Rep. James P. McGovern (Massachusetts-3rd) recently completed a trip to northern Ecuador, near the border with Colombia, for five days, November 8 – 13, 2008.

Rep. McGovern is Co-Chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. He is also the second-ranking member of the Committee on Rules. Rep. McGovern has a long history of advocacy in support of human rights and equitable development in Latin America, which goes back more than twenty years, when as a young legislative staffer with Rep. Joe Moakley (MA), he led investigations into human-rights abuses committed by U.S.-aided forces in Central America.

Background: conflict, the drug war, and an environmental disaster

The McGovern trip was an opportunity to focus on a crisis that should be getting far more attention. Eight years ago, the United States started pouring military aid – $4.8 billion of it – into Colombia, much of it focused on military and police operations in violent coca-growing zones just across the border from Ecuador.

The result has been an alarming spillover of violence into Ecuador’s peaceful but impoverished borderlands. About 200,000 Colombians – a number rivaling many refugee crises in Africa – have crossed the border since 2000 to flee greatly intensified fighting between guerrilla groups, government forces and paramilitary militias. Most are in Ecuador illegally, as the process of applying for refugee status is slow and cumbersome.

U.S. counter-drug strategies have failed to halt cocaine production in Colombia or ease the violence that comes with this illegal economy. Instead, organized crime activity has been pushed over the border. Meanwhile, Ecuador’s government claims that U.S.-funded herbicide spraying of coca plants in Colombia has damaged legal crops and done environmental harm in Ecuadorian territory.

In addition to all of this, the Amazon basin area along the border’s eastern half happens to be Ecuador’s oil heartland. (Ecuador is one of the United States’ top-ten sources of imported oil.) In this zone, indigenous communities have been pursuing a landmark lawsuit against Chevron Texaco for environmental and social devastation left behind by large-scale oil spills and toxic dumping.

From 1964 to 1992, Texaco drilled for oil in the rainforests of eastern Ecuador, in the process spilling more than 30 times as much oil as the Exxon Valdez did in Alaska in 1989. After nearly a decade in U.S. courts, the lawsuit returned to Ecuador in 2003. It alleges that Chevron dumped 18.5 billion gallons of toxic waste-water into Amazon waterways and abandoned hundreds of unlined waste pits gouged out of the jungle floor, causing a spike in cancer rates and forcing indigenous groups to abandon most of their ancestral land.

During his trip, Rep. McGovern toured the areas affected by the oil pollution and the refugee crisis, met with residents of these communities; and met with officials in the U.S. and Ecuadorian governments.

Based on what he saw, Rep. McGovern wrote a letter to President-Elect Barack Obama urging him to make this issue a priority in his new Administration.

A reporter from the Los Angeles Times accompanied Rep. McGovern on his tour of the oil-affected areas. His story can be found on the L.A. Times website.

Below are a few photos from Rep. McGovern’s trip:

Rep. McGovern at Yuca 5 oil well site, 11/9/08

Visit to San Carlos, Orenella, 11/9/2008

Shushufindi 38 Oil well site, 11/10/2008

Shushufindi 38 Oil well site, 11/10/2008

On a barge outside Lago Agrio, Ecuador, 11/10/2008

Visit to Cofan indigenous community in Dureno, Sucumbios, 11/10/2008

Meeting with community leaders in Barranca Bermeja, Sucumbios, 11/11/2008

Meeting with community leaders in Puerto Mestanza, Sucumbios, 11/11/2008