When we left off last time, it was 2003, and the Ecuadorian plaintiffs had just agreed

to refile their case against Chevron, Texaco down in Ecuador.

At the center of this case were these waste pits.

Where Texaco would dump toxic wastewater from oil drilling.

When the case was first filed in 1993 in New York, Texaco said it had cleaned up its fair share,

and that anything left was Petro Ecuador's mass.

The plaintiffs said the cleanup was no good, and that Texaco had overseen all operations,

and should clean it all up. That it should be based on who did what, not who got what percentage

of the profits. Ten years later, the arguments hadn't changed, but the defendant had.

Chevron's acquisition of Texaco was complete in 2001, and it had inherited this case as part of

that acquisition. Today, we're going to look at what happened next as the trial got underway in Ecuador.

I want to tell you about one of my favorite podcasts. It's called Flood Lions from The Atlantic.

In this year of crisis, it's worth remembering that the country has been through a lot of big

extreme weather disasters before, and history often repeats itself. Flood Lions is about hurricane

Katrina in New Orleans. It follows the lives of four people who lived through the flooding and

it's aftermath, and it shows how government failures and misinformation led to tragedies far

beyond what the hurricane caused. Host Van Nucrick shows what we can learn today from that disaster

15 years ago. Listen to Flood Lions wherever you get your podcasts.

A bunch of people told us that if we wanted to understand what the oil pollution in the

Amazon really looked like, we had to talk to Donald Moncaio. He was born and raised right at the

epicenter. My name is Donald Moncaio, and I was born about 200 meters from the second well,

Texaco Drilled in the Amazon in 1967 in 1967.

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