ason, when it came to cleaning up the sludge12), the government assigned just 133 of the 321 sites to Texaco; PetroEcuador took responsibility for the rest. Texaco spent $40 million in its cleanup efforts, and when the work was done, analysts from a Quito university came to collect oil and water samples. By 1998, all of Texaco’s sites had been approved, and the Ecuadorian government signed a full release.
By then, the first lawsuit was already being argued in U.S. courts. That suit, filed in New York in 1993, was eventually dismissed, but it paved the way for the current suit, filed in Ecuador in 2003. This time, Chevron13) is the defendant—the California-based oil company purchased Texaco in 2001. Chevron rests its defense on three pillars: Chevron itself never operated in Ecuador; the Ecuadorian government already released Texaco from these claims; and, finally, the plaintiffs have committed fraud.
