Crude
A Memoir
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Oil waste was everywhere—on the roads, in the rivers where they fished, and in the water that they used for bathing, cooking, and washing. Children became sick and died, cases of stomach cancer skyrocketed, and women miscarried or gave birth to children with congenital disorders. The American oil company Texaco—now part of Chevron—extracted its first barrel of crude oil from Amazonian Ecuador in 1972. It left behind millions of gallons of spilled oil and more than eighteen million gallons of toxic waste.
In Crude, Ecuadorian lawyer and activist Pablo Fajardo gives a firsthand account of Texaco’s involvement in the Amazon as well as the ensuing legal battles between the oil company, the Ecuadorian government, and the region’s inhabitants. As a teenager, Fajardo worked in the Amazonian oil fields, where he witnessed the consequences of Texaco/Chevron’s indifference to the environment and to the inhabitants of the Amazon. Fajardo mobilized with his peers to seek reparations and in time became the lead counsel for UDAPT (Union of People Affected by Texaco), a group of more than thirty thousand small farmers and indigenous people from the northern Ecuadorian Amazon who continue to fight for reparations and remediation to this day.
Eye-opening and galvanizing, Crude brings to light one of the least well-known but most important cases of environmental and racial injustice of our time.
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The pollution of Indigenous Ecuadorian land by American oil companies—described here as the "Amazonian Chernobyl"—propels the activism at heart of this visually stunning graphic memoir, which is part horror story, part urgent manifesto. Fajardo, one of 10 children from a poor family, travels from the Pacific Coast to find work in Lago Agrio, an oil-drilling boom town built by Texaco. In addition to hard labor, he finds both the land and human beings are treated as dumping ground. Supported by progressive Franciscan fathers, Fajardo goes to law school so he can hold Chevron (which owns Texaco) accountable for the destruction it leaves upon its 1993 departure. The seven-year, $9 billion case is won, only for the plaintiffs to face years of violent retribution, corruption, and nonpayment. As an afterword by Amnesty International underscores, multinational corporations slither between jurisdictions, getting away with literal murder (cancer skyrockets among locals who drink polluted water). Timelines and maps clarify the issues, and though the legal nuances are dense, the power of the testimony comes from Fajardo's narrative and Roudeau's impressionistic depictions of the Amazonian tapestry and inhabitants. Though UN legislation offers glimmers of hope, Fajardo admits that "after 25 years of fighting, I'm starting to think justice is a fiction, a nice story to tell children." Readers will root for Fajardo's account to herald meaningful change.
