When Servio Curipoma built his house in a small plot of land in the Ecuadorian Amazon, he did not know that a pool of oil lay underneath. This was one of the nearly one thousand pools Texaco dug for waste disposal from its oil extraction activities, which it then covered again with soil to hide it from sight. Twenty years later, in 2008, Servio and his family were relocated in a new house, some 20 meters away. By then, both his parents had died of cancer.
The rural parish of San Carlos, in the Amazonian province of Orellana, is located in the Sacha oil field, one of the largest in Ecuador. Discovered in 1969 by the US transnational company Texaco, it was bought by Chevron in 2001. In Sacha well no. 56 you can still see the remnants of its infrastructure and of the foundations of the house the Curipoma family left behind. Ermel Chávez, leader of the Front for the Defence of the Amazon, points to the land where Servio grew his bananas. "If you put a stick in here, for example, water and oil come out. The is oil is just covered up. Nobody knows the diameter, but they always built large pools, up to three metres deep and 30 metres in diameter”.
