Enron/Shell and Hard Lives made Harder: A Front Line Account of an Environmental Disaster Imported from Abroad

Dear Readers:

Our main project at The Democracy Center in the coming months is wrapping up work on a new book, a series of stories looking at Bolivia's dance – sometimes hopeful, but more often tragic – with economic and political forces from abroad.

One of those stories is the tale of a massive Enron/Shell (Transredes) oil spill into the waters of the ancient Disaguadero River during the first month of the new millennium. It is a story that reveals in stark reality how foreign corporations manipulate the rules to get away with an economic disaster. To chronicle the story close-up, one of our young researchers, Christina Haglund, has not only reviewed all of the key scientific and legal documents in the case – for weeks at a time she disappears to go hike and bike the length of the river and to live in the communities and homes of the people affected.

Here is a preview of that investigation, Christina's account of her recent time spent with Doña Ignacia, an animal herder and farmer whose life was turned upside down by two of the world's largest corporations and their recklessness in Bolivia's highlands.

Jim Shultz

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Enron/Shell and Hard Lives made Harder: A Front Line Account
of an Environmental Disaster Imported from Abroad

We both woke up with full bladders.

I unburied myself from the thick weight of llama wool blankets that she handmade and crawled over her smallness in the darkness, the cinnamon colored woman who refused to let me sleep alone in the Bolivian Alitplano.

She tickled me, knowing where I was going and we found our way into slip-on shoes. Three of my steps and five of hers got us out of the house and into the night. Why is it that women always go to the bathroom together? But this was no particular place, just outside.

Doña Ignacia knew how much longer the night would go on and explained to me how while we tried to keep our skirts dry. She pointed out the one star that she follows as her clock in the dark, and the one she still sees when she starts every new day.

It was so cold. We had barely been exposed to the elements five minutes and all I wanted was to retreat back to bed. Doña Ignacia didn’t seem to notice the cold that hummed all around us. The kind of cold that chaps cheeks dry and chaps the earth into dust to be found even in clean laundry. I want rough, resilient cheeks like hers, cheeks like most of the rural Aymara, Quechua, and Uru people acquire before they learn to speak Aymara, Quechua, or Uru.

We hustled back to the cluttered brick home, anxious to flee the cold. Doña Igancia reminded me of our plans for tomorrow, spending the day harvesting potatoes deep into the Andes with her 50-something sheep and half a dozen llamas. This is a relatively routine day for most of the rural women of the high flatlands, except Doña Ignacia owns more animals than most and potatoes are not harvested year round.

Most livestock must graze around 4 to 5 hours daily. And the women are the pastors. With children stumbling along side them or mummied to their backs in florescent colored cloths they cover the territory necessary to make their animals worth eating. Potatoes and bit of jerky are the sack lunch that is actually a tightly bundled knot of fabrics.

The Disaster the Coca Leaves Did Not Foresee

I woke up one morning earlier than I would have, to the whispers of Doña Ignacia, who was sitting upright in bed. Who is she talking to? – I wondered as I readjusted myself to see her better. She was reading coca leaves. Onto a tiny square fabric she dropped coca leaves one by one and spoke in hushed Aymara. I watched as she observed the landing of each coca leaf. Coca leaves are considered sacred and are read based on the position in which they fall.

The leaves will tell you if only you ask, she told me.

What did the leaves tell you when the river turned black six years ago? I asked her.

She did not reply.

I am certain that they did not tell her how much harder her life would become. I am certain that they did not tell her how six years later the once-lush forage along the riverside would still not have recuperated. I am certain they did not warn her about the fate awaiting her family's precious livestock, and that six of her sheep and two of her llamas would die.

Transredes, the privatized Enron/Shell subsidiary responsible for the transportation of hydrocarbons in Bolivia, could have seen this coming. Corporate leaders disregarded warnings about an old, eroded and rickety pipeline. A pipeline that crosses the largest source of water that faucets out of Lake Titicaca – The Desaguadero River. Instead they presided over an avoidable nightmare never fathomed by 30,000 rural folks of the Altiplano. The pipeline broke exactly where it crosses the Desaguadero River. It turned their water supply into poison.

The gush of Enron/Shell petroleum that poured into the shallow river was enough to fill more than two Olympic-sized swimming pools.

A Hard Life Made Harder Still

Doña Ignacia explained how lives cannot just be put on pause in the countryside. This is no office job, she told me, you don’t get Saturdays and Sundays off, animals have to eat every day. So Doña Ignacia had to choose between a bad thing and a bad thing. Either her animals would have to starve or they would have to consume contaminated water and grasses.

She made the choice that most people of the Altiplano would have, because their most valuable assets are their livestock. She chose to fill her animals’ bellies, so that her family’s bellies wouldn’t end up empty.

After an impossibly long day for me and a routine day for Doña Ignacia, all I wanted was to be horizontal. I am much too tall for the hoes we used all day harvesting potatoes, and not even coca could alleviate my day’s lost energy.

On my way into the house I noticed a practically illegible plaster plaque that read Desaguadero Project -- Transredes and C.A.R.E.

I had read about the compensation projects that came in the aftermath of the spill. Community leaders signed agreements with Transredes binding them to a compensation process determined by Transredes. The effected people along the river were compensated only for direct losses for which proof could be provided. And in an indigenous culture where paperwork is not a priority, that kind of proof was hard to come by. Based on that proof, CARE facilitated and distributed compensation in the form of "development" projects.

Empty Brick Houses for Families and a Fresh Supply of Cash for C.A.R.E.

Doña Ignacia laughed. I think we are one of the few families in our community who actually sleep in the house.

It was true. I discovered over a dozen brick homes scattered throughout the community. In the right sun I could catch the sparkle of distant aluminum roofs, on houses that were more often than not left empty. The frigid nights of winter are more warmly spent, I was told, within the traditional walls of adobe mud, on top of the earth floors, and below straw roofs.

Each community member who was evaluated as “effected” received bricks, concrete, a metal door, one window and aluminum roofing. The construction was left to the community members themselves.

Could you have opted for cash instead of the house if you wanted?

No, cash was not a choice.

C.A.R.E., on the other hand, opted for cash.

According to an investigation carried out by Fordham Law School, C.A.R.E. took in 68 cents for themselves on every dollar it received to supposedly make amends for the spill through projects (like the brick houses).

Doña Ignacia received the equivalent of about $175 for a house that doesn’t work as well as her old one.

I travel through the high flatlands along the river, seeking the human stories that I’ve not found in any report by Transredes. I find the stories that have been silenced. Stories that beg for the grass as it was before the spill. Stories that scream for the end of animal stillbirths. Stories of nostalgia that remember how much easier it was to find wild duck eggs with yolks more orange than the sun. Stories that weep with the resignation that nothing can be done.

They broke something without fixing it, Doña Ignacia told me without looking at me.

And now they have no choice but to live in what is broken.

Written by Christina Haglund