CRUDE
The other day I came home from the beach in Malibu and discovered that I had a big black spot on my skin. When I tried to wipe it off it was sticky and I had to rub hard. I picked up my bathing suit top and noticed the same sticky black gunk, and when I smelled it there was no doubt it was petroleum. Somehow during my wave frolic in the glorious Pacific Ocean, I had bumped into some oil floating about, without even noticing. And not in Santa Monica, I know better than to swim there, but way up in Malibu, where the rich people live.
This incident took place about 2 weeks after I saw Joe Berlinger’s maddeningly gripping and and inadvertently absurdist documentary about environmental, corporate malfeasance. Chevron/Texaco has been fighting charges for more than 10 years that it is responsible for polluting a larger area than the Exxon Valdez spill. As a result of Chevron/Texaco’s maliciously careless processing and disposal, there has been an epidemic of disease due to the toxic contamination of the rivers, groundwater and land in the areas where drilling took place.
It all began back in 1964 when Texaco began exploring and then later drilling for oil in Ecuador. The drilling was centered in the ancestral territory, still occupied by the Cofan indigenous people. The drilling went on but by 1992, the state run oil company, Petro Ecuador acquired ownership of the fields. The following year, 1993, a class action suit was filed in New York against Texaco by Ecuadoran plaintiffs. The next 9 years were spent on a jurisdictional struggle and the suit was finally moved to Ecuador.
Joe Berlinger became involved when he met Steven Donziger and then traveled to Ecuador, witnessing the environmental damage and devastating health effects on the Cofan people. Donziger is a New York City based attorney who has helped shepherd the lawsuit from the beginning, working closely with the Ecuadoran plaintiff’s attorney and true hero, Pablo Fajardo. The film begins at the time of the on site visits which are required by the Ecuadoran legal procedure. The judge, the attorneys for both plaintiff and defendents as well as witnesses and bystanders all visit various sites of damage and make their cases. In these segments we see Fajardo make his arguments, we see petroleum soaked mud removed from the ground on which they stand. We also hear, the Chevron’s main attorney, Adolfo Callejas, use a variety of arguments from it’s not Chevron’s responsibility, to the plaintiff’s attorneys are simply exploiting the little people and looking for money.
Of course this is always the problem on the bad side: the arguments don’t always match. In the course of the film we also hear from other Chevron representatives who insist that both the clean-up of the sites was conducted properly, and that there is no proven link between the Cofan communities epidemic of cancer and hydrocarbon exposure caused by pollution. In the face of pools of slime hidden in the forest next door to where people live or even under where people were told they could build homes, it cannot help but look disingenuous, to say the least.
When Trudy Styler and Sting become involved a whole new level of attention is drawn to the plight and the lawsuit. No one can believe that these people who have always fished and lived by the river can neither eat the fish nor drink the water. Next are fundraisers and temporary solutions involving drums that catch rainwater. In the end, Chevron is still fighting and whole families, from babies with blistering skin diseases to teenagers and adults with cancer are sick and dying. You look on, enraged at the way in which corporate greed preys on the most disenfranchised.
Then you read about the lack of enforcement of the Clean Water Act here, right here in both municipal water supplies as well as places near coal mines in West Virginia. Then you swim into an oil slick and ask yourself who can I sue.
Crude opens in Los Angeles on September 18, 2009.
Directed and produced by Joe Berlinger; edited by Alyse Ardell Spiegel; produced by J.R. Deleon and Richard Stratton; Director of Photography, Juan Diego Perez; music by Wendy Blackstone. Released by First Run Features. Running time: 104 minutes.
With: Pablo Fajardo; Luis Yanza; Emergildo Criollo; Steven Donziger; Trudie Styler; and Rafael Correa; and all the bad Chevron people.
