Between 1965 and 1990, a subsidiary of Chevron, the fourth-largest oil company in the world, polluted the Amazon rainforest with billions of gallons of toxic waste, according to Agence France Presse.

That waste contaminated groundwater supplies for more than 30,000 Indigenous people in the eastern provinces of Sucumbios and Orellana in Ecuador.

For decades, a knotty court battle has played out in domestic and international courts trying to pin blame and win restitution for those affected, according to The Star.

Now a judge upheld an earlier ruling that the company must pay $9.5 billion in damages, setting a potentially important precedent for Indigenous and environmental rights, The Philadelphia Tribune reports.

Whether or not the fine will be paid, however, is another matter. Chevron long ago withdrew its operations from Ecuador and has rejected its responsibility in the matter, arguing that the state-run oil company Petroecuador is responsible for the pollution, AFP reports. The oil giant has even filed a counter lawsuit against the plaintiffs.

Texaco partnered with Petroecuador during the period of contamination, and Texaco was acquired by Chevron in 2001.


Because Chevron is refusing to be held accountable in Ecuador, the plaintiffs have to seek justice in international courts.

They have so far tried to sue Chevron in Brazil, Argentina, the United States, and Canada. In the latest international development, a Canadian court ruled that Chevron does not have to pay the fine on May 23.

The new outcome in Ecuador will give the plaintiffs another chance to try the case outside of the country, according to AFP.

“There is no turning back,” Pablo Fajardo, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told AFP. "It might take us a bit longer in foreign courts, but Chevron must pay. It cannot act like a fugitive from justice forever.”


The lawsuit is one of many playing out around the world that pit Indigenous rights against alleged corporate malfeasance. The Amazon rainforest, in particular, has become the site of contentious legal battles and protests over environmental degradation.

Since 1978, nearly 300,000 square miles of Amazon rainforest have been destroyed. The vast forest has been subjected to intensive mineral extraction, urban development, agriculture, cattle-raising, and more, which has greatly harmed its biodiversity.


The destruction of the Amazon and other forests around the world leads to the displacement of Indigenous communities, which hold around 20% of the world’s land, yet have legal rights to just 10%, according to the World Resources Institute.

Land owned by Indigenous groups experience 50% less deforestation, WRI notes, which means that protecting these rights are critical to protecting the health of the planet as events like climate change intensify.

The lawsuit in Ecuador is about receiving compensation for grave injuries, but it’s also about protecting the right to a clean and healthy planet.
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VIDEO: The indigenous community of the Ecuadoran Amazon rejoices after the country's highest court upheld in a ruling a $9.5 billion damages award against oil giant Chevron over decades of pollution that harmed indigenous people pic.twitter.com/cKmklQfuG5

— AFP news agency (@AFP) July 12, 2018

“Every time a shaman dies, it is as though a book is burned,” says Jose Roque mournfully as he hacks through a vine with a machete.

The 63-year-old indigenous Shipibo healer is showing me around an overgrown jungle garden behind the traditional thatched-roof hut he calls home here in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon.

Roque has long been cultivating plants on this dense patch of rain forest to treat a host of ills, including headaches, nausea, inflammation, skin rashes and menstrual pains.

Once dismissed as primitive charlatans, medicine men like Roque are increasingly being recognized by scientists for their very real abilities.

Their skills and knowledge, acquired over thousands of generations spent experimenting with Amazonian wildlife, are now viewed as key to unlocking the rain forest’s vast potential to provide new pharmaceuticals — for everything from the common cold to cancer and AIDS.

Already five of the top 10 prescription medicines in the United States are derived from living organisms. For cancer drugs, the proportion is even higher, with three-quarters coming from biological sources.


And nowhere is richer in animal and plant species than the Amazon, the most biodiverse ecosystem on Earth.

Yet testing plants for potential treatments is a long and costly business. Only one of every 10,000 to 20,000 natural compounds screened by scientists ever becomes a drug approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.


That’s where native peoples come in, with their huge head start over Western medicine on identifying the jungle’s active compounds.

But younger generations here are increasingly rejecting their ancestral roots for a Western lifestyle. That means scientists are losing the shortcut of indigenous knowledge to finding the most promising natural substances in the world’s largest tropical rain forest.

During the 20th century, 90 tribes are thought to have disappeared across the Amazon, an area two-thirds the size of the contiguous United States. Some were wiped out by Western diseases to which they had no immunity. Others vanished as their members abandoned their traditional culture just to survive in the white man’s world.


In the last 15 years, the pace has accelerated as roads, logging, agriculture, mining and damming increasingly penetrate the jungle, says Michael Harner, a US anthropologist who has been studying Amazonian shamanism for more than 50 years.

“I am pessimistic. It is a very serious situation,” adds Harner, who founded the San Francisco-based Foundation for Shamanic Studies.

Protecting the Amazon jungle will not be enough. Culture must be maintained, too. This study of a Colombian tribe, led by a University of California, San Francisco expert, noted how their “healing tradition is a complex art of diagnosis, examination, communication, ritual and treatment, which cannot be ‘saved’” simply by preserving plants.


No one seems to know for sure how many medicine men still survive across the Amazon. But the scale of their natural cabinet is staggering. Just in the northwestern Amazon, locals use 1,300 different plants medicinally.

“It is very severe what is happening to our people,” says Roque. “When the young don’t learn and the old die, the myths die too. The few elderly people who still know our songs don’t dare sing them because they get laughed at.”

For Roque’s children and grandchildren, temptations to break with tradition are all around. They live in Santa Clara, on the outskirts of Pucallpa, one of Peru’s fastest growing cities. Their village was founded in the 1970s by missionaries who encouraged the Shipibos to give up their nomadic lifestyle and settle there.

Fueled by illegal logging, Pucallpa is high-decibel, chaotic and vibrant. The city is packed with discos, bars, fast food joints and street markets full of cheap, Chinese-produced clothing and blaring salsa music. Two huge, gleaming malls have been built in the last 10 years, as Western consumer culture takes this rain forest frontier by storm.

No wonder towns like Pucallpa across the Amazon draw native youngsters from the surrounding rain forest.

Behind them, they are leaving aging medicine men without the chance to pass on their unique knowledge to the younger generations. “Not a single tribe that has gone extinct in the Amazon had anything written down,” Plotkin says.

Which is why, as Roque puts it, the loss of each shaman is equal to the destruction of a treasured book.

It was once thought to only exist in legend, but a terrifying river that can boil its victims alive has been discovered in the heart of the Amazon.

The river was brought to the world's attention by a scientist who believed that the legendary geothermal formation couldn't possibly be real.

Now, he has shared video clips which explore the region's breathtaking uniqueness in a mini-documentary. Andrés Ruzo explored the river, in the Mayantuyacu region of Peru, in a short film produced by Great Big Story.

The name of the river, Shanay-timpishka, means boiled with the heat of the sun in the language of the area's inhabitants. The geoscientist says the heat of the air coming off the river is so intense that you can feel it burning in your nose and your lungs.

Speaking in the footage, Mr Ruzo said: 'The hottest temperature I've measured is 210°F (100°C).

'To put that into everyday terms, the average coffee is roughly 130°F (55°C). 'It's hard to physically imagine that much hot water. 'You stick your hand in, and you will see second or third degree burns in a matter of seconds.


The river has long been a legend in Peru, but when the geoscientist heard about it, he thought such a phenomenon couldn't possibly exist.


He believed that it would require a huge amount of geothermal heat to boil even a small river, and the Amazon basin is far from any active volcanoes.

Matsés Indians from the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon have denounced the threat of oil exploration on their ancestral land, which is home to uncontacted tribes.

 The Matsés live in the Amazon Uncontacted Frontier, the stretch of land that straddles the borders of Peru and Brazil. There are more uncontacted tribes here than anywhere else on the planet.

Two oil blocks lie on their ancestral land. The first is in an area home to uncontacted tribes. In 2012, Canadian oil company Pacific E&P began oil exploration in this block and it is now poised to do so again.

Oil exploration is devastating for uncontacted tribes. They are the most vulnerable peoples on the planet and any operations on their land increase the risk of unwanted contact. History shows that oil exploration can wipe out uncontacted Indians, who have no resistance to the diseases brought by outsiders.

One Matsés man said at the meeting: “I’m worried because those isolated groups don’t know about the oil companies.”

Another oil block lies on land that is titled to contacted Matsés. In 2016, Pacific E&P pulled out, in the face of stiff opposition from the tribe. The tribe are now campaigning for the concession to be cancelled for good.


Another Matsés man said: “I don’t want my children to be destroyed by oil and war. That’s why we’re defending ourselves… and why we Matsés have come together. The oil companies … are insulting us and we won’t stay silent as they exploit us on our homeland. If it’s necessary, we’ll die in the war against oil.”

The local indigenous organization ORPIO is taking the Peruvian government to court over the threat of oil exploration.
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Brazil’s Federal Environmental Agency announced the cancellation of licensing for the polemic São Luiz do Tapajós mega-dam, the largest hydroelectric project planned for the Amazon.

Following recommendations by Federal Public Prosecutors, the Brazilian agency for indigenous affairs, the decision reflects an official recognition that the São Luiz do Tapajós project is plagued by insurmountable legal obstacles: the flooding of indigenous lands that would cause the forced removal of indigenous Munduruku people from the traditional Sawre Muybu territory – prohibited under Brazil’s Constitution - and a series of other adverse social and environmental consequences of immense proportions that made it impossible to confirm the project’s viability.

The Munduruku people, along with International Rivers, Amazon Watch and other partners, welcomed today’s decision as a great success and an important precedent case. “We, Munduruku people, are very happy with the news. This is very important for us. Now, we will continue to fight against other dams in our rivers,” said Arnaldo Kabá Munduruku, Munduruku General Chief.

“Today’s decision is a major victory for the Munduruku, their allies and the rule of law in Brazil, sending a shot across the bow of the dam industry juggernaut in the Amazon,” noted Brent Millikan Amazon Program Director at International Rivers. “A next step will be to open public debate on the underlying causes of systematic violations of human rights and environmental law, in order to avoid similar disasters with other planned dams in the Tapajos and elsewhere in the Amazon.”

Another fundamental obstacle for São Luiz do Tapajós has been the imminent flooding of the Sawre Muybu indigenous territory, recently recognized by FUNAI as traditional Munduruku lands that should be demarcated according to the Brazilian Constitution. In early 2016, FUNAI expressed a formal opinion to IBAMA that the project would violate Brazil’s Constitution, given that it would forcibly remove Munduruku communities.


“We have been awaiting such a welcome announcement from the Brazilian government for more than a decade, while witnessing the tragic and unnecessary damming of the Madeira and Xingu Rivers during this time,” said Christian Poirier of Amazon Watch. “We are honored to stand beside the Munduruku people in their steadfast struggle in the defense of the Tapajós. Today’s victory belongs to them and will hopefully signal the end to further destructive dams in the Amazon.”
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Contact was a traumatic experience for many of the Matsés people in Peru's Amazon. Hear the tribe speak in their own words about life before contact, and prospects for their fellow tribespeople who remain uncontacted.

 There are around 2,200 Matsés living on the Peru-Brazil frontier in the Amazon rainforest. The Yaquerana river runs through the heart of their land, marking the international border that separates their home.

But to the Matsés, the streams, floodplains, and white-sand forests make up an ancestral territory that is shared by the entire tribe. Matsés hunt for animals such as tapir and paca – a large rodent – in the forest using bows and arrows, traps, and shotguns.

Each community lives close to the riverbank, and every morning children and adults will set off to catch the day’s fish. A wide variety of crops grow in their gardens, including staples such as plantain and manioc.

Chapo, a sweet plantain drink, is always on the boil in a Matsés home. Women cook the ripened fruit and squeeze its soft flesh through homemade palm-leaf sieves. The delicious drink is then served warm by the fire, and most often drunk while swinging in a hammock!
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