In recent years communities from Ecuador's Amazon have made demands for compensation from Texaco for polluting rivers and lakes near their homes and destroying their food supply. Texaco is responsible for extensive contamination of Amazon land and water as well as the oil and toxin pits that are scattered throughout the Ecuador countryside. These pits were made by Texaco to collect wastewater produced by the oil wells. Even today, in this age of technology, these pits continue to be used by Petroecuador to dispose of the waste. The overflow from these pits is allowed to run into the region's streams and rivers causing mass pollution. Texaco has not only left these pits filled with such toxins as arsenic, carbon dioxide, lead, hydrogen sulfides, mercury, acids, industrial solvents, and lethal concentrations of chloride salt, but also destroyed

thousands of acres of rainforest by cutting down trees. In August of 1993, Ecuadorian plaintiffs filed the Sequihua suit against Texaco in Texas. In November of the same year, Aguinda v. Texaco was filed, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, to force Texaco to compensate the affected indigenous people. This class-action suit against Texaco was filed on behalf of thousands of indigenous and other local peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Maria Aguinda states that contaminated water from nearby oil wells drilled by Texaco has caused her to suffer stomach ailments and rashes, as well as loose livestock. She can no longer bath or do laundry in the nearby rivers, which are blackened with oil.

In 1995, the Federal District Court in Texas dismissed the Sequihua case. The following year the Aguinda case was also dismissed. The plaintiffs in the Aguinda case appealed the District Court's decisions. In October of 1997 the Second Circuit Court remanded Aguinda to Federal District Court in New York for further consideration.

Tribal leaders from Ecuador's Oriente were back in a New York court In February of 1999 to try and get the one billion dollar pollution suit against Texaco to be heard in the United States rather than in Ecuador. The plaintiff argues that it should be heard in the United States. Their arguments are based on a 1798 U.S. law called the Alien Tort Claims Act, initially intended to allow litigants to gain redress for piracy, but the plaintiffs' lawyers claim also covers environmental cases. The plaintiff's lawyers argue that the case should be heard in New York State, where Texaco is headquartered, and were the concern of courts here. Texaco's lawyers argue that the case should be heard in Ecuador where operations were conducted, where the plaintiffs are located, where the state oil company Petroecuador is located.

Beginning in 1992, waste pits at dozens of Texaco well sites were covered with dirt, without testing, treating or removing the wastes. They called this a "cleanup". In 1995, Texaco made a weak clean up agreement with the Ecuadorian government. Texaco committed to cleaning up only one hundred thirty nine of over six hundred toxic waste pits it left in Ecuador, calling sites that register up to five hundred times the hydrocarbons permissible by Unites States standards clean. Texaco failed to give local workers any safety training, nor did they provide them with any medical or emergency care. The workers were only paid one hundred fifty dollars a month for a mandatory eighty-hour workweek, while Texaco's CEO earned over one point eight million dollars during the year.