm   125

site. Marcia then took each sample and inserted a small filter attached to the end of a wire probe leading to a handheld device for measuring volatile organic compounds. Certain tests must be taken in the field, while others can wait. They recorded each reading and stored the samples in the cooler to send to the laboratory. Pati and Paúl stood off to the side of the pit. Pati was concerned that all potential infractions in this camp be adequately recorded. But as you know, Paúl, the Regulation 1215 is very ample. Too ample. Many of these earlier companies never remediated anything. Even our own compañeros in CEPE just left the crude waste covered with dirt. Sometimes you find places where just two meters down, it’s all crude—just crude left in the ground. Paúl nodded in agreement. The legacies of how oil companies used to operate weigh heavily here, including on current company representatives. It was difficult to dissect the practices of the past from the present in the soils and waters of this place. Despite the jurisdictional division that the prior audit sought to make between the two companies, discerning breaks in the environmental record amid ongoing extraction is challenging in practice. So, Pati asked the group, given the standards, do you think this area will come out within the legal parameters? Paúl said yes, he thinks it most likely will be below the legal limits for TPH. Pati was not pleased: But who is responsible then, for this? With tools like the auger, contamination beneath our feet was made visible, even smellable, as we stood in this abandoned field of an old camp. Yet from the trained eye of someone who regularly completed environmental audits and could judge from what he sees and touches in the field whether it will be compliant, these contaminated muds were likely under the allowable limits. If he was correct, no further remediation would be required; PetroEcuador would inherit the existing contamination without any action required of the prior operating company. Paúl began: Well, PetroEcuador would retain responsibility. Pati continued: But these residual wastes are from Bellwether. And here, Petro is left with the problem. This is one of the problems with the regulation—the company is the one who generates the waste, but the regulation doesn’t indicate who is responsible in situations like this. Frequent changes in operator confound efforts to determine responsibility. In this case, it was the oil company representative who was expressing dismay that the existing regulatory limits were not strict enough to hold Bellwether accountable. Pati asked what Paúl would recommend be done with the waste pits that are about to become the responsibility of

126  reckoning with ha rm

PetroEcuador. He began to respond and then stopped himself short. No, the only thing that as the consultor I can do in this case is indicate that we found this here, and that over there, for instance. But you know, it shouldn’t be that hard to clean up—there are only two pits here. It’s not a huge amount. I headed off with Paúl in search of the other pit that was recorded under Bellwether operations. He was patient, explaining the context of this audit. Well, you see, Bellwether didn’t drill any new wells, they merely amplified the existing wells that Petro had made. So that’s why the pit you just saw is controlled—maybe you noticed that it’s not very big. PetroEcuador, however, has some huge pits here on this site. He indicated an area to our left, where the boundary of an open pit was clearly visible. It was more than three times the size of the pit we had just sampled. In the layered history of oil operations that trade hands like playing cards, this audit was not of the entire site but only of the operational changes made by Bellwether after they inherited the camp from its previous owner, PetroEcuador. The larger pits, then, did not fall under the purview of this audit because PetroEcuador constructed them and will once again inherit the site. The focus of the audit was exclusively on determining Bellwether’s liability. Based on the registers that Paúl obtained from PetroEcuador before the audit, he had a general idea of where to look for the new pits. In theory, he said, consultants like him should also be able to get old plans and documents from the Ministry of the Environment, but it would take far too long, so they usually obtain them directly from the companies. Pati joined us as we walked the edge of the second pit, where the lining of black plastic protruded visibly through the dirt and weeds. The problem, she explained, is that the previous audit locates the boundaries for this pit differently than the pit register. Multiple documents, from multiple companies, with multiple audits over the years make for contradictory records of the state of things. True, Paúl says, as he turned to me. Sometimes in the past, when a company would leave a camp, they’d have the guards burn all the archives when they left. Echan a candela todo. Officials lost, conveniently misplaced, and burned documents. Piecing together the historical record of oil sites for an audit means drawing together what you can find: one map might indicate a pit in one location, while the next register has no record of that pit. Determining liability for who constructed what, and when, is a problem not just for local communities seeking to have contamination cleaned up but also for

bo u n d i ng h a rm   127

regulators and the companies contracted to prepare site documentation and determine liability. We headed back to the rest of the team where they were washing the auger and other tools used to sample the last pit with a sulfate-free soap and clean water. The team took special care to not cross-contaminate the samples, but having no running water or other washing facilities in the field means that cleaning tools between samples takes a considerable amount of time. Pati checked her watch. The problem is that they are going to hand this camp over to us at Petro whether we want it or not. Nobody wants an old, unproductive camp like this. But this is the new responsibility under the legislation. It was almost noon, and Pati and José had to leave. The rest of the crew continued to the next task on their list. While walking back to the trucks we came across another team of consultants, down a bank and submerged in small-stream fishing. They were from the same company and were assessing the biotic features of the river. ¿Que tal? José shouted. ¡Bien! The colleague yelled back. Lots of fish. This morning— you should have seen it—a whole family of monkeys up that way. He gestured upriver. In the truck, Pati was not pleased with the way the group conducted the audit. She was suspicious of the consulting team because they were not contracted by PetroEcuador. She was not sure who was paying or if the cost of the audit would be split between the two companies. Since they were contracted by Bellwether, it doesn’t suit them to identify everything that Bellwether did. But for me, for Petro, well, I want them to identify every last thing. In an audit like this, determining responsibility for old environmental harm carries financial implications. We bumped down the road. José fell asleep in the passenger seat as Pati continued talking about the audit’s failings. His head jerked up and down with each rock in the road. José, she insisted, you need to write these things down in your report of the audit that you send to the Ministry in Quito. Half asleep, he responded. Yes, yes. I’ll put it all in the report. Pati drove us back to Lago Agrio, returning to the central camp. She parked the truck carefully in reverse and invited us both into the cafeteria for lunch. Oil workers and administrative personnel were lined up, trays in hand, watching the soccer game on TV as they made their way around the buffet line. The air conditioning offered relief from the heat. It was how I imagined the cafeteria of a military institution might be—orderly and controlled. Some of Pati’s coworkers joined us, along with another technician from the ministry who had also just returned from a different

128  reckoning with ha rm

inspection. They all knew each other. The boundaries between inspector and operator were fluid, not unlike those between operating companies. Within the audit, harm emerges as a matter contingent on a specific moment in time, tied to an operating company, and divorced from other harms that preceded or followed it. The determining factors for the intervention of the audit were the terms of the operator’s contract and the limits of allowable contamination in old pits. Harm was carefully identified within specific spatial, temporal, and jurisdictional divisions, and other harms that exceeded the contractual limits of one company on a site were assiduously put aside. Harm emerged as an object that could be measured, recorded, and limited to specific parameters and contractual obligations. Life in this region points us beyond the limits of the prior audit to those farmers who live nearby who experience health problems or whose animals may have drunk water contaminated by the site’s activities. Such harms span the time periods of multiple companies and are not contained by contractual, spatial, or temporal boundaries. The process of determining regulatory liability for harm bears little resemblance to the experiences of those who have lived that harm. Dissections between operators, distinctions made from one month to the next, or lines drawn around one pit on a site and not another are routinely confounded by the relations of the site and the lives of those who live nearby.

Containing the Flow It was mid-April, and like most April mornings in Amazonia it was gray and drizzling rain after the previous night’s downpour. The day’s work was a trip to see a spill. The ministry engineers needed to verify PetroEcuador’s progress in recuperating the spilled oil and cleanup of the area. I reviewed the report that the ministry had received on the spill from the company. The first page summarized the relevant information for the incident with the specific location information. Type of spill: Crude oil. Reason for spill: Corrosion of an internal pipeline. Quantity spilled: 10 barrels. Quantity recuperated: 6 barrels. Affected area: 25 square meters of firm ground; 800 meters of a stream. Measures taken: Emergency plan in place as of 10:30am; 6 workgroups for a total of 30 workers, 6 vehicles, and 6 emergency kits on site.

bo u n d i ng h a rm   129

Carlos, the engineer on duty, pointed me to the second page, where two pictures had been attached. The images were pixelated and hard to make out. In the first image, there was a dirty-looking stream, and in the second, an exposed pipeline protruding from a bank on the side of the road with onlookers. A document like this is a typical incident report for a spill. Oil companies have twenty-four hours to report the spill to the Ministry of the Environment. Upon receiving the report, the ministry must formally respond by going to inspect the site, check on cleanup procedures, and speak with the responsible party and affected landowners. We piled into a ministry truck and headed toward the location indicated on the papers. Neither Carlos nor Alfredo, another engineer on duty that day, were from the Amazon. The two were friends and roommates, engaging in a continual banter as we wound our way along the roads. Conversation eventually turned to the report. They were skeptical about the facts listed. Well, they wrote down ten barrels spilled because they know they can’t get away with putting down anything less. Carlos nodded. But hey, did you see they started working at 10:30? Because the spill happened at 8:00. We’ll need to talk to the community to find out what happened. Alfredo agreed, switching the radio station. Yeah, six barrels recovered, according to the company. The conversation turned to a community where there had been a spill of formation waters the week prior, for which we were all present for the inspection. The transport operator, contracted by PetroEcuador to haul waste products from one facility to the next, had fallen asleep while driving. As a result, his tanker truck tipped over, dumping more than 150 barrels of toxic formation waters into the adjacent forest. We had been out to inspect the site, and Carlos was annoyed that they still had not presented, or implemented, their remediation plan. They had made no further progress since we had visited. He shook his head, commenting to Alfredo that they should tell PetroEcuador to keep after the subcontractor, because the fines the ministry was charging for each day that they failed to respond did not appear to be a sufficient incentive. Alfredo responded that he had heard the company had begun negotiations with the community. Well, the Sionas—no wait, that’s not right. They are. . . . Well I can’t remember what they are. Victor, a technician sitting in the back with me intervened: Kichwa, I think. Alfredo agreed. Yes, that’s right. They’re Kichwa. We were taking a sharp curve, following behind a truck overloaded with pipelines. Yeah, well they began talking to them [about compensation], and they have asked for twenty laptops, five work positions, and five scholarships for students

130  reckoning with ha rm

to study in Quito. The other two engineers laughed. Aprovechosos! They always want to make themselves the victims. State officials invoked regulatory boundaries not only in routine audits or in efforts to contain toxic waters draining across a swampy forest, but also in conventions around what they considered acceptable compensation for living on contaminated land. Once, Mauricio explained to me that he believed the continued requests for compensation were a result of an inherited system of paternalism from the early days of oil operations when settlers depended on the oil companies for everything, from a new school to the construction of roads. Farmers today, he argued, simply wanted a handout rather than working hard to get ahead. Indigenous communities, following from the conversation in the truck on the way to the spill and oft-recounted racially coded anecdotes about the “difficulties” of negotiating operations on Indigenous land, were doubly suspect in this regard. On another occasion, a different official insinuated that residents exaggerated or even fabricated their claims of harm, questioning why residents would purposely act in “risky” ways—such as putting their farm animals out to graze near pipelines and spill sites. Yet no one from the ministry openly questioned why people living here had no other place to put their cows out to pasture, or why residents were exposed to contamination in the first place, never mind the perverseness of a system that pays someone a set dollar amount for each chicken lost after a pipeline has dumped crude oil all over their property but has no means of acknowledging the harms that exceed such quantified claims. The spill site came into view. Trucks were lined up beside a large backhoe and two piles of mud cascading into the road. One pile was the typical red-brown color of Amazonian clay soils, and the other was the same clay tinged with black. Below, the bank sloped down from the road, exposing a huge hole in which the silver length of the pipeline was visible. Rivulets of black crude ran out of the mud, collecting below in a pool of water. The grass and surrounding vegetation appeared especially green next to the black of the spill, as though I had donned a pair of tinted sunglasses. This is the color of irreparable loss, where the edges of before and after come briefly into focus. The boundaries of toxicity are informed by the history of experiences of personal encounters, regional legacies, bureaucratic norms, and moments of loss and rupture. Anyone interpreting this spill must account for the shared historical knowledge of what becomes of sites like this, of the impossibility of taking back the oil still streaming out of the pipeline. Any response necessarily involves a process of drawing boundaries between the containable and

bo u n d i ng h a rm   131

the uncontainable, where new contamination begins and older legacies of extraction end, and between what is deemed possible within the political economy of an extractive state. I accompanied the crew from the ministry and two supervisors from the oil company on a reconnaissance walk down the stream. I wondered: What does ten barrels of oil, the quantity reported on the form, mean for the frogs and fish in this stream? For the invertebrates living in these waters? For the children who play nearby, and for their parents, who swim, bathe, and wash clothes here? I turned to the officials. How, I asked, is it possible that ten barrels were reported spilled, six have been claimed to be cleaned up, but yet we’ve been walking for over twenty minutes along the river and the oil keeps flowing? Carlos replied: Well, we don’t really have a way to measure it precisely here, but you should keep in mind that crude expands. It forms a skim, and when it’s very fine, the quantity of crude is very small. Alfredo poked the top of the passing crude with a stick to probe its thickness.8 As we walked, we passed more booms. Victor noted out loud what was apparent to all of us: the booms were not stopping the crude. The supervisor from PetroEcuador sighed, nodding. Yes, you’re right, we need more booms. She pulled out her phone to call someone at the station to bring down more emergency kits. Look here, this one was put in wrong. The first step has to be stopping the flow of crude. At this point, the stream was joined by another arm, and the way the boom was placed, or perhaps due to the way it had floated out of place, it simply funneled the crude around the far end. Even partial, momentary containments are fragile achievements. We rounded a bend in the river and heard the squealing of tires against loose gravel in front of one of the houses nearby. A large water truck had pulled up, and the workers unloaded a hefty hose. A woman ran out of the house frantically, yelling to her children to find more buckets to collect water for drinking and cooking now that the river, their only water source, had been contaminated. They filled a large rain barrel and every other large plastic implement her children could find with water, and then the truck moved on. Carlos asked her how she was doing since the spill. Last night my son went out to get water and said, “Mamá, what’s going on with the river?” And it was just pure crude coming down. No one else knew. So, I called the neighbor because I didn’t have the number for the oil company. Carlos nodded sympathetically—Claro. She continued: Since 9:00 last night we haven’t had any water. I have four children, plus my husband. You’ve seen the stream.

132  recko ning with ha rm

Figure 3.2. Community members hired by the oil company use shovels to scrape crude off a stream following a spill, while an engineer from the Ministry of the Environment observes. Photo by the author, 2012.

We’re completely contaminated here in this area. We use the river for everything—to bathe, to wash clothes, to do the dishes, for the animals. Everything. We don’t have anywhere to go to get water. She was upset, but seemingly unsurprised. It’s the holidays soon, and the house—I have to wash, I have to clean. One of her younger children stood watching, with a firm grip on the hem of her mother’s shorts. You know, it scares me. They say you can get cancer of the stomach from drinking contaminated water. It scares me. Or cancer of the throat. She paused. Well, that is only when it’s not treated, Carlos said. Yes, but it makes me feel panicked to drink that water. Please, please help us with drilling a well. Do you know my husband? He’s going blind, and we don’t know what to do. . . Carlos stopped her in midsentence: Well, that is something you’ll have to speak to PetroEcuador about, for the well. But what I can tell you, Señora, is that we will do our best to follow up on this, to make sure that it all gets cleaned up. We’re going to be watching them closely. She thanked them for coming. Carlos left her with his number, they shook hands, and we left. It was unclear when this woman and her family or neighbors would

bo u n d i ng h a rm   133

have clean water again. For the foreseeable future, they would be dependent on the water truck from the oil company to come by every day and fill up their buckets, pots, and pans. It would be months before the cleanup of this stream was deemed resolved. And even then, under the best of circumstances, substantial doubt would likely remain as to whether the water in this stream was safe for bathing or washing dishes, never mind for drinking, cooking, or giving to animals. The uncertainty of this oil mingled with the stream would endure. In all likelihood, this stream will become one of many contaminated waterways here, tributaries along which, years later, you can stick a shovel into the bank and blips of oil will release from the mud, coating the surface in a rainbow slick, expanding, covering the top of the water before floating downstream. Pausing on the bank of the stream, I gazed at the ruptured pipeline and coils of oil snaking into the soil. As I reread my field notes, the urgency of regaining control overwhelms the writing, along with the poignant realization that the oil had floated too far, was buried too deep in the soils, was too profoundly implicated in local and national political economies, to undo. Harm emerges in regulatory responses as an entity that can be contained by limiting the spread of contamination in an environment. Yet at the same time, even within regulatory interventions, harm obviously exceeds efforts at containment, dripping out of banks even after companies have remediated oiled soil, migrating around booms, leaching into the lives of those who live nearby. A farmer spotted our group and came down to speak with the engineers. He greeted us: Somos afectados. The relations of this spill continued to grow. We stood together looking at the stream. This goes on a real long way. In 1986, there was another spill here. This whole area—he indicated the marshy area along the river toward the edge of the clearing—​all of this area is contaminated. This used to be a waste pit. This isn’t the first time. Before, in the last spill, cows fell in, and animals died. Yesterday my sister called me, she lives over there, and told me there was a big spill happening. We continue living like this, really contaminated. Victor nodded. A tree, heavy with orange fruit, sat on the bend just beyond the bridge. The fruit stood out against the monochromatic grays and greens. Black ribbons passed underneath the bridge, like thin eels floating downstream. The man told us how he would like to go back to school through a distance-learning program. He had only made it through la primaria, the equivalent of about fifth grade, and he would really like to study. But it’s hard, you know? Victor looked up: You’ll have to talk about that with Petro. The group was tired, and the early afternoon air was heavy. Spill

134  reckoning with ha rm

response usually means driving to the site, hiking a limited perimeter, speaking to the necessary people in charge of the cleanup, and moving on. But today, traversing the course of the river had taken nearly four hours. We piled into the truck and drove to the PetroEcuador station in Shushufindi. Conversation moved to lunch. Victor wanted chicken. Pollo, hermano? Carlos interjected, Where do you think the chickens drink from around here? Speculation ensued about water sources for livestock. We drove to the company cafeteria and got in line with the supervisor with whom we had spent the morning. The group may have left the spill behind for the day, but its effects lingered. In the spills I witnessed, ministry and company response was a coordinated management of unfolding harm, geared toward erecting material barriers in a landscape where the impossibility of control was apparent at every turn. The emphasis on containment revolved around institutionalizing protocols designed to limit the spread of contamination in a given environment, but not to challenge the generation or presence of pollution. Containment is a means of “fixing” the problem of the spill, in the sense that effort focuses on bounding harm to remove toxicants and remediate the environment. Emphasis on containment—whether in terms of physical boundaries or the conceptual apparatus for determining where the boundaries lie for contaminated versus uncontaminated spaces—is akin to the emphasis on jurisdictional divisions in the “prior audit.” It is a means of drawing limits around periods of time and physical spaces through which the extent and very nature of harm is curtailed. Enacting material boundaries to contain and clean up contamination is an urgent, necessary endeavor. At the same time, observing the futility of the booms along the oil-soaked river in contrast to the desperation among the people who depended upon the water for drinking, cooking, and bathing, it became clear that no institutional response could ever fully contain the consequences of extraction. While containment is an essential component of limiting the effects of the toxic substances produced by oil production, a focus on containment alone further instantiates harm by divorcing toxicity from pertinent histories of power and inequality (Murphy 2008; Fortun 2001). In this context, contamination of the neighboring family’s water supply is seemingly “resolved” by the provision of water deliveries. Containment provides a technological fix to a systemic problem (Rosner 2004), failing to address how institutional responses also make and perpetuate toxicity. As the anthropologist Elizabeth Hoover has shown, prioritizing containment often comes at the expense of other actions, such as removing waste or tightening standards

bo u n d i ng h a rm   135

for pollution (Hoover 2017, 114). At worst, the regulatory apparatus of containment and remediation can further reinforce the extractive status quo as the single mode of acting in polluted spaces, obscuring broader histories of harm and alternative possibilities of responding to and living in the toxic present. For those working for the ministry, responding to toxicity was not a matter of shock or of outrage at spills, explosions, or confrontations between settler farmers or Indigenous nationalities and security guards. Rather, industrial accidents were regrettable but ultimately expected outcomes for officials to manage within normal operations. The boundaries of harm that they worked to enact and shore up through regulatory interventions were central to justifying the continued function of the industry because they represented official efforts to contain contamination.

Incinerox I sat at my desk late on a February afternoon with a searing pain between my eyebrows, eyes stinging and red. Visions of the day flashed in my mind as I ran through what I should be writing up in my fieldnotes. I had spent the day with José on an inspection of Incinerox, a hazardous and solid waste incineration facility in Shushufindi, where the oil industry disposes of hazards resulting from daily operations. Located six hundred meters (ca. 1,970 ft) from the edge of town, the complex sits on a forested hill overlooking the surrounding area. As their slogan goes, Incinerox: We incinerate your contamination problems. Upon our arrival, the site manager greeted us to discuss risk management. Musty and dark, his office was covered wall to wall in shelves holding three-ring binders of documentation. José asked to review the site’s risk maps and emergency plans to verify whether the facility managers had enacted the ministry’s prior requests for operational improvements. Unable to locate the specific documents among the many possible binders where they might have been filed, the manager made some phone calls to request another copy. We proceeded on our tour. A worker equipped with a long pole fed huge incinerators wrapped in shiny silver plastic. Piles of contaminated dirt from oil spills sat off to the side. A mixing platform was designated for trash that contained acids. An assemblage of five-gallon buckets stained with crude sat next to a heap of household trash. Red trash bags, full of oil-stained gloves, wipes, absorbent booms, and other equipment used to clean up spills waited to be burned. Mounds of plastic had

136  reckoning with ha rm

been divided out in a separate section, designated for recycling into pellets. This was where all the materials—plant matter, clean-up equipment, old crude—came after an oil company completed a remediation. Looking around, I realized I had never considered what happened to the waste generated in the process of cleaning up the many spills I had witnessed. Necessary interventions also carry substantial toxic burdens. As we proceeded through the inspection, José verified the presence of fire extinguishers and eye-washing stations and stopped occasionally to interrogate the workers we encountered on what they would do in case of an emergency. He checked whether everyone was using earplugs, gloves, and masks when necessary. Walking under a large, corrugated metal roof, we entered the storage area for crude oil that had been recovered from spills or other accidents. The stacks of oil barrels towered above us, four to five barrels high, a mélange of different colors and company logos. One barrel, with the top cracked open, sat alone, black crude descending in a slow drip down the side. Beyond the aisles of barrels, contaminated water stood in a series of tanks, where it would eventually evaporate, and the remaining crude residue in the tanks would then be burned. The water in the very last tank was released down the hillside. José assured me that the company runs routine soil and water tests; this kind of environmental discharge was, according to him, nothing to be concerned about. Finishing our tour, José seemed satisfied. He noted that Incinerox had made a number of improvements and registered changes, and he informed the manager that he would complete the necessary report for the ministry once he received a copy of the emergency management plan and risk map. Next time, he noted, he would like to have those up front. Some months after our visit, Incinerox went up in flames. On the evening of August 19, 2012, an exodus of people surged out of Shushufindi as the city and surrounding communities were ordered to evacuate. As one witness from the 11 de Julio neighborhood reported to interviewers from the Clínica Ambiental (Environmental Clinic), “We saw the fire start because it was so close. We live two hundred meters [656 ft] from the warehouse that burned. . . . It started to smell very strongly of chemicals. This smell already existed every day, and continues to this day, but that day it was very strong. We had never protested before because we didn’t know where it came from” (Maldonado et al. 2013, 5). On the day of the fire, the persistent permeation of slow violence that this family experienced while living alongside the incinerator over the years materialized as a moment of explosive crisis.

bo u n d i ng h a rm   137

Figure 3.3. Stacks of oil barrels await incineration at the Incinerox hazardous and solid waste incineration facility in Shushufindi. The barrels contained crude and other contaminated materials collected from spills, such as the oil scraped off the river in figure 3.2. Photo by the author, 2012.

Support arrived from fire stations around the region, as well as backup from the oil companies’ fire services. The fire was not under control until nearly a full day later. Firefighters quickly exhausted oxygen and protective masks, reporting difficulties with the heavy, suffocating, acidic air that burned their eyes, mouths, and noses (Maldonado et al. 2013). Photographs in the newspaper showed an apocalyptic scene of the incineration station, leveled and smoking, with oil barrels strewn about (Gómez 2012). When the surrounding communities returned to their homes, they found that the water in the Shushufindi River and many household rainwater-collection tanks was unusable. Reports of difficulty breathing, headaches, nausea, vomiting, visual disturbances, and skin problems abounded in the weeks and months that followed. Stories of residents who feared for their health, and others who worried about the possibility of more fires and explosions, made their way

138  reckoning with ha rm

to Lago Agrio. In the following weeks, people spoke about the unknown effects of the fire and massive toxic exposure to a mixture of unknown chemicals. As one firefighter noted in the subsequent Clínica Ambiental investigation, “There is concern about what will happen in the long run. We were exposed to toxics from agrochemicals, hydrocarbons, pharmaceutical waste, miscellaneous, and it is not known what the impact may be. . . . I am afraid I might develop cancer because of the toxicity of the products.” A woman who had been four months pregnant at the time of the fire similarly described her fear that the exposures might have affected the health of her unborn child. A few months later, another family reported that their farm animals had delivered stillborn, malformed fetuses (Maldonado et al. 2013, 15). Records of visits to local health centers in the subsequent weeks, and investigative reports like the work done by the Clínica Ambiental, attest to the extent of harm experienced by residents, including evidence of elevated levels of polycylic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heavy metals such as chrome, cadmium, mercury, nickel, and lead in soils in the surrounding area. The Ministry of the Environment issued a statement on the chronology of its follow-up, describing the moment of the fire, the assistance it provided, and the meetings it held to put the mitigation and remediation plans into action (Ministerio del Ambiente y Agua 2012). After the fire, I sat looking at the photos I had taken from the day of the inspection, taking stock of all of the various toxic substances I had seen on our visit that had subsequently exploded, clouding the air and settling in fine particulates across the homes, farms, and rivers of tens of thousands of people in the surrounding area. Despite the contingency plans for hypothetical emergencies with their clear divisions of risk and response, clouds of toxic smoke unsettle any illusion of containment. The encounters addressed here, from witnessing public presentations and audits to overseeing spill cleanup or routine inspections of toxic waste facilities, are all part of a regime of oil industry regulation that is relatively new. Despite fifty years of production, only the past twenty have seen any organized, legitimate attempt by the state to regulate the industry. Whether in public presentations, on posters, or in social media posts, there was an effort by state entities such as the Ministry of the Environment and PetroEcuador to contrast the industry’s current practices to those of the past. This rhetoric describes operations in terms of responsibility, best practices, state-of-the-art technology, and environmental protection achieved through the goodwill of the oil companies and the oversight provided by the regulatory apparatus. Yet despite these

bo u n d i ng h a rm   139

efforts and improvements, harm is not only a thing of the past, a marker of the Texaco consortium era that has been eclipsed by technological advances and good regulation. Regulatory agencies continue to face the persistent challenges of delineating where harm begins and ends and figuring out how to address it. Spills drift downriver, and contamination leaches into water and lodges itself in soil despite the booms deployed to contain it, or the meetings held to preemptively address potential impacts and concerns. Like the pits left over by PetroEcuador, dug anew by Bellwether, and handed back to PetroEcuador, harm persists despite efforts to isolate it within time and space. In many cases, the state’s role is to witness the concerns and questions of the community and serve as an instrument of control that oversees the industry and its required assessments. The engineers working at local offices of the Ministry of the Environment are expected to cover the entire province, responding to inspections, problems, or spills that are often a two- or three-hour drive from the office along winding roads. In cases such as the example of the Tarapoa EIAs, one engineer was assigned two public meetings at the same time. The engineer left before the presentation at one event and arrived late to the next. Officials signed papers to certify that the state was present for the meetings. In the following hearing, residents articulated harm: a well that is too close to a home for the residents to sleep well at night, a well that is too close for one to feel safe, a well that does not allow for good relations between the company and the community. The ministry and company responses reiterated regulatory understandings of harm through the limits of impacts and zones of influence. Impacts as the EIA defined them do not encompass the very concerns raised by those living next to drilling, such that the public presentations of new or expanded operations can contribute to the profound disconnect between regulatory priorities and community concerns. In each of these cases, the engineer and company personnel repeated the relationship between the state, the company, and the people: they all must work together. Oil operations never exist on a blank slate. Particularly in places with extended extractive histories—including petrochemical, but also other contemporary and historical legacies of extraction—one company’s operations are interwoven with those that preceded them. In the prior audit of industrial operations before the handover of the Bellwether site, the consultants had to circumscribe their assessment within one part of the site’s extractive history. Only those waste pits constructed during a particular period of time and by a specific company came to matter.

140  reckoning with ha rm

Other spills, pits, and operational legacies fell out of view. As audit after audit is completed, the larger story of what the pits contain or what their continued presence means for the frogs, birds, and human neighbors is obscured and significantly diminished.9 In this way, regulation and its specific ways of recognizing contamination through scientific practice and legal limits enable the oil industry to continue, while also participating in the making and reproduction of harm that it purports to prevent (Liboiron 2021, 16). The work of artificially bounding environments can render problems of pollution principally technical, resulting in continued discursive and institutional violence through regulation. Regulation requires the physical presence of a variety of authorities: the Ministry of the Environment, representatives from the oil company, the environmental services company contracted to complete the EIA, and the community relations representative. Tasks like registering a spill, recording a meeting, conducting an audit, or inspecting facilities require a great mobilization of personnel and resources. Such regulatory practices solidify certain things as important, and others as irrelevant. Documents like the EIA and the audit select certain parts of the environment as documentable, referenceable, and comparable. In this sense, regulatory practices construct what the relevant understanding of harm is from the state’s point of view. In their completion, the value of these regulatory actions is in these acts of documenting, regardless of whether the inspection, EIA, or audit itself is poorly done, fails to include what people who live in the area consider important, or operates with an entirely different understanding of what harm is. One effect of the use of these documents as routine means of assessing environments has been attempts to stabilize harm through regulatory intervention (sometimes as isolatable “impacts,” other times as limited to a specific company or time period). The many contingencies involved in producing officially sanctioned regulatory understandings of harm are rarely made visible. Throughout these vignettes of regulatory practices, boundaries, whether synthetic means of separating the contents of a waste pit from the surrounding soil or jurisdictional distinctions between the inspectors and the operators, are central to the industry’s continued functioning. Boundaries represent official efforts to contain contamination. As long as the noxious effects of the industry are confined to specific spaces, the state can justify their benefits. Of course, boundaries are necessary; finding ways to measure how far contaminants have traveled, material structures to contain their spread, and plans to minimize the damage are essential to effective environmental regulation. Nonetheless, the tech-

bo u n d i ng h a rm   141

niques officials use to respond to and intervene in harm have become so firmly institutionalized as part of regulatory practice and as a given way of responding to harm in an extractive landscape that they often eclipse other concerns and lived experiences of harm. Regulatory actions are not the only ways of intervening in the contaminated spaces of industry and life; these are methods that invoke particular concerns over others, that privilege particular modes of understanding and acting in the world over others. Regulatory interventions into harm are not neutral. The boundaries of toxicity are informed by the relations of life, past and present, in this place: of personal encounters, regional legacies, bureaucratic norms, and histories of loss and rupture. The interpretation of contaminated sites, both old and future operations, is refracted through the shared knowledge that comes from inhabiting a place of active extraction. Despite the concerted efforts of the Ecuadorian state to divorce its own extractive history and continued operations from earlier decades under the consortium, harm remains a central problem in Amazonia, one that cannot be addressed through regulatory practices of witnessing, documentation, or containment alone.

chapter 4

toxic exposures

In his Quito office, Camilo showed me slides from a presentation he had delivered at Brown University a few years before to explain how people in the Ecuadorian Amazon encounter the industrial chemicals used in oil production. A trained biologist, he lived in the Amazon in the 1990s and had since worked on environmental issues associated with oil production, as well as on the Aguinda lawsuit. He clicked through the slides, reviewing Texaco’s operational practices and discussing how these choices exposed people living in the region to toxic substances. As we spoke, he paused on a slide featuring two images side by side. The first image read “EPA’s polluted guy.” It was a graphic intended to summarize for a lay audience the different means by which an average individual could be exposed to toxicants in a generically contaminated site, the kind you might find in a pamphlet about environmental contamination. A figure stands on a patch of soil, fully dressed, surrounded by arrows which indicate various forms of potential exposures (“inhalation,” “intake from crops,” “soil vapors,” “skin absorption,” and “intake from water”). By contrast, a second image on the right depicts a young child sitting on a dirt road covered with oil residue in an unidentified location in the Amazon. Camilo has titled the photograph “Ecuador’s polluted kid.” These two images, he said, are essential for understanding the nature of toxic exposure in Ecuador and underscore the relationship between ongoing problems with oil contamination in the Amazon and the history of the US companies that have operated there. He explained: This for me is important. Because this is how the EPA sees people who are exposed to contamination. And this is how it is here. He has no shoes and no shirt. . . . If you’re in the United States on a contaminated site, normally you’re like this [“EPA’s polluted guy”], and not like this

 143

144  reckoning with ha rm

[“Ecuador’s polluted kid”]. Thus, the contact that our people have with contamination is much closer. . . . Whatever scientific study you might do on contamination, or whatever you might know from the United States, well, it’s different here because we live differently. People here are much more naked in the face of contamination.

“Naked in the face of contamination” makes bare the vulnerability of Amazon residents who live alongside oil. “Naked” refers to how unprotected human bodies—such as the boy’s extended crude-stained foot, or his hands and uncovered upper body—come in contact with chemicals. But “naked” also refers beyond the skin to the proximity of people’s homes to waste pits; to the unfiltered water in their wells that, for lack of better options, they drink despite the smell of oil; or to the lack of resources to protect themselves from those exposures within this industrial-natural landscape, which shape the form toxicity takes in the Amazon. While early settlers did not know that oil was toxic, people living in the region now have a clear understanding of oil’s dangers. Thus, to be “naked” is not necessarily contingent on a lack of knowledge about toxicity but has to do first and foremost with the social, material, and historical conditions that make some more vulnerable to toxic exposures than others. To expose is to lay open, to reveal, to leave unprotected. To expose is also to make visible through technical, scientific, legal, and social mediations, each of which captures particular, partial manifestations of toxicity. In this chapter I explore connections between toxicants, the difficulties of tracking their corporeal presences, and experiences of chemical intoxications to develop an understanding of toxic exposure that begins from the perspectives of those living in Amazonia.1 That is, instead of trying to make sense of harm through top-down applications of toxicity models, exposure pathways, or notions of “chemicals in white space” (Murphy 2021), I build from ethnographic material to argue that the relations between the entangled histories of settlement and industry, the particularities of life in the Amazon, and the temporal incongruities of determining harm in the past are central to understanding how toxic exposures have occurred and continue to occur today. The ways that we trace exposure are consequential interventions into the visibility and invisibility of pollutants. Camilo’s juxtaposition of the two drawings articulates a direct relationship between the Amazon and the United States, histories of extraction under Texaco, and the profoundly unequal burdens of exposure and toxic pollution that characterize life today.

toxic e xposu r es   145

Of and in the World: Exposure in the Amazon Swimming in Oil “Well, I’m from Loja. And I tell you, I didn’t know anything, didn’t know what petroleum was.” Coming from the southern highlands after ongoing struggles with drought, land crowding, and poverty, the first groups of settlers saw the Amazon as a source of wonder when they arrived in Lago Agrio in the 1970s. Like Gonzalo, Lidia described her initial delight at the natural abundance, coupled with a fear of the unknown. “I tell you, we came here to see something new, to feel what it was like to live in another world here in our own country . . . the fauna, the flora, the jungle. There were some huge trees, tremendous trees. And different flowers too.” She went on to list the size of the fish they could catch even in small streams, and the abundant game, including paujiles (currasows), pavos (turkeys), and even a fat guatusa (agouti). This was the divine providence that many, like Lidia, felt was a gift from God, made possible by the government’s invitation and the long-standing declaration that these lands were “vacant” and ready to be worked. Yet they were not alone in this wild. Settling on the ancestral lands of the Cofán nationality north of what is today the bustling city of Lago Agrio, Lidia’s family claimed land that would soon become home to a Texaco oil station and multiple wells. And that, she says, is when it all began to change. “After this, the oil started to spill. A substance, black, started spreading. First, the machine would come by, removing the rocks from the roads . . . and then they’d put down the oil. And everything would be coated.” Lidia described the common practice of road oiling, the same confirmed by Chevron representatives and shown in pictures of the earlier decades of extraction in the Amazon. The feet of families like Lidia’s were coated in crude oil as they walked to town, school, or their farmland. As Camilo emphasized, paying attention to the particulars of how crude oil production unfolded in this region (such as practices like road oiling that are now obsolete) among a population that often went barefoot (something not accounted for in conventional models of exposure) begins to illustrate how toxicity is not a scientific given as Camilo’s example of the “EPA guy” suggests. Rather, toxicity is a sociomaterial process that emerges in distinct formations entangled with the relations of this place, the histories of settler colonialism, interventions of scientific knowledge, and a political economy that hinges on oil extraction. Early tales of rivers that ran black with crude, waste pits that overflowed and filled swamps downstream, or the many documented and

146  recko ning with ha rm

undocumented spills in rivers are indicative of the widespread contamination of land, waterways, and air as a result of oil operations in this region. Exposure to chemicals in the water was amplified by the absence of piped water in residents’ homes; people relied on rivers for all their basic needs and ingested toxicants directly through drinking, cooking, and bathing. Today, plants often grow in soil previously saturated by spills, or in close proximity to waste pits. Farmers frequently recounted changes in their fruit trees, declining cacao productivity, or shriveled fruit after industrial incidents. On several occasions, locals showed me plantings of plantain, pineapple, or heart of palm growing directly on top of old waste pits. When they dug down with a spade, black soil smelling of crude emerged less than a meter beneath the surface. For Lidia, these early years of life in the Amazon were riddled with memories of the materiality of oil—how its viscosity changed under the hot sun, how it stuck to skin, impervious to any amount of soap, scrubbing, or swearing. She described how these corporeal presences and permutations were connected to experiences of illness: Oil is sticky and, when it was hot out, because the sun is strong here, there was no way to walk because the oil [on the roads] burned your feet. It would cause blisters, all of that. So, that’s how things started, first our legs started to hurt, we started to get cramps. And we said to the engineers from Texaco, “Why do you spill oil?” And they said, “No, no, oil is not harmful. Petroleum is a form of medicine. Petroleum can be used for pain, for pain in your bones, for whatever.” So, we were unconcerned, out there swimming in oil.

In the process of conducting fieldwork, I found that Lidia’s account was remarkably similar to the accounts of other residents in the region who emphasized the settlers’ initial ignorance of the health problems that can result from exposure to products used in oil operations. Anecdotes like her exchange with Texaco workers were repeated to me frequently. Lidia and others recounted that Texaco workers told residents that petroleum was good for curing the aches and pains of arthritis, instructing them to place it directly on their joints. Stories like this encapsulate a common view of those in charge of oil operations during the consortium: at best they left the population in the dark due to their own ignorance, and at worst they intentionally exposed residents to toxic substances.2 As Lidia tells it, the settlers’ collective ignorance of petroleum’s harmful effects was so great—and their resources to seek out alternatives once they began to experience damages so poor—that when the oil became

toxic e xposu r es   147

so thick that it formed a skim floating on the water in rivers or in their rain buckets, she and others would simply scrape it off and proceed. She recalled, No, we weren’t worried because they told us that petroleum wasn’t harmful. .  .  . We used the water in these streams to wash .  .  . for cooking, for drinking, for everything. . . . There was a skim, a thick covering, sometimes two or three centimeters thick, sometimes up to five centimeters thick—a layer that was made out of crude. So that’s why I tell you, it was hard. It was hard, really hard, for us.

Lidia’s words echoed in my head after our meetings. “Swimming in oil.” An apt summary of the lengthy accounts she would tell of her experience in this place. While doubling as a semantic description, there is also a literal truth embedded that is instructive for understanding the material manifestations of toxicity: she and her family have indeed swum, bathed, walked upon, breathed, and ingested the toxic components of oil production over the course of decades. Lidia’s reality—one of pain and struggle, joys and new delights in this place—exceeds any model of “normal” exposure from oil operations. Her descriptions reflect toxic exposure as emerging from a specific place and history where people walked on roads without shoes, lived in homes without treated water, or washed clothes while standing or kneeling in polluted rivers. These are the cumulative, layered, kaleidoscopic effects of repeated exposures over decades of life in this place. Lidia was one of the first settlers in the region. In her case, the labor to carve a life out of contaminated land has propelled her into broader struggles for justice in the Aguinda lawsuit, for which she traveled to the United States to share her story with other environmental justice activists and Chevron shareholders. She illustrates the importance of attending to vernacular, intimate, sensory experiences when tracing the material presence of toxicants. Her story also points us to ways that the colonialist project of state-sponsored settlement displaced Indigenous communities that hunted and fished in this territory and called it home. At the same time, she illustrates the new forms of exposure that were created as trees were felled, wells were drilled, and settler communities grew. Smoke Thick Like Marmalade Close to where she first settled, Lidia now lives at the end of a dirt path on the rise of a hill overlooking her grown children’s homes. The road and pipeline form a parallel horizon as she gazes out her front door.

148  reckoning with ha rm

Her immediate neighbors are the currently state-run oil station on one side and a sherbet-colored hourly motel on the other. She has lived here for about five decades. Over time, the boundaries of her property, the places where she keeps her pigs and grows her cacao, have shifted as various industrial incidents have rendered land unsuitable for planting or raising animals. The soundscape of Lidia’s home is filled with the insistent squawks of chickens, the grunts of her favorite fat sow tethered close to the door, and the recurrent requests of grandchildren, to which she invariably responds, Ya, mí amor. In the background is the constant drone of motors and gas flares from the station. By 6:00 p.m. the flares flash through the treetops against the lavender light of Amazonian dusk. The noise, in the relative quiet of the evening hours, is amplified. The flares are always lit. Depending on the direction of the wind, the smell of gas is unmistakable. For days after these visits, my throat would burn. When you ask Lidia about life next to the gas flares, she tells a story of unrelenting adversity. In years prior, a black film coated everything: rooftops, rain barrels, the leaves of planted crops, clothing hung on the line. Sometimes, she notes, this still happens, though not as often. Today, the flare leaves ashy traces that Lidia and her family touch and inadvertently ingest by drinking from water tanks or harvesting crops. The flare emits gasses: sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and nitrogen dioxide. Present too are other substances: carbon dioxide, methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane, heptane, and carbon monoxide. Although she can never be sure on a given day what combination of chemicals happens to surround them, Lidia is certain that these gases sometimes cause headaches that render her and her family unable to work; for others, they make eyes red and itchy, throats scratchy, or chests too tight to breathe. Each person’s response is a bit different. The proximity of Lidia’s home to these flares—while exceptional in its unremitting onslaught against her family members’ health—is routine here. As we spoke, occasionally Lidia’s adult children would come by to collect their children, whom she had been watching while the parents were at work, and stop to listen, leaning on the doorframe to add any additional details she had neglected. During one visit, one of her sons sat down to describe the debris that would catch fire in the gas flares and fall down on them, like flaming bits of smoldering rain. There were other times too, he noted, when the workers would light the waste pits on fire, and the smoke descended upon them like a thick blanket: They would light the waste pits on fire where they would store the oil. And the fire would make these terrible columns of smoke. Black,

toxic e xposu r es   149

but thick, like when you’re making marmalade. And in each part of these columns, you could see this big thick cloud. That’s how it was. It would start like that, and then within an hour and a half or so, then it would rain. And with the rain, all of this smoke fell over the plants. Stained all the plants, the clothes too if they were outside. Sometimes we weren’t at home, and when we got back all of the clothes would be stained black. The plants were bathed in this. It would damage the roofs of the houses, and we wouldn’t have any water. And the water in the tanks that we had started to build would be covered too.3

Lidia’s son went on to describe how their animals began to lose their fur. For Lidia and her children, the health problems of their numerous dogs clearly signaled what the toxicants were doing to their bodies as well. Her son stuck his chin in the direction of one dog who was sleeping in the sun of the courtyard, drawing my attention to the mangy patches where much of the fur on its haunches had fallen out: “He went to the river and was crossing near the station when he went in the river. . . . The water was hot and doubtless had a lot of chemicals in it.” The loss of fur, moments of seizure-like shaking, the effects of toxicity on animal counterparts are registered in family histories among overlapping memories of clouds thick with black smoke. Stories of animals lost to contamination here abound: some farmers told me of cows who gave birth to malformed calves, while others described chickens who ran around in a frenetic dance after drinking contaminated water just before dying. Animals died after drinking water in the rivers and streams; on occasion, they would fall into open waste pits and drown, stuck in the oily slop. Farmers recalled pregnant animals that miscarried or simply became so thin that they died. When they opened up the animals after their deaths, their insides had crude residues that their bodies had been unable to process. Tales of animals lost or injured by oil operations, or those deformed or defurred after crossing a nearby river, circulate here as evidence of the continuum of human and nonhuman vulnerabilities that emerge in relation to extraction.4 The chicken in the yard or the hunting dog on the run becomes a sentinel of the dangers that lurk in the smoke that clouds the horizon. A Horrible Smell, and Then TSAAC! Living next to industry places Lidia and her family in relation to toxicants. These are not voluntary relations, but more along the lines of “chemical kinships” (Agard-Jones 2016), illustrating the nonlinear

150  reckoning with ha rm

effects of chemicals on those least equipped to prevent toxicants from penetrating bodily limits (Roberts 2017b). Exposures in the Amazon were and are multiple, differentiated, and infrequently recorded. From the time they arrived in the Amazon, Lidia and other women spent hours washing laundry by hand in the streams nearby. Sitting on the riverbank, partially or completely submerged in the water, women’s bodies were awash in toxicants running with the current. She described countless days when the water changed color to a frothy gray, or when they would arrive at the stream to find an awful stench flowing downstream. Contamination from production waters, crude oil, and other chemicals ran across their bodies: barium, mercury, arsenic, selenium, antimony, chromium, cadmium, cobalt, lead, manganese, vanadium, and zinc. Production waters contain many salts and heavy metals, which are highly toxic to humans and can bioaccumulate in fish and other animals. Other radioactive elements, such as strontium-90 or radium-226, flowed around them, linking the daily routines of scrubbing laundry to aromatic hydrocarbons of benzene, xylene, and toluene. It did not take long before settlers started experiencing health problems. Others living in the areas outside of Lago Agrio told me of skin rashes from bathing in the river, persistent coughs and respiratory problems, miscarriages, and infants born with birth defects. For some, ill health began as a vague series of complaints. When they went to the river to bathe, Lidia and others noted, rashes and skin spots would coat the arms, bellies, and backs of their young children. Lidia’s story is marked by the pain of three miscarriages. She remembers each in exacting relation to the industrial operations and daily routines at the time, bringing her to tears as she recalls those days decades later: The first miscarriage was because I crossed the stream. I had been washing [laundry]. I was washing when before we knew it a stain of black oil was floating downstream. And we got out of the water. But since I had left the clothes on the other side, a whole tub of clothes on the other side, I risked crossing the stream. I got wet up to here [indicating the height with her hand] on my legs, covered in oil. The water was floating down with a black layer on top, but underneath the water was a gray color. It stunk. A horrible smell. And then I started getting dizzy, vomiting, dizziness with vomiting, and then tsaac! All of a sudden, I had pain in my stomach, pain in my hips, all through the middle of the night.

toxic e xposu r es   151

In another instance, she went on to describe how at just over three months pregnant, she miscarried. Each miscarriage is tied to an oil spill, a river crossing, or in one case, pulling a fallen bull out of a waste pit. The experience of illness—from headaches to vomiting, the sensation that she was going crazy from the ensuing pain, the loss of each child—is permeated with memories of specific industrial events and encounters with toxicants. Moments of agony mark this history of routine oil spills and industrial operations; these are accounts that have no official traces within legal or scientific reckonings with the history of contamination in this place. The capacity of toxic substances to transgress boundaries (Tuana 2008), whether through accumulation in the fatty tissue of fish or their movement through the air and into our lungs, has other effects as well. Exposures remind us that distinctions between subject and object, human and nonhuman, mother and river, memory and the present, are not fixed. Here, Lidia and her neighbors’ bodies were submerged, surrounded, embedded, penetrated by industrial contaminants while they worked and bathed in the river. Toxic relations with chemical particles, as the queer and gender theorist Mel Chen suggests, involve the shifting capacities to both affect and be affected that are central to the experience of exposure (Chen 2012, 159). As the feminist STS philosopher Nancy Tuana argues, this is the “viscous porosity of flesh” (Tuana 2008), those moments when toxic substances make us sick that remind us of the ways that we are in and of the world. There is no way to extract the bodily memories of loss, pain, and agony from the industrial register of this place. Lidia and other people I worked with were resolute that they would not leave the homes they had made in the Amazon despite their ongoing struggles with pollution. Some described with pride the lives they had carved out of nothing, others said that they felt that God had chosen this place for them and they would persevere, and others told me that it would be far too difficult to move. “Where would I go?” one man asked rhetorically. He told me how some twenty years earlier he and his family had moved to their current farm in an effort to escape the contamination they were facing in a different community, only to find that the contamination, struggles with oil in their well, and health problems followed them with dogged insistence. Others responded with variations of, “Who is going to buy a contaminated farm?” For many of the settlers, their livelihoods and financial resources are tied up in their farms. Some families had only one person making a salary of $400 per month; others had to sell farm animals when medical emergencies came

152  recko ning with ha rm

up. Others felt it would be unethical to knowingly sell a toxic property to another family for fear that the problems they struggled with would only be passed on. Economic constraints and the persistence of toxicity lodged in the soil, as well as personal feelings of attachment, a devout resolution in the face of adversity, or even resignation to life’s course, led people to stay. The complexity of settler relations to the place—often formed through a sense of entitlement and the initial audacity they recalled when setting off to colonize the Amazon—made it difficult to leave and underlined the burdens of poor farmers occupying the region. The lived knowledge they now possessed of how hard life was alongside an industry whose effects they had not previously contemplated had opened their eyes to exposure but left them no better protected in its wake. To be naked in the face of contamination, after all these years, is contingent not on not knowing the potential risks, as was the case when they first arrived, but rather on the social, material, and historical conditions that make some more vulnerable than others. While Lidia makes different choices today than when she first moved to Lago Agrio based on her accumulated knowledge and experience alongside oil extraction, the principal health risks to her and her family remain unavoidable as they farm and eat vegetables grown in contaminated land, swim and wash clothes in contaminated rivers, or breathe poisonous gases from the flares next door. Lidia’s stories, along with anecdotes from her son and other residents, illustrate how difficult it is to encapsulate exposure as a bounded moment; these accounts center on the permeability of bodies, rivers, houses, and animals to chemical agents. Toxicants flow around Lidia and her family in the water and the air; the flash of pain in her womb refracts the lived burden of chemical onslaught through moments of loss. If, following Mol (2002, 54), “to be is to be related,” then to live here is to live in relation to industry. Despite proximity to the ongoing combustion of chemicals, Lidia is adamant that things are much better than before. Farmers who had lived in the region for decades made similar comments. Camilo, like Lidia, was quick to note two immediate differences from the 1990s: “Now it is much better. Why? One, they don’t dump oil on roads. Very important. Two, they don’t burn the oil like before, in the pits.” He described how, after oil workers separate water from crude in separation stations, the water flows through a gooseneck pipe into a series of waste pits. In the past, standard practice was to burn the gas in flares not as they do now but through a lower flare directly over the pit itself. The water in the pits

toxic e xposu r es   153

contained crude particulates that would burn along with the gas, día y noche, noche y día. Years ago, when companies lit waste pits on fire, it was routine to see great columns of smoke towering through the clouds, so thick that company helicopters disappeared behind them. Burned petroleum produces smoke that contains carcinogens. Because the flares and pits that were lit on fire are not perfect forms of combustion, aromatic hydrocarbons that do not combust completely are also released in the process. Regulatory measures and industrial practices have changed over the past fifty years, such that the nature, frequency, and intensity of exposure to toxicants in the air that Lidia and her family breathe have changed over time. Lidia’s family’s arrival coincided with the industry’s early development. Her accounts include forms of exposure that, while significant years ago, are fortunately now less of an issue given the end to practices such as road oiling or open waste pit burning. Yet other forms of routine contact, such as spills from pipelines or overflowing waste pits, mean that as they walk across their land or tend to their crops, the hands and feet of those who live here are in contact with chemicals today just like in the past. Spectacular events, such as massive pipeline ruptures or animals slicked with oil, still occur, such as the Incinerox fire in Shushufindi in 2012 or the immense rupture of a heavy crude pipeline at the border of Sucumbíos and Napo provinces when I was revising this book in early 2022 (Vásconez 2022). Limiting an understanding of exposure to isolated moments like these would miss the everyday exposures that are part of the very fabric of life in this place. Far more difficult to capture, these insidious forms of toxic exposure are just as consequential.

Relations of Knowledge Production There is much at stake in the boundaries scientists and regulators draw when assessing how oil operations refigure life. As Camilo suggested at the opening of this chapter, and as Lidia’s account also shows, applying generic models of risk assessment to exposure in the Amazon means missing fundamental connections between people’s lives and the toxicants produced in oil extraction. While people living alongside industrial operations are often the first to detect problems and are essential in providing the contextual information that informs where officials should test for certain chemicals (those very insights necessary for science to “work,” as seen in chapter 2), experiences with toxic exposures are also systematically excluded from official forms of knowledge production.

154  reckoning with ha rm

Community-based participatory health (CBPR) research has emerged over the past half century as a response to persistent health disparities, legacies of medical racism, and environmental contamination. CBPR works to dismantle asymmetric power relationships between the researcher and the research subject, questioning assumptions central to dominant Western science by taking people’s everyday experiences seriously (Koning and Martin 1996; Baum, MacDougall, and Smith 2006; Aldridge 2015). Those engaged in CBPR do not collect data for its own sake but do so with the explicit aim of addressing inequities or matters of injustice as defined by the affected community. While such efforts have been formalized through terms like “CBPR,” or related efforts in “citizen science” or “popular epidemiology,” it is important to note that marginalized groups have long taken health research into their own hands, such as the Black Panthers (Nelson 2011), women’s health movements (Murphy 2012), or HIV/AIDS activists in the United States (Epstein 1996). Such movements reflect alternative modes of empirical inquiry that leveraged individual experience, contesting traditional hierarchies of authority and creating space for new forms of public collaboration (Strasser and Mahr 2017). Many contemporary formulations of CBPR draw from these earlier examples in explicitly rejecting traditional hierarchies, structures, and distinctions between lay and expert participants, and dominant and “alternative” knowledge practices (e.g., Ciencia Forense Ciudadana, ExCiteS, and the genre of some “bio-hacking” initiatives) (Ikemoto 2017; Schwartz-Marin and Cruz-Santiago 2018; Maynard 2016). Efforts to construct different models of research, particularly for environmental health concerns, have emerged in response to a long history of building scientific and medical knowledge on the backs of Indigenous people, people of color, and other marginalized communities through experimentation or taking samples (or human remains) in the name of science or “humanity” writ large. Scholars engaged with CBPR methodologies have argued that scientists have an ethical imperative to conduct research with, rather than on, affected communities on matters that will benefit them (Harrison 1991; Tuhiwai Smith 1999; Mora Bayo 2017; Tuck and Yang 2012, 2013, 2014; Webster et al. 2017; Zavala 2013; Simpson 2007; Zahara 2016). Indigenous researchers have contended that community collaboration and control over research is a prerequisite to working toward scholarship that does not replicate colonial hierarchies and violence, in which communities determine what data is collected and how it is used (Zavala 2013). In

toxic e xposu r es   155

this vein, scholars have emphasized the right of refusal (Zahara 2016), calling for researchers to suspend damage-centered research, which can pathologize affected communities (Tuck and Yang 2013; Tuck 2009), and instead turn to the “upstream” perpetrators of violence, such as industrial polluters. In contrast to damage-based approaches, Kim TallBear, a scholar of Indigenous and feminist technoscience, advocates cultivating feminist methodologies of “standing with,” processes of codetermining how different intellectual, ethical, scientific, and community-​building projects might benefit from shared conversation and practice (TallBear 2014). The relationality of harm is vital for building expansive concepts of exposure, toxicity, and connection through time such that corporate or state actors cannot disassociate individual and collective experiences that escape dominant modes of capture in science or law from industrial effects. A central component of some CBPR is the work of translating between the language of experience and the language of dominant science. In her work with the Akwesasne Indigenous community in New York State, the anthropologist Elizabeth Hoover looks at the challenges of some of the earliest examples of CBPR. She describes how, despite ongoing struggles with environmental contamination from multiple Superfund sites, it was difficult for the people of Akwesasne to gain attention because their experiences with contamination were not legible for scientists or regulators (Hoover 2017, 131). It was only later, after multiple studies had documented the high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in breast milk, and in the surrounding soil and animals, that the state took some degree of action. One of the important insights in Hoover’s ethnography is the dual nature of the translation required in CBPR: not only is experience rendered in the language of PCB levels, but scientific processes are also transformed through the participation and capacity building of tribal community members to carry out their own health research. Methodologies that engage with toxic exposures are always entangled with political and socioeconomic structures, ones that CBPR initiatives have repeatedly identified as unjust and harmful (Liboiron 2017a, 21). Social scientists have a key role to play in connecting self-reported health problems to these broader structures of power, including the production of visibility and invisibility through scientific methodologies. In her work on natural gas fracking in the US Midwest, Sarah Wylie observed that the embodied experiences of poor health among those living next to the shale gas industry were easily dismissed, silenced, and forgotten (Wylie

156  reckoning with ha rm

2018, 279). Working from the premise that the illegibility of peoples’ health problems was not accidental but actually by industrial and scientific design, Wylie advances practice-based science and technology studies through the development of environmental health research tools. In her work, this includes creating open-source, decentralized informatics tools that aim to connect and empower people living in places of extraction to study and share their experiences, and to facilitate the involvement of researchers, regulators, and lawyers to create multidisciplinary networks to work with affected communities (Wylie 2018, 303). Her work is an example of environmental health research that begins with the embodied experiences of individuals. In the Amazon, various participatory health research projects have sought to enroll residents in collaborative practices of knowledge production about the effects of the oil industry on health. In what follows, I present the findings of foundational participatory health research studies conducted in the region and discuss how industry scientists have contested them. My point is not to place dominant Western science in opposition to “alternative” community-oriented methods. The community-oriented methods I discuss are established epidemiological and public health methods. Rather, my aim is to show how specific knowledge practices render toxic exposures differently and why these differences matter. In her ethnographic work on human-soil relations in the Colombian Amazon, the anthropologist Kristina Lyons illustrates how both traditional and nontraditional scientific practices with soils are never just about soil itself; instead, they are imbricated with deeper struggles over what constitutes sustainability, what counts as peace in the context of decades of conflict, or how “a good life” should be enacted (Lyons 2020). Similarly, a relational approach to harm insists that toxic exposures are about much more than errant chemicals mistakenly meeting bodies. It is about giving voice to lived experiences of harm or loss in the face of environmental contamination that have not historically “counted” because they do not align with established methodologies, specifically those associated with particular kinds of political and economic power to pollute (Fortun 2001; Petryna 2002). A pair of epidemiologists, Miguel San Sebastián and Anna-Karin Hurtig, along with colleagues Juan Antonio Córdoba, Adolfo Maldonado, and Alexandra Almeida, and others from groups such as Acción Ecológica have produced most of the epidemiological work on health problems associated with oil development in the Amazon since the early 1990s. Responding to growing concerns by the government and

toxic e xposu r es   157

oil companies to prove the effects of oil development on human health, the Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía approached a local health nongovernmental organization that worked with the Catholic mission (Vicariato de Aguarico), the Institute of Epidemiology and Community Health “Manuel Amunárriz” (Instituto de Epidemiología y Salud Communitaria “Manuel Amunárriz”; IESCMA), about conducting a research study (San Sebastián and Hurtig 2005, 801). Beginning from the concerns raised by the FDA, and employing community-based epidemiological methods, the goal of the study was to “increase the limited knowledge that exists about the health effects caused by the contamination in communities surrounded by the oil wells and stations,” and to “respond to public concerns about the potential effects that the oil contamination could have on their health” (San Sebastián 2000, 10). The FDA wished to express in scientific terms what their constituents already knew: that there was a clear link between oil contamination and the health problems from which they and their families suffered. The long-standing relationship between the FDA, the Catholic mission, and IESCMA provided the foundation necessary for undertaking the research. This Yana Curi study, meaning “black gold” in Kichwa, has since become one of the most frequently referenced and most controversial health studies in the region. The FDA wanted a scientific report that leaders could mobilize in official encounters with government and company representatives as part of their advocacy efforts. Lay knowledge and concerns about exposure informed the formulation of the research problem; however, the researchers and the FDA decided that traditional epidemiological methods would be best suited for the investigation. The authors described the study as a means to transform lay knowledge into “another language,” that of dominant science, that would be recognized by authorities (San Sebastián and Hurtig 2005, 801). After agreeing on the methodology with the researchers, the FDA played no role in data collection or analysis. The report outlined evidence of the effects of contamination on health and completed a case study on the community of San Carlos, where locals had raised concerns and their health clinic had reported several cases of cancer (San Sebastián 2000). After confirming ten patients with cancer between 1989 and 1998 and calculating the standard cancer rate in the area of study, the authors determined that the risk of cancer for men there was 2.3 times higher than expected (San Sebastián 2000, 53). The authors found elevated risk for cancer of the larynx, bile duct, liver, and stomach and for melanoma and leukemia in men (2000, 55).

158  reckoning with ha rm

Today, activists and residents frequently reference the study to speak of the region’s “cancer crisis,” which industry critics dispute, citing the limited study population of approximately one thousand individuals. In addition, the authors found high concentrations of contamination from oil pollution in the water that residents living near oil installations in the region used for drinking and bathing. Greater risk of health effects was also found among those living near oil operations, including self-reported skin mycosis, tiredness, itchy nose, sore throat, headache, red eyes, ear pain, diarrhea, and gastritis among women. These women were also found to have a significantly increased risk of miscarriage, when compared with women living in areas without oil operations (San Sebastián and Hurtig 2005, 803). Lowell Sever, an epidemiologist who was working as a consultant for Chevron, reviewed existing literature on health effects and oil contamination in the region, including the Yana Curi study (Sever 2005). The aim of Sever’s report is to identify methodological design issues. The report underscores the confounding effects of socioeconomic conditions in the environmental health research in the region. “There is little or no evidence that would support a causal relationship between oil contamination and health effects” (Sever 2005, 2). He found the suggestion of an association “highly questionable” given methodological concerns with how cases and exposures had been defined, and named issues with bias and confounding variables.5 Moreover, Sever called the researchers’ motivations into question: “The larger agenda of social activism with respect to lack of public health programs and medical services is potentially being used to argue, speciously, for attributing the poor health of members of marginalized and disenfranchised communities to oil contamination. Review of the documents related to health status and human rights in Ecuador in general suggests that the problems observed are unrelated to oil contamination” (2005, 2). Sever questions how the heterogenous types of cancer reported in the San Carlos case could possibly have the same etiologic origin and suggests that issues of socioeconomic inequality, such as poverty, social disorganization, and a lack of basic health services largely due to the recent history of settler colonialism and ecological transformation of the Amazon, are confounding factors that have led to the inaccurate attribution of health problems to oil contamination.6 In February 2005, amid the ongoing Aguinda litigation, Chevron organized a press conference in Quito to present the reports of scientists that critiqued the health studies conducted by San Sebastián, Hurtig,

toxic e xposu r es   159

and colleagues. Quotes from these reports were later run as a full-page advertisement in major Ecuadorian newspapers. The scientists cited in the advertisement, including Sever and other scientists who had worked with Texaco, alleged problems with peer-reviewed journal articles that identified associations between adverse health outcomes and oil contamination in the region (Hurtig and San Sebastián 2005, 1171; Breilh 2005). As Jaime Breilh, a physician at the Health Research and Advisory Center in Quito noted, the techniques for data collection used in the studies (such as self-reported health effects) are widely accepted methodologies in the field of epidemiology. Further, a lack of available data to evaluate the adverse health effects of industry cannot be the responsibility of researchers. Rather, the onus for demonstrating that harm has not occurred should remain with the company conducting the operations (Breilh 2005). A principal objection of Sever and others to popular epidemiological work has been the role of researcher bias due to the relationship the researchers had with affected communities. In an article entitled “Epidemiology vs. epidemiology: The Case of Oil Exploitation in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador” (2005), Hurtig and San Sebastián responded to the critiques, arguing that complex cause-effect relationships cannot be reduced to purely methodological issues. Assertions that an epidemiologist must be an “objective” and “independent” observer should not obscure broader questions of who is exposed to contamination. While an obvious point for those familiar with feminist theory on “strong objectivity” (Harding 1992) or the problem of the “gaze from nowhere” (Haraway 1988), it bears noting that scientists working with Chevron are no more objective or independent from the concerns at hand than those working with the FDA. This dispute between San Sebastián and Hurtig, and scientists working with Chevron, such as Sever or Kelsh, Morimoto, and Lau (2009), encapsulates what is at stake in disputes over normative commitments to objectivity in epidemiological work. As Hurtig and San Sebastián argue: None of us live in a vacuum and epidemiology, as a science, is a social process, never the application of objective value-free rules. In this case, Texaco’s consultants ignored the history of environmental pollution and human rights violations that communities of farmers and indigenous people have experienced. While focusing on specific chemicals and individual exposures, they also forgot to ask themselves where the exposures came from, why they have been produced and who bene-

160  recko ning with ha rm

fited from them. The reductionist approach that the consultants took focusing just on a set of techniques and ignoring the broader issues of context, is unfortunate, leads to a lack of action and potentially transforms epidemiology into a tool of unfairness and oppression. The main issue for public health and the inhabitants of the Amazon basin of Ecuador is not whether some studies show or do not show causality but about the need for preventing disease and promoting health. Our research, together with qualitative and environmental information from the region, has indicated that those residents are in a public health emergency requiring immediate action. (Hurtig and San Sebastián 2005, 1172, emphasis added)

The authors contend that questions of why exposures occurred and who has benefited from them must lie at the heart of scientific assessments. They argue that epidemiology should reveal the complexity of toxicity, rather than limit relationships of exposure to narrow questions of causality. Their statement holds epidemiologists—and, I would argue, by extension other experts and scientific researchers working on toxicity—​accountable to the limits of their assessment tools, within a broader imperative to promote health in the places where they work. The Yana Curi report was part of a series of studies throughout the northeastern Amazon. One study, which examined differences in overall and specific cancer incidence rates between those living in proximity to oil fields and those living in areas free from oil exploitation, found that the relative risks of all cancers were significantly elevated for those living in exposed counties. In particular, stomach, rectum, skin melanoma, soft tissue, and kidney cancers were elevated in men; cervical and lymph node cancers elevated for women; and hematopoietic cancers high among children under the age of ten (Hurtig and San Sebastián 2002b). A study of childhood leukemia incidence that compared groups living near oil fields to those who did not, found that the relative risks for all leukemias were significantly elevated for children under the age of four, both genders combined, across all age groups for females (ages 0–14), and both genders combined. San Sebastián and Hurtig argue that the results suggest a relationship between leukemia incidence in children and oil operations, but they state that the data are not sufficient to confirm a causal relationship (Hurtig and San Sebastián 2004b). They have published numerous other studies investigating relationships between oil operations and cancer in the Amazon (see Hurtig and San Sebastián 2002a, 2004a).

toxic e xposu r es   161

A study funded by Chevron that was published by Kelsh, Morimoto, and Lau (2009) examined national mortality data and determined that there was no evidence of excess cancer risk in oil-producing regions of the Amazon. The authors begin by noting, “Poor socioeconomic conditions, inadequate water and sanitation quality, limited educational achievement, and lack of adequate public health infrastructure” are common across Latin America and have detrimental effects on health that are “difficult to distinguish and frequently confound public health investigations of the impact of industrialization and development” (2009:381). Citing problems with underreporting, misclassification of disease and exposure, methodological limitations, lack of other studies examining the health effects associated with oil production, and problems with data quality, interpretation of results, and study reproducibility, the authors question the accuracy of San Sebastián and Hurtig’s findings. By contrast, Kelsh, Morimoto, and Lau found no elevated risk of cancer. They determine that relative risk estimates were lower for most site-specific mortality data on cancer and that mortality rates in Amazonian provinces were generally lower than those in the province of Pichincha, where the capital city of Quito is located. The authors affirm what they believe to be the fundamentally unresolved nature of these questions: “These limitations have left the question of how oil production activities may have affected community health largely unanswered” (Kelsh, Morimoto, and Lau 2009, 382). These disputes are not only over differing numbers or questions of interpretation. In some cases, researchers have used the very same data to bolster opposing claims—as in the matter of environmental sampling in the Aguinda case in chapter 2. Often, the disputes hinge on distinctions about the scope of the studies: in other words, how far do the relations of oil activity extend? What kinds of knowledge about daily life, the history of the place, prior knowledge of industrial sites or practices, is acceptable to draw on in scientific studies? How do oil operations intersect with histories of poverty and exclusion, a lack of social and health services, or precarious settlements amid a forested landscape under transformation? In Chevron’s rebuttal to Richard Cabrera, the independent court expert who produced the Technical Summary Report for the Aguinda case, epidemiologist Michael Kelsh, toxicologist Thomas McHugh, and environmental economist Theodore Tomasi concluded that data on levels of oil-related chemicals in soils, sediments, and water submitted to

162  reckoning with ha rm

the court did not demonstrate a health risk to local residents. Chevron’s experts argued instead that the existing health problems in the region were actually a result of factors unrelated to oil: An evaluation of available epidemiologic studies and Ecuadorian government health statistics demonstrates that most, if not all, of the health conditions of local residents that could be attributed to an environmental factor are not related to petroleum exposures, per se, but are more likely attributable to other factors relating to lack of adequate public health infrastructure, which encompasses poor sanitation, lack of potable water, and inadequate medical and health facilities, as well as widespread poverty. (Kelsh, McHugh, and Tomasi 2008, 10)

This argument relies on bounding the material reaches of oil production and its toxicants. Chevron representatives have maintained that while pollution may exist, for instance, inside the boundaries of a waste pit, it has not migrated to rivers. In other words, company representatives and consultant scientists claim that the contamination in one site is not related to concerns in the surrounding area, such that evaluating harm from oil is deliberately decoupled from how settlement unfolded and how people have drunk unfiltered water from streams and rivers. This approach makes an epistemological cut at the wall of the pit or the boundary of company property, as though industrial sites can be isolated from the places and political economies in which they operate, rather than understanding these processes as intimately related in the making of toxic exposures. At the same time, they cite processes of unregulated settlement and poor state investment in the area as an explanation for health problems. Tracking exposure hinges on experience living and working in the area. As a result, much of the research on exposure has occurred in partnership with affected communities, something that critics argue compromises scientific integrity. Scientific work has relied on collaboration with the plaintiffs or environmental activists, since they are often the individuals most interested in documenting the impact of the industry, and the ones who know the area the best. Explicit political commitments strengthen such collaborations. For instance, a register of impacts of the industry completed with 1,520 people living in eighty communities across twenty-two oil fields, eighteen subfields, and five marginal fields across Sucumbíos and Orellana, produced in conjunction with the Ecuadorian NGO Acción Ecológica, opens by stating the authors’ intent to

toxic e xposu r es   163

produce “an inventory that aims to make visible the abuses that the companies wish to hide” (Maldonado and Narváez 2003, 3). Maldonado and Narváez found that 60 percent of the oil wells they surveyed and 100 percent of the stations they surveyed had homes that were located less than five hundred meters (about a third of a mile) away. Of those, 42 percent of homes were less than fifty meters (165 ft) from the wells and stations, indicating a continual exposure to high concentrations of toxic contamination (Maldonado and Narváez 2003, 8). Among those interviewed, 82.4 percent reported sickness at some point from contamination. Of those who had been made ill, 96 percent reported problems with their skin, 75 percent respiratory problems, 64 percent digestive problems, and 42 percent eye problems, among other complaints (Maldonado and Narváez 2003, 9). Seventy-five percent of those surveyed reported using contaminated water for drinking, cooking, and bathing, because they had no other source. Length of time living near oil operations amplified the number of cancers in a population, with the number of cases at five years doubling at twenty years and tripling after that (Maldonado and Narváez 2003, 38). Other researchers have undertaken related studies on the effects of the oil industry on the environment over the past four decades. A study by the Ecuadorian state oil company CEPE (Corporación Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana 1987) found elevated levels of oil in rivers and streams near production facilities. It also noted the depletion of dissolved oxygen in waters, presenting problems for the health of aquatic ecosystems. An Environmental Impact Assessment completed in 1989 found that crude oil had been routinely discharged into the surrounding forests and waterways (Dirección General de Medio Ambiente de Ecuador 1989; San Sebastián and Hurtig 2004a). Such studies suggest that the Ecuadorian government has known and documented problems with contamination since the late 1980s. These are a few examples of how epidemiologists and exposure scientists have investigated the question of toxic exposure in the Amazon. San Sebastián and Hurtig’s explicit recognition of the limits of epidemiology and their call for scientists to be accountable to the places where they work have high stakes in this context. Scientific techniques and knowledge practices have material consequences not only for how exposure is made real but also for how harm is redressed and compensation is determined. Following the feminist STS scholar and philosopher Karen Barad, “practices of knowing are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world” (Barad 2007, 91). Collabora-

164  recko ning with ha rm

tion with affected communities marks an important turn toward more inclusive forms of knowledge production that center the experiences of those who have been affected by toxicants. Yet this commitment is not shared by all. The contestations over scientific studies in the Amazon illustrate some of the ways that corporate actors have tried to weaponize community-driven methodologies by comparing them to evidentiary standards based on illusory forms of objectivity.

Moving between Image and Place In chapter 1 I described some of the ways that the oil industry and settlement have grown together throughout this region. The resulting contamination brought by the industry within a broader project of state-sponsored colonization, as Lidia’s account of life outside Lago Agrio demonstrates, has shaped the particular ways that toxic exposures are produced. As seen in the contested nature of epidemiological studies in the region, toxic exposures over the course of decades of oil activities are exceedingly difficult to pinpoint, for reasons ranging from methodological difficulties inherent to measuring environmental toxicity to issues of political economy, migration, a lack of basic social services and infrastructure, poverty, and displacement. Capturing the complexity of exposures requires attention to the relational, situated forms in which they happen—it is not just a matter of “Ecuador’s polluted boy” not having shoes, as in Camilo’s opening slide, but also that he was walking on roads slicked with crude oil put there by an American company, working in conjunction with the Ecuadorian state. The work of making past contamination evident in the present requires thinking of exposures across previous decades as situated in specific spaces and informed by the knowledge that comes with living in a place. Let us return to Camilo, who opened this chapter, to follow another approach for tracking moments of exposure that occurred decades before. A biologist with an MA in GIS mapping, Camilo has decades of experience working in the Amazon. In the early 1990s, while living in the Cuyabeno, he partnered with Cristóbal Bonifaz and others in laying the groundwork for the initial Aguinda complaint. In the lawsuit’s early years, he surveyed more than a thousand families living within the concession, going house to house, ten families a day, to compile information on the effects of oil extraction on people’s lives. Later, he worked for the Environmental and Social Reparation Fund (Programa de Reparación Ambiental y Social, PRAS) of the Ecuadorian government.

toxic e xposu r es   165

Figure 4.1. An aerial image of oil infrastructure amid an Amazonian landscape: an​ open waste pit is visible in the foreground, a small station in the middle, and the nearby town in the background. Photo by Mitch Anderson/Amazon Frontlines.

Sitting together in his office, we reviewed aerial images of different wells, which had been taken over decades. There were thousands of images, some shot by the Geographic Military Institute (Instituto Geográfico Militar, IGM) and others from smaller planes, of the hundreds of oil wells throughout the Amazon. By comparing images of the same well sites over time, different features of the industrial landscape became visible: the outlines of platforms, pits, spills, rivers and streams, forest cover, and the growing roads and homes, crops, and schools of settlers. Camilo had selected some of the images for a presentation in which he had labeled the most important features: pit, oil spill, wellhead, school, river. These images do not demonstrate exposures per se; instead, they draw relations through proximity. They establish the ways that industrial infrastructure is in connection, in space and time, with people’s lives. While some features, such as pits and spills, disappear over time and from one photo to the next, the images make it possible to trace these sites through other tools, such as sampling and observation, to make a case for the harm resulting from oil production. Reading the

166  recko ning with ha rm

images chronologically allows for a close view of the industry and the growth of communities over the years. Oil tankers pause on the winding roads; schools and houses appear a stone’s throw from the scraped clear areas of platforms and the black stains of waste pits. In one image, the forest diminishes. The repeated squares of settlers’ crops emerge, checkering the land. Pits appear and disappear as dirt and grass cover their perimeters, fading into the surrounding scrub. Camilo has labeled the images to aid the eye of an uninitiated viewer. The black shapes that might, in a different context or to a different eye, appear to be ponds of water, he has marked as waste pits. The leaking plume from an otherwise nondescript square labeled “wellhead” takes on new meaning in this setting; a dark stain labeled “oil spill” is now clearly a site of contamination. Other shapes also are labeled, to indicate the sweep of a river in the same frame, or the proximity of a school—and by extension, children playing and going about daily activities—to the black point of a wellhead and pit. Unlike some images of the past, these photographs evoke no nostalgia. The megapixels of their layers of meticulous detail and historical capture, as well as the sheer quantity of images, lend solidity to their review. They are part of an archive of photographs that Camilo keeps on his computer and are also preserved in the state archive through the IGM and as part of the official Aguinda court record. Yet the images are not self-evident. Without the red outline added to the pit or the helpful finger of someone who has lived in the region and knows the sites, it would be difficult to see the changes over time, or know where pits had been: “But,” Camilo says, tapping an image with the knowledge of someone who knows the place intimately, “if you go here with an auger and dig down, oil will come out.” In the Amazon, industrial activities overlap and layer upon one another as in stratigraphy. It was common to meet people who had unknowingly built their homes on top of covered-over waste pits, or others who began farming in an area only to later realize that there were unremediated spills on the land. Industry is so entwined with settlement that many old spill sites, covered waste pits, or other areas of industrial incidents were often not immediately clear to me either. Drawing on both GPS technology and direct knowledge of the area proved crucial for plaintiffs during the judicial inspections of the Aguinda lawsuit. Camilo explained: This was one of the important things in the lawsuit because . . . the plaintiffs had access to this technology, so we could find and generate

toxic e xposu r es   167

the coordinates and go with the judge and say, “We’ll dig the hole right here.” It was funny because in the first few inspections, before we had presented any report, they did an inspection, and another and another. And Texaco still hadn’t seen any of the reports because there was a four-month delay to hand in the reports [to the court]. So, in the early inspections they didn’t know what methods we were using. So I was there [in a judicial inspection], it was very funny, we said, “Judge, we want to take the sample right here!” And there is a relationship [between those working for the plaintiffs and] the lawyers from Texaco too, since you spend all day together. And in addition to this, one of them was the father of a friend of mine from high school, so there’s a relationship of sorts. And they would say, “How do you know that there is oil there?!” and I would say, “We consulted with our shamans [laughing]; it’s just the magic of the jungle! So there—right there—we’ll dig our hole [to take the soil sample].” And at first they didn’t believe us—but then pure petroleum [came out]. Pure petroleum. The funniest one was in the station at Sacha. In Sacha station, right where the oil camps are [inside the perimeter of the station area]. I had seen a pit on the aerial photos, and now there is a parking lot on top of the pit. The parking lot of PetroEcuador. So, we asked them to dig the hole right there. And they said, “OK, now your shamans have gone crazy!” And I said, “Well, we’ll see. The shamans are never wrong!” So, we dug the hole—but [it was] all rock, all gravel. One meter [down]. Two meters, nothing. Then at three meters, all oil. Right there in the middle of the oil camp. Texaco didn’t even know where the pits were; they didn’t have a record of anything—how many pits there were, or where they were.

Moving between images and physical sites provided a way to find and demonstrate the presence of old toxicants hidden under meters of soil.7 It let the plaintiffs show, via samples, something that people who lived in the area insisted—that there had been a spill here more than twenty years earlier or a pit there that the company or state later covered over. It allowed the plaintiffs to access contamination that was not immediately visible but whose traces were still present, now covered over by soil, parking lots, or crops. Also visible are the columns of smoke that Lidia and many other settlers described in their accounts of earlier decades. Here, moments of exposure appear in photographs at a precise moment in time and space, a specificity impossible to obtain from an interview or a memory of the air quality years before. Depending on the angle of the plane flying overhead, the density of the smoke is notable, casting a long shadow

168  recko ning with ha rm

over the land below. Harm takes shape through the work of assembling verbal accounts, soil samples, and aerial images together. Something as nebulous as a cloud of smoke or a chemical plume in the ground years ago takes on a specific form through these interventions and is placed in relation to other personal experiences of exposures and historical processes such as settlement. The images illustrate the importance of understanding exposure as something that changes over time. They capture forms of exposure to toxicants different in type and degree from those that I witnessed during fieldwork. They corroborate the accounts of people like Lidia, Gonzalo, and Emeregildo, who described in detail the columns of smoke filling the sky, or the waste pits that trapped farm animals. While industrial practices have changed over time, especially after Ecuador passed comprehensive environmental regulation in 2001, these images express the extent of the damage that is no longer visible, no longer palpable, no longer measurable, that occurred in this place. The specificity of time and space, of industrial practices and settlement, the household routines of those living here, from washing clothes to bathing in rivers, delineate the ways that toxic exposures have occurred in the past and the ways that they continue to shape life today. As Lyons reflected on farmers’ memories of cyclical flooding in the Colombian Amazon, attending to temporality “permits a kind of proximity to other times—times that interrupt a human life, inevitably press on, and double back again. These processes are not bound by progressivist, future-oriented temporalities or clear states between decay, disappearance, and regeneration” (Lyons 2020, 42). To make sense of toxic exposures today, it is necessary to draw relations with exposures in the past—ones which, while no longer apparent, are nonetheless present in the making of harm from oil operations. Just as clouds of smoke from fifty years before still come to bear on Lidia’s life and the buried waste pit under Luz Maria’s home continues to haunt her, thinking about harm relationally helps to trouble modern temporal divides between toxic past, present, and future.

Building a Theory of Exposure from the Amazon Exposures may be differential, uneven, or even incommensurate; yet to practice exposure entails the intuitive sense or the philosophical conviction that the impermeable Western human subject is no longer tenable. Performing exposure as an ethical and political act means to

toxic e xposu r es   169

reckon with—rather than disavow—such horrific events and to grapple with the particular entanglements of vulnerability and complicity that radiate from disasters and their terribly disjunctive connection to everyday life in the industrialized world. (Alaimo 2016, 5)

In the Amazon, as in other places of industrial disaster, experiences of harm do not align with dominant modalities for making sense of what has occurred as a result of industrial operations (Petryna 2002; Fortun 2001; Ott 2008), leading people like Camilo to insist that exposure is different here. Bodies, toxicants, and places are differently entangled, disavowing assumptions of a chemical “universality” (Povinelli 2017; Shapiro and Kirksey 2017) and the predictability of bounded bodies and controllable environments (Nash 2007). Instead of trying to make Lidia’s experiences fit those models of toxicity engaged in dominant Western science by homogenizing or erasing difference through universalized explanations of toxicants’ effects on bodies, my intent is to attend to what individual and collective experiences of life in this region make legible about toxic exposure. Building from Lidia’s accounts, matters such as vulnerability in the face of industrial practices, historical inequalities reproduced through settler colonialism, and the temporal connections between past and present toxicity emerge as central to an understanding of exposure that attunes to the partial, distributed, life-altering relations of oil production. Let me draw from Lidia’s accounts of life in the region to suggest how working from Amazonian experiences to inform a theory of exposure might begin. This is an exercise in asking what can be learned from the quotidian encounters of a settler woman over the course of decades, and what implications this has for studying exposures in a world increasingly constituted by everyday forms of toxicity. In the words of environmental humanities scholar Stacy Alaimo, “The exposed subject is always already penetrated by substances and forces that can never be properly accounted for—ethics and politics must proceed from there” (Alaimo 2016, 5). Beginning from lived experiences of exposures helps shift the questions at hand from variations on “Is it possible to demonstrate that a given health condition is the result of exposures to the toxic chemicals used in oil production?” to asking about whose territories have been taken away in the process of settlement and industrialization, whose lives have been lost through the systemic production of toxicity, who has amassed wealth in the process, or how it made sense to dump toxic waste in the first place (see Lyons 2020, 64; Liboiron 2021; Ofrias 2017). Rela-

170  recko ning with ha rm

tionality refutes the idea that harm goes away when cleaned up, covered over, or dispersed in the winds and waters of previous decades. Any theory of exposure is necessarily partial; Lidia’s experiences do not speak for others, particularly for Indigenous people living in the region. As Hoover argues in her work with the Akwesasne Mohawk community, the experiences of Indigenous peoples need to be understood both on their own terms and through the lens of settler colonialism and not assumed to be the same as other settler experiences of environmental injustice. The experience of settlement for Lidia is radically different than for someone like Emeregildo, even though there may be commonalities in some of their encounters with toxicity. That said, Lidia’s stories are unfortunately also not exceptional. The widespread nature of contamination in this region means that many people I spent time with recounted similar occurrences. Lidia’s accounts offer a means of approaching toxic exposures from the perspective of those living at the intersection of settler colonialism and extraction, rather than presume that Amazonian experiences will fit prescribed means of tracing and attending to toxicity. Lidia and her family are profoundly vulnerable to the chemicals that infuse their daily lives. It is no more possible to separate out the individual toxicants from the river water running by her home than it is to extract their cumulative weight from her experience since arriving in the Amazon. As we sat in Lidia’s home, the hum of the flare nearby was ever present. Everyday activities like walking along the road, washing clothes in the river, hanging laundry to dry, tending plants in the garden, or working with farm animals were infused with continual possibilities for exposure. This is what Camilo referred to when he spoke of being naked in the face of contamination. The vulnerability they experience through daily encounters with toxicity serves as a reminder that assumed distinctions between subject and object, human and nonhuman, are not fixed (Chen 2012, 159). Human apprehension of chemicals is a simultaneously sensuous and epistemological process, what anthropologist Nicholas Shapiro calls a form of “bodily knowledge” (2015, 387), formed in this case through perseverance and the fortitude of family amid the exacting costs of extraction, settlement, and inequality. Vulnerability underscores the entanglements of people living in this place with chemical and industrial infrastructures, and the artificiality of insisting on causal relations bounded in a specific moment in time and space. Throughout the two years I spent in Ecuador, the experience of vulnerability that Lidia described or that scholars like Chen and Alaimo

toxic e xposu r es   171

wrote about was clear to me on multiple occasions. One period stands out in particular: following a month living in a community in the Orellana province that had multiple gas flares running in the immediate vicinity, I found myself having increasing difficulty breathing. Waking up at night, chest tight and mind panicked, I traveled to Quito, where I spent two weeks receiving nebulizer treatments for what the doctors explained as an episode of “chemically induced asthma.” On other occasions, following visits with Ministry of the Environment officials on inspections, such as the visit to the toxic waste facility Incinerox or to collect water samples at a production station, I would spend the rest of the day with a headache, eyes red and watering as I wrote up fieldnotes. To be clear: such moments do not compare to the experiences of those who live and work alongside oil operations every day. I recount them here, however, because these moments of becoming acutely aware of my own vulnerability were part of my process of conducting research and reflexively relating to what it means to feel chemically transformed through toxic encounters (Tuana 2008; Chen 2012; Alaimo 2016). A theory of exposure built from the Amazon up needs to retain the centrality of inequality in the making of exposures. Environmental justice scholars have demonstrated the relationships of race and class to environmental inequality and pollution many times over (Bullard 2001; Carmin and Agyeman 2011; Checker 2007; Pellow 2007). What is particular to this story is the process of settlement in relation to the perpetuation of historic inequalities and subsequent exposure to toxic substances used in oil production. Settler stories of “making it” in the Amazonian wilderness are more than just racialized narratives of personal and collective triumph over nature, for they speak as well to broader processes of the accumulation of wealth in relation to land in Ecuador. The historical concentration of wealth in a few families with large land holdings in the Sierra in the twentieth century meant that many campesinos did not have enough land to farm. For example, when Ecuador completed its first agricultural census in the 1950s, 0.4 percent of all proprietors held nearly half (45 percent) of all farmland. At the same time, half of Ecuadorians owned farms; however, 90 percent of them were too small to support a single family (Wasserstrom and Southgate 2013, 33). Poverty led settlers to seek lives for their families in the Amazon, participating in the broader program of state-sponsored colonization of the region, as described in chapter 1. Arriving with very little, their physical and socioeconomic vulnerability in a vast, foreign landscape, combined with their total ignorance of the dangers of the

172  recko ning with ha rm

burgeoning and unregulated oil industry, left them with no recourse to protect themselves from the growing, haphazard toxic sprawl. At the same time, settlers were reproducing systemic inequalities by deforesting land, appropriating Indigenous territories, and contributing to the increased vulnerability of the Cofán, Siekopai, Siona, Shuar, and Waorani in the face of industry and colonization. I do not aim to defend the violence of settler colonialism or to blame individual settlers; rather, I want to insist that investigations of exposures need to consider the historical reproduction of differential forms of inequality and vulnerability through the lens of settlement and colonization in the Amazon. Even with the introduction of environmental regulation, better infrastructure, cessation of some of the most pernicious industrial practices such as road oiling and pit burning, and international clamor around contamination in the rainforest, this is as true today as it was in the past: widespread poverty in the region, combined with historically entangled processes of extraction and settlement, leaves people with little ability to protect themselves from industrial toxicants. Experiences of exposure point to the deeply constrained choices for those living surrounded by industrial contamination. Recall Emeregildo’s account of the well-meaning suggestion of SIL missionaries to boil the water his family drank. Indigenous people and settlers alike depended on the rivers for drinking, cooking, bathing, washing clothes and more; all their daily necessities were tied to Amazonian waterways. When oil operations began to contaminate the rivers, there was little choice about where they would get water for everyday needs. Boiling water is generally a good idea, but it does little to address the harm posed by toxic chemicals. Grounding a theory of exposure in vulnerability and inequality can also help make sense of practices that may seem contradictory because they do not involve avoiding potential exposures. Let me provide two examples that I struggled with in fieldwork: A family I visited with repeatedly over the course of fieldwork had an active remediation site in their backyard, a decades-old spill site linked to a well a few hundred meters away. As the oil company dug out and gradually remediated the old pit, a large pond of water formed, through which a dike separated the “remediated” and “unremediated” sections. Despite an oily film that was still visible around the edges of the remediated half, the family continued to catch and eat fish that they were growing in the pond as remediation progressed. Small children played every day around the pond’s edges, occasionally slipping in and getting their hands and legs wet.

toxic e xposu r es   173

Figure 4.2. Drying cacao beneath a low gas flare. Photo by the author, 2012.

Another example: As one drove along the curving roads through the region, it was common to come across sections of the road that had been partially blocked off with sticks to dry harvested cacao in the sun. Passing motorists dutifully slowed while making their way through the makeshift one-lane road. But in other instances, some families would use the warmth of low gas flares close to well sites to dry their cacao, carefully spreading the beans on tarps in the area beneath. It was hard for me to make sense of why someone would choose the warmth of flare instead of the warmth of the sun on the road or on a tarp spread elsewhere. These are two examples that gave me pause as I lived in the Amazon. But if understanding exposure begins from an experience like Lidia’s, of swimming in oil, to ask questions about why families might choose to continue fishing in an active remediation site, or to dry their cacao under the gas flares, misses the point. The more pressing question is, “Why is there an old spill still on this family’s land, or why is there an active gas flare just meters from another family’s home?” To criticize individual

174  recko ning with ha rm

decisions within the context of decades-long contamination, continued extraction, and widespread economic precarity is the equivalent of victim blaming and furthers the logic of damage-centered approaches to toxicity (Tuck and Yang 2013; Shadaan and Murphy 2020). Like so many other examples of health inequalities (Singer and Baer 2018; Farmer 2004; Rouse 2009; Biehl 2005), issues of toxic exposure are not reducible to poor individual choices by those who reside in places of extraction. Any theory of exposure needs to depart from the structural relations of toxicity that shape and constrain people’s lives. Given that toxicity is radically restructuring the relations of life across the world, thinking in terms of individual prevention or protection increasingly misses the mark. As the anthropologist Elizabeth Roberts shows through her ethnographic work in Mexico City, it is no longer possible to prevent exposures within the continual residual onslaught of industrial toxicants (Roberts 2017b). Work that has illustrated the extensive, long-lived infiltration of synthetic, human-made toxic chemicals into the fabric of biological and social life (Lyons 2016; Harrison 2011; Langston 2010) can help us move away from an understanding of exposures as occurring in otherwise “pure,” or “clean,” environments, toward the complex and even contradictory perspectives and practices of those who are exposed. When we shift focus on toxicity toward its “upstream” relations—the political and economic structures, historical inequalities, and financial dominance of extraction—it clearly becomes untenable to reduce systemic inequality in toxic exposures to questions of human behavior. Perhaps one of the most enduring insights from Lidia’s experiences is how past and present exposures are connected through time. Lidia’s miscarriages continue to bring her to tears as she recounts them decades later. Unlike fleeting “moments” of exposure, these are losses that persist in the present; understandings of exposure need to make space for the burdens of grief and loss that spread across years. Luz Maria continued to worry how her exposure to fumes while pregnant could affect her toddler as he grew older, speaking to how the anxiety and uncertainty of toxic exposures reaches into coming years (Lamoreaux 2016). Old exposures also gain new materiality through interventions with contemporary tools. Camilo brought together local memories of where companies dug pits with tools such as GPS and aerial photographs to help render past exposures legible today—like the clouds of smoke that routinely filled the skies after workers burned waste pits. The affective weight of exposures in the past takes many forms. One

toxic e xposu r es   175

of my favorite companions in fieldwork was David, a bus driver and professional chauffeur. Two decades earlier, David had worked for a subcontractor that provided well-drilling services. He described the emotional burden of working with toxic chemicals and the physical exhaustion that resulted from long, stressful shifts. As time went on working for the company, David would wake nightly in a cold sweat, suffering from nightmares of things gone wrong with the radioactive materials. Now a bus driver, he still has these dreams and is emphatic that he will never return to work in the oil industry. The affective reach of toxicants makes past experiences of exposure immediate, present events that deny linear progressions where contamination gets “better” through technological improvements in extraction, or where it “goes away” in state-led remediation projects. The temporality of exposures ruptures clear distinctions between past, present, and future, between clean and contaminated, between healthy and unhealthy bodies. Approaches to toxic exposures, whether developed from standardized models, experiential accounts, or relations drawn through photographs, have direct consequences for how researchers, regulators, policy makers, and residents of places like the Amazon understand and address harm. Attention to vernacular experience alongside oil operations points to the fundamentally flawed assumption that all forms of toxicity must be isolated, traced, and unequivocally demonstrated in order to hold polluters accountable. Approaching toxic exposures relationally helps complicate understandings of accountability and responsibility for harm in spaces of extensive environmental contamination because it turns the focus away from the moment of exposure, in which an isolated individual meets an errant chemical. Advances in biomonitoring and scholarship in toxicology, public health, and epidemiology that are attuned to tracking changes in bodies and health as a result of extractive industries have found increasingly more precise ways of registering the consequences of toxicity for health, both in the present and for future generations (Lamoreaux 2016). Yet, this work has also raised new questions around the ways knowledge of toxic exposures is produced, and the obligations of the researchers involved to those they are working with (Resnik 2009). One effect of focusing on toxic exposures as isolated events is that the structural conditions and institutions that produce and enable toxic harm in the first place are obscured from sociopolitical vision and action. A focus on relationality, on the other hand, examines first and foremost how harm is made through the historical, political, economic, and structural conditions that shape the disproportionate toxic burdens

176  recko ning with ha rm

borne by some and not others—whether through the lens of vulnerability, the history of settlement and inequality, or the continued affective and material presence of past contamination in the present. I have drawn on Lidia’s story to show the importance of accounting for unrecorded seepages of industrial toxicants and unofficial erasures of lives and land in models of toxicity. Yet in honoring stories of embodied experience of exposures, I do not aim to promote a wiser or more authentic “local” body over numbers, samples, or other forms of evidence of harm. Bodies are also multiple (Mol 2002), suggestible, and even misleading; most relevant to the discussion here, they are situated. Whether addressing soil samples, sensory experiences on Toxic Tours, regulatory limits on toxicants, or individual memories, it is important to retain and insist on the context of all accounts: within the technical and the experiential, in relative positions of power and proximity to pollution, and within critical histories of colonization, settlement, and extraction. The point of understanding the relationality of toxicity is not to insist that boundaries and contours of difference do not exist, but rather to be accountable for the ways we draw them in our work and the consequences they have for people’s everyday lives. Accounts of bodily harm are not always completely coherent, nor do they need to be so in order to be true. Today, many of the details of past stories are impossible to fix: precise dates and times, numbers of barrels spilled, coordinates of spills, or the extent of a plume of smoke in the sky. The memories of illnesses and daily oil operations blend together, the specifics often implying connections between industry and daily life that are difficult to verify in official forums. Yet the burden continues to lie with those who have suffered the consequences of contamination to produce evidence that aligns with the expectations and standards of official registers of harm, such as in science and law. Often this is an impossible task. The continued need to confirm the effects of toxicity amid widespread contamination in this region compounds the profound inequalities of power and place that shape how harm unfolds (Kelly 2020). Chemicals are often described and acted upon as isolated, discrete entities in technoscientific forums, such as the arrows surrounding the “EPA guy” to represent possible routes of environmental exposure of a universal subject. The experiences of someone like Lidia, who described how she and her family were “swimming in oil,” or whose son recalled smoke thick like “marmalade,” point to possibilities of experiencing and speaking about chemical exposures that do not require calculable precision to be real. To take these descriptions seriously is to recognize

toxic e xposu r es   177

that chemical concentrations often far exceed the “normal” forms and quantities modeled in dominant Western scientific tools for assessing oil operations, pointing to the failure of these models to capture experiences of exposure that inundate daily life. This is not to say that dominant Western science serves no purpose; to the contrary, dominant science is an essential way of measuring and demonstrating the toxicity of specific compounds used in extraction and continues to be the standard language into which people living in the Amazon must translate their experiences. Such studies fail, however, to capture the weight of harm as it lives within toxic spaces, and no single mode of measuring toxicity is sufficient. Whether a personal account of a miscarriage, aerial photographs that show life and industry overlapping through time, or door-to-door studies that corroborate the common experiences of specific health problems in relation to oil contamination, each is a means of approaching the experience of toxic exposure, and each is durable in specific ways and insufficient in others. We will never completely know the effects of a childhood spent playing on crude-slicked roads, like the one of the child in Camilo’s photo, or the precise triggers of Lidia’s miscarriages. But by recording these stories, by situating them within the context of settlement and unregulated oil development, we need not know all of the causes of individual health problems to know that industrial and state actors that pollute an entire region need to be held accountable for the harm they inflict.

chapter 5

Touring Toxic Places

The well platform is quiet in the afternoon heat. Two school-aged kids in matching uniforms wander across the empty dirt rectangle carved out of the forest on their way home. I am with a group of photographers who have come to document the pollution left in the soil. Events like this are called “Toxic Tours.” Donald Moncayo has brought the group to this site to illustrate how residents’ lives are entangled with industrial contamination and ongoing struggles for justice. The son of settlers to the region who grew up in the first oil camp drilled by Texaco, Donald is an experienced guide with a wealth of anecdotes, legal points, and regional history at the ready. Donald knows the region intimately. As a child, he watched Texaco’s operations unfold. He knows which streams had been contaminated by spills and which old waste pits the companies covered over. He points out aspects of life alongside extraction that would be otherwise obvious or even taken-for-granted features of the landscape for those who live here. Unlike the places where the participants might have traveled from, here it is common to find houses that are immediately adjacent to or sometimes even located on top of waste pits of buried crude oil. At times, Donald’s guests are from far-flung places in the United States, Sweden, or France. In other cases, they are not “from away” but might be visiting from Quito or the southern highlands of Ecuador, or even from fifty kilometers (31 mi) to the west in a town without active oil operations. Sometimes his participants are fellow activists, coming with their own stories of life alongside mining or oil operations. In most cases, however, the participants on the Toxic Tours are experiencing realities of contamination from oil development that they do not experience on a daily basis; they are new to contamination en vivo, even if they are already familiar with the Aguinda case and the effects of oil extraction more generally.  179

180  reckoning with ha rm

Heading toward the house bordering the well platform, we walk through a narrow passage in the fence. Signs of life—outgrown shoes, a stray tuna fish can—litter the yard. A sheep bleats in the brush. Donald indicates with his hand a depression in the land just a few meters from the house, a rectangular indentation, as though years ago someone had dug a swimming pool and filled it in, and it had become overgrown with grass. This will be today’s operating theater for the tour, and we are the spectators. Setting up a small plastic table in one corner, Donald and his assistants begin to dig with a hand auger, a metal tool for extracting shallow, subsurface soil cores. At first the dirt resists, but then it gives way under their effort. They pull up one core sample, then another, and another, each approximately thirty centimeters (12 in) long. They lay the samples out in order of their extraction in PVC pipes they have sliced in half lengthwise, on a sheet of plastic prepared on the table. As they add each sample to the next, a color gradient begins to appear, from rocky gray to red to deep brown, as the auger probes deeper into the earth. Presenting the samples in this manner allows Donald to build his case, from the unremarkable soil at the surface to the gradually darker, smellier, more evidently contaminated soil the farther down he goes. The onlookers can gauge for themselves the proximity of the contamination as they observe the samples lined up on the table. When the auger pulls up rock or soil, it scrapes loudly against the tool’s metal frame. But when the auger pulls up mud or dirt that is heavily contaminated with oil, it makes a sucking sound as it disengages from the hole. The next core slides out with a telltale squeak: Aha! There is an immediate, collective recognition of the contents. Camera shutters fire rapidly as Donald rights the auger and scrapes the core into position on the table. One of the participants leans in to smell the sample. Through whispers and photographs, sniffs, and manual inspection with gloves, there is a public dissection of the remnants of oil extraction from decades before. It is a moment of reckoning, of realization that just a few feet beneath the land on which we are standing and upon which this family lived are the buried contents of an old waste pit. Despite Donald’s telling the group before beginning coring that we were on top of a waste pit, as well as how and why the pit was constructed, the moment of sensory apprehension of the contaminated soil is visceral. At this site, one of many along the Toxic Tour, Donald exhumes traces of pollution for collective confirmation while narrating how these sites relate to the history of oil development and the current landscape of contamination that participants are witnessing on their tour.

tou r i ng toxic pl aces  181

How do people who do not live in this area of the Amazon come to know about the realities of oil contamination? For the past decade, one of the principal means has been through Toxic Tours, in which a guide (often Donald, but not exclusively) brings participants—students, lawyers, environmental activists, journalists, foreign tourists—to visit contaminated sites. Harm is not simply on display in these tours, as the name might lead one to believe, but becomes real by enrolling participants as witnesses: to observe soil as the guide pulls it from the ground, to feel the squish of oily leaves between their fingers, or to hear stories about waste pits and fallen animals. The work of the Toxic Tours is to contextualize these soils, waters, and stories for participants, to make them speak to broader histories of oil extraction in the region and draw out their relations with systems of extraction and consumption that are not immediately visible. Given the obviousness of contamination from past and present oil operations throughout this area, the outcome of a Toxic Tour might seem like a given: those who come and take the tour are clearly convinced by the pervasive contamination and, politically speaking, align with the residents who have been involved in the Aguinda lawsuit or support broader struggles for environmental and social justice. Yet the experience and outcome of the Toxic Tour, like all other techniques for making harm real, depend in great part on the context in which it occurs. When other individuals lead tours, such as a corporate representative for Chevron or someone who does not know the region in this degree of detail, an entirely different reality of the nature of and responsibility for the harm caused by this oiled dirt emerges. The personal and political effects of these tours, then, are also contingent on the experience and positioning of the guide in relation to extraction, as well as on what the participants bring to the experience. The industry’s effects are undeniable as one travels in this region, some of which I have tried to make visible throughout this book: the spaghetti-like pipelines that follow the roads, the scattering of waste pits underneath or immediately next to houses, the suffocating gas that leaks from some of the flares, the billboards announcing the oil revenues reinvested in roads, bridges, and other regional infrastructure. Both Toxic Tours led by Donald and media tours led by Chevron representatives engage directly with this reality, but not to the same end. In Toxic Tours, Donald offers participants an experience with contamination and invites them to consider how what they are witnessing is related to broader questions of injustice. In media tours, Chevron representatives

182  reckoning with ha rm

offer participants explanations for why the contamination they are witnessing is not related to harm. The tours employ a range of tools, both material and rhetorical: sticks illustrate the depth of waste pits; gloved hands squish oil between fingers; augers dig up buried soil; histories of industrial practices and local development are recounted along with legal standards and records of remediation. In one case, harm emerges through weaving relations between histories, bodies, stories, waste pits, and experiences; in the other, harm dissolves through the rhetorical dissection of connections between contamination and experience.

A Brief History of Amazonian Toxic Tours Toxic Tours began as a civic forum for education and social change through expeditions to polluted spaces in the United States, most often led by members of communities that had been historically disadvantaged and bore an undue burden of industrial pollution (Pezzullo 2009). These tours emerged in the Environmental Justice movement of the mid-1980s, as activists in North America began to articulate the ways race, class, and environmental assault were tightly linked. The movement theorized the ways that certain spaces came to be seen as “appropriately polluted” (Higgins 1994) or as “human sacrifice zones” (Bullard and Benjamin 1999), pointing out the consistent siting of toxic waste in low-income communities of color (Commission for Racial Justice 1987). The idea of a Toxic Tour was to invite outsiders into spaces they would not normally go to bridge spatial, political, racial, and affective distance by presenting a firsthand demonstration of places where the “other” lived, worked, and played. In 2003, the Aguinda lawsuit returned to Ecuadorian courts after nearly ten years in the US judicial system. With the case’s arrival, journalists, lawyers, and students began to arrive in Lago Agrio with questions, asking to see the disputed Texaco sites. Often, they were referred to the Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía (FDA), the most prominent national NGO supporting the case at the time. There they met Donald, who volunteered to show visitors around when someone arrived with questions. As he began to conduct tours more regularly, they became his vocation. As Donald told me, a journalist suggested the name “Toxic Tour,” and that is the term by which Donald and others began calling them. During the time of my fieldwork (2011–2013), Donald’s principal role at the nonprofit Selva Viva was to run the tours; when I returned in 2020, he was still running the tours in conjunction with his work at the

tou r i ng toxic pl aces  183

Figure 5.1. Donald displays the core samples that he took with a hand auger from the front yard of a family that lives on top of an old waste pit. After dissolving a clump of soil taken from the cores in a bowl of water, he skimmed the oil with his gloved hand to show the contamination present in the soil. Photo by the author, 2012.

Unión de Afectados y Afectadas por las Operaciones Petroleras de Texaco (Union of the People Affected by Texaco Oil Operations, UDAPT). While UDAPT paid him as an employee, it charged nothing for the tour itself. Participants were responsible for paying only for their transportation for the day. Donald conducts tours alone, as well as with the

184  recko ning with ha rm

collaboration of others, including Indigenous leaders like Emeregildo, plaintiffs in the Aguinda lawsuit, or his young daughter, who has since become an expert and activist in her own right. While Toxic Tours like the one Donald leads do not share a lineage with the North American Environmental Justice movement, the Amazonian toxic tour is not far afield. In the late 1980s, settlers in Sucumbíos and Orellana began to organize to address the region’s political and economic marginalization, demanding land titles, better roads, and social services. Concerns of residents, activists, missionaries, and others were mounting about environmental contamination from the innumerable oil spills and routine dumping that characterized the industry’s first two decades. One of the groups born out of this community organizing was the FDA, founded in 1994 in part to respond to the call for civic support put out by the plaintiffs of Aguinda v. Texaco. The return of the Aguinda lawsuit to Ecuador was gaining increased traction on the international and national stage as a result of advocacy work by both plaintiffs and environmental groups such as Amazon Watch, Acción Ecológica, Rainforest Action Network, and the FDA. Much of this work emphasized the fact that Texaco was a US corporation. Groups argued that Texaco had made cost-saving decisions in their operations in Ecuador because they believed it was beyond the rule of law, decisions that the company would not have made if operating at home. Advocates for the plaintiffs framed the case through a critical analysis of power and wealth disparities between the United States and Ecuador. The Toxic Tours provided a space in which the plaintiffs could show outsiders how their crops had been contaminated, explain what a waste pit was, or have visitors smell the remnants of burned tar on their land. It was a means to give voice to the commonplace ways oil operations had affected individual people. In the time since, the Toxic Tours led by Donald have evolved into a principal means to relay the plaintiffs’ stories to outsiders. I attended dozens of these tours throughout the provinces of Sucumbíos and Orellana during fieldwork. Donald mostly conducted tours in the area of the concession previously operated by the consortium. Although each tour was designed to speak to the specific interests of the group participating (for example, lawyers, students, tourists, or activists), the tours had several key components that were always present. Opening with a historical narrative describing the beginning of oil exploration in the Amazon, Donald would then discuss the technical practices of Texaco operations and their resulting contamination of the surround-

tou r i ng toxic pl aces  185

ing soils and water. He interwove this narrative with a review of the Aguinda lawsuit as groups visited different sites. Sometimes he showed them the endless bookshelves of documents related to the lawsuit in the plaintiff lawyer’s office, and other times he displayed well-known photos of the region (Dematteis and Szymczak 2008) or recounted the stories of individuals who had lost family members or become ill from exposure to toxicants related to oil production. If a group was particularly interested in one aspect of oil production—such as the role of Chinese companies operating in the Amazon, the history of the Aguinda case, or taking water samples to test the streams surrounding well and waste sites, Donald would tailor the tour to their interests. While the order and precise locations would vary, the tours always included at least one and most often several firsthand encounters with contamination. During my time in the Amazon, there were several Toxic Tours in any given week. Over the years, people like Donald have become accustomed to telling their stories to visitors. On some occasions, tours visit the homes of those who refer to themselves as los afectados, those harmed by oil operations under Texaco. They, like Emeregildo and Donald, recount stories that they have told many times, not only to students, but also to lawyers, tourists, Chevron shareholders, politicians, and documentary film directors (Berlinger 2009). Such stories condense decades of suffering, colonization, and industrialization into several minutes. These are narratives crafted from lifetimes spent alongside oil development, accounts of survivors of this toxic legacy. First-person accounts give participants an impression of the lived experiences of loss and sickness within the history of this industry. In the process, Donald and his collaborators sought to convince participants of the personal weight of toxic legacies by situating them in relation to the history of the profound injustice borne in the name of profit.

Toxic Tours: Aguarico-4 I opened chapter 1 with a scene set on the banks of the Aguarico, just before the arrival of oil. Now, instead of workers parachuting in from helicopters, one can approach the well by an access road through the forest off of a recently repaved road lined with billboards announcing the benefits oil profits have brought. Only a forty-five-minute drive from Lago Agrio, this Aguarico oil platform has become a principal stop on Donald’s Toxic Tours. Nearing the town of Dureno, you cross the Aguarico River on the cranky Jenny Nepali barge. Often it seems that

Figure 5.2. A student on a Toxic Tour balances on a decaying log that is partially submerged on top of the Aguarico-4 waste pit. He uses a stick to probe the depth of the pit. Photo by the author, 2011.

tou r i ng toxic pl aces  187

the motor might putter out midcurrent, leaving the rusty hulk to float sideways downstream like a beetle abandoned on its back. The well is a short drive from the other bank. Unlike other sites, the open-air pit is easily accessible on foot without a long trek through the forest or an industrial fence enclosing it. While most old pits have been covered over, Aguarico-4 offers an opportunity to see remnants of how companies ran their oil operations. Donald is patient with my questions and lets me tag along with different groups, joking that soon I will be able to run my own tour. This day, the participants are high school students from a town outside of Lago Agrio that, despite the pipeline that runs through the main road, has no oil operations. Their teacher, speaking for the group, explains to Donald that the students are lucky to have very little, if any, direct experience with oil operations. Part of her intention in bringing them on the tour is for them to see firsthand the consequences of extraction for their Amazonian neighbors. Leading the students through the brush to the edge of the waste pit, Donald pauses in the speckled light of the forest to tell them about the well we are visiting. Describing Texaco’s operational practices, he indicates the boundaries of the pit, which are overgrown. This pit is about three meters [9.8 ft] deep, he begins, as the students gather before him. In 1974, Texaco drilled this well and operated it for many years until it later became dry. In the year 2000, PetroEcuador began to reinject the well with formation waters. This pit has been here for thirty-seven years. Horses, animals have died here. Twenty-four cows have died here. These pools are directly related to the problems you see in the area. He picks up a long stick lying on the bank of the pit propped against a tree. He has used this particular stick on many tours; the bottom half is stained black. Sometimes he has so many tours to conduct that he visits the Aguarico-4 site several times a week. He makes a point to reuse the same stick. This pit was never covered over. Texaco says that it is the responsibility of PetroEcuador. But Texaco built it, operated it. It was exclusively their fault. This is the territory of the Siona and Siekopai and the Cofán. It killed off what they used to feed their people, it killed their animals, their fish. It killed their sumak kawsay.1 Look, he says, gesturing toward the pit, this is business. They didn’t cover it over, they just dumped it here. They saved a huge amount of money by doing it this way. He begins to explain the allegations of the Aguinda lawsuit and cites the controversial Cabrera report that estimated total damages at $27 billion. But this report was so heavily

188  recko ning with ha rm

attacked for more than two years that the judge said he wouldn’t rely on it in his final decision. So then the court hired another expert. But there are always things that the experts didn’t take into account. For example, before, Texaco always put oil on the roads. They lit pits like this on fire. There were columns of smoke that you could see forever. There were two planes at this time, one that was Texaco and one that was CEPE. These planes would fly through the columns of smoke—pilots said that up in the sky the columns of smoke formed pyramids, joining together. Today it’s illegal to burn oil pits like this. Donald steps onto the surface of the pit, sustaining himself on suspended fallen tree branches. Who wants to walk on the pit? he asks, looking up at the group. Part of his aim is to conjure a sense that the contaminated reality they are walking over and around on the tour was produced through specific historical processes, which include practices that are, fortunately, outlawed today. He threads past histories into present realities. Having taken many of these tours, I read his narrations as offering a sense that the crude in the waste pit they are standing before did not simply appear in this place but rather was a routine result of oil production in the past and was accompanied by deliberate, damaging practices that were not sufficiently documented in the historical record. These narrations are a critical reconstruction of how oil made this place and the contemporary reality alongside oil extraction. After illustrating the pit’s depth by inserting and removing the crude-covered stick and holding it outward for group inspection, Donald leads the group down the hillside. Arriving at the bottom of the forested embankment, we find ourselves at an otherwise unremarkable stream running through a swampy forested area. Donald tells the group that this stream is also contaminated with oil. The water moves past us, muddy and slow. It is completely shaded but stubbornly hot. Sometimes Texaco says, “We’re going to show you how those plaintiffs are lying— look, the water is clear,” they say. But once, when we were here, Pablo [Fajardo, an attorney for the plaintiffs] took a stick and stirred the water, like this. Donald digs a stick into the muck at the bottom of the stream, moving it around in a circle. And look, there it is: bubbles of oil rise, opening in an iridescent bloom across the surface of the water. Pulling a plastic glove from his back pocket, he puts it on, and then skims the water with his gloved hand. Oil sticks to the glove, staining his hand black. He shows the students on the bank. People assume there is no oil here because it sits down below in the mud, where it is initially not visible. But everyone downstream is drinking this. Texaco said that

tou r i ng toxic pl aces  189

it was impossible to test this water, but it’s not impossible. Once, they took a fish that they caught here, they dried the fish, they ground it up, and they sent the powder to the laboratory for analysis. They found that the fish contained heavy metals. The stick and the glove are two ways that Donald works to capture ephemeral moments of toxicity through material evidence. If this group had arrived at this stream while walking through the woods, rather than descending from the banks of the pit, it is possible that they could have passed by without recognizing its significance. By stirring the mud in the water, releasing the layers of chemical memory contained beneath us, and then capturing it on the glove, Donald contextualizes material evidence that his spectators can interrogate. The water shines behind him as he stands with one foot in the river and the other propped up on the bank. Some students take pictures with their cellphones; others fidget in the heat. Donald continues, explaining how chemical toxicity is linked to other forms of social toxicity that create division among communities: When the people come out to protest, they send the military. Everything in the Amazon is divided now by oil blocks. And if not for oil, then for mining. There is a lot of mining in the area where you all live; that’s why you need to be prepared. I’m not proud of this. It causes me great shame that as Ecuadorians we weren’t capable of protecting our land. This is ours, not for people to come and dump things here. We just passed a spill by the side of the road on the way here. That happened a few months ago. That was PetroEcuador. This keeps happening. Conflict, fear, and feelings of guilt over industrial practices in the past is what anthropologist Lindsay Ofrias calls “contamination of the social fabric.” Individuals living amid oil extraction face forms of assault, including physical violence along with psychosocial terror and conflict, that engulf daily life and are impossible to capture in formal mechanisms of accounting for harm, such as Environmental Impact Assessments (Ofrias 2018). It is precisely these forms of accompanying harm that are so difficult to apprehend and so easy to dismiss, that give shape to the material forms of toxicity experienced in the everyday. Although Donald always includes a visit to an open pit, many pits have been covered over, either through remediation programs or topped off with soil. The covering of pits illustrates what he calls “la técnica del gato” (the technique of the cat): bury your waste with a scoop of dirt and don’t look back. No offense to cats, he says with a laugh. I don’t want to insult cats by comparing them to Chevron. Humor is a frequent element

190  reckoning with ha rm

of these tours, a rhetorical technique that both engages audiences and allows Donald to point to the absurdity of such incredible disregard on the part of the companies and state agencies that perpetrated this toxic mess. Cat jokes were a recurrent means of poking fun at oil companies. Another comparison I heard Donald and others use to describe an oil company that was feverishly fighting back against allegations of wrongdoing was “como gato, patas arriba” (like a cat on its back). Yet cats and jokes aside, on these tours there was no denying the ease at which companies covered over waste with a scratch of dirt sometimes only a meter deep, a derisory effort to erase it from public memory and political accountability. These tours convince through experience. It is one thing to stand on a grassy surface and be told that underneath there is a pit twenty by thirty meters (66 × 98.4 ft) in extent and three meters (9.8 ft) deep, but it is another thing entirely to stand on the edge of one, next to an area the size of a swimming pool, and see the crude yourself; to watch as Donald submerges a long branch that keeps disappearing downward before hitting bottom; and to smell the oil in front of you, to see its luster when Donald rakes the bottom of the streambed, or to flip over a leaf with your boot and find the bottom coated shiny black. Probing a waste pit with sticks or mucking a streambed to bring crude to the surface makes contamination real for visitors on a Toxic Tour. Growing up in the Lago oil camp near some of the first wells Texaco drilled in the Amazon, some of Donald’s earliest memories are of the tremendous clouds of black smoke that billowed from burning waste pits, or of the family laundry turning black after they hung it outside. As a child, he would walk to school barefoot on the hot pipeline to avoid ruining his shoes on oil-slicked roads. He remembers numerous times when his family lost their crops after oil spills, or when he found farm animals suffering or dead after drinking contaminated water from nearby streams. Donald recounts how when he was thirteen, his mother passed away from symptoms of acute toxic exposure after washing laundry in a stream contaminated by a recent spill of production waters near their house. Taking over responsibility for the family farm with his siblings, he saw his community divided by disputes over land, jobs, and spills—first with Texaco, then with PetroEcuador. Over the years, Donald’s awareness of the toxicity surrounding him became more acute. Today, living across the street from an oil flare that burns twenty-four hours a day, he continues to live with the persistent fear that the air his family breathes might one day make them sick.

tou r i ng toxic pl aces  191

The Toxic Tours that Donald leads weave everyday encounters with contamination together with a critique of the relations of power, pollution, and justice that extend beyond the Amazon. He draws attention not only to the enduring presence of contamination in a particular place but also to the ways those toxicants travel: which river this stream connects to; the family that lives a few miles below, became sick, and had to move away in search of medical care; the sale of agricultural products grown in contaminated Amazonian soil for national and international markets. The Toxic Tour articulates the details of immediate struggles within a broader political economy, highlighting the symbolic and material patterns of pollution and injustice in oil-producing regions (Pezzullo 2009, 23). Donald’s tour, involving the details of daily life with oil operations, such as the number of farm animals lost by falling into uncovered waste pits, combines personal and anecdotal knowledge to denounce the legacy of oil pollution around his home. His narration makes it possible for visitors whose lives are geographically and culturally distant from the Amazon to relate to the weight of Texaco’s practices, forging a space of shared connection between outsiders and the lives of Amazonian residents. In other words, Donald aims to draw participants on the tours into the relations that he makes evident for them through these firsthand encounters. It is difficult to leave one of these tours without contemplating one’s own position in relation to oil production and consumption, from the cellphone in one’s hand to the airplane fuel that brought many participants to the Amazon for the tours.

Toxic Tours: Lago Agrio-1 Donald frequently brings groups to visit the site that marks the origin of commercial oil production in the Amazon: Lago Agrio-1, the first oil well perforated by Texaco in Ecuador in 1967. On one tour, the group of students lumber off a school bus after traveling all day from their university in the Andes. They land on the well platform in the midday heat, stretching and blinking in the sunlight. For many of them, it is their first time in the Amazon. It is also their first Toxic Tour. Donald directs the group to gather around the well, their shadows distorted against the oily water accumulated at its base. Emeregildo, who has joined Donald for the day, calls on the group to imagine the place not as it is now, with felled trees, farms, fields, and oil wells, but as deep forest. He tells them of a time before Texaco’s arrival, insisting on the history of the place before it became known for oil production. Emeregildo’s intervention

Figure 5.3. A typical gas flare visited on a Toxic Tour. The area beneath the well is covered in a thick burned layer of hydrocarbons, along with innumerable dead insects. Photo by the author, 2012.

tou r i ng toxic pl aces  193

Figure 5.4. Donald shows participants on a Toxic Tour how leaves on the trees surrounding the Aguarico-4 station gas flare are coated in hydrocarbons. The rocks on the ground were also speckled with oil. Photo by the author, 2012.

is critical to remind the students that the infrastructure that is now a taken-for-granted part of the landscape was not always here; these fields, farms, and wells are sites of violence and dispossession for the Cofán. He helps the students perceive this place, now memorialized with a large billboard announcing the discovery of oil in the Amazon, as one might have seen it before the fanfare of black gold.2 Motioning for the students to follow him, Donald leads the group across the cleared area of the platform, crossing over the smaller tubes that connect the looming storage tank to the pipelines. The suspended tubes are wobbly, giving beneath your weight just enough to make you wonder if they might rupture. Lean your ear close to them and you can hear the contents hissing by, with the pipeline hot to the touch. Just beyond the pipelines, on the other side of a low bank, lies an old waste pit. An abandoned gas flare sits toward one end of the pit, a rusted triangular configuration of pipelines used to burn off excess gas produced from the well. The waste pit is overgrown with dead grass and pondweeds, the pooled water tinted here and there with the bluish sheen of oil. Unlike

194  recko ning with ha rm

at the Aguarico-4 waste pit, the students must use their imaginations here to envision how this site looked when it was filled with oil. In many ways, this site requires more work on the part of Donald and Emeregildo to help students see the past through the lens of the Toxic Tour; in places where contamination is not immediately palpable, its interpretation is more at stake and requires additional tools, stories, and histories to understand. Tour participants line up along the banks of the pit with Donald below. The pit has been covered over with dirt, so it is firm enough to stand on. Picking up the auger, he announces to the group: Here I am going to dig down one meter deep to start to remove what is hidden below. You all will realize what it is when you see it. Donald screws the auger clockwise into the mud. It scrapes rocks and sucks mud reluctantly as he pulls out the first core. Knocking the auger on the ground, he dumps out the surface mud and screws it in deeper. Inspecting the second core, he looks up: Get your noses ready! Less than a meter down, the cores of mud begin to take on a dark tint. He removes a clump of mud and with gloved hands passes it off to the student on his left. The students lean in to inspect the mud. You can smell it from all the way over here! says one, reluctant to get closer. Donning latex gloves, the students pass the mud around, smashing it between their fingers, holding it up for friends to smell or take pictures of. The mud is black and iridescent, glinting in the light. Taking out an old five-gallon water bottle that he has brought along for this purpose, Donald cuts it in half with a machete to form a makeshift bowl. Now this, you can see, he says, is clear plastic. And the water here is clean too. Picking up a clump of mud taken from the sample of the pit, he drops it in the water, mixing it until it dissolves. The water turns a dark black, leaving a rainbow stain as it sloshes up the sides of the bottle. The students lean in to get a better look. With a clean, gloved hand, Donald skims the surface of the water with his palm, holding it out to face the students. The glove is black and shiny with oil. This, he says, is the remediation done by Texaco. The most iconic image of the Toxic Tour is the extended, crude-covered hand. Donald’s picture, face out of focus and obscured behind his blackened hand, regularly accompanies articles in newspapers and magazines and has made countless appearances on activist websites and blogs. The dirtied hand makes contamination—which, when sitting in the mud at the bottom of a stream or distributed across the surface of water, can be evasive—apparent to the viewer. It is a striking, personal gesture that denounces the toxic legacy of oil (Fiske 2018).

tou r i ng toxic pl aces  195

Figure 5.5. An oil-coated hand illustrates the contents of the waste pit. Photo by Mitch Anderson/Amazon Frontlines.

Donald uses the auger to uncover what lies below now covered-over pits, to excavate, as an archeologist might, the material remains of Texaco activities. As he holds out the oily mud for inspection, Donald states unequivocally: This is to discover the lie told by Texaco. The act of screwing the auger down and pulling up oily mud for participants to examine on his outstretched glove is continually to “rediscover” contamination, as though for the first time, for audience after audience. In doing so, the tour reveals the stratigraphy of toxicity: how toxicants in the soil are intertwined with operational practices oil companies used in Ecuador that were outlawed in Texas, with legal battles, and with stories of children lost. Here the act of soil sampling is woven together with matters of justice, resisting any simple bifurcation of science and advocacy within the context of the tour: these contaminated soils are products of profit, intention, and neglect. Soil samples are but one element of the tapestry that Donald weaves in the Toxic Tour. Sampling with the auger is informed by personal experience of life alongside the oil industry and the suffering it has brought; indeed, Donald knows where to dig because he has lived the history of these sites. Samples are not stand-alone objects; rather, they

196  recko ning with ha rm

are interlaced with the stories of how this place was prior to the industry’s arrival, with the encounters participants have with other residents of the area on the tour, with the smells of gas when groups stop to visit flares. In the process, the Toxic Tour illustrates that the facts of contamination—​whether soil samples, eyewitness accounts, or waste pits that stand open to this day—are situated in relational contexts. None of these facts, stories, or objects can tell the story of harm alone; the Toxic Tour is a collaborative, relational venture. Toxic Tours operate in a space between what is evident (in the sense of being viscerally apparent to observers) and what is evidence (the figures, studies, maps, measures, and other official forms of legal or scientific proof) of pollution in this region. Recall, for instance, the scene that opened this chapter: in the Toxic Tour there was a collective recognition of the soil’s contamination as it was brought to the surface. The presence of oil was evident to those watching, indicated by their audible gasps, wrinkled noses, and outraged comments. Yet soil that smells of petroleum to the human nose is not scientific or legal evidence until it has been sampled according to specific procedures, submitted to a series of laboratory protocols, evaluated, compared to other samples, and interpreted for the court by an appropriate expert, as in the fact-finding portion of the Aguinda lawsuit in chapter 2. By the end of this chain of transformations, those initially telling features of that soil—its smell, its consistency, its iridescent glint under the Amazonian sun, the story of the family that lived alongside it—are no longer relevant. Yet, in the Toxic Tour, the stink, the stickiness, and the sheen of the muds, as well as the narratives that accompany them, serve as central features of this public evidentiary process. Perhaps if these samples were not so heavily contaminated with the visible, smellable presence of crude oil that participants can see and squish between their fingers, they would not be so convincing. But here the blackness of crude or the sensations of nausea after walking beneath a gas flare convince through their viscerality; no further testing is necessary for contamination to be apparent.

Media Tour Although the oil industry’s presence throughout this region becomes obvious to visitors as they come across spill sites marked with danger tape or see the plumes of dark smoke trailing from gas flares, the question of responsibility for harm is not something that one can necessarily ascertain by sight or touch. I had the opportunity to go on Chevron’s media

tou r i ng toxic pl aces  197

tour led by James Craig, the company’s official spokesperson, in March 2013. Over the course of two days, Craig and a small group made up of an engineer, an occupational safety consultant, two members of a security team, and a lawyer took me and three Ecuadorian journalism students from Quito to various sites in the Amazon to offer the company’s account of how oil operations and the Aguinda lawsuit unfolded.3 On the media tour I once again found myself on the banks of the Aguarico-4 waste pit. This time the intention of the visit was not to explore the many harmful relations and effects of toxic waste, but rather to insist on Chevron’s distance from that pit and any harm that it might imply for the surrounding communities. In the media tour, harm was not something that emerged through the sedimentation of toxicity and industry in daily life, refracted through a broader lens of historical inequality. Instead, harm was a specific, often quantifiable, effect that could be dissected, as though life alongside extraction were an intricate rug that with enough effort and precision could be unwoven and each strand pulled apart and named, its provenance and role accounted for. The purpose of the tour, Craig says, was in part to answer some of the questions the company continually received from reporters. Such questions usually followed familiar refrains, such as, Mr. Craig, Señora So-and-So lives next to a well in the Amazon, and her husband died five years ago from contamination. What does Chevron have to say about that? Craig seemed skeptical as he recounted some of the many questions of this genre that he has received. He noted he would always ask if they had seen a medical record, to which the individual would invariably answer no, or alternatively, yes, but we can’t show you. These kinds of questions, he felt, were unfair, and amounted to little more than accusing the company without presenting any evidence. So, these media tours were born, giving Chevron an opportunity to answer the questions they received from journalists, academics, lawyers, and others interested in the case. While not necessarily intended as a retort to the Toxic Tours, the media tours effectively functioned as such. Over the two days on the tour I attended with Chevron, we visited many of the same sites I had previously come to know through Toxic Tours with Donald or other fieldwork activities, including the Aguarico-4 pit. As soon as we passed through security at the Quito airport, Craig had my ear explaining Chevron’s position on the case. He was an endless font of rebuttals; whatever question, example, or argument I would bring up, he had an answer. I was surprised by his enthusiasm and grateful that he appeared to sincerely welcome my questions. He seemed

198  recko ning with ha rm

to have genuine, unbridled energy for talking about the details of the A­guinda case, the plaintiff lawyers’ actions, and problems with judges and allegations of corruption, as well as the history of Texaco’s arrival and contracts with the Ecuadorian government at the time. While Craig was open to debate, according to the company line, the truth of this case was singular, without room for shared complicities in the creation of harm. Technical details determined broader questions of accountability, even if the larger context in which oil extraction unfolded was eclipsed in the process. Frequently returning to the company bottom line in our conversations, Craig argued over the course of the tour that in cases where harm had occurred, it would be absurd for Chevron to settle or admit guilt for another company’s crimes (usually referring to PetroEcuador). Rather, according to Chevron, PetroEcuador and the Ecuadorian government needed to be held responsible for contamination that occurred under their operations during the same period as Texaco’s tenure. The plane descended over the airport of Francisco de Orellana, leveling out over the dizzying layout of African palm cultivation. Square after square of cleared land with palms planted at exacting diagonals, interspersed with zinc roofs, soccer fields, and laundry hanging in the humid air, emerged as we sank closer to land. Disembarking, a driver brought us to the hotel and Craig gave us safety precautions for the tour: do not mention anyone other than Craig by name when writing, tweeting, or speaking of the tour; do not tweet or publicize the exact locations of sites on the itinerary until it is completed (when I asked why, he said they were concerned that community members would show up and cause problems for the group); do not speak to anyone else who arrives on the sites, but refer them directly to the security team. I found it ironic to hear the farmers who lived here described as security threats by a representative of one of the most wealthy and powerful oil companies on the planet. Such depictions fit within a long history of corporations claiming to be victims of landholders or activists who dare to oppose company activities. When I was in the field, it was routine for the Ecuadorian government to charge community leaders with terrorism and sabotage for participating in protests against oil companies like PetroEcuador, such as blocking entrances to wells when other forms of negotiation failed. The criminalization of protest has also been seen in other extractive sectors in Ecuador, such as mining, and throughout Latin America more broadly (Becker 2013; Velásquez 2017; Jenkins and Rondón 2015; Sveinsdóttir, Aguilar-Støen, and Bull 2021). Chevron, as Craig told me, does not have the luxury of playing on

tou r i ng toxic pl aces  199

negative prejudgments of oil. Activists display images of people suffering from health conditions to tell their story, such as the commonly circulated images by Lou Dematteis and Kayana Szymczak in the visual chronicle of environmental and personal tragedy in Crude Reflections. He notes that Chevron, on the other hand, relies only on facts. Knowing my interest in health problems resulting from oil operations, Craig brought up the studies by San Sebastián and colleagues on the community of San Carlos. The study was based on a relatively small sample with high levels of cancer incidence (as discussed in chapter 4). Yet, he noted, the official cancer mortality data published by the National Institute of Statistics and Census (Instituto Nacional Estadisticas y Censos, INEC) shows no excess cancer risk for the region. Based on this data, Chevron hired several experts to scrutinize the question of cancer and oil production, including the San Carlos study. They refuted its methodology and results, as well as the subsequent conclusions the authors drew about health risks for populations living in the concession zone in the Aguinda case (Kelsh, Morimoto, and Lau 2009; see also Kelsh, McHugh, and Tomasi 2008; Sever 2005). These studies and residents’ accounts of life alongside the industry often speak of various cancers, Craig tells me, but the question remains: How are they related to oil? Describing the different causes for a range of cancers, he argues that activists and others have simplified the matter to such an extent that somehow, they all have the same cause: oil. He questions how the many different health effects cited as resulting from oil activity could possibly have the same cause. Even though medical reports are usually not available, Craig noted with frustration that activists continue to use pictures of individuals from the region who are sick, often those suffering with cancer. Admitting that these are indeed sad cases—Craig is careful not to dismiss individual stories of suffering—he instead insists there is no demonstrated connection between their claims and Texaco’s operations. He returns repeatedly to the bottom line: there is no evidence that a given cancer is a result of oil activity, or more specifically, of oil activity under Texaco. Regardless, he concedes, the pictures carry significance because they affect public opinion of the case. In the media tour, the Chevron team intensely queries the connections between different sites, events, and individual claims: Craig tells the story of oil development in the region from a “high-proof” position where there is no room for plausible connections between pollution and adverse health outcomes, only proven causal relationships (Sismondo 2017).

200  reckoning with ha rm

Before attending this media tour, the three journalism students had been with Donald on a Toxic Tour. On the tour they met Emeregildo and heard part of his life story, including how he lost two of his children in the early years of oil operations. They had also listened to Donald discuss the higher rates of cancers in the region, including the San Carlos study. The students recounted this to the group on the media tour and asked Craig to respond to Donald and Emeregildo’s claims. Craig was familiar with both accounts: Is there a medical record? The journalism students acknowledged that they had not seen a medical record. You see, Craig noted. Cancer has been used politically, but it has very little to do with this case. Cancer is the result of many things, and it is a challenge to prove that it comes from toxic exposure. The students noted his answer, seemingly stymied for a response. In a narrow sense, Craig is correct. Determining the origin of an individual’s cancer is exceptionally difficult. Indeed, cancer carries a particular kind of cultural weight (Jain 2013) in mobilizing public sentiment, more than many other conditions. Yet the difficulty of determining the origins of health problems like cancer, which are likely related to toxic exposure, cannot be a reason for denying the health consequences of industrial activity. Discussion among the group shifts away from the specifics of Emeregildo’s story and the San Carlos cancer cluster to the many reasons that it is difficult to prove the cause of a disease, whether it is a diagnosis of cancer or other occupational health concerns, such as hearing loss. Contrary to how Donald uses individual accounts of residents to give context to the waste pits, oily soil samples, or old spills, Craig uses these questions to chip away at the solidity of those personal accounts by effectively separating them from the context in which they occurred. Exactly when was the afflicted individual exposed? For what duration? How do you know the exposure was due to Texaco operations and not those of CEPE or a company that operated in the region subsequently? What about other life conditions? Does the individual smoke? Have they ever sprayed pesticides in their garden or drunk water from a hand-dug well? For every potential health effect from living near or working in the oil industry, the argument goes, you have to look at all the other possible causes, including personal health history, family health history, and other occupational and environmental exposures throughout their life course. I was always struck by the weight of Emeregildo’s story: the unfathomable depth of pain that would come with losing a child, all in a moment when everything you knew of the place where you grew up

tou r i ng toxic pl aces  201

was rapidly being transformed by oil development and settlement. Yet the discussion on the media tour renders the contextual details of his story peripheral and irrelevant to the verifiable “facts.” The fact that the Cofán were living along the river where there are documented oil spills from these early years or that they took their sick children to the missionaries in Limoncocha or the hospital in Quito, where it would have been extremely difficult to prove the proximate cause of death through medical examination, no longer seemed to matter. It only mattered that there was no specific corroborating evidence. The memory of crude that coated the water that Emeregildo’s wife drank, or the oily traces as he and his child swam in the river, floated out of sight with the repeated insistence on precise medical confirmation. The Chevron media tour dismisses memories of human suffering and loss when not bolstered by the weight of an official, albeit impossible, confirmation. Our first stop on the media tour the following day is a spot along the Rio Napo where, Craig tells us, a processing facility is dumping wastewater directly into the river. This facility is run by the municipality of Coca. I had no means at the time of verifying whether the waters had been treated, but group conversation quickly turns to the kinds of contaminants you would expect to find in greater quantities downstream from an urban area: fecal coliforms, fats, cooking oils, all of which were slowly being diluted with the flow of the water. So continues the work of scrutiny on the media tour. Entangled questions surrounding contamination are divided into singular threads with immediate causes: the primary contaminant of waterways in the region is fecal contamination, which, the argument went, is unrelated to oil contamination. Citing the insufficiency and even total lack of sanitary infrastructure in some cases, Craig argues that while there were real risks to human health posed by fecal contaminants, as well as unfortunate reasons for why children get sick after bathing and playing in the rivers, oil operations are not to blame. As we head out of Coca toward the town of Joya de los Sachas (known to most as simply “Sacha”), we pass by the sports federation complex, lined with bleachers surrounding a soccer field and track. The mascot of the federation is an oversized drop of oil, caricatured with sinewy limbs that end in oversized gloves carrying a torch and boots, labeled with the national oil company logo. “Orellana: El último paraíso” (Ore­ llana: The last paradise) has been painted on the cement fence below. As the tour winds its way throughout the day, we visit sites that Chevron representatives thought emblematic of their main points in the case— moments where the expert reports indicated that oil had not migrated

202  reckoning with ha rm

from the pits, descriptions of particular practices undertaken by the state oil company, or aerial photographs that showed land deforested by colonists following Texaco’s exit. Craig and others had brought company handouts with summaries of this information for the group, along with jump drives with compilations of media clips. By noon we arrive at the Aguarico-4 well. Craig asks if I have been here before, noting that it was a favored spot of the plaintiffs in the legal case and of Donald’s Toxic Tours in particular. He describes one moment when Donald was leaving the site with a large tour group in a van and passed Craig leading a media tour on the way in. The two made eye contact from their respective vehicles, he says, and laughed. The whole thing is a circus, he intones. I understand this comment as a way of dismissing the work of Toxic Tours, perhaps suggesting that they are just for show. Such an assertion runs entirely contrary to my experience with Donald and his commitment to showing others the realities of oil operations in the place he calls home. Craig narrates the history of Aguarico-4 for the group, describing how it was not very productive as a well; the slurry it brought up contained a high percentage of water mixed with crude. As a result, it was later transformed into a reinjection well. In the list of sites Texaco and the Ecuadorian State agreed upon in the Remedial Action Plan in 1995, there was a spill on the platform of the Aguarico-4 well that was designated as Texaco’s responsibility. The waste pit off to the side of the well site, which remains open to this day and formed part of the Toxic Tour described earlier with Donald, was determined to be PetroEcuador’s responsibility. This is a key point in terms of legal accountability, and one I was not aware of before the media tour: when the RAP divvied up the sites identified in the environmental audits as needing remediation, sometimes it gave Texaco responsibility for one part of a site (such as the platform spill on Aguarico-4), while the state retained responsibility for other parts of the same site (such as the waste pit on Aguarico-4). This distinction, while legally important, has no meaning for people who live here. When people in the surrounding communities contemplate the Aguarico-4 site, or any other site of oil operations, they do not divide it up into sections of differentiated corporate responsibility. Nearly all of the oil sites in the Amazon today have been operated by different companies at different times, changing hands, operators, or even subcontractors multiple times—as in the “prior audit” with Paul and Pati in chapter 3. For people who live in the region, responsibility for contamination exists as a whole and not as individual fragments, as

tou r i ng toxic pl aces  203

though a lifetime of operations on a site could be divided into specific time frames with corresponding legal responsibility. For a company like Chevron, which assumed responsibility for Texaco in the merger, teasing apart these differences is a foundation of its argument for why Chevron is not guilty. In 1997, then sub-secretary for environmental protection Jorge Albán Gómez accepted the platform spill on Aguarico-4 as remediated.4 Chevron thus maintains that the remaining waste pit, which is filled with toxicants, crude, industrial trash, and other materials, is not only not their legal responsibility but also illustrates why others are misinformed about who is responsible for contamination. We make our way through the brush to the waste pit. The crude of the pit glints in the filtered light of the forest. Members of our contingent made comments that if this were in fact old oil, it would have long since lost its gleam and would not have the same visual qualities of fresh oil. My mind flashes to a story that Donald had told me once, in which he said that someone accused him of coming the night before his Toxic Tours to dump oil into the pits and rivers, to stage the events. At the time, this had struck me as so absurd that I chalked it up to a legend of the oil fields. Why, I thought to myself, would anyone think that Donald would need to cart in his own crude when it was so easy to find contaminated sites throughout the region? The journalism students continue to discuss with the other tour participants claims of such toxic shams. In particular, they raise questions about a stain of fresh oil present on the bank next to a long stick that had clearly been dipped in the pit. Craig jumps into the conversation, ever cautious to redirect the group discussion back to the realm of the verifiable. He intervenes: We cannot say that someone is bringing in oil in order to manipulate the situation. I can’t say that because we don’t have any proof. This is a site that has a lot of visitors. We move over to the gooseneck pipe sticking out of the bank of the pit. Noting that this pipe clearly has not been properly maintained, Craig reviews its intended technical function for the group. As it was installed, he explains, such a pipe is supposed to prevent contamination from overflowing the banks of the waste pit by allowing excess rainwater to drain off. This explanation is counter to the plaintiffs’ claim that the gooseneck pipe is an example of pollution by design, allowing the contents of the pits to run into the surrounding areas for decades. In Chevron’s account, the pipe served a purpose, which was actually to protect the surrounding environment from the pit. The earth beneath the pipe’s egress is dark, a blackish stain running down the hill. This, Craig notes, is just organic

Figure 5.6. The corroded end of the gooseneck pipeline protruding from the Aguarico-4 waste pit with a trail of oil-covered debris beneath. Photo by the author, 2012.

tou r i ng toxic pl aces  205

degradation. He climbs down the bank and straddles the stream where water is dripping out, leaning in to smell it. You see, there’s no smell of oil here. He cups the water in his hands for us to smell. Picking up the wet leaves below, he squishes them in his hands: Look, if these were coated in oil, they would stick to your hands. But I don’t feel any hydrocarbons on my hands. The group looks on, seemingly perplexed by the contradiction between Craig’s presentation and their own observations of the contaminated pit the water was draining from. I have visited this site many times on Toxic Tours and been with Donald and groups of visitors as we hiked down this bank to the stream beneath the spot where this very pipe drains. I have seen how, when Donald takes a stick and stirs the mud of the stream, oil bubbles up from the muck to the top. I have my own photographs of the rainbow sheen that accumulates on the surface of the stream, and of Donald’s outstretched gloved hand when he skims that surface. The glove always retained the black oily residue floating across the water. As Donald has explained, it is logical that the contamination in the stream has its origins in the decades-old waste pit on the hilltop above it. I ask Craig about this, why the stream located below this waste pit contains visible crude on a site that has many documented spills. He says he does not know, but it is not coming from the pipe. Maybe a spill further upstream? he asks, noting that it is not unusual to find hydrocarbons in places where there has been oil production for years. But you need to ask yourself, what is the risk? What is the risk posed by this pit for the environment and for human health? Craig quickly renders the immediacy of this stream, of these spills, of the effects of this contamination abstract. It’s about weighing probability versus consequences, he notes. Making our way up the hill, talk returns to the naturally occurring vegetable oils in plants that also can produce a sheen that some might mistake for crude residues. I am struck by the contrast between the two tours, how the same site, the same rusting infrastructure, and the same old toxic waste could be used to make such profoundly incongruous arguments about the harm that results from oil production. Without immediate access to water sampling equipment, it was impossible to determine the chemical content of the water draining from the pit that day. Of course, one sample alone would not have been sufficient. The contents of the water draining from the waste pit depend in great part on how much it has rained in prior days. Further, toxicants are not always palpable to human senses. Usually, when oil contains volatile organic compounds (VOCs), the smell is indeed detectable to the human

206  reckoning with ha rm

nose. This is why as crude degrades, it will have less of a smell as VOCs are released over time. The absence of an “oily” smell, however, does not mean that the contents are harmless. While Chevron representatives like Craig generally remain staunchly suspicious of other, unvalidated experiential accounts of oil’s effects on the senses, in this example, he used bodily perception (the lack of smell or feel of oil) to deflect corporate responsibility. The tour proceeded throughout the day, with members of the Chevron team repeatedly redirecting conversations to the legal matter of technical responsibility. They questioned every example, anecdote, or study a participant brought up on the tour, highlighting the many possibilities for sources of injury other than those related to oil. There was no room for understanding the contemporary configuration of life next to oil operations through profound gradients of power and wealth, nor as part of the complex history of an industry that has many known as well as unknown, proximate as well as distant, effects on human health and everyday life. There was no room for indeterminacies, for considering the context in which legal disputes over oil and accountability have unfolded in the Amazon. In doing so, the conversation was reduced to limited understandings of cause and effect, of legal responsibility based on only what can be precisely demonstrated in a laboratory or a court of law. In the process, harm on the media tour became so constrained in scope, so dubious, that it seemed to filter between one’s fingers, impossible to catch before falling to the ground.

Curating Experiential Encounters with Harm One afternoon I was sitting with Donald in his office. We were talking about a recent spill that had occurred in the community where he lives, which he had documented with a small handheld video recorder. He has many such videos, often fuzzy, poorly focused, sometimes with grasses brushing the lens as he walks through a field. Sometimes he is standing on the side of the road, documenting a spill he came upon as he drove by, or one that a neighbor notified him about. Other times he visits his neighbors’ farms to document their struggles with leaking wellheads, the presence of crude-contaminated soil in a field of pineapples, or in one case a pair of cows that were insatiably drawn to licking the salty crude that oozed out of the soil over a buried waste pit. Donald takes the time to record things that are routine parts of the landscape. The act of stopping to document leaks, breaches, oozing crude, and slow drips

tou r i ng toxic pl aces  207

is a means of insisting on the extraordinariness of toxicity amid the ordinariness of extraction. Resistance to the routine of contamination is a way to say that things were not always like this, and they do not have to be like this now either. One video recounts a scene that I witnessed several times with Donald. A roaring gas flare towers overhead, the ground beneath a darkened shadow of charred detritus. Donald pans over the blackened pipelines: “Here I find myself at the Aguarico station, in the area where they burn gas.” If you have ever been up close to a flare, then it is easy to imagine the suffocating heat bearing down and the noise of the burning gas rumbling overhead. The smell envelops those below, making some feel lightheaded, others sick enough to need to lie down. The act of taking people to view these sites and filming beneath the flare also involves considerable personal discomfort and potential risk. “As you can see, this [flare] is lit day and night.” Yet for all of the video’s potency, Donald’s focus in it is not on showing the flare itself. Swinging the camera from the lurching plume of flame against the sky, he turns the lens downward to the earth. “The strange thing about this is when I come here, I always find the insects, the pollinators, but [this time] I find a great number of ants.” He bends, fingers coming into view as he plucks the bodies of lifeless, dried ants off the charred earth at the base of the flare. He pans across what looks like asphalt but are actually accumulated layers of crude particulate matter in the arc of earth beneath the flare. “They can’t stand the heat. . . . There are thousands, thousands of ants.” Corpses are scattered over the ground. It is dizzying to watch, in part because of the camera’s quick movements, in part the accumulated weight of death before one’s eyes, and in part the difficulty of separating my own memories of nausea experienced beneath those flares from the images moving on screen. “When I say that this breaks the food chain, it’s real. This shouldn’t be happening. This needs to stop. This is a crime against nature,” he narrates. He pans up over the base of the flare again: “All of this is petroleum,” he indicates for uninitiated viewers, zooming in on the gauges coated in bumpy layers of oil and soot. I have been with Donald many times as he leads groups of visitors to these flares, showing them the crumpled bodies of hundreds, thousands of insects unable to resist the flare’s call in the darkness or survive its crippling heat under the sun. These bodies are not counted as part of industry or regulatory assessments of harm and make no demands on those of us walking above. Often after showing his audiences the flare, Donald

208  reckoning with ha rm

takes groups to the edges of the clearing, pointing to the rocks speckled with drops of oil or pulling a branch down from a tree to show the thin coating of oil that slicks the leaves in the immediate vicinity. He chronicles the number of flares companies have installed in the region and the accounts of individuals who have become sick from living nearby. The effort that goes into documenting the presence of toxicity where he carefully zooms in to show the dead ants or the oily slick on the leaves of the surrounding forest is a way of illustrating the relations of this flare. It is a commitment to making the glossed-over seen, to counting, naming, and making visible the ways that toxicity is present and woven throughout daily life here for human and animal inhabitants alike. Toxic Tours and Chevron’s media tours are curated experiences of the Amazon. Both tours engage with evidence of harm in the past, offering an experiential encounter with extraction through particular constructions of place and time, often referring to the era of Texaco but also dealing with subsequent harm by PetroEcuador and other international companies. In key moments, such as at the Aguarico-4 waste pit, both Donald and Craig engage with harm through the role of mitigation as a process that has potentially transformative possibilities. Donald argues that sufficient action has not been taken to clean up polluted sites and that, moreover, the Amazon should never have been contaminated in the first place. Craig, on the other hand, argues that where it was Chevron’s responsibility, the company took sufficient action to alleviate harm, deferring responsibility for any further mitigation to the Ecuadorian state. For Donald, the relations of harm, from the past to the present moment, exist in these sensory, experiential encounters on the banks of contaminated rivers, in the slow drip of a rusted pipe or the feel of charred ants beneath your feet. For Craig, those relations are suspect, unconfirmed, and easily diminished by inserting doubt. In the media tour, harm in the past is circumscribed, deferred, or denied such that it has no connection to harm from ongoing extraction in the present. In this manner, both tours temporalize the relations between the oil industry and this place, either working to make past pollution a present, open problem or striving to make it a closed matter that requires no further intervention by Chevron. Another central aim of Toxic Tours is to provide an opportunity for those who do not have quotidian, personal knowledge of contamination to begin to comprehend what it is like to live alongside oil operations. To facilitate these encounters, Donald employs several objects to assist

touri ng toxic pl aces  209

visitors in seeing, smelling, and touching oil pollution for the first time: a glove, a long stick, a large recycled water bottle, and a hand auger. He uses these assorted tools, contextualized by first-person accounts, anecdotes, and historical information to enable participants to engage directly with the materiality of toxicity and legacies of extraction. In Toxic Tours, Donald brings questions of justice to the fore. The act of digging up old crude oil and inviting participants to smell, touch, and see it with their own eyes makes it impossible to ignore questions of why ordinary people have had to bear the burden of such contamination in the name of corporate or state profit. The questions brought to bear in other contexts, such as the judicial inspections (Is there contamination on this site? How much? Has it migrated outside the boundaries of the waste pit? Who is responsible?), materialize in the Toxic Tour with new salience. In the Toxic Tours, knowledge of petrochemical toxicity is constituted through collective practices of learning about the effects of pollution in vivo, such that relations among polluted sites, the sensory experience of being present on the site, and the history of the Ecuadorian Amazon convince participants of the reality of harm. Toxic Tours are a critical move beyond a notion of toxicity based on the triad of causality, individual bodies, and bounded environments and toward conceptions based on relationality, where the contamination pulled from the ground in front of participants is directly linked to larger struggles over producing waste and creating profit (Alaimo 2010; Tuana 2008; Armiero and De Rosa 2017). In contrast, the central practice of the media tour is one of scrupulous dissection. It is a process of probing every account of harm for other possible explanations. The media tour insists on limited, technical understandings of wrongdoing that fly in the face of the broader, cumulative, lived effects of extraction among people who live in the region. Curiously, both tours rely on some of the same sites to tell their stories of what has happened here. In the media tour, Chevron officials do not necessarily cast doubt on the presence of toxic waste on a given site, but they deliberately query ad nauseum the connections of that waste to human health and the environment to repudiate and deflect responsibility. On the tours, the very same objects—an old waste pit, a former spill, a rusty pipe—are mobilized to entirely different ends. In one rendering, they are related to one another through conjoined histories of settlement and industrialization, profound inequities between Ecuador and the United States, and a politics of extraction. In the other, each object

210  recko ning with ha rm

is presumed to be distinct, all relations suspect and subject to extensive review. Given the contested space in which evidence of harm circulates in relation to debates and legal cases over accountability for extensive environmental damage, Toxic Tours insist on the entangled nature of contamination and justice. The tours provide a critical counter to calls to divorce science from advocacy, such as in the corporate responses to community-led environmental health methodologies in the previous chapter, illustrating how questions of toxic exposure are always questions of justice. By attending to this context of injustice present in the stories of Emeregildo or the scent of contaminated muds beneath a family’s home, rather than narrowly focusing on verifying the presence of hydrocarbons and toxicants where they should not be, the Toxic Tours sound a crucial refrain for those living with decades of oil contamination: that harm, like matters of responsibility for extractive legacies, is deeply relational.

conclusion

Relations of the Aguarico-4 Well

A well near the Aguarico River. Decades ago the site was lush and verdant, a favored hunting spot and salt lick, which oil workers and politicians hurriedly turned into the locus of cosmopolitan industrial activity that opened this book. The Aguarico-4 well has been a figure throughout my research, a place that has shaped my understanding of oil’s living legacies. This waste pit and old well on a forested bluff capture a central contradiction of life with oil extraction in the Amazon: harm wrought by oil is abundant, lying in plain sight, yet efforts to address it have been consistently confounded by narrow understandings of toxicity, responsibility, and evidence. Limited conceptions of the relations that toxicants forge across time and space have made it possible to endlessly question whether oil is connected to profound changes in human health and the environment, and, if it is, to negate responsibility by shifting blame to another company, finding a loophole in a legal decision, or insisting that the harm of the past no longer affects the present. Meanwhile, personal accounts of the effects of this waste pit and so many others accumulate, and the oil still bubbles up from the muck of the stream below. In 2010, when I arrived in the Amazon to conduct preliminary research for this project, a local taxi driver recommended by a friend of mine brought me to the Aguarico-4. Standing on the banks of the pit, I had the chance to contemplate for the first time what crude oil looked like out of place. The moment stuck with me, and it shaped the course of my research. When I began fieldwork the following year, I was on a Toxic Tour when we stopped at the Aguarico-4, and I realized that I had been there before. In a coincidence of the sort that often shapes ethnographic fieldwork, I came to learn that David, the taxi driver, had driven groups on Toxic Tours and had brought me to the site because of what he had learned from Donald. Over the course of 2011 and 2013,

 211

212 conclusio n

I visited the Aguarico-4 dozens of times with Donald and David and returned with David again toward the end of my fieldwork to spend time with people in the communities surrounding the site. The Aguarico-4 is an ordinary site that tells the story of the northeastern region of the Amazon in microcosm: transformed by dual processes of settlement and oil development, this spot on the river was sited for a well initially opened by Texaco and later turned over to PetroEcuador. As recounted in the previous chapter, the well has been part of the extractive boom as well as the transition to reinjection, where toxic waste is shot deep into the earth, once the well was no longer productive enough. Over the years, operating companies built several waste pits on the site. Only one is open today, allowing visitors to glimpse what this place might have been like in the past, when the platform was newly opened and the well still productive. It is here at this routine stop on Donald’s Toxic Tour that many Ecuadorians and foreigners alike have come to understand what the oil industry looks like up close. The site also featured frequently in photographic documentary and artwork, such as in Pablo Cardoso’s 2012 work “Lago Agrio-Sour Lake,” a series of 120 sepia-toned oil and acrylic paintings documenting the journey of one vial of toxic waste from the Amazon back to its geopolitical “origin” in Sour Lake, Texas. Toward the end of 2013, the site pivoted once again to the center of my research when then-president Correa kicked off the La Mano Sucia de Chevron (The Dirty Hand of Chevron) campaign on the banks of the Aguarico-4 waste pit. Using the motif of an oily hand, the Mano Sucia campaign denounced the legacy of contamination from Texaco operations in the Amazon (Fiske 2018). There are many other sites of industrial contamination in this region, including ones with multiple buried waste pits that continue to leach their contents into the surrounding area. But the Aguarico-4 seems to attract a particular kind of fanfare in disputing harm. I was not alone returning to this site to consider its many transformations over the past half-century: it is a place where farmers, activists, tourists, artists, corporate representatives, and the Ecuadorian president have all grappled with questions of responsibility for the toxic legacies of the oil industry, making it an apt place to close this interrogation of harm in the Amazon. One of the reasons why the Aguarico-4 site has orbited so regularly in public negotiations of harm in the region has to do with logistics. The Aguarico-4 is located in relatively close proximity to Lago Agrio and has become part of the origin story of oil here. The uncovered waste pit is easily accessible for visitors to walk to, inspect, smell, and get to know

co nclusio n 213

firsthand on their visits. The site would likely not be as compelling if the waste pit had been covered over, as the majority of older pits have been. Instead, it stands a reminder of how things once were—the flagrancy of extractive industries that, for many people, is now incongruous with expectations of modern environmental management regimes. In a crucial sense, the Aguarico-4 waste pit seems to fulfill the imaginaries of many visitors who have heard about the “Amazon Chernobyl” and seek to witness part of that tragedy with their own eyes. For corporate representatives, the site has served as an important place to build a counternarrative, offering an example of how Chevron has been blamed for messes that were technically the responsibility of the national company, such as the distinction made on the media tour between the spill on the platform and the unremediated waste pit. Such a conception of legal and technical forms of accountability for industrial contamination is at odds with the broader, lived experiences of life alongside extraction, one I have sought to evoke throughout this book by illustrating the relations that overflow narrow understandings of harm from oil production. For me, the site was fascinating because it captured all these encounters—the stories and counterstories, the facts and myths of the industry in the Amazon, the contradictions and reverberations of what oil does to people and places—in one place that is continually reinvented. The Aguarico-4 is a fitting place to close this book, for, like attempts to understand, capture, or “fix” harm, it continues to surprise. Harm, whether found in soil samples; retold in accounts of personal pain and memory; revealed with the help of augers, sticks, or gloves; or measured as discrete forms of “impact” in regulatory interventions, is not one thing but many. Harm is evident, something we can touch, witness, and track over time and space and through lives, memories, and images. But it is often not self-evident in the sense that some might expect. The waste pit of the Aguarico-4 is a place to reckon with these relations and to consider our own connections to the crude that still lies within its banks.

La Mano Sucia Today, you can find the site by its metal sign, made from a piece of pipeline with the soldered letters “AG-4.” With Donald and some acquaintances, we had heard of the Mano Sucia event by word of mouth, and we traveled from Lago Agrio as a small group. Normally, one can enter the access road without any problems, but the morning of September

214 conclusio n

17, 2013, a military checkpoint stood at the entrance. The soldiers questioned our permission to attend the event. We each provided our identification and reasons for attending the campaign launch. They allowed me to proceed along with a foreign environmental activist as members of the “international press,” but they turned away the wife of a Cofán leader in our group with the obtuse pronouncement “no señoras allowed.” If you worked for the state oil company or the government, if you were a male leader of a local community, or if you were a white foreigner equipped to take notes on the event, adelante. Otherwise, no entrance. Bumping down the road onto the platform, we found the Aguarico-4 site transformed. The forested bank between the waste pit and the platform had been cleared and prepared with yellow danger tape. The platform seemed larger than usual with all the people gathered, some seated under a large tent in front of a stage with a screen set up for a live stream. Music wafted in from loudspeakers around the stage. Press vans were parked around the platform’s edge, satellite hookups ready to beam. Many of those present wore the uniforms of oil companies, others the vests and logos of different government ministries. Journalists milled about, trailed by camera crews, interviewing those present. A few minutes later, a caravan of PetroEcuador trucks pulled into the platform, and President Correa emerged in yellow rubber boots and a white guayabera shirt with the rainbow swirl of the “Ecuador loves life” logo on the front pocket. He greeted the onlookers, waving while music played in the background. A large crowd had gathered on the edge of the platform looking toward the pit, awaiting the spectacle. In what followed, environmental officials gave President Correa a tour, submerging a long pole into the pit to demonstrate its depth, and taking him around to the corner where the gooseneck pipe was located. There, they paused to explain the pipe’s function, pointing out that it continued to pollute the surrounding area for years after its construction. Making their way back around toward the cleared area, they stopped on the bank of the waste pit in front of the crowd. Balancing on a felled log suspended on the top of the pit, President Correa turned to address the residents of the region, journalists, and government officials watching from below. Kneeling, he stuck his gloved hand into the crude mess of the waste pit. Mixed with debris, the oil covered the glove. Turning to the waiting audience, he thrust his right hand outright, fingers spread and palm open. “This pit,” he said, “is close to me, to all of our Amazon.” A young man from the region was waiting in the wings to illustrate

co nclusio n  215

the dimensions of the waste pit to Correa and the audience. The man stepped out onto the pit’s surface. With each step, the ground reeled beneath him, rising in black waves that never crested. Decaying crude oil that had been collecting leaves and sticks and other natural matter for decades was at once liquid enough to undulate, yet solid enough to sustain the man’s weight as he lurched across. Pausing just behind the president, the man reached down to punch the fern-covered surface with his bare hand. Extending his hand covered in crude high above his head, he assumed the same forthright posture as Correa. The crowd cheered. Not to be outdone, President Correa took off his crude-covered glove: “Just as the compañero here muddied his hand, I also muddy mine. As our compatriots have muddied theirs for decades.” The delighted crowd whistled and clapped as Correa repeated the same gesture he had just performed, but this time with no barrier—symbolic or synthetic— between his hand and the contents of the pit. Shouts erupted: ¡Bravo, Presidente! Correa held out his crude-covered hand for the cameras: “For what our Amazon has lived through, our communities, throughout decades of exploitation by this company. We are going to use against this arrogance, those millions, those transnationals, ChevronTexaco, the most lethal weapon ever invented: the truth. Here is the truth, fellow citizens. To the whole world, here is the truth of ChevronTexaco.” In baring himself to the public and drawing a connection between his own dirtied hand and fellow Amazonians who have been exposed to pollution, Correa indexed the poisoned bodies of those, human and nonhuman alike, who have lived alongside the oil industry for the past half-century. Correa was outspoken in his critique of the extract-and-dump practices of Texaco in Ecuador and of the unequal burdens of climate change for the Global South. The waste pit event kicked off the Mano Sucia campaign, which employed the dirtied hand motif to enroll supporters in efforts to hold Chevron accountable for decades of environmental damage in the region. Although government officials never officially stated so, it seems likely that their motivation for the campaign was related to the legal disputes between the Ecuadorian state and Chevron then ongoing in the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague. The campaign launch recalled other moments of denunciation that have emerged throughout this book, most notably Donald’s extension of a gloved hand on Toxic Tours, only with considerably more fanfare. Correa, the most powerful figure of Ecuadorian politics at the time, chose to use his own hand, deliberately oiled, to speak to the suffering of the Amazon under oil operations. Despite other moments where

216 conclusio n

claims of harm from oil have been denied or dismissed, here, the dirtied hand retained undeniably demonstrative power in the spectacle of the Mano Sucia campaign. The campaign played on a popular assumption in responses to environmental catastrophe that contamination is self-evident, that those who live next to oil operations can simply point to the water in their well, or that soil samples will convincingly reveal the presence of toxicants. Yet this waste pit, and the widespread contamination it represents, was not new. Many others before Correa had documented the existence of pits like these, photographed their contents, studied the downstream effects, and rallied others to hold Texaco and PetroEcuador accountable or to end oil extraction. His staged act of intentional exposure revealed not only his own compromised relations with oil as a president who was advancing an extractive agenda with PetroEcuador but also his own distance from daily life alongside oil extraction (Fiske 2018). I was struck by the irony of the leader of an extractive state denouncing the history of oil operations by Texaco, as though the operations had not occurred within a consortium with the Ecuadorian state, and as though today’s operations were not a significant environmental threat for which he also bore responsibility. Even in the narrowest of interpretations, the waste pit that he chose to exhibit in his campaign was technically the responsibility of Ecuador, and not Chevron. Correa’s “discovery” of old crude was as much a moment of revelation as it was a moment of occlusion, an attempt to draw clear boundaries between harm from oil production in the past and in the present, between one company’s harm and another’s operations. The Aguarico-4 shows why the project of examining harm relationally is so urgent: the relations of harm are forged not only by deliberate decisions to pollute the soils and rivers of the Amazon over the past half-century, but also by decisions on extraction and remediation made now and in years to come. Dominant modalities for understanding and managing toxic substances—such as the regulatory apparatus mobilized by the Ecuadorian state, or the Aguinda lawsuit that sought to hold Chevron accountable, or scientific studies that exclude lived experience—​obscure the political and economic structures that allow for the continued production of pollution. At the same time, the Aguarico-4’s notoriety points us to the significance of its relations with those who live in the region, and with those who have toured this place with Donald or James Craig. Refiguring harm so that expansive understandings of bodies, territories, scientific practices, extractive histories, and

co nclusio n  217

toxic substances matter is critical for moving beyond damage-centered denunciations of toxicity in the past. Oil from the Aguarico-4 seeps beyond any one company’s operations. The encounters with this site illustrate how colonization and oil development grew together, the ways that past experiences of pollution inform present-day encounters with harm, and the tensions between corporeal, scientific, and regulatory registers of toxicity. Life with oil complicates and confounds binaries between clean and polluted, natural and industrial, past and present. Understanding harm as relational is necessary for rethinking possibilities for life alongside extraction and expanding concepts for better holding polluters accountable for environmental injustice.

Following the Access Roads It was 8:00 a.m. on the Aguarico-4 platform in November 2013. The well was deserted, and the yellow danger tape left over from the Mano Sucia event fluttered from its ties. The platform had been cleaned up for its presidential visit, weeds trimmed, logs moved, and a rope installed around the perimeter of the waste pit. It was clear that there had been more traffic here than usual, with various crude-covered sticks propped up against the buttress roots of the trees on the bank or left beside the path. I had acquired a map of the Aguarico and Shushufindi oil fields from PetroEcuador, the two closest oil fields to the Aguarico-4 wellsite. The oil field lies like a large vertical lake beneath the map, shaded with horizontal lines to indicate its approximate presence beneath the earth. Red access roads connect the black points like small vertebrae, each marking the site of a well, each connecting back to the spine of the main road. This road travels past the Aguarico station, heading south into the Shushufindi oil field. The map is crowded with well numbers, stations, and other reinjection sites. Working with David, we began to trace our own map of relations across these access roads, connected by the seepages of oil above and beneath the ground, working from personal contacts and historical references to understand the experiences of the communities surrounding the Aguarico-4 pit. Whether tales of livestock falling in waste pits, people unable to drink contaminated water, or the fumes of gas flares, many of these accounts echo the voices of others in earlier chapters. Along the way, harm accumulates, solidifying in place, memory, and in this text. Following harm along the access roads away

218 conclusio n

from the Aguarico-4 well illustrates that harm is not just about relations but is also an animating feature of relationships in this place. The access roads are quiet, some paved and branching off from the main road in the middle of town, others made of rough gravel following every rise and fall of the rolling hills. Houses dot the roads, often built directly next to the pipeline. The surrounding hills are a combination of forest and pasture; here and there, standing water indicates a swampy area. Occasionally old booms in a ditch or the flutter of plastic danger tape marks the site of a spill. Billboards remind those passing by of the state’s investment of oil revenues in roadways, among them “¡El petroleo impulsa el buen vivir de tu comunidad!” (oil promotes the good life of your community) and “¡El petroleo construye caminos hacia el desarrollo!” (oil builds roads to development). Each billboard states the specific investment and location, such as “Rehabilitación y Asfalto de la carretera La Primavera–Aguarico III, Shushufinidi-Sucumbios” (reconstruction and paving of the La Primavera–Aguarico III road, Shushufinidi-Sucumbíos), as well as the quantity of money spent ($4,091,300.62) and the government ministries behind the project. Fredy’s son was waiting for us as we pulled up. He darted off to fetch his father. Fredy came as a newborn from Santo Domingo, brought in the arms of his parents. When they arrived in the Amazon, Texaco had not yet opened the Aguarico oil field. Fredy later built this house for his own family as an adult, made out of wood, decorated with posters from the last round of local elections. He had no electricity or running water. Some day he hoped to build a house made from cement, since wooden houses are in constant need of repair in a place of abundant rain. The rumble of the flare from the station blared behind us as we spoke, a low roar over the forest. Here and there a faint strain of bachata arrived with the wind from the next house down the road. As we sat in the shade of his home, he recounted his time living in what had become the Aguarico camp. Like many people here, he could recite the years in which the respective wells near his current home were drilled. Memories of place-making are as natural as they are industrial. The valley behind Fredy’s home was forested when he arrived, later cleared for pasture by his parents and other settlers. If you looked carefully, you could see the wavy line of the road as it wound around the curves in the landscape. He pointed to a spot above his property where one of the pipelines broke about fifteen years prior. The spill leaked down the hillside, contaminating his land and several of his neighbors’ properties. At the time, PetroEcuador paid his father the equivalent of

co nclusio n  219

about $300 for contamination of his property. His neighbors, who lived closer to the spill, received more compensation than his father, including new houses built by the company. The measly amount of money his family received still irked him. He had no desire to leave this place, land that he and his parents had cleared, farmed, and raised families on, but a cement house would have made a big difference. The water that ran past the station was contaminated. He described the two tubes that discharged water, one of which ran into the valley just behind their house. The color of the water varied between red and yellow. As a result, his family fetched water from a spring on the other side of the hill. Fredy recounted the animals he had lost over the years, cows, chickens, dogs, mostly because of contaminated water. Eventually he gave up on raising cattle; either the contaminated water would ruin the grass for grazing or the cows would fall into the waste pits. At the end of our visit, we began to talk about the Mano Sucia campaign. Despite having lived next to the well for most of his life, on that day, Fredy was not allowed to enter the platform. He described the military checkpoint at the top of the access road, and how they turned him and his neighbors away. The irony was palpable: the president arrived in the region to denounce harm under Texaco, and the very people who had suffered directly from the operations of the well on display were not allowed to attend the event. Yolanda, a neighbor who lives a few houses over, has had similar chemical encounters. The swamp that sits below the Aguarico-4 well drains behind Yolanda’s house. The swamp is contaminated, and she was suspicious that the chemicals in the swamp had migrated into her water too. We can’t take the animals to graze there, or to drink the water, or even to wash clothes anymore because when you go in the water you come out covered in a horrible rash. That stream—she indicated the one that drains from the swamp—has iron oxide in it, and no swamp should be giving off iron oxide. I recalled trips with Donald, when he showed me how to look for different chemicals in the water without having test kits or other equipment on hand. Iron oxide, he said, has a rotten smell. It gives the water a rusted hue, often with a light film of brown spots on the top like the color of coffee. Yolanda spoke of the same swamp where James Craig, the spokesperson for Chevron, encouraged me to distinguish between the presence of chemicals and their effects on environment and health so as not to conflate the presence of oil in waterways with other, unsubstantiated health problems in the region. Here, however, there was no

220 conclusio n

distinction between chemicals and effects; their “conflation” was the very connection of lived experiences with toxicants over decades. The confirmation of specific chemicals, or the isolation of their individual effects, is moot when the aggregate effects of the broader industry were plain to see from the front door. Relations do not require a causal relationship between two entities at a specific, documented moment in time. The chemicals present in the swamp and streams here do not have single pathways, with definitive origins and endpoints. These chemicals operate in concert with others, with decisions to pollute in the past, with the vulnerabilities that connect those downstream to their dispersion, enabling them to infiltrate water for cattle or for bathing or washing clothes. Fredy and Yolanda do not know them by their chemical structures. Rather, these chemicals are identifiable by their color, their smell, and most of all, their world-changing properties: how they alter the quality of the grass for grazing, how they make animals sick, how they taste when they mingle with water in wells, how they spark uncertainties when one falls ill. These chemicals are the institutionalized violence of the industry that shapes the very possibilities for life in the region. In the middle of town, you can take the access road past well 2B.1 The road dead-ends at the platform under a lone lamppost, and to the right begins an expanse of African palm. Maribel’s house was on the corner just before the symmetric lines of palm converge. She had arranged two plastic tables outside for the days when she sells lunch. Two men lingered over a soda while David and I visited one afternoon. Maribel was notoriously wary of talking to anyone outside her immediate circle. Originally from Bolivar, she lived in Santo Domingo before marrying and moving with her partner to the Oriente. She arrived here just as Texaco was leaving and PetroEcuador was taking over and had lived near the Aguarico oil field ever since. She recounted her time here in connection to the wells. Early on she lived near the entrance to Aguarico-6. Later she lived for two years by well 19. My first farm was contaminated, so I sold it and moved here to this spot. Then the same thing happened. So, why would I move again, just to continue being contaminated? She finally made her home by well 16. She lamented the long history of pollution in the region—We never should have been contaminated, she said—but now that it has happened, It needs to be cleaned up. Maribel’s account focuses on normalized forms of pollution that characterize life alongside extraction, punctuated by fixed moments of outrage. Stories of mishaps are entangled with the industry. Once,

co nclusio n  221

Maribel was on her way into Shushufindi. She tied her horse up to a tree before she left for town. She was not sure what happened while she was gone—perhaps it was a swarm of wasps, she speculated—but the horse spooked and fell into one of the waste pits. The pit was deep, and the horse’s rope got strung up on a nearby tree. Unable to gain enough traction to pull himself up, the horse was strangled by the rope. Her dog, highly protective of the horse, went in after him. By the time Maribel returned, the horse was already gone. We pulled and pulled but couldn’t do anything to rescue him. Another time, she and her sister were crossing a stream, and her sister fell in. The water appeared clean, but when her sister pulled herself up on the bank, an oily residue covered her previously white pants. Around the corner, two towering gas flares sit at the corner where an access road meets the main road. In the dusty space beneath them, settlers created a soccer field years ago. With flares rumbling overhead and the dirt plot illuminated by their light, families have gathered since the 1980s and 1990s to play at night. Nearby is the home of Álvaro, who arrived in the Amazon at age twenty-eight to assume the post of schoolteacher. Having moved from the mountains, he was unfamiliar with the lowland landscape of oil. “Everything was covered in oil; it stained the shoes, clothes, and we would walk—there were very few cars—we would walk and there would be all these bad smells. Out in the sun your body would burn, and it was, well, a toxic environment.” Initially his supervisor gave Álvaro an assignment on the Napo River, downstream from the developing center of Coca. The contaminated waters draining from upstream operations flowed into the rivers next to his new home. He felt the effects in a matter of months. “Since there weren’t any water wells . . . we’d drink the water from the river. We’d cook with the water from the river. We’d wash with the water directly from the river. And you’d see small particles, or stains of black in the water, surely oil. And so then, after six months of working as a teacher there, I got sick. The same sickness I have today. And as you can see, my body is covered with sores.” Álvaro paused to roll up his sleeves and pant legs to show me the sores on his calves and forearms before continuing to speak. “I have to receive treatment constantly. So I started traveling further downstream to El Eden and then to Quito, Guayaquil, Cuenca, Shell, looking for medication and nobody knew what it was. And even today they tell me they don’t know what it is.” Reaching across the kitchen table, he took a plastic basket containing pill bottles, picking them up and pointing to the

222 conclusio n

names of the medication on the labels. “In the end, what I wish for the most is to have my skin strong again and resistant. My skin is like the skin of a tomato. . . . Any kind of bump, or if I run into something, it breaks open. And the worst is when I get [lesions] on the groin and the face, I get [makes a noise like skin blistering—chup chup chup] and it hurts.” Requesting permission from his employer to move closer to a health center so he could obtain care for his growing medical concerns, Álvaro relocated near the Aguarico-4. Unbeknownst to him, moving closer to roads, electricity, and health clinics in urbanizing areas of the Amazon would not offer respite; instead, it meant moving even closer to oil operations. When he arrived, there were already more than twenty wells in the community. No one had running water in their homes. Relocating may have made it easier to make his medical visits, but it was no escape from the effects of the industry outside his door. Still tormented in his continued search for a cure, Álvaro situated his own poor health in relation to others. As we spoke, he gestured in the direction of his neighbors’ homes. In his story, relations branch outward from his own account, connecting his sores and frustrations to the lives of friends and of those who are gone. “Their daughter died, she was three years old, of cancer. Over here, Don Gonzalez died, where the spills are—three spills. Over here, Don Larrea died, also from cancer. Señora Alvarez with children also died from cancer. That neighbor had two daughters who died from unknown diseases, probably cancer. They didn’t even know what from.” He continued to narrate names of people he had known who had died. Their suffering has become a referential part of his own. Álvaro works as a teacher at the local school and knows all the children in his town. An astute observer, he reflects on the relationships he notices between the proximity of different children’s homes to oil operations and their performance in school: “There are children who are disabled, children who have malformations, children who don’t perform well.” Particular practices, like bathing in the town’s rivers, seem to him to place some children at greater risk of health problems. “Also those who live next to the station. There are spills there. They live right next to the station . . . and the kids have problems learning. Those who don’t live as close, they have fewer problems. Those who live right next to it have more problems. It seems to be from the contamination.” Álvaro’s life history is a relational analysis built from knowing where waste pits and spills lie and how well individual kids can pay attention in class or learn new material. These are relations of proximity, of toxicity, of

co nclusio n 223

collective struggles of making a life in this place, where the experiences of others also inform private experiences of exposure.

Why a Relational Approach Matters Throughout this book, realities that were evident to the people I worked with rarely aligned easily with legal, scientific, or regulatory understandings of what constituted harm. Everyday experiences—including the ways that harm in the past figures in contemporary encounters with pollution—exceeded given ways of tracking, visualizing, or accounting for harm. When the harm writ large that this book has addressed is understood only through dominant explanations of how chemicals act in the world, it is to the exclusion of a host of concerns and ways of living—specifically, of those who live among these chemicals and bear their weight. Refiguring harm as primarily relational is a vital project for addressing the effects of oil extraction and contemplating how to build a different future within a toxic world. Such exclusions have material effects, such as in Fredy’s account and decisions regarding whose property has been sufficiently damaged by an industrial accident to merit compensation. They have emotional effects, such as Álvaro’s continued suffering, or the loss of Emeregildo’s children or Donald’s mother. These are epistemological exclusions, such as in distinctions drawn around what counts as an “impact” in regulatory work or the limited associations that epidemiological studies can draw about the health effects of oil pollution. Dominant explanations of how chemicals act in the world used in science, regulation, and law also effect world-making, ontological exclusions that emerge when the very concerns of those closest to pollution do not “count” within official mechanisms for recognizing and acting on harm. In some cases, the very tools for engaging the problem of contamination from oil and its effects on human health and the environment can also contribute to the continued suffering of those living in the Amazon (see Wylie 2018). Exposures from living alongside industrial operations are exceedingly difficult to prevent and are fundamentally altering what it is to be human, what anthropologist Elizabeth Roberts calls “anthropocentric exposure.” Life in the Amazon is full of experiences of being submerged, surrounded, embedded, and otherwise unwillingly affected by industrial contaminants while going about everyday life (Roberts 2017b, 597). These commonplace, everyday relations with chemicals often fail to muster a critical sense of public urgency. Far from being marginal, these

224 conclusio n

“side effects” of life alongside oil are central to understanding the relations that surround extractivism. Using the example of a doped fish swimming blithely in American streams while sedated on the remainders of excreted pharmaceuticals, anthropologist Joe Masco argues, “It is an effect of the side effect, to put it bluntly, to depoliticize inevitable forms of violence by marking them as either unwanted or unforeseen” (Masco 2013). In attending to harm relationally, I have centered forms of harm that escape dominant modalities of accounting and responding but form key elements of lived experience alongside industry in the Amazon, both now and in the past. One of the principal concerns I have raised surrounding the continued mobilization of narrow, technocratic concepts of harm is that they are damage focused and therefore result in inadequate understandings of responsibility for toxic contamination. Concepts that rely on circumscribed notions of time, place, and effect are insufficient to account for or act upon the scope of harm that has occurred across a region and over generations. This is evident in the labor of cleaning up a spill, in regulatory “prior audits,” or in moments on the media tour where Chevron officials drew distinctions between the spill on the platform of the Aguarico-4 and the waste pit itself. In each case, boundaries were erected—whether synthetic separations of the contents of a waste pit from the surrounding soil or jurisdictional distinctions between inspectors and operators—to shore up arguments about why companies had effectively contained contamination, or why one company was not accountable simply because others had polluted as well. Such boundary-​making efforts also served to justify different endeavors— such as the Ecuadorian State’s continuation of extraction or Chevron’s refusal to pay reparations—because the noxious effects of industry were seemingly confined to specific times and places. The work of circumscribing harm in time, place, and effect is indeed necessary for dominant forms of Western science, law, or environmental control to work. Yet the relations of the everyday, unbounded effects of oil development continually confound even the most well-intentioned regulatory efforts to define, contain, and prevent harm within an extractive state. The resulting tensions between harm within specific technoscientific, legal, or regulatory conceptions and the everyday encounters of those who live alongside industry illustrate the centrality of contingencies involved in making sense of extraction’s effects on life. When scientists, regulators, and researchers do not bring such contingencies to the fore, it can appear that “impacts” are a natural way of

co nclusio n  225

understanding what oil does to environments, or that concerns that exceed causal relationships between specific chemicals and their effects do not matter. Specific knowledge practices render toxic exposures differently. As demonstrated in the debate between leading epidemiologists working in the region and scientists working with Chevron, science is always a value-laden, social activity, informed by particular knowledge traditions. It is not possible to study the effects of toxic exposure without also methodologically incorporating histories of inequality and vulnerability and the political economy of pollution. In other words, as the epidemiologists Anna-Karin Hurtig and Miguel San Sebastián note, it is always necessary to ask “where the exposures came from, why they have been produced and who benefited from them” (Hurtig and San Sebastián 2005, 1172). A relational approach to toxic exposures insists that harm is about much more than errant chemicals mistakenly meeting bodies. It is about giving voice to lived experiences of harm and loss in the face of environmental contamination that historically have not “counted” because they do not align with established methodologies associated with particular kinds of political and economic power to pollute (Fortun 2001; Petryna 2002). To this end, treating harm relationally also means looking beyond the immediate effects of extractive violence to ensure that public scrutiny remains on those who pollute and not on the bodies, lives, and choices of those bearing pollution’s burdens (Tuck and Yang 2014; Tuck 2009). At the core of this book have been accounts of the vulnerabilities and (in)visibilities produced by toxic exposures. Like Yolanda’s rashes after bathing in water draining from the contaminated swamp, or Maribel’s horse who fell into the waste pit, experiences with the toxicants used and produced in oil extraction exceed any model of “normal” exposure from oil operations. These vulnerabilities in the face of chemicals illustrate why a politics of avoiding potential exposures is untenable and obscures the social, material, and historical conditions that leave some disproportionately exposed to toxic substances and without other means to protect themselves. An insistence on chemical universality in science or in regulation assumes that toxicants in a place like the Amazon can be effectively avoided, and flattens critical differences between exposures, thus obscuring more than it reveals when making sense of harm. Instead, building from the idea that toxic exposures involve corporeal penetrations and environmental diffusions that can never be fully accounted for (Alaimo 2016), theories of exposure grounded in vulnerabilities, histor-

226 conclusio n

ical inequalities, and knowledge practices situated in specific places can make partial manifestations of toxicity actionable. In this vein, throughout this book I have sought to speak to the importance of the vernacular within scientific understandings of toxicity. Harm from oil is an animating feature of relations. These relations are not the same for each of us; they depend on our relative positions and imply specific forms of obligation to one another (Liboiron 2021, 120). By extension, it is essential to understand harm as place-based within specific settler colonialist infrastructures—even when rooted in the activities of global corporations like Chevron and other oil companies. Keeping attention on complexity requires attuning to particular histories and experiences not only on the level of individual exposures but also on systemic, patterned forms of extractive inequality that are nonetheless rooted in sociohistorical contexts. Addressing extractive violence remains key to understanding what toxic chemicals are and do (Shadaan and Murphy 2020). For me, writing this book has been a chance to reflect on my commitments and obligations to those woven into this story and on the oil that enables and constrains my life and to acknowledge how, where, and why I draw boundaries in my research and in my daily life. Thinking about harm relationally is productive not just because relations reveal how harm is produced, but because the toxicants and their travels forge connections between harm and each of us. While we are all in relation with oil to some degree, those who profit from it the most bear significant responsibility for the harm it produces. Harm demands both ethical consideration and practical intervention (Shapiro 2015, 369). Looking at the relations between charred ants and a flare, or between an oil skim on water and human health, entails a critical engagement beyond what is merely useful or politically possible in the present. It requires centering life beyond extraction and within the relations, responsibilities, and values that exceed those captured in scientific studies, environmental assessments, or lawsuits (Hoover 2017; McGregor 2018; Fiske 2017b). While we are each accountable for building the conditions for flourishing within sites of extraction and beyond, we are not responsible in the same ways (Haraway 2016, 29). Attending to the relationality of harm does not give clear answers on where harm begins or ends or resolve contentious issues, such as how harm can be compensated for, but it does illustrate how failing to draw out the relations of harm can have the perverse effect of obscuring the wide-ranging, aggregate effects of extractive violence. Taking a rela-

co nclusio n  227

tional approach allows space for disputes over the specifics of individual accounts—of how far a spill leached, or whether a cacao tree failed to yield fruit due to contamination, or whether specific health problems came from pollution in the rivers or air—without discounting that harm has occurred. This differs from dominant approaches that some corporate actors, politicians, and scientists have used in this part of the Amazon, where scientific disagreement over the relationships between oil and health, or legal disputes over the representativity of soil samples, have been mobilized to try and undermine the idea that harm has occurred at all (or that if it has, that it is due to reasons other than oil). It is my hope that by probing the boundaries of harm, it is possible to build tools better equipped to address the expansive, cumulative, slow violence of extraction made evident in this book. I have followed the story of this forested hill over the Aguarico River: from its opening as a renowned salt lick and hunting spot, through its remaking as an oil well to its starring role in Toxic Tours, disputes in the Aguinda lawsuit, and subsequent Mano Sucia campaign, and finally to the well’s reverberations in the lives of people like Fredy, Maribel, Yolanda, Álvaro, and their families. In various interventions—whether through historical reconstruction of this place, legal and jurisdictional distinctions, or acts of public “discovery”—harm is not the same thing. Harm accumulates like the sediments on the Aguarico-4 waste pit, at times steady enough to walk on, at other times fragile enough to give way. Thinking deliberately about the harm that results from extraction not only helps complicate understandings of what oil does to people and places but also points to multiple registers of potential action to affirm and address that harm looking forward.

epilogue

una masa dura

Luisa knew why the group from the Toxic Tour had arrived. She was a schoolteacher in a small community that has grown alongside oil activity since the 1970s. Along the dirt road the tour group took to reach her house there were multiple well platforms off to each side, tucked between houses and farms. Her neighbors had already shown the group from the Toxic Tour around, with extensive discussion over which pits were dug where and the order of surrounding spills. Instructing the group to sit around a large wooden table, Luisa called for her daughter, who had been studying in another room, to join her. Sitting together, Luisa spoke while her teenage daughter leaned her head on her shoulder. Luisa’s head inclined in response. She described how she came to realize that there was a problem with the water sources near their home years ago: When the kids were younger, they would get a white fungus on them after they went in the rivers. She tells the group how, when she realized this, she began to boil the water they used at home and sought medical treatment for the fungus. Once, while visiting grandparents in Guayaquil on the Pacific coast, Luisa’s daughter became ill with intense abdominal pain and vomiting. Luisa took her to a clinic, where the doctor found a malignant tumor— una masa dura—of eleven centimeters located on the girl’s left ovary. Luisa’s daughter stared ahead at the table as her mother told the story of her diagnosis. Telling the group to wait, Luisa left the room. Returning a few minutes later, she held a stack of paper in a tattered folder. She spilled documents across the table in front of us. There was documentation of various medical visits, specialist trips, expenses, pharmacy bills, and bus tickets. Wisps of paper slipped off the table onto the ground. It is a long journey from Luisa’s home to the coast, a twelve-hour trip overnight on a bus that winds its way over the Andes and back down.

 229

230 epilogu e

Shuffling through the stacks of papers as though in search of something in particular, she continued to speak: I went to the doctor and asked for a detailed sheet of paper explaining what she had. Then the doctor asked where the girl lived, since they were only visiting Guayaquil at the time the cancer was discovered. El Oriente, Luisa recalls responding. The doctor sighed. Oh, well, this is because of the oil contamination. Since the discovery of the cancer, her daughter has undergone multiple rounds of chemotherapy and was being followed regularly by doctors in Guayaquil. Luisa was concerned about the quality of care available locally, and so they continued to make the long trip to the coast for follow-up. The group sat with the weight of her story. The paper slips, medical reports, and receipts were strewn across the table. Itineraries of long nights traveling in search of treatment surrounded us, each relating moments of care within the terrifying panorama of pursuing treatment for a seriously ill child. After decades of disastrous consequences from extractive industries in this region, is it necessary to see documentation of every trip that Luisa and her daughter have made to the doctor to believe the veracity of her account of caring for a sick child alongside active oil operations? Must the waste pit still lie in the open to know that it exists? Need the wounds still fester on the skin for others to be convinced of their deadly consequences? Must we have incontrovertible scientific studies linking every possible bodily insult with a specific time and place to know that oil operations cause extensive harm to human health and the environment, and to act on that knowledge to proactively protect people’s health? Instead of querying every detail of the accounts of those who have suffered, might the better question be why it is necessary to constantly “discover” companies in the proverbial act of midnight dumping to conclude that harm has occurred? Need toxicity be so readily, visually, obviously recognizable for one to be convinced of its power? The irony, of course, is that repeated, flagrant acts of “pollution by design” (Donziger 2010) occurred throughout this region during the years of Texaco, PetroEcuador, and subsequent operators. These histories are recounted in this book and by the people living in the region, as well as in images, written accounts, and legal documentation: dirt roads covered in oil waste to keep the dust down, the routine burning of oil waste pits, the construction of waste pits without impermeable liners to enclose their contents, the intentional use of subpar operational practices to increase profit. The state-sponsored, precarious settlement of colonist communities in Indigenous territories and alongside growing oil oper-

e pi logu e  231

ations, and an utter lack of industrial regulation and adequate health services in the first decades of operations, all subsequently compounded emerging inequalities in health, wealth, and education in the region. Still, it seems, there is a desire for documentation of the momentary crisis of toxicity—the wellhead gushing crude, the oil slick on the river suffocating birds, the injured body—to confirm the present planetary predicament of extractive industries. I was deeply uncomfortable with the idea that Luisa or others I met while completing research for this book might feel that their accounts needed additional corroboration. Yet time and again, as in the media tour with Chevron representatives or in offhand comments by environmental officials, individual stories of bodily harm or personal loss were met with the expectation of meticulous recordkeeping, documentation bordering on the impossible. Responding to the indeterminacies inherent in lived experiences of toxicity with endless interrogation of their veracity is to reenact the violence of extraction under the guise of positivism. Nonetheless, this remains an undeniable component of claiming harm in a place that is so profoundly polluted, where the histories of oil operations are so deeply contested. The great ruse of oil companies has been the continued interrogation of individual accounts of harm while obscuring the undeniable, structural injustice of toxic contamination that enables their profit.

Notes Introduction: ENCOUNTERING HARM 1. In Ecuador, the Consejo de Desarrollo de las Nacionalidades y Pueblos del Ecuador (Council for the Development of the Nationalities and Peoples of Ecuador, CODENPE) recognizes fourteen nationalities and eighteen indigenous peoples. The principal Indigenous groups that live in Sucumbíos and Orellana all define themselves as nationalities (Cofán, Waorani, Siekopai, Siona, Shuar, and Kichwa), and that is the term I use throughout this book. 2. I distinguish between Texaco’s actions before the merger in 2001 and those of Chevron thereafter. 3. In her work with the Akwesasne Indigenous community in New York State, Hoover describes the significance of the terms used for industrial pollution. Scientists called PCBs “contaminants” and Akwesasne community members called them “poisons,” illustrating “the divergence in thinking between researchers educated in toxicology and members of a community that has felt under threat by outside forces for centuries” (Hoover 2017, 124). 4. Social science scholarship has been critical in capturing the specific struggles and the lived experiences of extractive violence around the world (Li 2015; Wylie 2018; Rogers 2015; Arce 2014; Appel 2012; Appel, Mason, and Watts 2015; Bebbington and Bury 2014; Bebbington and Bebbington 2010; Lu, Valdivia, and Silva 2017; Zalik 2004; Reed 2009; Davidov 2013; Auyero and Swistun 2009; Armiero 2017; Watts 2005a, 2005b). Oil is not only about hopes of wealth, modernity, and development but also about place-specific encounters with a multiplicity of social, political, ecological, and embodied changes that are linked both to the transformation of crude as a material substance and the revenue gained from it. In Ecuador, scholars have documented the multiple and intersecting cultural, ecological, health, and political effects of oil both in relation to the Aguinda lawsuit and more broadly (Beristain, Páez Rovira, and Fernández 2009; Cielo and Coba 2018; Cielo, Coba, and Vallejo 2016; I. Vallejo, Cielo, and García 2019; Solíz Torres, Cepeda Vélez, and Maldonado Campos 2019; Cepek 2016, 2018; Sawyer 2004, 2008, 2015). 5. The argument that oil is both life-sustaining and life-threatening has been made by others in a variety of ways, e.g., “American Petro-topia” (Altman 2015). 6. Max Liboiron’s writing and thinking on relations and obligations through plastics has helped me to clarify why I believe that relationality matters. In particular, Pollution Is Colonialism (2021) has greatly shaped my revision of this book. 7. In making this claim I am drawing on earlier work by scholars such as Michelle Murphy (2008), as well as more recent work examining the effects of specific chemicals and industries. The evidence for the growing transformation of life is extensive, from the proliferation of toxic compounds in our soil (Lyons 2016), water (Davis 2003), air (J. L. Harrison 2011), bodies (Lundqvist et al. 2006; Wahlberg 2018) and future generations, to the flame retardants sprayed on baby mattresses and couches (Miller n.d.; Liboiron 2016b), the formaldehyde-derived adhesives in the flooring, walls, and carpentry of the average American home (Shapiro 2015), the plastic particles found

 233

234  notes to pages 1 2–15 in most tap water worldwide (Carrington 2017), or the routine, authorized use of chemical agents and violence against protesters such as at Standing Rock (Estes 2019). 8. When oil is extracted from the ground, it is part of a hybrid mixture of crude oil, gas, and water that exists as a slurry in underground pockets. The water that is part of this underground solution is referred to as “formation waters”; it varies in composition by location and is characterized by high salinity, the presence of hydrocarbons, and naturally occurring radioactive material. In order to coax this naturally occurring slurry out of the underground depths and separate it into crude that can then be sent to refineries, as well as byproducts such as gas, various chemical compounds are added in the drilling process. These can include radioactive materials and other chemical cocktails that are added to the muds to make them more viscous and more stable and to reduce fluid loss, resulting in what are known as “production waters” (Borchardt 1989). During my research, residents recounted that routine practices of extraction under Texaco and state companies included dumping the production waters, drilling muds, crude oil, added chemicals, and other forms of industrial trash into nearby waste pits created alongside the wells. Over the years, the chemicals from this mélange flooded their banks, were intentionally lit on fire, or slowly seeped through the unlined walls of the pits. Thus, when residents encounter contamination from oil in their streams, farms, homes, and places they traverse throughout the day, this contamination exceeds the natural origins of hydrocarbons: it is most often in the form of mixtures of toxicants that are made possible only through the political-economic and ideological structures that have enabled and encouraged oil extraction in the Amazon since the early 1960s. 9. Liboiron uses the term “dominant science” to highlight the centrality of power within the workings of what is usually referred to as just “science” and to mark a distinction from “Western science.” Western science often overlaps with dominant science but is not necessarily the same. For more see Pollution Is Colonialism, 20n77. 10. It is important to point out that there are many commonalities among the relations of harm wrought by extractive industries across the world. This book is in conversation with anthropological and social science scholarship on oil extraction, particularly that which is located in and emerging from Latin America (Coronil 1997; Breglia 2013; Bebbington and Bury 2014) and Ecuador in particular (Acosta 2009,; 2011; Larrea 2009; Larrea and Warnars 2009; Vallejo et al. 2015; Bustamante 2007; Fontaine 2007; Cepek 2018; Sawyer 2004). 11. This text is written in response to my observations of how dominant ways of under­ standing harm fail to capture the lived experiences of those living in areas of extraction. Dominant ways of approaching extraction, whether in science, law, or regulation, are based on settler institutions and ideas of how the world is organized. Scholarship on relations and concepts of relationality by Max Liboiron, Michelle Murphy, Elizabeth Hoover, and Kristina Lyons, among others, was particularly helpful for thinking about how to push against narrow, technocratic understandings of harm. A lot of science and technology studies, as well as decolonial and anthropological scholarship, on relations draws from paradigms inspired by Indigenous scholars, theories, and experiences of the world. As a settler scholar from the United States working in Ecuador, I have found this scholarship to be helpful in challenging my own interpretation of broader settler rationalities for making sense of harm. However, I recognize that there is a tension in applying scholarship grown out of life experiences in other parts of the world to the problematics of oil in the Amazon, and I have tried to do so with care and without assuming that concepts of relations will be the same. Scholarship on

notes to pages 17 – 2 5   235 relations and relationality has been vital for me in thinking about how harm might be approached otherwise and why this matters; my hope is that this book can contribute to this liter­ature in pushing for new ways forward within a toxic world. 12. In addition to studies tracking the health effects of oil in this region, specific threads of anthropological scholarship in the Ecuadorian Amazon deserve further mention. During fieldwork, I met Mike Cepek, who has worked for decades with the Cofán nationality (Cepek 2008, 2012b, 2016). At the time, he was conducting research for Life in Oil (2018) in Cofán Dureno, about a half-hour away from where I was living, in Lago Agrio. Cepek has since become an important interlocutor for me in this research. His work illustrates through long-term ethnography the enigmatic relationships between oil and the ways it has infiltrated the air, water, soil, food, bodies, and community negotiations, forming a “slow, confusing, and ultimately unknowable violence,” (Cepek 2018, 10). Other notable scholarship on oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon includes Sawyer’s landmark ethnography, situated farther south in Pastaza in the 1990s. Crude Chronicles (Sawyer 2004) traces the emergence of the Indigenous movement’s demands in relation to the government’s push toward neoliberalism. Sawyer’s work shows how oil is never only about natural resource extraction but rather speaks both to local, national, and transnational struggles over social injustice and to the violence of demands for “democratic governance” by oil companies. Particularly relevant for this text is Sawyer’s more recent work on the Aguinda lawsuit (Sawyer 2002, 2008) and subsequent work on the chemical toxicity of crude (Sawyer 2015). She illustrates how the sentence issued in the Aguinda lawsuit found Chevron guilty despite ongoing indeterminacy about the toxicity of oil (Sawyer 2015). 13. The official name of the city, Nueva Loja, was chosen by the group of settlers who came to the city from Loja in the southern highlands. Today it is most commonly referred to as Lago Agrio. 14. Clearwater has since grown considerably and is now a collaboration between Clearwater, the Ceibo Alliance, and Amazon Frontlines. Their work providing clean drinking water for Cofán, Siona, Siekopai, and Waorani families can be seen at https://www .amazonfrontlines.org/. 15. There is a related vein of anthropological scholarship that has dealt specifically with corporations as polluters, the dynamics of foreign capital on the ground, and the politics of corporate social responsibility, which is useful for thinking about the history of Texaco in Ecuador and present-day dynamics of companies like Chevron in disputing the Aguinda lawsuit (Welker 2014; Gardner 2012; Dietrich 2013; Little 2014; Appel 2019; Sawyer 2002). 16. This was presumably part of the strategy of the Chevron legal team: to wear down the plaintiffs through the sheer length of the lawsuit. As a Chevron representative once said, “We will fight the lawsuit until hell freezes over” (Potter 2014). An oil company has far more resources—human and monetary—to dedicate to a legal battle stretching over decades than the plaintiffs. The same struggle puts significant economic and emotional strain on local communities, legal teams, and activists. 17. An ongoing defense used by Chevron has been that Ecuador needs to be held responsible for pollution that resulted from state oil company operations, and therefore the Aguinda lawsuit is unfair because it charges Chevron with the wrongs of another company. Thus, many of the disputes in the case have hinged on demonstrating that harm occurred under Texaco operations and not due to the operations of other companies,

236  notes to pages 25 –39 a complicated matter in a place where operations have changed hands many times. As a result, statements that both parties need to be held accountable and that the wrongs of one do not dismiss the wrongs of the other are politically significant in this context. 18. While the mechanisms by which harm has occurred are disputed, the fact that harm has occurred as a result of oil development is evident. However, ongoing legal disputes, confusing questions of legal jurisdiction, and retrospective analysis of liability have had the effect of reducing matters of environmental injustice to debates over technicalities. One of the incredibly unfortunate effects of various legal arbitrations in the Amazon has been that broader matters of lives lost and damaged, of how and why oil companies were allowed to operate with impunity in the Amazon or of the continued and ongoing harm resulting from past and present operations, have been eclipsed by the details of what is legally demonstrable. When the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) lawsuit brought by Chevron against plaintiff lawyer Steven Donziger was ongoing, a witness recounted his experience to me after returning from the United States in 2013. He noted his profound sense of disillusion in the process. He reported that he had been prohibited from discussing the contamination that exists in the Ecuadorian Amazon during his testimony, since the case was dealing only with the questions of fraud and racketeering in relation to the Aguinda proceedings. These are distinctions that may be drawn in a court of law that cannot be drawn in everyday life. There is tremendous injustice in proceedings that ask about the process of achieving a legal ruling while erasing the subject of that process altogether. The same is true for oil companies that choose to invest millions in fighting legal cases rather than settling to clean up the communities that have been harmed.

Chapter 1: Building a Life on the Aguarico 1. To offer just one example of this, Sara Wylie has shown how dominant Western science has been employed in the context of the natural gas industry to make personal encounters with extractive violence illegible in official forums (Wylie 2018). 2. This chapter is informed by a rich body of anthropological and scholarly work on life in the Amazon. For further reading on the lives, struggles, and survival of Indigenous nationalities in the face of expropriation of land, forced labor, relocation, civilization projects, and political organizing over the last century, see Cepek (2008, 2012a, 2012b), Rival (2002), Cabodevilla (1994, 1996), Davis and Yost (1983), Kimerling (1990, 1996, 2006a, 2006b), Whitten (1976, 1985), Whitten and Whitten (2007), Muratorio (1991, 1998, 2008), Uzendoski (2004, 2005), and Hames and Vickers (1983). 3. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that industry insiders often know that the contamination their industry produces causes health problems long before it is publicly acknowledged or before industrial practices are changed—whether in relation to oil, air pollution (Davis 2003), the tobacco industry, or debates over climate change (Oreskes and Conway 2011). 4. In her work with the Akwesasne Mohawk community on the border of New York and Ontario, which has suffered environmental contamination from PCBs and other chemicals from multiple industrial sites over decades, Elizabeth Hoover shows how environmental health research often makes unhelpful suggestions to affected communities, such as telling pregnant or nursing women not to eat fish (Hoover 2017). 5. For an account of the complexity of Cofán experiences with the arrival of oil and subsequent decades of life alongside the industry, see Cepek (2018).

notes to pages 40 – 7 6   237 6. I refer to Texaco throughout this account because Texaco drilled the Aguarico-4 well. However, it is important to keep in mind that all of the extraction that occurred during this time was within the context of the joint venture with the Ecuadorian State; the same practices would have taken place at other wells drilled by Texaco and CEPE. 7. At the government’s request, the Texaco-Gulf Company built roadways, bridges, and the Lago Agrio airport in order to facilitate colonization in addition to oil exploration, so-called dual purpose infrastructure (Wasserstrom and Southgate 2013, 35). 8. Responding to intense land crowding in the Sierra and a drought in the Loja province of the southern highlands in the 1960s, government officials created a plan for agrarian reform. Officials mistakenly suspected that the abundant jungle flora hid rich agricultural soils. Potential areas for colonization were identified by leaders in Quito, the majority of which were in the Amazon basin and had no road access (Wasserstrom and Southgate 2013). At the same time, Ecuador was on the brink of becoming an oil-producing nation. Politicians imagined that oil—through the infrastructure and revenue it would bring—would be a means of facilitating colonization of unconquered border territory. 9. Auca is a Kichwa word for outsider or enemy, used to designate someone who was not from one’s own group, that has since been adopted into usage also in Ecuadorian Spanish. Auca became an important category during the colonial period to denote a contrast between “wild” Indigenous people (aucas) and “tame” Indigenous people (mansos) on the basis of their participation in Christian missions and evangelical processes (High 2009). In twentieth-century usage in Ecuadorian Spanish, auca has come to stand for the archetypical savage. When used in this account by a mestizo colonist, it is used to evoke the racialized savagery of Amazonian Indians who the speaker feared were dangerous. 10. Given the timing, this is likely the same group of settlers that Gonzalo describes meeting on the Aguarico, although I was unable to confirm this in oral interviews because many of the original settlers are now deceased. 11. For further resources on the history of settlement and colonization of the Amazon, see Wasserstrom and Southgate (2013), Little (2001), Whitaker and Colyer (1990), and Hiraoka and Yamamoto (1980). 12. Tigers do not live in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The term here refers to the jaguar. 13. The Ecuadorian currency at the time was the sucre. 14. Johanna Espín provides detailed investigations into questions of violence, security, and governance on the border between Ecuador and Colombia (Espín 2009, 2011). 15. The Cabrera report was subsequently dismissed from the Aguinda proceedings because of allegations of corruption and inappropriate collaboration between Cabrera and the plaintiffs. It did not figure in the final ruling.

Chapter 2: Evidence 1. A ratio of 4:1 is low, with other fields in the Amazon producing closer to 1:10, or one barrel of oil for every ten barrels of production waters. The ability to count oil produced with such precision (1,223,284 barrels) contrasts with the fuzzy estimate of waste water (300,000 barrels). Given that companies routinely dumped production waters into waste pits or drained them directly into surrounding streams, there are obvious disincentives to reporting exact quantities of discharge. 2. The estimated population of the Oriente was 25,582 in 1962. By 1992, the estimated

238  notes to pages 7 6 –8 3 population had jumped to 371,110. For more on processes of deforestation, agrarian reform, and oil development, see Wasserstrom and Southgate (2013). 3. The Napo Concession is the parcel of land granted to the consortium by the Ecuadorian state at the beginning of operations. The exact dimensions of the concession were adjusted several times throughout the twenty years of Texaco operations. 4. The OPEC model sought to promote national sovereignty through extraction of natural resources. “Risk-Service Contracts” stipulated that the foreign company be paid back for all expenses associated with development and exploratory drilling during the first five years. Over a period of ten years, expenses associated with constructing infrastructure (generally much greater than the costs of exploration) would also be paid back. Throughout this time the state company would receive a percentage of the revenues, which would grow until reaching a predetermined revenue split. In most cases this meant a 65–35 split, with the state company receiving 65 percent and the foreign company 35 percent. The oil company would then be responsible for paying taxes and royalties. However, in Ecuador the split was closer to 85–15. The contract that Texaco had with the Ecuadorian state was standard for OPEC countries at the time, with the company receiving a 12–15 percent rate of return on investment. Stipulations in the contract required hiring and training national professionals, in a plan in which operations would switch to the state after eighteen years and the minority partner would leave completely after twenty years. Many thanks to Robert Wasserstrom for his help in understanding the specifics of the OPEC model in Ecuador. 5. It was common for officials to hold positions in both state and foreign companies, as well as to have ties in the industry and in remediation companies. These arrangements have raised many concerns about the independence of regulatory, remediation, and operating bodies as well as about collusion between state and foreign company officials. 6. The case later proceeded to the highest level of review in the National Court of Justice in Quito. In this final appeal, the doubling of the Sentence was eliminated. 7. The class of plaintiffs was defined in the original 1993 complaint: “all individuals who at any time from 1972 to the present reside in the region of Ecuador comprised by the area bounded on the North by Colombia, on the South by the Parallel at 1.5 degrees south of the Equator, on the West by the Meridian located at 77.5 degrees West of Greenwich England and on the East by the 76th Meridian west of Greenwich England.” 8. Texaco denied parent company control over Texaco Petroleum Company (Texpet) operations, arguing that Texpet was a fourth-tier subsidiary and therefore constituted an “indirect investment” on the part of Texaco in Ecuador, despite being wholly owned by the company (Kimerling 2006a, 485). 9. Images capturing this day can be found in Crude Reflections (2008) by Lou Dematteis and Kayana Szymczak. 10. Lady Justice is traditionally depicted with a blindfold in order to represent her objectivity. I find the lack of blindfold significant because it underscores the situatedness of all truth claims. Legal systems, like science, are a way to make particular meanings and facts mobile, but they are also reductionist when used to assert dominance over all other accounts of the world. The key to the Lady Justice’s truth in the Lago Agrio courtroom is rooted in her partial gaze from her position in the Amazon. 11. Because Ecuador did have some environmental regulations in the 1970s and 1980s, however insufficient, Zambrano declared that it was generally considered “prohibited to discharge solid or liquid gas residues into the air, soil, and water without prior treatment to make them harmless for health” (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 96).

notes to pages 8 3 – 10 7   239 12. PetroEcuador, the national oil company, merged in 2012 with Petroamazonas, the state exploration and production company. Subsequently, in 2013, Petroamazonas took ownership of Operaciones Rio Napo, a joint venture formed between PetroEcuador and Petróleos de Venezuela (the national oil company of Venezuela). Together these companies conducted the vast majority of oil production in Ecuador at the time of research for this text, around 80 percent (US Energy Information Administration 2017). 13. Total petroleum hydrocarbons is itself a contested measure. It is an indicator of the presence of hydrocarbons, broadly speaking, in a sample. The methods for measuring TPH were also disputed, since the plaintiff and the defendant used different laboratory methods to arrive at their results. The accuracy of each method depends on the degree of contamination present in the sample; some methods are better suited for detecting smaller amounts of TPH, and others are better for registering higher amounts. 14. By “contingencies,” I mean that knowledge is produced through relations with other human and nonhuman actors (which can fail or surprise in a variety of ways) that form social-material engagements and give the world specific material form (Barad 2007, 91). Attention to contingencies—to relationships, technicalities, and unknowns—​ emphasizes the positionality, coordination, and fragility of such engagements with evidence. Contingencies are important, because they show us that the things we assume to be given might easily have been otherwise. In this case, contingencies help illustrate the consequences of divorcing sampling techniques, facts, or sites of contamination from the broader relations of harm in this region. 15. As seen in the exchanges between the lawyers, there were many disagreements over sampling procedures. Lawyers for the plaintiffs and the defendant also disputed the laboratory methods used to detect or measure chemicals, the accreditation of the laboratories used, and the use of impartial expert testimony. On top of this, there were allegations of fraud and tampering with evidence. Contamination was a challenge to prove. These difficulties do not mean that contamination is not present; however, they do illustrate a point that those involved in the empirical study of scientific practice have long argued: there is no direct access to nature (Latour 2004). Technologies of measurement are always partial, particular, and constituted through prior knowledge and position (Haraway 1988; Barad 2007). 16. Since Texaco had not turned over records concerning the precise number of pits it had constructed or their dimensions, the court calculated an average of 60 x 40 x 2.4 meters for each pit, with five additional meters beyond the original boundary for possible spills and leaks (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 125). 17. The standard of the “average good” oil company raises many questions, not least of which is whether the “average” behavior of an oil company should be the standard against which egregious environmental contamination is subsequently judged. What “good” means in this context is not interrogated. 18. Some chemicals, such as benzene, are harmful at levels far below the detection of the human nose. Others, such as ethylbenzene, can be smelled at levels that generally are not considered toxic to human health (Solomon 2010).

Chapter 3: Bounding Harm 1. The EIA, first established in 1969 as part of the US National Environmental Policy Act, had become a “global tool of accountability” required in all World Bank projects by the 1990s (Li 2009; Sadler 1996). The EIA has since become the most common form

240  notes to pages 1 1 1 –1 4 4

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

of environmental assessment, now employed in more than 170 countries (Morgan 2012, 6; Hochstetler 2011). This example of “vienen conversando” is a common idiomatic conjugation in Ecuador. This conjugation is also used with verbs such as ir or quedar to indicate that two activities are happening at the same time. According to sociologist Kati Alvárez, this grammatical form was borrowed from Kichwa into Spanish. I was told that the name Tarapoa is a composite of the Siona words tara (stick) and puya (river). The “Company Man” is an official title in oil company management, used to indicate an individual responsible for making sure that operations were running according to plan. In my fieldwork, residents and oil workers alike used the term “Company Man” when speaking in Spanish. Prior consultation, or consulta previa, as defined in Article 9 of Regulation 1215 (and in ILO Convention 169), requires that before the execution of plans for oil development the oil company must adequately inform communities that are within the direct area of influence of the project. The requirement for prior, free, and informed consultation, however, is not the same as prior consent (the binding approval of the community as a prerequisite for extractive projects to move forward). In 2007–2008, the discussions held by the Natural Resources and Biodiversity Committee as part of the drafting of the 2008 Constitution debated the meaning of the right to prior consultation, proceedings that are analyzed by Riofrancos (2020, Chapter 3). According to the parameters established in Annex 1 of Regulation 1215, maximal limits for noise pollution depend on the length of time that the noise will be emitted. Operations that emit 80 decibels (dB) are permitted for sixteen hours per day, whereas operations that emit 115 dB are permitted for 7.5 minutes per day. For context, 80 dB is comparable to busy street traffic, whereas 115–120 dB is as loud as a chainsaw or sirens. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, damage to hearing is possible after two hours of sustained exposure to 80dB and after only two minutes of sustained exposure to 110dB (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022). Most environmental regulation has been concerned not with the complete absence of contaminants but rather with limiting them to “non-harmful” levels. However, increasingly researchers have challenged the premise of dose-response methods employed in risk assessment, illustrating the negative health effects of even low-level toxic exposures of substances such as radon, lead, airborne particles, asbestos, and benzene (Lanphear 2017; Raffles 2010). On similar occasions while visiting spills or waste pits, residents would throw rocks onto the surface in order to illustrate how thick the oil was. Sometimes small to midsized rocks would initially sit on the top of the crude before slowly sinking. This is not just a theoretical argument, but one that has been documented within conservation literature and is referred to as “shifting baseline syndrome.” When the reference points for how change is measured continually shift, the risk is that the evaluation of environmental degradation in an ecosystem will only measure changes against the previously altered conditions. As a result, the evaluation misses significant change generated over longer periods of time (Papworth et al. 2009; Soga and Gaston 2018).

Chapter 4: Toxic Exposures 1. Beyond the methodological difficulties that trouble environmental exposure studies in general, there are many additional concerns peculiar to the Amazon. Widespread

notes to pages 1 46– 1 67   241

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

migration to the region began at the same time as the inauguration of the industry. As a result, no longitudinal data on the health of residents exists before the initiation of oil exploration. High rates of mobility have also made it difficult for epidemiologists to establish degrees of proximity or duration of exposure or to form clear “control” groups of unexposed individuals for comparison. A lack of basic infrastructure, such as running water and plumbing, means that there are many confounding factors. A dearth of health services meant that when people fell ill they often sought health care in urban centers such as Quito or Guayaquil if possible, which resulted in a possibly limited local reporting of disease incidence. In addition, the Aguinda lawsuit and the state’s continued push for extraction have led to an explicit politicization of investigations of contamination and the health effects of the oil industry. Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy and specialist on the Aguinda case, describes the failure of Texaco to implement environmental protection practices as part of their operations in Ecuador. Ecuadorian personnel were trained by the company and were reportedly completely unaware of the risks posed by crude oil. She cites historical sources that indicate that environmental neglect was not an intentional policy choice by Ecuadorian officials in the 1970s–1980s, but rather a result of their total ignorance of the industry. In one case, an official from the MEM said that Texaco was their “professor” who taught them how to produce oil but neglected to instruct them in environmental health concerns or ecological protection. By contrast, Texaco should have had extensive knowledge of both the hazards of oil pollution and technological procedures to prevent it (Kimerling 2006a, 436–443). Zambrano affirms this claim in the sentence, noting that choices such as discharging oil field brine instead of reinjecting it were made in order to save money (Zambrano Lozada 2011). Lighting waste pits on fire was a means of emptying the pits when they became too full and was reportedly a common practice from the 1970s to 2000. Burning pits is not permitted under current regulations. In a 2003 study of families living close to oil installations, researchers found that 94 percent of those surveyed reported having lost animals due to contamination. This included an average loss of eight cows, five pigs, two horses, and forty-three chickens per family. The same study found that families on average had lost 3 hectares (7.4 ac) of coffee, 1.3 hectares (3.2 ac) of rice, and 1.6 hectares (4 ac) of corn to contamination, for a total of 5.9 damaged hectares (14.5 ac) per family (Maldonado and Narváez 2003, 9). In a study reviewing cancer mortality in the Amazon that was funded by Chevron, the authors questioned how San Sebastián and colleagues determined population size, arguing that the cancer incidence rate is misleading because the study used conservative population estimates (Kelsh, Morimoto, and Lau 2009). Teodoro Bustamante and Maria Cristina Jarrín found that oil production was not the principal factor correlated with differences in socioeconomic indicators between areas of oil extraction and other parts of the Amazon or the rest of the country. While they found a relationship between the precarity of infrastructure and access to services in oil-producing regions, they did not find a statistical relationship between oil and massive poverty or ill health (Bustamante and Jarrín 2005, 26). As with any technique, the interpretation of images is no less disputed than the soil samples linked with their coordinates. The independent expert Richard Cabrera used this method of locating pits in the compilation of his much debated, and ultimately discarded, Technical Summary Report (2008) to the court in the Aguinda proceedings. Consultants for Chevron generated their own report, “Rebuttal of the Methodology Used by Mr. Cabrera to Determine the Number and Size of Pits in the PetroEcuador-

242  notes to pages 1 8 7 –220 Texaco Concession” (Di Paolo and Hall 2008). In this rebuttal, Di Paolo and Hall argue that aerial photography can be used to make preliminary assessments of oil field operations when experienced individuals do the interpretation by “ground-truthing,” verifying features seen on images. The authors cite inconsistencies, such as a lack of photographic evidence to match claims for 249 of the 335 sites evaluated in the Technical Summary Report, as well as problems with misidentification and incorrect outlining of pit perimeters. Interpreting aerial images is difficult due to the effects of shadowing, the distribution and size of vegetation, soil moisture differences, and the use of variable-quality, low-resolution black-and-white photography. These are some of the methodological constraints of this technique, all of which, they argue, contributed to the errors they detail in the report (Di Paolo and Hall 2008, 3). The Technical Summary Report was ultimately removed from consideration following allegations that the expert was not independent and had been inappropriately collaborating with Stratus Consulting (Barrett 2014). Chevron’s rebuttal illustrates some of the limitations of pit identification via aerial photographs, just like other techniques for determining contamination and tracing the relations that give rise to exposures.

Chapter 5: Touring Toxic Places 1. Sumak Kawsay, or el buen vivir in Spanish, is the Kichwa concept of “good living,” which was adopted into Ecuadorian political and popular discourse, most notably in the 2008 constitution. Sumak Kawsay implies the possibility for a full life within a community and natural environment. El buen vivir is both an institutionalized term of the Ecuadorian government as well as a means for civil society groups to express alternatives to development within a pluricultural nation (Gudynas 2011b; Acosta 2009b). 2. During fieldwork, there were many rumors about the planned construction of a “Museum of Oil” on the site of the Lago Agrio-1 well. When I returned to Lago Agrio in 2020, I found that the long-awaited museum had been constructed, and then subsequently closed due to local outcry. The site had been transformed from when I had visited it on Toxic Tours between 2011 and 2013; in 2020 we had to access to the pit through the Museum property, and various artifacts of oil drilling and exploitation had been installed outside of the museum. 3. James Craig, the Chevron spokesperson, was the only individual present on the tour who was able to speak in an official capacity for the company. As such, I am not able to write about explanations given by those accompanying the group. I have done my best to accurately and in good faith represent the content of my conversations with Craig and others throughout the trip based on my fieldnotes. However, as in any reconstruction of fieldnotes, this text is interpreted through my position as anthropologist, written after the fact, and should not be taken as direct quotes unless indicated. 4. The act was signed in March 1997, in conjunction with Ricardo Reis Vega, then vice president of Texaco, and Rodrigo Perez, then legal representative of Texaco. A copy is kept in the Texaco Petroleum Company Archive in Quito.

Conclusion: Relations of the Aguarico-4 Well 1. In this chapter I have used invented well numbers in order to protect the privacy of the people I spoke with, who would otherwise be readily identifiable by the wells of a specific oil field.

Works Cited

Acosta, Alberto. 2009a. Derechos de la naturaleza: El futuro es ahora. Quito: Abya Yala. Acosta, Alberto. 2009b. El buen vivir. Quito: Abya Yala. Acosta, Alberto. 2011. “Sentencia a la Chevron-Texaco, un triunfo de la humanidad.” Observatorio de Derechos Colectivos del Ecuador. http://observatorio.cdes.org.ec /documentos/cat_view/82-documentos/86-otras-publicaciones/89-extractivas?start=25. Acosta, Alberto, and Esperanza Martínez, eds. 2011. La naturaleza con derechos: De la filosofía a la política. Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala. Agard-Jones, Vanessa. 2014. “Spray.” Somatosphere, May 27, 2014. http:// somatosphere.net/2014/05/spray.html. Agard-Jones, Vanessa. 2016. Episode 35, Cultures of Energy Podcast. http:// culturesofenergy.com/ep-35-vanessa-agard-jones/. Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alaimo, Stacy. 2016. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Aldridge, Jo. 2015. Participatory Research: Working with Vulnerable Groups in Research and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Altman, Rebecca. 2015. “American Petro-Topia.” Aeon Essays, March 11, 2015. https://aeon.co/essays/plastics-run-in-my-family-but-their-inheritance-is-in-us-all. American Civil Liberties Union. n.d. “SLAPPed: A Tool for Activists.” ACLU of Ohio. https://www.acluohio.org/slapped. Añazco Castillo, Jorge. 2008. Sucumbíos: Quinta provincia amazónica. Quito: Producción Gráfica. Appel, Hannah. 2012. “Walls and White Elephants: Oil Extraction, Responsibility, and Infrastructural Violence in Equatorial Guinea.” Ethnography 13 (4): 439–465. Appel, Hannah. 2019. The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Appel, Hannah, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts. 2015. Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Aráuz, Luis Alberto. 2009. Derecho petrolero ecuatoriano. Quito: Petroproduccion. Arce, Moises. 2014. Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Armiero, Marco. 2017. “Toxic Bios: Traversing Hazardous Time-Scapes through Corporeal Storytelling.” Presented at “Hazardous Time-Scapes: How to Make Sense of Toxic Landscapes from Multiple Timed, Spaced, and Embodied Perspectives?” conference held at the Rachel Carson Center, Munich. December 1. Armiero, Marco, and Salvatore Paolo De Rosa. 2017. “Political Effluvia: Smells, Revelations, and the Politicization of Daily Experience in Naples, Italy.” In Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research, edited by Jocelyn Thorpe, Stephanie Rutherford, and L. Anders Sandberg, 173–186. New York: Routledge. Auyero, Javier, and Débora Swistun. 2009. Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an  243

244  works cite d Argentine Shantytown. New York: Oxford University Press. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barrett, Paul M. 2014. Law of the Jungle: The $19 Billion Legal Battle over Oil in the Rain Forest and the Lawyer Who’d Stop at Nothing to Win. New York: Crown. Baum, Fran, Colin MacDougall, and Danielle Smith. 2006. “Participatory Action Research.” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 60 (10): 854–857. https:// doi.org/10.1136/jech.2004.028662. Bebbington, Anthony, and Jeffrey Bury, eds. 2014. Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil, and Gas in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bebbington, Denise Humphreys, and Anthony Bebbington. 2010. “Extraction, Territory, and Inequalities: Gas in the Bolivian Chaco.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue Canadienne d’Études du Développement 30 (1): 259. Beck, Ulrich. 2009. World at Risk. Cambridge: Polity. Becker, Marc. 2011. “Correa, Indigenous Movements, and the Writing of a New Constitution in Ecuador.” Latin American Perspectives 38 (1): 47–62. https://doi.org/10 .1177/0094582X10384209. Becker, Marc. 2013. “The Stormy Relations between Rafael Correa and Social Movements in Ecuador.” Latin American Perspectives 40 (3): 43–62. https://doi.org/10 .1177/0094582X13479305. Beristain, Carlos Martín, Darío Páez Rovira, and Itziar Fernández. 2009. Las palabras de la selva: Estudio psicosocial del impacto de las explotaciones petroleras de Texaco en las comunidades amazónicas de Ecuador. Bilbao: Instituto de Estudios sobre Desarrollo y Cooperación Internacional. Berlinger, Joe. 2009. Crude: The Real Price of Oil. DVD. New York: First Run Features. Biehl, João. 2005. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bjorkman, Bjorn, Douglas Southgate, and Robert Wasserstrom. 2008. “Response to Mr. Cabrera’s Declarations about Alleged Harm to Indigenous Communities in the Petroecuador-Texaco Concession Area.” Proceedings of Aguinda v. Texaco. Provincial Court of Justice of Sucumbíos, Nueva Loja, Ecuador. September 8. Bohme, Susanna Rankin. 2014. Toxic Injustice: A Transnational History of Exposure and Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press. Borchardt, John K. 1989. “Chemicals Used in Oil-Field Operations.” In Oil-Field Chemistry, 3–54. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society. https://doi.org/10 .1021/bk-1989-0396.ch001. Boudia, Soraya, and Nathalie Jas, eds. 2014. Powerless Science? Science and Politics in a Toxic World. New York: Berghahn Books. Breglia, Lisa C. 2013. Living with Oil: Promises, Peaks, and Declines on Mexico’s Gulf Coast. Austin: University of Texas Press. Breilh, Jaime. 2005. “Texaco and its Consultants.” International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, 11(2) (Apr/Jun): 217–220. Brown, Phil. 2007. Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement. New York: Columbia University Press. Brulle, Robert, and David Pellow. 2006. “Environmental Justice: Human Health and Environmental Inequalities.” Annual Review of Public Health 27 (1): 103–124. Bullard, Robert D. 2001. “Environmental Justice in the 21st Century: Race Still Matters.” Phylon 49 (3–4): 151–171. Bullard, Robert D., and Chavis Benjamin. 1999. Confronting Environmental Racism:

wor ks cite d   245 Voices from the Grassroots. Boston: South End Press. Burchardt, Hans-Jürgen, Rafael Domínguez, Carlos Larrea, and Stefan Peters, eds. 2016. Nada dura para siempre : Neo-extractivismo tras el boom de las materias primas. Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Sede Ecuador. Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. n.d. “Texaco/Chevron Lawsuits (Re Ecuador).” https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/texacochevron-lawsuits-re-ecuador. Bustamante, Teodoro, ed. 2007. Detrás de la cortina de humo: Dinámicas sociales y petróleo en el Ecuador. Quito: FLACSO–Sede Ecuador. Bustamante, Teodoro, and María Cristina Jarrín. 2005. “Impactos sociales de la actividad petrolera en Ecuador: Un análisis de los indicadores.” Iconos 21:19–34. Cabodevilla, Miguel Angel. 1994. Los Huaorani en la historia de los pueblos del oriente. Coca, Ecuador: CICAME. Cabodevilla, Miguel Angel. 1996. Coca: La región y sus historias. Coca, Ecuador: CICAME. Cabrera Vega, Richard. 2008. “Technical Summary to the Court of Nueva Loja.” chevrontoxico.com/assets/docs/cabrera-english-2008.pdf. Cadena, Marisol de la. 2010. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics.’” Cultural Anthropology 25 (2): 334–370. Cardoso, Pablo. 2012. “Lago agrio–Sour Lake: Óleo y acrílico sobre lienzo.” http:// www.pablocardoso.com/lago-agrio—-sour-lake.html. Carmin, J., and J. Agyeman, eds. 2011. Environmental Inequalities beyond Borders: Local Perspectives on Global Injustices. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carrington, Damian. 2017. “Plastic Fibres Found in Tap Water around the World, Study Reveals.” The Guardian, September 6, 2017. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/06/plastic-fibres-found-tap-water-around-world-study-reveals. Casey, Nicholas, and Clifford Krauss. 2018. “It Doesn’t Matter if Ecuador Can Afford This Dam. China Still Gets Paid.” New York Times, December 24, 2018. https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/americas/ecuador-china-dam.html. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2022. “What noises cause hearing loss?” November 8, 2022. https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/hearing_loss/what_noises_cause _hearing_loss.html Cepek, Michael. 2008. “Bold Jaguars and Unsuspecting Monkeys: The Value of Fearlessness in Cofán Politics.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (2): 334–352. Cepek, Michael. 2012a. “Strange Powers: Conservation, Science, and Transparency in an Indigenous Political Project.” Anthropology Today 28 (4): 14–17. Cepek, Michael. 2012b. A Future for Amazonia: Randy Borman and Cofán Environmental Politics. Austin: University of Texas Press. Cepek, Michael. 2016. “There Might Be Blood: Oil, Humility, and the Cosmopolitics of a Cofán Petro-Being.” American Ethnologist 43 (4): 623–635. Cepek, Michael. 2018. Life in Oil: Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia. Austin: University of Texas Press. Checker, Melissa. 2005. Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town. New York: NYU Press. Checker, Melissa. 2007. “‘But I Know It’s True’: Environmental Risk Assessment, Justice, and Anthropology.” Human Organization 66 (2): 112–124. Chen, Mel. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chevron. 2007. “Chevron Calls for Dismissal of Ecuador Lawsuit.” Chevron Press

246  works cite d Release. Chevron.Com. October 8, 2007. https://www.chevron.com/stories/chevron -calls-for-dismissal-of-ecuador-lawsuit. Chevron. 2014. “Aguarico-04.” Chevron Corp. http://www.juiciocrudo.com/articulo/la -interferencia-del-gobierno-en-el-juicio-continua/1076. Chevron Corporation v. Steven Donziger, et al., No. 11-0691. 2014. United States District Court, Southern District of New York. Cielo, Cristina, and Lisset Coba. 2018. “Extractivism, Gender, and Disease: An Intersectional Approach to Inequalities.” Ethics & International Affairs 32 (2): 169–178. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0892679418000291. Cielo, Cristina, Lisset Coba, and Ivette Vallejo. 2016. “Women, Nature, and Development in Sites of Ecuador’s Petroleum Circuit: Ecuador’s Petroleum Circuit.” Economic Anthropology 3 (1): 119–132. https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12049. Contraloría General del Estado, Dirección de Auditoría de Proyectos y Ambiental. 2015. “Examen especial de Control Ambiental a los Pasivos Ambientales en la Región Amazónica, como Resultado de la Operación y Manejo de la Compañía Texpet-Texaco, Actual Chevron, Luego de la Ejecución del Plan de Remediación Ambiental, a cargo de Entidades Realcionadas, de la Empresa Estatal Petróleos del Ecuador ‘PetroEcuador,’ Empresa Pública de Hidrocarburos del Ecuador ‘EP PetroEcuador,’ y de la Empresa Pública de Exploración y Explotación de Hidrocarburos ‘Petroamazonas EP,’ por el período comprendido entre el 1 de enero de 2009 y el 31 de agosto de 2014.” Document number DAPyA-0034-2015. Quito: Empresa Pública de Exploración y Explotación de Hidrocarburos “PetroAmazonas EP.” Coronil, Fernando. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Corporación Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana. 1987. Análisis de La contaminación ambiental en los campos petroleros Libertador y Bermejo. Quito: CEPE. Davidov, Veronica. 2013. “Mining versus Oil Extraction: Divergent and Differentiated Environmental Subjectivities in ‘Post-Neoliberal’ Ecuador.” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 18 (3): 485–504. https://doi.org/10.1111 /jlca.12043. Davis, Devra. 2003. When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle against Pollution. New York: Basic Books. Davis, E. Wade, and James A. Yost. 1983. “The Ethnomedicine of the Waorani of Amazonian Ecuador.” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 9 (2–3): 273–297. https://doi.org /10.1016/0378-8741(83)90036-3. Dematteis, Lou, and Kayana Szymczak. 2008. Crude Reflections/Cruda realidad: Oil, Ruin and Resistance in the Amazon Rainforest. San Francisco: City Lights. Di Paolo, William, and Laura Hall. 2008. “Rebuttal of the Methodology Used by Mr. Cabrera to Determine the Number and Size of Pits in the Petroecuador-Texaco Concession.” Proceedings of Aguinda v. Texaco. Provincial Court of Justice of Sucumbíos, Nueva Loja, Ecuador. September 8. Dietrich, Alexa S. 2013. The Drug Company Next Door : Pollution, Jobs, and Community Health in Puerto Rico. New York : New York University Press, 2013. Dirección General de Medio Ambiente de Ecuador. 1989. Estudio de impacto ambiental 42. Quito: Dirección General de Medio Ambiente. Donziger, Steven. 2010. “Litigating Indigenous Rights and the Environment in Latin America.” Presented at the Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, November 14.

wor ks cite d   247 Edwards, Paul N. 1999. “Global Climate Science, Uncertainty and Politics: Data-laden Models, Model-filtered Data.” Science as Culture 8 (4): 437–472. Epstein, Steven. 1996. Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Espín, Johanna. 2009. “Seguridad ciudadana en la frontera norte ecuatoriana.” La Cooperación en Frontera Norte. www.cooperacion.org.ec. Espín M, Johanna. 2009. “La problemática de la violencia y respeto a la vida en la frontera norte.” Fronteras—Flacso Sede Ecuador 1: 4–8. Espín M, Johanna. 2011. “Gobernanza de la seguridad en la frontera norte ecuatoriana.” FLACSO—Sede Ecuador. https://idl-bnc-idrc.dspacedirect.org/bitstream/handle/10625/48441/IDL-48441.pdf. Estes, Nick. 2017. “Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context.” Wicazo Sa Review 32 (2): 115–122. Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. New York: Verso Books. Fajardo Mendoza, Pablo, Julio Prieto Méndez, Juan Pablo Sáenz. 2011. Summary of Part One of Plaintiffs’ Alegato Final (Final Argument) in Environmental Disaster Litigation Against Chevron. Published online by the Amazon Defense Coalition on January 24, 2011. https://chevroninecuador.org/news-and -multimedia/2011/0124-summary-of-final-argument-part-1 Farmer, Paul. 2004. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press. Finer, Matt, Varsha Vijay, Fernando Ponce, Clinton N. Jenkins, and Ted R. Kahn. 2009. “Ecuador’s Yasuní Biosphere Reserve: A Brief Modern History and Conservation Challenges.” Environmental Research Letters 4 (3): 034005. Fisher, Daniel. 2016. “Appeals Court Upholds Sanctions Against Donziger Over $9.5 Billion Chevron Judgment.” Forbes.com, August 8. https://www .forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2016/08/08/appeals-court-upholds-sanctions -against-donziger-over-chevron-litigation-in-ecuador/#2f20b769511a. Fiske, Amelia. 2017a. “Bounded Impacts, Boundless Promise: Environmental Impact Assessments of Oil Production in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” In ExtrACTION: Impacts, Engagements and Alternative Futures, edited by Kirk Jalbert, Anna Willow, David Casagrande, and Stephanie Paladino, 63–76. London: Routledge. Fiske, Amelia. 2017b. “Natural Resources by Numbers.” Environment and Society 8 (1): 125–143. Fiske, Amelia. 2018. “Dirty Hands: The Toxic Politics of Denunciation.” Social Studies of Science 48 (3): 389–413. Fontaine, Guillaume. 2007. El precio del petroleo. Quito: Editorial Abya Yala. Fortun, Kim. 2001. Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fortun, Kim. 2012. “Ethnography in Late Industrialism.” Cultural Anthropology 27 (3): 446–464. Gallego Coto, Pablo. n.d. “Historia de la provincia de Sucumbios.” Sucumbios Gobierno Autónomo Provincial. www.sucumbios.gob.ec. Gardner, Katy. 2012. Discordant Development : Global Capitalism and the Struggle for Connection in Bangladesh. London : Pluto Press , 2012. Gill, Lesley. 2004. The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

248  works cite d Gill, Nathan. 2015. “China Rescues Ecuador Budget from Deeper Cuts as Crude Drops.” Bloomberg.com, January 13. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles /2015-01-13/china-rescues-ecuador-budget-from-deeper-cuts-as-crude-drops-1-. Goldstein, Donna M., and Kira Hall. 2015. “Mass Hysteria in Le Roy, New York: How Brain Experts Materialized Truth and Outscienced Environmental Inquiry.” American Ethnologist 42 (4): 640–657. Gómez, Víctor. 2012. “Autoridades advierten de contaminación tras incendio en Shushufindi.” El Universo, August 2012. https://www.eluniverso.com/2012/08/21/1 /1422/autoridades-advierten-contaminacion-tras-incendio-shushufindi.html. Gray-Cosgrove, Carmella, Max Liboiron, and Josh Lepawsky. 2015. “The Challenges of Temporality to Depollution and Remediation.” S.A.P.I.EN.S.: Surveys and Perspectives Integrating Environment and Society 8 (1):1–9. Gudynas, Eduardo. 2009a. “Diez tesis urgentes sobre el nuevo extractivismo: Contextos y demandas bajo el progresismo sudamericano actual.” In Extractivismo, política y sociedad, 187–225. Quito: Centro Andino de Acción Popular y Centro Latino Americano de Ecología Social. Gudynas, Eduardo. 2009b. El mandato ecológico: Derechos de la naturaleza y políticas ambientales en la nueva constitución. Quito: Abya Yala. Gudynas, Eduardo. 2011a. “Más allá del nuevo extractivismo: Transiciones sostenibles y alternativas al desarrollo.” In La Tierra no es muda: Diálogos entre el desarrollo sostenible y el postdesarrollo, edited by A. Matarán Ruíz and F. López Castellano, 69–96. Granada, Spain: Universidad de Granada. Gudynas, Eduardo. 2011b. “Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow.” Development 54 (4): 441–447. Hames, Raymond, and William T. Vickers. 1983. Adaptive Responses of Native Amazonians. New York: Academic Press. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599. Haraway, Donna. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harding, Sandra. 1992. “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is ‘Strong Objectivity?’” Centennial Review 36 (3): 437–470. Harrison, Faye Venetia. 1991. Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association. Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2011. Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hecht, Gabrielle. 2014. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hecht, Susanna B. 2013. The Scramble for the Amazon and the “Lost Paradise” of Euclides Da Cunha. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hecht, Susanna B., and Alexander Cockburn. 2010. The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Higgins, Robert R. 1994. “Race, Pollution, and the Mastery of Nature.” Environmental Ethics 16 (3): 251–264. High, Casey. 2009. “Remembering the Auca: Violence and Generational Memory

wor ks cite d   249 in Amazonian Ecuador.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (4): 719–736. Hilson, Christopher J. 2016. “Environmental SLAPPs in the UK: Threat or Opportunity?” Environmental Politics 25 (2): 248–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016 .2015.1105176. Hiraoka, Mario, and Shozo Yamamoto. 1980. “Agricultural Development in the Upper Amazon of Ecuador.” Geographical Review 70 (4): 423–445. https://doi.org/10.2307 /214077. Hochstetler, Kathryn. 2011. “The Politics of Environmental Licensing: Energy Projects of the Past and Future in Brazil.” Studies in Comparative International Development 46:349–371. Hoover, Elizabeth. 2017. The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hurtig, Anna Karin, and Miguel San Sebastián. 2002a. “Gynecologic and Breast Malignancies in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador, 1985–1998.” International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics 76 (2): 199–201. Hurtig, Anna Karin, and Miguel San Sebastián. 2002b. “Geographical Differences in Cancer Incidence in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador in Relation to Residence near Oil Fields.” International Journal of Epidemiology 31 (5): 1021–1027. Hurtig, Anna Karin, and Miguel San Sebastián. 2004a. Cáncer en la amazonía del Ecuador (1985–1998). Coca, Ecuador: CICAME. Hurtig, Anna Karin, and Miguel San Sebastián. 2004b. “Incidence of Childhood Leukemia and Oil Exploitation in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador.” International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health 10 (3): 245–250. Hurtig, Anna Karin, and Miguel San Sebastián. 2005. “Epidemiology vs epidemiology: The Case of Oil Exploitation in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador.” International Journal of Epidemiology 34 (5): 1170–1172. Ikemoto, Lisa. 2017. “DIY Bio: Hacking Life in Biotech’s Backyard.” U.C. Davis Law Review 51 (2): 539. Jain, S. Lochlann. 2013. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jenkins, Katy, and Glevys Rondón. 2015. “‘Eventually the Mine Will Come’: Women Anti-Mining Activists’ Everyday Resilience in Opposing Resource Extraction in the Andes.” Gender & Development 23 (3): 415–431. https://doi.org/10.1080/1355207 4.2015.1095560. Jephcote, Calvin, David Brown, Thomas Verbeek, and Alice Mah. 2020. “A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Haematological Malignancies in Residents Living near Petrochemical Facilities.” Environmental Health 19 (1): 53. https://doi.org/10.1186 /s12940-020-00582-1. Kelly, Jennifer. 2020. “Subjection and Performance: Tourism, Witnessing, and Acts of Refusal in Palestine.” Feminist Formations 32 (2): 79–110. Kelsh, Michael A., Thomas E. McHugh, and Theodore D. Tomasi. 2008. “Rebuttal to Mr. Cabrera’s Excess Cancer Death and Other Health Effects Claims, and His Proposal for a New Health Infrastructure.” Chevron Energy Technology Company, September 8. Kelsh, Michael A., Libby Morimoto, and Edmund Lau. 2009. “Cancer Mortality and Oil Production in the Amazon Region of Ecuador, 1990–2005.” International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health 82 (3): 381–395.

250  works cite d Kennemore, Amy, and Gregory Weeks. 2011. “Twenty-First Century Socialism? The Elusive Search for a Post-Neoliberal Development Model in Bolivia and Ecuador.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 30 (3): 267–281. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1470 -9856.2010.00496.x. Kimerling, Judith. 1990. “Disregarding Environmental Law: Petroleum Development in Protected Natural Areas and Indigenous Homelands in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” Hastings International and Comparative Law Review 14:849. Kimerling, Judith. 1991. Amazon Crude. New York: Natural Resources Defense Council. Kimerling, Judith. 1996. El derecho del tambor. Quito: Abya-Yala Ediciones. Kimerling, Judith. 2006a. “Indigenous Peoples and the Oil Frontier in Amazonia: The Case of Ecuador, ChevronTexaco, and Aguinda v. Texaco.” New York University Journal of International Law and Politics 38:413–664. Kimerling, Judith. 2006b. “Transnational Operations, Bi-National Injustice: Chevrontexaco and Indigenous Huaorani and Kichwa in the Amazon Rainforest in Ecuador.” American Indian Law Review 31:445. Kimerling, Judith. 2013. “Lessons from the Chevron Ecuador Litigation: The Proposed Intervenors’ Perspective.” Stanford Journal of Complex Litigation (SJCL) 1, no. 2: 241. Kohn, Joseph, Myles Malman, Martin D’Urso, Diana Liberto, Cristobal Bonifaz, John Bonifaz, Steven Donziger, and Amy Damen. 1993. Aguinda et. al. v. Texaco Inc. 1–37. United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Koning, Korrie de, and Marion Martin. 1996. Participatory Research in Health: Issues and Experiences. London: Zed Books. Lamoreaux, Janelle. 2016. “What if the Environment Is a Person? Lineages of Epigenetic Science in a Toxic China.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (2): 188–214. Langewiesche, William. 2007. “Jungle Law.” Vanity Fair, May 2007. http://www .vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/05/texaco200705. Langston, Nancy. 2010. Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lanphear, Bruce P. 2017. “Low-Level Toxicity of Chemicals: No Acceptable Levels?” PLoS Biology 15 (12): e2003066. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2003066. Larrea, Carlos. 2009. Yasuni ITT: An Initiative to Change History. Quito: Gobierno Nacional de la República del Ecuador. Larrea, Carlos, and Lavinia Warnars. 2009. “Ecuador’s Yasuni-ITT Initiative: Avoiding Emissions by Keeping Petroleum Underground.” Energy for Sustainable Development 13 (3): 219–223. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lerner, Steve. 2010. Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lessmann, Janeth, Javier Fajardo, Jesús Muñoz, and Elisa Bonaccorso. 2016. “Large Expansion of Oil Industry in the Ecuadorian Amazon: Biodiversity Vulnerability and Conservation Alternatives.” Ecology and Evolution 6 (14): 4997–5012. https://doi .org/10.1002/ece3.2099. Li, Fabiana. 2009. “Documenting Accountability: Environmental Impact Assessment in a Peruvian Mining Project.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 32 (2): 218–236.

wor ks cite d   251 Li, Fabiana. 2015. Unearthing Conflict: Corporate Mining, Activism, and Expertise in Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Liboiron, Max. 2016a. “Redefining Pollution and Action: The Matter of Plastics.” Journal of Material Culture 21 (1): 87–110. Liboiron, Max. 2016b. “How Toxic Flame Retardant Chemicals Become-and Stay-Ubiquitous in Our Homes and Bodies.” Discard Studies, October 25, 2016. https://discardstudies.com/2016/10/25/how-toxic-flame-retardant-chemicals-become -and-stay-ubiquitous-in-our-homes-and-bodies/. Liboiron, Max. 2017a. “Pollution Is Colonialism.” Discard Studies, September 1, 2017. https://discardstudies.com/2017/09/01/pollution-is-colonialism/. Liboiron, Max. 2017b. “Toxins or Toxicants? Why the Difference Matters.” Discard Studies, November 9, 2017. https://discardstudies.com/2017/09/11/toxins-or -toxicants-why-the-difference-matters/. Liboiron, Max. 2021. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Liboiron, Max, Emily Simmonds, Edward Allen, Emily Wells, Jessica Melvin, Alex Zahara, and Charles Mather. 2021. “Doing Ethics with Cod.” https://doi.org/10.7551 /mitpress/11310.003.0009. Little, Paul E. 2001. Amazonia : Territorial Struggles on Perennial Frontiers. Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University Press. Little, Peter C. 2014. Toxic Town: IBM, Pollution, and Industrial Risks. New York: NYU Press. López, Adrián. 2010. “La soberanía y sus fronteras: Frontera norte y estado ecuatoriano.” MA thesis, Programa de Estudios Políticos, Facultad Latino Americana de Ciencias Sociales Ecuador. Lovell, W., and Christopher Lutz. 2001. “The Primacy of Larger Truths: Rigoberta Menchú and the Tradition of Native Testimony in Guatemala.” In The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, edited by Arturo Arias and David Stoll, 171–197. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lu, Flora, Gabriela Valdivia, and Néstor L. Silva. 2017. Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian Amazonia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lucero, Jose Antonio. 2008. Struggles of Voice: The Politics of Indigenous Representation in the Andes. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Lundqvist, Christofer, Moniek Zuurbier, Marike Leijs, Carolina Johansson, Sandra Ceccatelli, Margaret Saunders, Greet Schoeters, Gavin ten Tusscher, and Janna G. Koppe. 2006. “The Effects of PCBs and Dioxins on Child Health.” Acta Paediatrica Supplement 95 (453): 55–64. Lyall, Angus, and Gabriela Valdivia. 2019. “The Speculative Petro-State: Volatile Oil Prices and Resource Populism in Ecuador.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109 (2): 349–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1531690. Lyons, Kristina. 2016. “Decomposition as Life Politics: Soils, Selva, and Small Farmers under the Gun of the U.S.-Colombian War on Drugs.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (1): 56–81. Lyons, Kristina. 2020. Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Maldonado, Adolfo, and Alberto Narváez. 2003. Ecuador ni es ni ya será un oaís amazónico: Inventario de impactos petroleros. Quito: Acción Ecológica. Maldonado, Adolfo, Fernanda Solíz, Alexandra Almeida, Diego Pérez Figueroa, Dominique Villagómez Torres, Micaela Morejón Armijo, Oscar Bonilla Baquero, et al. 2013. “Alerta naranja No. 8. Incendio en Shushufindi: Un informe.” Clinica Ambi-

252  works cite d ental, September. https://www.clinicambiental.org/alerta-nd8-informe-shushufindi -accidente-e-incendio-de-bodegas-de-la-empresa-incinerox/. Markowitz, Gerald, and David Rosner. 2002. Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Masco, Joseph. 2013. “Side Effect.” Somatosphere, December 2, 2013. http:// somatosphere.net/2013/side-effect.html/. Masco, Joseph. 2016. “The Crisis in Crisis.” Current Anthropology 58 (S15). https:// doi.org/10.1086/688695. Maynard, Andrew. 2016. “Can Citizen Science Empower Disenfranchised Communities?” Brink: The Edge of Risk, January 27, 2016. http://www.brinknews.com/can -citizen-science-empower-disenfranchised-communities/. McGregor, Deborah. 2018. “Mino-Mnaamodzawin: Achieving Indigenous Environmental Justice in Canada.” Environment and Society 9 (1): 7–24. Michaels, David, and Celeste Monforton. 2005. “Manufacturing Uncertainty: Contested Science and the Protection of the Public’s Health and Environment.” American Journal of Public Health 95, Supplement 1: S39–48. Miller, Blair. n.d. “Turns out the Deadliest Part about Being a Boston Firefighter Isn’t Running into a Burning Building.” Boston Magazine, March 19, 2017. http://www .bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2017/03/19/firefighters-cancer/. Miller, Gary. 2013. The Exposome: A Primer. Amsterdam: Academic Press. Ministerio de Coordinación de la Producción, Empleo y Competitividad. 2011. “Agendas para la transformacion productiva territorial: Provincia de Sucumbíos.” http:// www.produccion.gob.ec/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2013/02/AGENDA -TERRITORIAL-SUCUMBIOS.pdf. Ministerio del Ambiente y Agua. 2012. “Ministerio del Ambiente informa sobre incendio en Shushufindi.” August 22, 2012. https://www.ambiente.gob.ec/ministerio-del -ambiente-informa-sobre-incendio-en-shushufindi/. Mitman, Greg, Michelle Murphy, and Christopher Sellers, eds. 2004. Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mora Bayo, Mariana. 2017. Kuxlejal Politics : Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin: University of Texas Press. Morgan, Richard K. 2012. “Environmental Impact Assessment: The State of the Art.” Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal 30 (1): 5–14. Muratorio, Blanca. 1991. The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso: Culture and History in the Upper Amazon. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Muratorio, Blanca. 1998. “Indigenous Women’s Identities and the Politics of Cultural Reproduction in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” American Anthropologist 100 (2): 409–420. Muratorio, Blanca. 2008. “The State, Missionaries, and Native Consciousness in the Upper Amazon, 1767–1896.” In The Ecuador Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by Carlos de la Torre and Steve Striffler, 86–97. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Murphy, Michelle. 2008. “Chemical Regimes of Living.” Environmental History 13 (4): 695–703. Murphy, Michelle. 2012. Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

wor ks cite d   253 Murphy, Michelle. 2017. “Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (4): 494–503. Murphy, Michelle. 2021. “Pollution, Colonialism and Re-Imagining Chemicals.” Presented at the AusSTS 2021 Situated Practice workshop, June 24. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=4fTL-iRyM3U&t=1s. Nading, Alex M. 2020. “Living in a Toxic World.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49 (1): 209–224. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-010220-074557. Nash, Linda. 2007. Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nelson, Alondra. 2011. Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. North, James. 2021. “Is Chevron’s Vendetta against Steven Donziger Finally Backfiring?,” October 4. https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/steven-donziger -chevron-sentencing/. North, James. 2022. “Chevron’s Prosecution of Steven Donziger,” January 27, 2022. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/donziger-chevron-documents/. Observatory of Economic Complexity. 2022. “Ecuador (ECU) Exports, Imports, and Trade Partners.” OEC: The Observatory of Economic Complexity. https://oec.world/ en/profile/country/ecu?yearSelector1=exportGrowthYear25. Ofrias, Lindsay. 2017. “Invisible Harms, Invisible Profits: A Theory of the Incentive to Contaminate.” Culture, Theory and Critique 58 (4): 435–456. https://doi.org/10 .1080/14735784.2017.1357478. Ofrias, Lindsay. 2018. “Contamination of the Social Fabric: Sápara Leaders’ Resistance to Oil Companies in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Narrow Vision of Environmental Impact Studies.” Engagement, March 20, 2018. https://aesengagement .wordpress.com/2018/03/20/contamination-of-the-social-fabric-sapara-leaders -resistance-to-oil-companies-in-the-ecuadorian-amazon-and-the-narrow-vision -of-environmental-impact-studies/. Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. 2011. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury. Ott, Riki. 2008. Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. Papworth, S. K., J. Rist, L. Coad, and E. J. Milner-Gulland. 2009. “Evidence for Shifting Baseline Syndrome in Conservation.” Conservation Letters 2 (2): 93–100. Patel, Suraj. 2012. “Delayed Justice: A Case Study of Texaco and the Republic of Ecuador’s Operations, Harms, and Possible Redress in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” Tulane Environmental Law Journal 26, no. 1: 71–110. Paz, Isabella Grullón. 2021. “Lawyer Who Won $9.5 Billion Settlement against Chevron Reports to Prison.” New York Times, October 28, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com /2021/10/27/business/energy-environment/steven-donziger-chevron.html. Pellow, David. 2007. Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pennock, Dan, Thomas Yates, and Jeff Braidek. 2007. “Soil Sampling Designs.” In Soil Sampling and Methods of Analysis, 2nd ed., edited by M. R. Carter and E. G. Gregorich, 1–14. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

254  works cite d Petroecuador. 2009. El petróleo en el Ecuador. Quito: Petroecuador. Petryna, Adriana. 2002. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pezzullo, Phaedra Carmen. 2009. Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Potter, Will. 2014. “Hell Will Freeze over before Chevron Pays for Pollution.” Vice, March 7, 2014. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wd4n3n/chevron-uses-mafia -law-against-ecuadorian-villagers. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2017. “Fires, Fogs, Winds.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (4): 504–513. Powell, Dana E. 2018. Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pring, George, and Penelope Canan. 1996. SLAPPs: Getting Sued for Speaking Out. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Programa de Reparación Ambiental y Social. 2011. “Propuesta de actualización conceptual del enfoque del programa de reparación ambiental y social del Ministerio del Ambiente sobre reparación integral de daños y pasivos ambientales.” Quito: Ministerio del Ambiente. Pulido, Laura. 2000. “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (1): 12–40. Raffles, Hugh. 2002. In Amazonia: A Natural History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Raffles, Hugh. 2010. A Conjoined Fate. Orion, January/February. http://www .orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/issue/5224/. Reed, Kristin. 2009. Crude Existence: Environment and the Politics of Oil in Northern Angola. Berkeley: University of California Press. Resnik, David B. 2009. “Environmental Health Research and the Observer’s Dilemma.” Environmental Health Perspectives 117 (8): 1191–1194. Reuters Staff. 2020. “Ecuador to Slash Budget, Seek Better Debt Terms after Oil Plunges.” Reuters, March 11, 2020. https://www.reuters.com/article/ecuador-oil -idUSL1N2B4033. Riofrancos, Thea. 2017. “Extractivismo Unearthed: A Genealogy of a Radical Discourse.” Cultural Studies 31 (2–3): 277–306. Riofrancos, Thea. 2020. Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rival, Laura M. 2002. Trekking through History: The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador. New York: Columbia University Press. Rival, Laura M. 2010. “Ecuador’s Yasuní-ITT Initiative: The Old and New Values of Petroleum.” Ecological Economics 70 (2): 358–365. Roberts, Elizabeth. 2017a. “Exposure.” Cultural Anthropology: Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen, June 28, 2017. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1152-exposure. Roberts, Elizabeth. 2017b. “What Gets Inside: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (4): 592–619. Robinson, Scott, and Michael Scott. 1968. “Sky Chief.” Archivo Antropología Visual. http://www.antropologiavisual.net/2007/sky-chief/. Rogers, Douglas. 2015. The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

wor ks cite d   255 Rosner, Lisa. 2004. The Technological Fix: How People Use Technology to Create and Solve Problems. New York: Routledge. Rouse, Carolyn. 2009. Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Care Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease. Berkeley: University of California Press. Russi, Daniela, and Joan Martinez-Alier. 2003. “Los pasivos ambientales.” Iconos 15 (January): 123–131. Sadler, Barry. 1996. Environmental Assessment in a Changing World: Evaluating Practice to Improve Performance. Ottawa: Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, International Association for Impact Assessment. San Sebastián, Miguel. 2000. Informe yana curi: Impacto de la actividad petrolera en la salud de poblaciones rurales de la Amazonia ecuatoriana. Quito: CICAME and Abya-Yala. San Sebastián, Miguel, B. Armstrong, J. A. Córdoba, and C Stephens. 2001. “Exposures and Cancer Incidence near Oil Fields in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador.” Occupational and Environmental Medicine 58 (8): 517–522. San Sebastián, Miguel, Ben Armstrong, and Carolyn Stephens. 2002. “Outcomes of Pregnancy among Women Living in the Proximity of Oil Fields in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador.” International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health 8 (4): 312–319. San Sebastián, Miguel, and Anna Karin Hurtig. 2004a. “Oil Exploitation in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador: A Public Health Emergency.” Revista Panamericana de Salud Pública 15 (3): 205–211. San Sebastián, Miguel, and Anna Karin Hurtig. 2004b. “Cancer among Indigenous People in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador, 1985–2000.” Revista Panamericana de Salud Pública 16 (5): 328–333. San Sebastián, Miguel, and Anna Karin Hurtig. 2005. “Oil Development and Health in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador: The Popular Epidemiology Process.” Social Science & Medicine 60 (4): 799–807. Sánchez-Garzoli, Gimena. 2008. “Fumigation: Spreading Coca and Threatening Colombia’s Ecological and Cultural Diversity.” Washington Office on Latin America. http:// www.wola.org/sites/default/files/downloadable/Andes/Colombia/past/WOLA %20Chemical%20Reactions%20February%202008.pdf. Sawyer, Suzana. 2002. “Bobbittizing Texaco: Dis-Membering Corporate Capital and Re-Membering the Nation in Ecuador.” Cultural Anthropology 17 (2): 150–180. Sawyer, Suzana. 2004. Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sawyer, Suzana 2008. “Suing ChevronTexaco.” In The Ecuador Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by Carlos de la Torre and Steve Striffler, 321–328. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sawyer, Suzana. 2015. “Crude Contamination: Law, Science, and Indeterminacy in Ecuador and Beyond.” In Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas, edited by Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts, 126–146. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Schaffer, Simon. 1992. “Self Evidence.” Critical Inquiry 18 (2): 327–362. Schalie, W. H. van der, H. S. Gardner, J. A. Bantle, C. T. De Rosa, R. A. Finch, J. S. Reif, R. H. Reuter, et al. 1999. “Animals as Sentinels of Human Health Hazards of Environmental Chemicals.” Environmental Health Perspectives 107 (4): 309–315. Schwartz-Marin, Ernesto, and Arely Cruz-Santiago. 2018. “Antígona y su biobanco de

256  works cite d ADN: Desaparecidos, búsqueda y tecnologías forenses en México.” Athenea Digital 18 (1): 129–153. Sever, Lowell. 2005. “Oil Contamination and Health Effects in the Ecuadorian Amazon Basin: A Review of Recent Reports and Publications.” https://www.texaco.com /ecuador/docs/report_sever_en.pdf. Shadaan, Reena, and Michelle Murphy. 2020. “EDC’s as Industrial Chemicals and Settler Colonial Structures: Towards a Decolonial Feminist Approach.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 6 (1). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v6i1.32089. Shapiro, Nicholas. 2015. “Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily Reasoning, and the Chemical Sublime.” Cultural Anthropology 30 (3): 368–393. Shapiro, Nicholas, and Eben Kirksey. 2017. “Chemo-Ethnography: An Introduction.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (4): 481–493. Simmons, Kristen. 2017. “Settler Atmospherics.” Member Voices, Fieldsights, November 20, 2017. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1221-settler-atmospherics. Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9. Singer, Merrill, and Hans Baer. 2018. Critical Medical Anthropology. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, FL: Routledge. Sismondo, Sergio. 2017. “Post-Truth?” Social Studies of Science 47 (1): 3–6. Soga, Masashi, and Kevin J. Gaston. 2018. “Shifting Baseline Syndrome: Causes, Consequences, and Implications.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 16 (4): 222–230. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.1794. “Soil Sampling for Environmental Contaminants, IAEA-TECDOC-1415.” 2004. International Atomic Energy Agency. https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF /te_1415_web.pdf. Solíz Torres, María Fernanda, Pamela Cepeda Vélez, and Adolfo Maldonado Campos. 2019. En tiempos de petróleo: Salud psicosocial en niños, niñas y adolescentes de las comunidades en las que operó Texaco. Quito: Clinica Ambiental. Solomon, Gina. 2010. “Oil Odors: If You Smell It, Is It Toxic?” Huffington Post, June 8, 2010. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-solomon/oil-odors-if-you-smell-it_b _605007.html. Southgate, Douglas, Robert Wasserstrom, and Susan Reider. 2009. “Oil Development, Deforestation, and Indigenous Populations in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” Conference presentation at the Latin American Studies Association in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 11–14. Sovacool, Benjamin K., and Joseph Scarpaci. 2016. “Energy Justice and the Contested Petroleum Politics of Stranded Assets: Policy Insights from the Yasuní-ITT Initiative in Ecuador.” Energy Policy 95 (August): 158–171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol .2016.04.045. St. Louis, Regis, Greg Benchwick, Michael Grosberg, and Tom Masters. 2012. Ecuador & the Galapagos Islands. 9th ed. Oakland, CA: Lonely Planet. Steyn, Maria. 2003. “Oil Politics in Ecuador and Nigeria: A Perspective from Environmental History on the Struggles between Ethnic Minority Groups, Multinational Oil Companies and National Governments.” PhD dissertation, University of the Free State Bloemfontien, South Africa. Strasser, Bruno, and Dana Mahr. 2017. “Experiential Knowledge, Public Participation, and the Challenge to the Authority of Science in the 1970s.” Harvard Bill of Health,

wor ks cite d   257 May 2, 2017. http://blogs.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2017/05/02/experiential -knowledge-public-participation-and-the-challenge-to-the-authority-of-science -in-the-1970s/. Sveinsdóttir, Anna G., Mariel Aguilar-Støen, and Benedicte Bull. 2021. “Resistance, Repression and Elite Dynamics: Unpacking Violence in the Guatemalan Mining Sector.” Geoforum 118 (January): 117–129. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum .2020.12.011. TallBear, Kim. 2014. “Standing with and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry.” Journal of Research Practice 10 (2): 17. Tavares, Paulo. 2011. “Murky Evidence: Environmental Forensics in the Age of the Anthropocene.” Cabinet 43: 101–105. Torre, Carlos de la. 2013. “El technopopulismo de Rafael Correa ¿Es compatible el carisma con la tecnocracia?” Latin American Research Review 48 (1): 24–43. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2004. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tuana, Nancy. 2008. “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo, Susan Hekman, and Michael Hames-Garcia, 188–213. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tuck, Eve. 2009. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review 79 (3): 409–428. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1 (1): 1–40. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2013. “R-Words: Refusing Research.” In Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, edited by Django Paris and Maisha Winn, 223–247. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2014. “Unbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of Refusal in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 20 (6): 811–818. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. UDAPT. 2016. “Sabías qué . . . Informe de salud.” Union de Afectados y Afectadas por las Operaciones Petroleras de Texaco. United Church of Christ, Commission for Racial Justice. 1987. “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites.” Available at https://omeka. middlebury.edu/fyg/items/show/316. US Energy Information Administration. 2017. “Country Analysis Brief: Ecuador.” October 5, 2017. Uzendoski, Michael. 2004. “Manioc Beer and Meat: Value, Reproduction and Cosmic Substance among the Napo Runa of the Ecuadorian Amazon.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10 (4): 883–902. Uzendoski, Michael. 2005. The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Vallejo, Ivette, Cristina Cielo, and Fernando García. 2019. “Ethnicity, Gender, and Oil: Comparative Dynamics in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” Latin American Perspectives 46 (2): 182–198. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X18820296. Vallejo, María Cristina, Rafael Burbano, Fander Falconí, and Carlos Larrea. 2015. “Leaving Oil Underground in Ecuador: The Yasuní-ITT Initiative from a Multi-Criteria Perspective.” Ecological Economics 109 (January): 175–185.

258  works cite d Vásconez, Lucía. 2022. “Rotura del OCP y derrame de petróleo se registra en el sector de Piedra Fina.” El Comercio, January 29, 2022. https://www.elcomercio.com /actualidad/ecuador/rotura-tuberia-ocp-derrame-petroleo.html. Velásquez, Teresa A. 2017. “Enacting Refusals: Mestiza Women’s Anti-Mining Activism in Andean Ecuador.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 12 (3): 250–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2017.1344263. Viteri Toro, Jorge. 2008. Petroleo, lanzas y sangre. Quito: Ministerio de Minas y Petroleos. Wahlberg, Ayo. 2018. “Exposed Biologies and the Banking of Reproductive Vitality in China.” Science, Technology and Society 23 (2): 307–323. Walker, Brett L. 2011. Toxic Archipelago : A History of Industrial Disease in Japan. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Wasserstrom, Robert. 2014. “Surviving the Rubber Boom: Cofán and Siona Society in the Colombia-Ecuador Borderlands (1875–1955).” Ethnohistory 61 (3): 525–548. Wasserstrom, Robert, and Douglas Southgate. 2013. “Deforestation, Agrarian Reform and Oil Development in Ecuador, 1964–1994.” Natural Resources 4:31–44. Watts, Michael. 2005a. “The Sinister Political Life of Community: Economies of Violence and Governable Spaces in the Niger Delta, Nigeria.” Niger Delta Economies of Violence Working Paper No. 3. Institute of International Studies, University of California Berkeley. Watts, Michael. 2005b. “Righteous Oil? Human Rights, the Oil Complex, and Corporate Social Responsibility.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30 (1): 373–407. Webster, Emma, Craig Johnson, Monica Johnson, Bernie Kemp, Valerie Smith, and Billie Townsend. 2017. “Engaging Aboriginal People in Research: Taking a Decolonizing Gaze.” In Handbook of Research Methods in Health Social Sciences, edited by Pranee Liamputtong, 1–17. Singapore: Springer Singapore. Welker, Marina. 2014. Enacting the Corporation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weyler, Rex. 2018. “Chevron’s SLAPP Suit against Ecuadorians: Corporate Intimidation.” Greenpeace International, May 11, 2018. https://www.greenpeace.org /international/story/16448/chevrons-slapp-suit-against-ecuadorians-corporate -intimidation. Whitaker, Morris D., and Dale Colyer. 1990. Agriculture and Economic Survival: The Role of Agriculture in Ecuador’s Development. Boulder, CO: Westview. Whitten, Norman E. 1976. Sacha Runa. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Whitten, Norman E. 1985. Sicuanga Runa. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Whitten, Norman E., and Dorothea S. Whitten. 2007. Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Wilbur, Matika, Desi Small-Rodriguez, and Adrienne Keene. 2019. All My Relations Podcast, March 19. https://www.allmyrelationspodcast.com/podcast/episode/468a0a6b/decolonizing-sex. Wild, Christopher Paul. 2005. “Complementing the Genome with an ‘Exposome’: The Outstanding Challenge of Environmental Exposure Measurement in Molecular Epidemiology.” Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention 14 (8): 1847–1850. Wilson, Japhy. 2021. Reality of Dreams: Post-Neoliberal Utopias in the Ecuadorian Amazon. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Worldometer. 2016. “Ecuador Oil Reserves, Production and Consumption Statistics.” 2016. https://www.worldometers.info/oil/ecuador-oil/.

wor ks cite d   259 Wylie, Sara Ann. 2018. Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zahara, Alex. 2016. “Refusal as Research Method in Discard Studies.” Discard Studies, March 21, 2016. https://discardstudies.com/2016/03/21/refusal-as-research-method -in-discard-studies/. Zalik, Anna. 2004. “The Niger Delta: ‘Petro Violence’ and ‘Partnership Development.’” Review of African Political Economy 31 (101): 401. Zambrano Lozada, Nicolas. 2011. Aguinda et al. v. Chevron Corporation 188. Provincial Court of Justice of Sucumbíos. Zavala, M. 2013. “What Do We Mean by Decolonizing Research Strategies? Lessons from Decolonizing, Indigenous Research Projects in New Zealand and Latin America.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 2:55–71.

Index

Page numbers in italic type indicate information contained in images or image captions. Acción Ecológica, 156, 162–163, 184 accountability for harm: denial of through corporate media tours, 181–182, 196–206, 213; and proximity concept, 22, 45–46, 144, 165–166; value of relational approach to, 4–9. See also blame shifting activism and advocacy: community-based organizing of 1980s, 184; criminalization of protest, 109, 189, 198; environmental organizations, 23; at filing of Aguinda suit in Lago Agrio, 80; public awareness efforts, 180, 187–189, 208–210, 212–216; social movements and progressive government, 108–109; in Sucumbíos Province, 60–61. See also Toxic Tours aerial images used in impact studies, 84, 95, 165–167, 242n7 “age of toxicity,” 11–12 Agrarian Reform and Colonization program, 46, 48, 53 agricultural settlement. See farmers, settler Aguarico-4 well: author’s experience of, 211–213; corporate media tour of, 202–206; and Mano Sucia campaign, 213–217; shutdown of, 43–44; site preparation and operation overviews, 31, 33, 40–42, 69; Toxic Tour of, 185–191 Aguarico oil field, 217–218, 220–221. See also Aguarico-4 well; Aguarico Station Aguarico River: as fresh water source, 33– 34; location and ecosystem overview, 27; settler experiences of contamination of, 34–39, 62, 219, 221. See also rivers; swamp below Aguarico-4 Aguarico Station, 42, 207, 217 Aguinda, Maria, 78, 99. See also Aguinda v. Texaco Aguinda v. Texaco: class of plaintiffs

defined, 238n7; Correa’s stance on, 109; disputes over sampling methods, 84–91, 92–95, 158, 239n15, 241nn5–6; expert appraisal phase of Aguinda case, 81; filing in Superior Court, Lago Agrio, 80; fraud and wrongdoing allegations, 24–25, 78, 81–82, 126, 236n18; jurisdictional disputes, 79–80; original filing and accusations (1993), 77, 79; overviews, 3; return to Ecuadorian courts (2003), 182; rulings and appeals, 78–79, 81, 82, 85, 93–98 A’ingae (Cofán language), 34, 35 airports/landing strips, 32, 38, 65 Akwesasne Mohawk people (North America), 155, 170, 236n4 Alaimo, Stacy, 168–169, 170–171 Albán Gómez, Jorge, 203 Almeida, Alexandra, 156 Alvarado Roca, Xavier, 95–96 “Amazon Chernobyl,” 213 Amazon Frontlines, 235n14 Amazon Watch, 184 American Petroleum Institute, 97 Añazco Castillo, Jorge, 50–51, 56 Andes Petroleum, 114–116, 117–119 animals/livestock, effects of pollution on: direct contamination losses, 39, 149, 190, 219; fish, 172–173, 189; Incinerox proximity and fire, 138; in/near waste pits, 3, 42, 133, 168, 187, 191, 206, 219, 221; native, disappearance of from area, 44; proximity and risk hazards, 6–7 apology mandate imposed on Chevron, 79 Aráus, Luis Alberto, 77 arbitration appeal by Chevron, 82 Asamblea Biprovincial de Sucumbíos y Orellana (Biprovincial Assembly of Orellana-Sucumbíos, ABP), 60–61

 261

262 index audits, environmental: biennial, per Environmental Management Plan, 107, 121; “prior audit” process and limitations, 7, 123–128, 139–140, 202; for remediation plans, 77, 121, 202 Auyero, Javier, 18

Barad, Karen, 163–164 Bellwether Exploration Company, 123–127, 139–140 bioaccumulation, 150, 151 birth defects: in livestock, 138, 149; personal experiences, 37, 150, 222 blame shifting: of causality to effects of settler colonialism, 61–63, 69–71, 143–144, 151–152, 158, 161–163; Chevron and PetroEcuador, 18, 78, 80, 198, 202, 235–236n17; Chevron denial of responsibility for Texaco/ TexPet, 79; deforestation, 69–70; and temporal deferral, 22; victim blaming, 174. See also causality “bodily knowledge,” 170 boiling of water meant as preventive, 37, 172, 229 Bonifaz, Cristóbal, 79, 164 bounding harm, 131–135. See also containment practices; regulatory apparatus in Ecuador (environmental); relationality of harm Breilh, Jaime, 159 brine, oil field (production waste), 76. See also production waters Brink, T. C., 97 BTEX (benzene, toluene, xylene), 89 Bucaram, Rene, 97 Bustamante, Teodoro, 241n6

Cabrera, Richard (independent expert), 70, 81, 161–162, 187–188, 241– 242n7 cacao, drying of under flares, 173 Callejas Ribadeneira, Adolfo, 83–84, 86–88, 90 Camilo (biologist), 143–145, 152, 164–167, 169, 170

cancer: causality arguments, 158, 160–161, 199–200; examples/cases, 222, 229–230; fears of, 16, 19, 29, 132, 138; rate increases, 17, 157, 160–161, 163 Cardoso, Pablo, 212 Carlos (engineer, Ministry of the Environment), 129, 131–132, 134 causality: blame shifting of effects of settler colonialism, 61–63, 69–71, 143–144, 151–152, 158, 161–163; challenges in demonstrating, 13, 176; evidentiary v. legal proof of, 9, 75, 89–91, 98–102, 196; oil company denial of, 158–159, 161–164, 196–206; proof and certitude issues, 9, 17–18, 19, 199. See also accountability for harm; blame shifting; evidence and methodologies; intent and negligence Cayambe Coca National Park (Parque Nacional Cayambe-Coca), 27 CBPR (community-based participatory research). See community-driven research methodologies ceiba (kapok) tree, 116 Ceibo Alliance, 235n14 CEPE (Corporación Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana, Ecuadorian State Petroleum Company), 3, 75, 163. See also consortium, TexPet-CEPE; PetroEcuador Cepek, Michael, 235n12 Chavez, Hugo, 108 chemical contaminants, examples of, xvii, xix, 79, 89, 138, 150. See also toxicants and contaminants “chemo-ethnography,” 12 Chen, Mel, 151, 170–171 Chevron: acquisition of Texaco, 18, 80; blame shifting with PetroEcuador, 18, 78, 80, 202, 235–236n17; corporate media tours, 181–182, 196–206, 213; and disputes over sampling methods, 84–91, 92–95, 158, 239n15, 241nn5–6; on profits, 77. See also Aguinda v. Texaco Chinese involvement in Amazon oil industry, 83, 114, 185 chongos (brothels), 57, 59

i n d e x  263 classism, environmental, 171, 182 clearing of land. See deforestation ClearWater project (nonprofit), 23 climate change and Correa policy decisions, 108, 215 Clínica Ambiental (Environmental Clinic), 17, 138 Coca (Puerto Francisco de Orellana), Orellana, Ecuador, 58, 201, 221 Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric dam, 83 coca cultivation, 67 Cockburn, Alexander, 28–29 Cofán people, 3–4, 27, 48, 172, 193. See also Emeregildo (Cofán elder, activist) Colombian refugees, 67 colonization of Indigenous lands. See under Indigenous nationalities colonos (settlers), 3. See also farmers, settler; settler colonialism (state sponsored) community-based participatory research (CBPR). See under community-driven research methodologies community-driven research methodologies: community-based participatory research (CBPR), 154–157; experiential records, value of, 175–177; v. conventional methodologies, 153–154, 158–160, 161–164; Yana Curi study, 157–158, 160. See also evidence and methodologies Company Man position, 114–116, 240n4 compensation for affected settlers: inadequate level of, 218–219; perceived as endpoint to harm, 7; and Remedial Action Plan, omission from, 77; requests for seen as self-serving, 63, 129–130. See also damages awarded by court decision Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas de la Amazonía Ecuatoriana (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, CONFENIAE), 38 conflict of interest issues for state, 78, 109–112 Cononaco-6 well site, 87 consortium, TexPet-CEPE: earnings and

profits, 77; expansion phases, 32, 56; formation of and overview, 75–76; joint venture begins, 3, 23; remediation plan for, 77–78. See also Aguinda v. Texaco; Napo Concession (Ecuadorian state to Texaco, 1964); PetroEcuador containment practices: focus on and inadequacy of, 129–135, 138, 224; and slow violence concept, 21–22, 133 Córdoba, Juan Antonio, 156 core samples, soil. See soil testing Corporación Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana (Ecuadorian State Petroleum Company, CEPE), 3, 75, 163. See also consortium, TexPet-CEPE corporate media tours, 181–182, 196–206, 213 Correa, Rafael, 103–104, 108–109, 212, 214–216 COVID-19 impact, 83 Craig, James (Chevron spokesperson), 197–206, 208 crime in Lago Agrio, 67–68 crisis-oriented focus on harm, 21 crop (coca) fumigation and drug wars, 67 crops and vegetation, effects of pollution on, 61–63, 98–99, 146, 241n4 Crude Reflections (Dematteis and Szymczak), 199 cuello de ganso (gooseneck) pipe, xix, 43. See also gooseneck pipes in waste pits cultural harm, 5, 49, 79 Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve, xviii, 68, 113, 120

damage: damage-centric research approaches, 154–155, 174; definitions of, 6–9, 78–79. See also harm, concepts and definitions of damages awarded by court decision, 3, 78–79, 81–82, 96, 129. See also compensation for affected settlers “daño” (harm), 6 David (taxi driver, ex-oil worker), 175, 211–212, 217 deaths (human), settler narratives of, 37, 190, 197, 222. See also miscarriages

264 index decolonial approaches to toxicity, 12, 14–15 deforestation: blame-shifting arguments, 69–70; due to state-sponsored colonization, 53, 68, 75–76, 172, 202; and extractive industry development, 28–30, 32–34, 46 Dematteis, Lou, 199 Di Paolo, William, 242n7 dirtied hand motif. See Mano Sucia campaign “dominant science,” 234n9 Donziger, Steven, 81–82 drilling site preparation and operation, description of, 32–35, 40 drought and settler migration, 50–51, 53, 145, 237n8 drug trade, 67 Dureno, Sucumbíos, Ecuador, 34–35, 113, 185, 187

earnings and profits made, 77, 83 Ecuadorian Oil Law (Aráuz), 77 EIAs. See Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) El Coca. See Coca (Puerto Francisco de Orellana), Orellana, Ecuador Emeregildo (Cofán elder, activist), 31, 33–39, 191, 200–201 Environmental and Social Reparation Fund (Programa de Reparación Ambiental y Social, PRAS), 20, 164 Environmental Audits (regulatory mechanism), 107. See also audits, environmental Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs): 1989 study and results, 163; as basis for regulatory strategies, 104–105; control apparatus overview, 107–108; and definitions of “impact” and “damage,” 6–9; limitations of and bias toward state point of view, 140–141; on proximity and causality, 46; public/community presentations of, 107–108, 113–115, 116–121 Environmental Justice movement and concept, 15, 147, 171, 182, 184

“environmental liabilities” as value-​ neutral rationalization, 6, 7–8 Environmental Management Plans, 107–108 Environmental Protection Agency (US), policies based on, 107 environmental racism/inequality, 15, 170–171, 182. See also Environmental Justice movement and concept Environmental Regulation, Executive Decree No. 2982 (1995), 106, 107 environmental regulations/standards. See regulatory apparatus in Ecuador (environmental) epidemiological methods. See community-​ driven research methodologies EP PetroEcuador. See PetroEcuador Escuela de Líderes (Leadership School), 23 Esmeraldas, Ecuador, xviii, 32, 73, 75. See also Sistema del Oleoducto de Transecuatoriano (Trans-Ecuadorian Oil Pipeline System, SOTE) Estuipiñan Recalde, Ney, 97, 98 evacuations of communities, 19–20, 136 evidence and methodologies: aerial images used in impact studies, 84, 95, 165– 167, 242n7; blame shifting causality to settler circumstances and behavior, 61–63, 69–71, 143–144, 151–152, 158, 161–163; damage-based research approaches, 154–155, 174; and disputes over testing methods, 84–91, 92–94, 158, 239n15, 241nn5–6; documentary, 95–98; fieldwork and study approach overview, 23–26; lack of prior to modern technology, 31; and relationality of harm, 4–6. See also causality; community-driven research methodologies; soil testing; Toxic Tours exploratory activities, 32–33, 40 exports of oil, 83, 108 exposure to toxicants: challenges in quantifying, 240–241n1; direct exposure, examples of, 37, 147, 149–151, 173, 219, 221–222; impact survey and register, 162–163; liability for and intersection of settler colonialism and

i n d e x 265 extraction, 61–63, 69–71, 143–144, 151–152, 158–159, 161–163; from road oiling, 10, 59, 62, 96, 98, 99, 145–146 extractive violence, 5, 18, 92–93, 140, 189, 220, 225–227. See also “slow violence” concept

Fajardo, Pablo, 83, 85–86, 87, 89, 188 farmers, settler: contamination and productivity/land value, 61–63, 152, 220; in-country migrants, 44–53; interconnectedness of settlement and oil industry, 29–32; numbers of, 75–76; overviews and narratives, 4, 30–32, 43–44; seeking farm/ homestead land, 3–4, 75–76; settler entitlement perspective, 49, 53, 55–56, 152; and state v. oil company blame shifting, 129–130. See also animals/ livestock, effects of pollution on; crops and vegetation, effects of pollution on; narratives of harm (lived experiences); settler colonialism (state sponsored) FDA (Amazon Defense Front). See Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía (Amazon Defense Front, FDA) fecal contamination of water, 201 feminist approach to toxicity, 13, 14, 151, 163–164 fines/damages assessed, 3, 78–79, 81, 96, 129. See also compensation for affected settlers fish, effects of pollution on, 172–173, 189 fish farming, commercial, 63, 64 Flammable (Auyero and Swistun), 18 flares, gas, xvii, 2, 148, 173, 192, 193, 207–208, 221. See also smoke and fumes, toxic exposure to formation waters, xvii, 95, 98, 129, 187, 234n8. See also production waters fraud and wrongdoing allegations in Aguinda case, 24–25, 78, 81–82, 126, 236n18 Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía (Amazon Defense Front, FDA), 23, 73, 112, 157, 182, 184

Fugro-McClelland, 77 fumigation of coca and ecological destruction, 67

gas flares. See flares, gas Geographic Military Institute (Instituto Geográfico Militar, IGM), 84, 95, 165, 166 Geraldo (settler, plaintiff in Aguinda case), narrative, 91–93 “god trick,” 11 gold, trade in, 58–59 Gonzalo, settler (narrative), 46, 48–50, 53–56, 61–62 gooseneck pipes in waste pits, xix, 2, 4, 43, 96, 203, 204, 214 grief, loss, and uncertainty, relationality of, 8, 16–19, 133, 174–176 Guanta-8 well, 20 Guayaquil, Guayas, Ecuador, xviii, 55, 229–230 Guerra, Alberto (judge), 80 Gulf Oil, 3, 75, 77

Hall, Laura, 242n7 Haraway, Donna, 11 harm, concepts and definitions of, 3–9, 10–11, 13–14, 70–71, 220–221. See also accountability for harm; bounding harm; damage; “impacts,” definitions of; lived experiences of harm; relationality of harm healthcare, inadequate, 5, 158–159, 161–162, 221–222 health effects: deaths (human), settler narratives of, 37, 190, 197, 222; deception/dishonesty of oil company employees, 146–147; miscarriages, 16, 36–37, 138, 150–151, 174; symptoms (physical) of environmental contamination, 16–17, 137–138, 148, 150, 163, 171, 221–222, 229; uncertainty and relational harm, 8, 16–19, 133, 174–176. See also birth defects; cancer Health Research and Advisory Center, Quito, 159

266 index heavy metals, 89, 138, 189 Hecht, Susanna, 28–29 helicopters, 32, 33–34 homicide rates in Ecuador, 67 “homogenization” of samples in inspections, 85–87, 89 Hoover, Elizabeth, 15, 134–135, 155, 170, 236n4 Hurtig, Anna-Karin, 156–163, 225. See also Yana Curi study

Ibarra, Velasco (President of Ecuador), 48, 56 IGM. See Geographic Military Institute (Instituto Geográfico Militar, IGM) “impacts,” definitions of, 5, 6–9, 10, 139. See also harm, concepts and definitions of Incinerox fire and aftermath, 135–138 Indigenous nationalities: aucas, 237n9; “civilizing” of, 38; displaced by state-sponsored colonialization, 3–4, 48, 49, 53, 76, 147, 172, 193; and gold trade, 58–59; racism against, 49 infrastructure development for extraction industry, 165–166; airports/landing strips, 32, 38, 65; major projects, 108, 181; platforms, 32–33; roads, 28–30, 40, 44, 46, 56, 69–70, 98, 217–218. See also pipelines injury, definitions of, 8–9 insects affected by oil industry activities, 192, 207–208 inspections: Incinerox fire and aftermath, 135–138; judicial inspections phase of Aguinda case, 81, 83–84, 85, 87, 89–91; Pit Project (assessment and documentation of contamination), 73–75, 85, 91–93; routine (Ministry of the Environment), 110–112; testing/ inspections of spill sites, 92, 128–135. See also audits, environmental; Toxic Tours Institute of Epidemiology and Community Health “Manuel Amunárriz,” (Instituto de Epidemiología y Salud Communitaria “Manuel Amunárriz,” IESCMA), 157

institutionalized violence (responses and protocols), 21, 134–135, 140–141, 220–221 Instituto Ecuatoriano de Reforma Agraria y Colonización (Ecuadorian Institute for Agrarian Reform and Colonization, IERAC), 53 intent and negligence, 8, 18, 79, 97, 146. See also “pollution by design” Inter-American Court of Human Rights, 79 iron oxide, 219 Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) block of the Yasuní Wildlife Reserve, 108–109

Jaime (plaintiff in Aguinda), 98–99 Jarrín, Maria Cristina, 241n6 Jesuit missionary interventions, 38 José (environmental engineer, Ministry of the Environment), 121–123, 127, 135–136 Josefina, settler (narrative), 51–52, 55 judicial inspections phase of Aguinda case, 81, 83–84, 85, 87, 89–91 junk and other waste, 43, 46

Kelsh, Michael A., 159, 161, 162 Kimerling, Judith, 78, 241n2 knowledge production and epidemiological method, 30–31, 153–154, 185. See also community-driven research methodologies; evidence and methodologies; narratives of harm (lived experiences) Kyoto Protocol, 106

Lago Agrio, overviews, xviii, 23, 50–52, 56–61, 63–69, 122–123 Lago Agrio-1 well, 32, 34–36, 191, 193–196 Lago Agrio-15 site, 73–75, 81, 83–84, 85, 87, 89–91 “Lago Agrio-Sour Lake” (Cardoso, art exhibition), 212 Lago Agrio station site, 17, 122–123, 145, 148

i n d e x 267 La Mano Sucia de Chevron (The Dirty Hand of Chevron) campaign, 212 landing strips/airports, 32, 38, 65 language and concepts of harm, 5, 6–9, 13–14, 220–221 “la técnica del gato” (the technique of the cat), 189–190 Lau, Edmund, 159, 161 Law for the Prevention and Control of Environmental Contamination, 96, 106 Law of Environmental Management (1999), 106 Law of Fishing and Fishing Development, 96, 106 Law of Hydrocarbons, 96, 106 Law of Waters, 96, 106 Leonard Exploration Company, 32 leukemia, 16, 157, 160–161. See also cancer liability issues. See accountability for harm; causality Liboiron, Max, 12, 15, 88, 120, 234n9 Lidia, settler (narrative), 145–153, 169–171, 174, 176–177 Limoncocha (missionary facility and hospital in), 37, 38, 201 lived experiences of harm: and effects of oil production in Ecuadorian Amazon, 28–32; exclusion of from risk assessments and reporting, 153, 216–217; relationality approach to, 18, 213, 224, 231; and universal theory of exposure, 120, 168–177; video documenting harm to communities, 206–208; v. measurable evidence as proof, 10, 101–102, 120–121, 140–141, 155–156, 168, 230–231. See also health effects; narratives of harm (lived experiences) livestock. See animals/livestock, effects of pollution on “Loja Colony,” 51 Loja Province, settlers from, xviii, 1, 31, 48, 50–51, 145 Lupe, settler (narrative), 57–59 Luz Maria and Wilmer, settler family (narrative), 1–3, 21–22, 168, 174 Lyons, Kristina, 156, 168

Maldonado, Adolfo, 156, 163 Manabí Province, 31, 50 Mano Sucia campaign, 212, 213–217 Marco Vinicio Iza Hospital, 61 María Aguinda et al. v. Chevron Corporation, 78. See also Aguinda v. Texaco mate/arbol de las calabazas (calabash tree), 48 Mauricio (engineer, Ministry of the Environment), 111–112, 113–115, 116–120 McHugh, Thomas, 161 media tours. See corporate media tours medical racism, 154 mental health effects: cancer, fears of, 16, 19, 29, 132, 138; uncertainty, relational harm of, 8, 16–19, 133, 174–176 military, Ecuadorian, 49, 51 mining industry, 189, 198 Ministerial Agreement No. 621 (1992), 106 Ministerio de Desarrollo Urbano y Vivienda (Ministry of Urban Development and Housing), 103 Ministerio de Recursos Naturales No Renovables (Ministry of Nonrenewable Natural Resources), 103 Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM), 96, 106 Ministry of the Environment (Ministerio del Ambiente, MAE), 6, 7, 106, 110–112. See also audits, environmental; Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) miscarriages, 16, 36–37, 138, 150–151, 174 missionaries in region, 37–38, 157, 172, 201 Mol, Annemarie, 88, 152 Moncayo, Donald, 23, 42, 45, 73–75, 91–93, 179, 190. See also Toxic Tours Morales, Evo (former president of Bolivia), 108 morete palm trees, 27, 32, 43 Morimoto, Libby, 159, 161 muds, drilling, 4, 119 Murphy, Michelle, 13–14 Museum of Oil, Lago Agrio, 242n2

268  index Nading, Alex, 19 “naked” in the face of contamination, 144, 152, 170 Napo Concession (Ecuadorian state to Texaco, 1964), xviii, 23, 75–76, 84–85. See also consortium, TexPet-CEPE Napo River, 27, 49, 108, 221 narratives of harm (lived experiences): deaths (human), 37, 190, 197, 222; Emeregildo (Cofán elder, activist), 31, 33–39, 191, 200–201; Geraldo (plaintiff in Aguinda case), 91–93; Gonzalo, 46, 48–50, 53–56, 61–62; Josefina, 51–52, 55; Lidia, 145–153, 169–171, 174, 176–177; Lupe, 57–59; Luz Maria and Wilmer, 1–3, 21–22, 168, 174; settlers in Aguarico and Shushufindi oil fields, 217–223; value of to knowledge production, 30–31, 153–154, 185 Narváez, Alberto, 163 National Institute of Statistics and Census (Instituto Nacional Estadisticas y Censos, INEC), 199 neoliberalism, response to, 108 Nixon, Rob, 20–21 noise of oil operations, 8, 33, 117–118, 120, 121, 148, 207 NorOriente, 51. See also Oriente region of Ecuador Nueva Loja, xviii, 23, 235n13. See also Lago Agrio, overviews

Ofrias, Lindsay, 189 oil field brine. See production waters oil prices, 83, 108 OPEC model agreements, 76 Operaciones Rio Napo, 239n12 Orellana Province, xviii; Coca (Puerto Francisco de Orellana), 58, 201, 221; interconnection of settlement and oil industry in, 29–32; San Carlos, 17, 157–159, 199 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 76 Orienco River, 34, 35

Oriente region of Ecuador, 30–32, 48, 51–53, 76, 79

palm cultivation, 29, 63 panela (unrefined cane sugar), 34 pantano de cacería (hunting swamp), 27. See also swamp below Aguarico-4 Parahuaco site, 17 Parque Nacional Cayambe-Coca (Cayambe Coca National Park), 27 pasivos ambientales (environmental liabilities), 7 paternalism, continuing effects of, 63, 130 Pati (environmental consultant with PetroEcuador), 7, 122–127 Patricia, settler (narrative), 53 Pennock, Dan, 93 Pérez Pallarez, Rodrigo, 95–96, 97 Permanente Court of Arbitration, The Hague, 82 pesticides in agriculture, 63 Petroamazonas, 73, 238–239n12 PetroEcuador: Chevron’s blame shifting with, 18, 78, 80, 198, 202, 235– 236n17; merger with Petroamazonas, 238–239n12; profits from Napo Concession, 77. See also consortium, TexPet-CEPE Petróleos de Venezuela, 239n12 petroviolence, 18. See also extractive violence pipelines: installation of, overview, 41–42; living with, examples of, 4, 29, 44, 45, 47, 193; operation overview, xviii; SOTE, 32, 73, 75; spills from, 99, 111, 128–133, 152–153, 218. See also gooseneck pipes in waste pits Pit Project (assessment and documentation of contamination), 73–75, 85, 91–93 pits. See waste pits plants and vegetation. See crops and vegetation, effects of pollution on plurinationalism, Correa’s commitment to, 109 “pollution by design,” 79, 203, 230–231. See also intent and negligence Pollution Is Colonialism (Liboiron), 15

i n d e x 269 polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), 155 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), 89, 138 poverty and socioeconomic inequality, 61, 108, 158, 161–162, 171–172 Prieto, Julio, 83 Primer of Oil and Gas Production (American Petroleum Institute), 97 “prior audits.” See under audits, environmental production data: Aguarico-4, 43; Ecuador, 83; Lago Agrio-15, 73; Texaco over 20 years (estimates), 3, 76 production waters: amounts produced, 73; chemical contaminants in, 150; direct exposure incidents, 190; dumping of, xvii, 3, 74, 76, 96, 234n8; reinjection technology, failure to use, 97–98 productivity (well) testing, 40, 42, 43 profit motive, 14, 18, 77, 209, 230 Programa de Reparación Ambiental y Social (Environmental and Social Remediation Program, PRAS), 20, 165 proof and certitude of causality, 9, 17–18, 19, 199 protest. See activism and advocacy Provincial Court of Sucumbíos, 3, 78 proximity and context of accountability, 22, 45–46, 144, 165–166 psychosocial health and environmental contamination, 17, 18–19. See also mental health effects public awareness efforts, 180, 187–189, 208–210, 212–213. See also activism and advocacy public works and services in Lago Agrio, slow implementation of, 59–60. See also waste management/sanitation services, lack of Puerto Francisco de Orellana (Coca). See Coca (Puerto Francisco de Orellana), Orellana, Ecuador

racial hierarchies within production sites, 33, 49 Racines, Alberto, 83 racism, environmental, 15, 171, 182. See

also Environmental Justice movement and concept Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), 81–82, 236n18 radioactive contaminants, 150, 175 rain, contamination of, xix, 38–39, 149 Rainforest Action Network, 184 Ramón (plaintiff in Aguinda), 98, 99 Regulation 1040 (2008), 107, 120–121 Regulation 1215 (2001), 107, 120, 125 regulatory apparatus in Ecuador (environmental): conflict of interest issues for state, 78, 109–112; evolution of, overview, 103–109; failures/inadequacies of, 76, 115–121, 133, 138–141; historical profile and retroactive application of, 80–81, 93–98. See also audits, environmental; inspections; Ministry of the Environment (Ministerio del Ambiente, MAE) reinjection technology, xvii, 47, 76, 97–98, 187, 202, 212 relationality of harm: and building theories of exposure, 155–156, 164–165, 168–174, 176–177; and concepts of accountability, 11–12, 25–26, 215– 217; demonstration of through Toxic Tours, 180–181, 191, 196; documenting experiential encounters, 206–210; harm of fear and uncertainty, 16–19; and temporality of slow violence, 21–22, 220; understanding and defining scope of harm, 5–9, 12–16, 46, 102, 223–227. See also harm, concepts and definitions of religious faith of settlers, 31, 49, 50, 52, 66, 145, 151 Remedial Action Plan (RAP) (1995), 77–78, 202 remediation efforts, 73–75, 76, 77–78, 121, 122, 202 representative samples, defining, 86–91, 92–93. See also soil testing research methodologies. See community-​ driven research methodologies; evidence and methodologies Reserva Producción Faunística Cuyabeno (Cuyabeno Reserve), 68

270 index Revolución Ciudadana movement, 103 RICO Act. See Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) riesgo (risk), 8 RioNapo company, 91, 92 risk, concepts and definitions, 8 “Risk-Service Contracts,” 238n4 rivers: contamination of, personal experience narratives, 34–39, 62, 219, 221; dependence on for fresh water, 131–132, 146, 163, 172, 221–222; non-extractive pollutants, 63, 201; remediation plans absent for, 77. See also Aguarico River road oiling, 10, 59, 62, 96, 98, 99, 145–146 roads. See infrastructure development for extraction industry; road oiling Roberts, Elizabeth, 174 Robinson, Scott, 34 Rojas Martín, Erasmo, 51 Rosanía, Giovanni, 77 rubber era, 38

Sacha station site, 17, 167 sampling methods. See soil testing San Carlos, Orellana, Ecuador, 17, 157–159, 199 sanitation services. See waste management/sanitation services, lack of San Sebastián, Miguel, 156–163, 199, 225. See also Yana Curi study Santa Cecilia, Sucumbíos, Ecuador, 32, 48, 49, 51–52 Sawyer, Suzana, 235n12 Schaffer, Simon, 100 scholarship, related: challenges for Indigenous nationalities, 236n2; on toxicity, 11–15, 233–234n7, 233n4, 234–235n11, 235n12, 235n15 scientific study and proof of harm, 16–19 Scott, Michael, 34 Secretaría de Hidrocarburos (Secretary of Hydrocarbons), 103 Selva Viva (Living Jungle, nonprofit organization), 23, 182–183 separation stations, 41, 113, 152

settler colonialism (state sponsored): and displacement of Indigenous nationalities, 3–4, 48, 49, 53, 76, 147, 172, 193; effects of v. industry effects and exposure liability, 61–63, 69–71, 143–144, 151–152, 158, 161–163; as form of violence, 15, 172, 193; IERAC stipulations for claims, 53–54; as lens for Indigenous studies, 170; profile and dynamic of, 30–32, 46, 48, 53, 69–70; settler entitlement perspective, 49, 53, 55–56, 152. See also farmers, settler settlers. See farmers, settler Sever, Lowell (Chevron consultant), 158–159 sex work and brothels, 57, 59 Shapiro, Nicholas, 170 Shell operation and settlement, Pastaza Province, Ecuador, 32, 49, 51, 54 “shifting baseline syndrome,” 240n9 Shuar people, 3–4, 48, 172 Shushufindi area, 19–20, 90, 97, 135–138, 217–218 Siekopai people, 3–4, 27, 33, 38, 48, 172, 187 Siona people, 3–4, 33, 38, 48, 172, 187 Sistema del Oleoducto de Transecuatoriano (Trans-Ecuadorian Oil Pipeline System, SOTE), 32, 73, 75 “situatedness” and ethical obligation, 15, 19, 226, 238n10 Sky Chief (film), 34–35 “slow violence” concept, 18, 19–22, 71, 136 smoke and fumes, toxic exposure to, 62, 76, 147–149, 153, 167–168. See also flares, gas Social Participation Regulation 1040 (Reglamento de Participación Social 1040), 107. See also Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) soil testing: of covered waste pits, 20, 45, 180, 183, 194; disputes over sampling methods, 84–91, 92–95, 158, 239n15, 241nn5–6; in “prior audit” inspection, 124–125 SOTE pipeline. See Sistema del Oleoducto

i n d e x 271 de Transecuatoriano (Trans-Ecuadorian Oil Pipeline System, SOTE) Sour Lake, Texas, 23, 212 spills, notable: Aguarico-4 platform, 202, 203; pipelines, 76, 99, 111, 128–133, 153, 218; testing/inspections of spill sites, 92, 128–135 “spudding,” 40 Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation (SLAPP), 82 Streeter-Phelps equation, 120 STS (science and technology studies), 12, 13, 14, 151, 156, 164 Suárez, Liliana, 83 Subra, William, 78 Sucumbíos Province, xviii; Dureno, 34–35, 113, 185, 187; establishment of, 50; interconnection of settlement and oil industry in, 29–32; poverty and quality of life in, 61; Provincial Court of Justice, 3, 78; Santa Cecilia, 32, 48, 49, 51–52; Tarapoa, 113–115; violence in, 66–68 Sucumbios: The Fifth Amazonian Province (Añazco), 50 sumak kawsay (good life), 187, 242n1 Summer Institute of Linguistics/Wycliffe Bible Translators (SIL), 38, 172 swamp below Aguarico-4, 27, 43–44, 219–220 swimmability factor, 120 Swistun, Débora, 18 Szymczak, Kayana, 199

Tarapoa, Sucumbíos, Ecuador, 113–115 Technical Summary Report for Aguinda case, 81, 162, 241–242n7 “techno-populism,” 108 temporality of harm: determining liability for past practices, 7, 103–104, 125–128, 138–141; and importance of relationality in toxic exposure studies, 164–168; and persistence of loss/harm, 174–176; and “slow violence,” 19–22. See also Toxic Tours testing and analysis. See soil testing; water, testing of

Texaco: acquisition of by Chevron, 80; designated operator of consortium, 76; joint venture begins with Gulf and CEPE (1972), 3; Napo Concession granted to (1967), 75; operations summaries, 3, 76; worker’s animosity toward settlers, 54, 55 Texaco-PetroEcuador consortium. See consortium, TexPet-CEPE TexPet (subsidiary of Texaco), 75, 78 TexPet-CEPE consortium. See consortium, TexPet-CEPE timber extraction, 29. See also deforestation time in relation to liability of harm, 7. See also temporality of harm Tomasi, Theodore, 161 total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH), 77, 89, 95, 120, 125, 239n13 tours of extraction sites and communities. See corporate media tours; Toxic Tours toxicants and contaminants: chemical contaminants, examples of, xvii, xix, 79, 89, 138, 148, 150, 189; as complex relations v. discreet entities, 13–15; definition, 12–13; heavy metals, 89, 138, 189; radioactive materials, 150, 175 Toxic Tours: Aguarico-4 site, 185–189, 193, 205; historical background and outline of tour components, 182–185; and increasing public awareness, 208–210, 212; Lago Agrio-1 site, 191– 194; overviews, 179–182, 190–191, 195–196, 211–213 “toxic uncertainty,” 18–19. See also uncertainty and relational harm Tuana, Nancy, 151 tumors. See cancer

uncertainty and relational harm, 8, 16–19, 133, 174–176. See also under cancer Unión de Afectados y Afectadas por las Operaciones Petroleras de Texaco (Union of the People Affected by Texaco’s Oil Operations, UDAPT), 17, 183 United Nations Earth Summit 1992, 106

272 index Vicariato de Aguarico (Catholic mission), 157 violence: extractive violence concept, 5, 18, 92–93, 140, 189, 220, 225–227; settler colonialism as form of violence, 15, 172, 193; “slow violence” concept, 18, 19–22, 71, 136. See under Sucumbíos Province Vistazo magazine, 95 volatile organic compounds (VOCs), 205–206 vulnerability concepts, 170–171

Walker, Brett, 11–12 Waorani people, 3–4, 48, 172 waste management/sanitation services, lack of, 61, 63, 161, 162, 201 waste pits: burning of, 62, 76, 148–149, 152–153; covering over of, 76, 166– 167, 189–190, 194; gooseneck pipes in, xix, 2, 4, 43, 96, 203, 204, 214; homes built on top of, 4, 45, 46, 168; negligent design and use of, 74, 76, 96; soil testing of, 20, 45, 180, 183, 194; in typical operation, xvii, xix, 43, 95; uncovered, 90, 165, 187–189,

202, 212–213. See also Pit Project (assessment and documentation of contamination); Toxic Tours water, contaminated: boiling of, meant as preventive method, 37, 172, 229; unavoidable use of from rivers, 131–132, 146–147, 163, 172, 221–222; wells for home use, 2, 100–101, 151, 216 water, testing of, 89, 123, 189 water deliveries in affected communities, 131, 133, 134 water treatment systems, 23, 63, 162 wealth inequality in Ecuador, 171–172 Woodward-Clyde Consultants, 77 Wunder, Sven, 70 Wylie, Sara, 18, 155–156, 236n1

Yana Curi study, 157–158, 160–161 Yánez Ruiz, Germán (judge), 83, 85 Yasuní-ITT initiative, 108–109 Yasuní Wildlife Reserve, xviii, 108–109

Zambrano Lozada, Nicolas (judge), 78–79, 81, 85, 93, 94–98, 238n11, 241n2