Write on Human Rights: Take Two

Next up in our "blog on the Human Rights Watch Film Festival" contest--Gregory Hess' look at the particularly timely doc, Crude!


From the opening image of Crude, of an old woman with a long wooden piercing stuck through her nose, a red flower adorning it at one end, the path of Joe Belinger's documentary would seem mostly cut and dried. The woman, a member of one of the myriad Amazon Indian tribes in the Ecuadorian rainforest, tells calmly of the hardships her people have endured at the hands of a decades-old botched oil drilling campaign, which displaced thousands of natives and left a trail of ecological havoc in its path. There is evidence of the oil to be found everywhere in her daily life, spilling out into the rivers and laying stagnant in decaying runoff pools, shoddily hidden and left behind by the oil companies. Animals no longer thrive in the region, and diagnoses of cancers and devastating skin ailments abound. Heroes and villains would appear set from the get-go, but Crude commendably dismantles our preconceptions, revealing instead a thirty-year morass of poor decisions, mismanagement and legal jockeying as mucky and dirty as the crude which flows up from the wells.

The Amazonian tribes live like many other non-westernized groups do, with a smattering of modern ways grafted onto their ancient beliefs. Though they may sport eyeglasses and factory-hemmed clothing, their painted faces and rare dialects tell of a deeply rooted lifestyle, which was violently upended when the Ecuadorian government chose to allow Texaco to begin drilling for oil in their midst in the 1960's. Texaco would go on to relinquish the wells to PetrolEcuador, the state-run oil company in 1992, but both operated the pumping stations with equal disregard for the inhabitants of the region.

These native Indians share a quiet grief, a powerful mourning for the loss of their homeland (in a moving scene, a man who has lost both of his two sons recalls his pain with a matter-of-fact calm). Only with the help of a well-funded American legal team and one unlikely Ecuadorian rookie lawyer, Pablo Fajardo, were the effected inhabitants able to summon their collective anger into action, mounting a massive $27 billion class-action suit against Chevron, who merged with Texaco in 2001. But that was in 1993, and the plaintiffs have since been up against not only the limitless pockets of Chevron’s legal team, but also a crooked Ecuadorian government where judges commonly accept bribes and practice law as a distinct afterthought. Thus, for more than a decade the fate of the lawsuit has been on perpetually shaky ground. Fajardo is the film’s most intriguing character, a native Ecuadorian who had not left the country until 4 days before he was brought to New York City to meet with his American legal partners. His rage is palpable and, in a film filled with impassioned shouting, the only rage we can truly trust. He too has lost a brother in this fight, and though he begins the film fresh and not yet disillusioned by the ways of the Ecuadorian (and American) legal systems, his experience in this fight is long.

Texaco maintains that they cannot be held legally responsible for the repercussions of these wells, as they were not in control of them for their entire lifespan. It's classic damage control spin; you've heard it all before, and with BP's not-dissimilar nightmare unfolding right now in the Gulf of Mexico, you will soon hear it again. Though Belinger's film occasionally falls victim to a few PBS-friendly documentary trappings (use of vintage Texaco PR films is effective but old hat), on balance the director maintains a remarkably even hand. Neither side is expressly indicted by the film, and rightly so, as everyone on both ends has a clear agenda. Steve Donziger, the foulmouthed American lawyer for the plaintiffs, says all the right things and offers some cutthroat legal coaching to the Indians who are brought to America, but he is still collecting a healthy paycheck. Indeed, the whole endeavor is being funded by a private law firm hoping to cash in on the positive press if a verdict in the case is ever won. Texaco has no desire to play the villain, and, much as we may desire to paint them as such (I've never heard more squirming in a theater than when Texaco spokesmen were on-screen) we should be careful not to assign blame too carelessly.

It is unclear what (if any) economic gains Ecuador might have reaped from its foolhardy decision to allow Texaco to drill in the region, but the environmental and social impacts 30 years later are could not be more clear. No amount of money could undo the heartache of those who have lost their loved ones, let alone the loss of use of ancestral lands which these tribes have depended on for generations. But, armed with a boisterous American lawyer and an ever-growing stockpile of international attention, they are going after Chevron anyway. Berlinger’s film endeavors to show that the human cost is paramount. True victory would be in assigning fault to this fiasco, which is undoubtedly what Texaco fears the most, and ultimately the hardest thing to pin down. So, the two sides clash on, each one hoping to clear that highest hurdle and end this war at last with as the clear victor. But the course stretches out into the distance, and with so much at stake, there are many miles still to go. Some predict that a verdict in the case will take yet another decade of legal corralling and case-building.

If it takes a village to raise a child, what does it take to raise up a village? For starters, as Berlinger’s film illuminates, it takes a lot of American money, a glossy magazine spread or two, and some British rock stars. When Ecuador elects a new President who understands the gravity of the situation and pledges to help, the team goes ballistic, sensing a new opportunity in their decade-long struggle. The vibrant pasillo music reminded me vaguely of a zither, which took my thoughts to Orson Welles famous speech on the Vienna Ferris wheel in The Third Man. Looking down at the people below, he asks, “what if one of those tiny dots were to suddenly… stop moving?” Would anyone notice? The fact that footage of the film’s interviews has been successfully subpoenaed by Chevron as part of the still-pending lawsuit should speak loud enough for the gravity of the film’s content. In Chevron’s case, those tiny dots could be an entire village, a language, a way of life. And they’re determined to keep you from looking down to notice.