On November 10, 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other leaders from the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) were executed in a rigged military tribunal. In present-day Patagonia, local herders are becoming wary of the fields near hydraulic fracturing sites—their cattle numbers have inexplicably decreased, and the air does not quite taste right. Where do these seemingly unrelated occurrences, separated by thousands of miles, overlap? Both events have unambiguous ties to one of the world’s most valuable companies, Royal Dutch Shell.

Many consumers frequent the gas stations labeled by the emblematic yellow scallop, unaware of the company’s complex history. That history begins at the Niger Delta. Once a sprawling ecosystem of some of the highest biodiversity on the planet, the Niger Delta has been ravaged by more than 7,000 oil spills and the introduction of a total of 13 million barrels of oil into its waters and mangroves since 1970, rendering much of its delicate environment damaged and its fisherman and locals who depend on its resources impoverished. In addition, spills affect not only the river systems, but also the agricultural sector of the Niger Delta, impacting the livelihoods of the native populations in severe ways. Crops are destroyed, fish exterminated, and drinking water contaminated.

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Per Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights issued by the United Nations, “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family.” What is an expected right for an individual—health, the access to food, clean water, and the ability to work—has summarily been stripped from the various indigenous peoples of the region. In January 30, 2013, a Dutch court ruled Shell responsible for the devastation of the Niger Delta, and the Nigerian Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency held Shell accountable for its failed management in the region.

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Shell has run its pipelines irresponsibility. The company itself admits that they would “not build them that way today.” This has caused the suffering and deterioration in health and livelihood of many individuals. But Shell’s impact goes beyond that: Shell has allegedly usurped ethnic groups from areas within the Niger Delta to get its oil.

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In 1957, petroleum was found in the oil-rich Niger Delta, prompting companies like Shell to begin intense field operations. As the greed for new oil grew, so did the frustration of the Ogoni people and the other native ethnic groups of the Delta. The government was forcing them from their land with little compensation, and often with military support. Further, in 1979, the Nigerian constitution was amended to allow the government land-rights to any territory in Nigeria, effectively enabling the government to allocate land to oil companies however it decided.

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In the following years, the international community witnessed the Nigerian government ban public gatherings and protests against main oil companies in the region (largely Shell), and the military systematically raze villages and displace civilians in the ethnic group settlements of the Delta region. How could this country allow for such a perversion of democracy? And how is Shell related to such blatant violations of basic human rights?

 

The answer lies in the complex relationship between the oil industry and Nigeria. The aforementioned humanitarian abuses can be partially attributed to the relatively undiversified structure of the Nigerian economy: 98% of Nigeria’s export earnings and 83% of federal revenues come from its oil sector. With the government and the oil industry so closely tied, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that corruption within the government is rampant, with Nigeria ranking 139 out of 176 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Index.

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But Shell itself has particularly close ties to the government. In a leaked diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Abuja in 2010, the Shell Vice- President in the Sub-Saharan Region of Africa, Ann Pickard, said to a U.S. ambassador of how far Shell had infiltrated the Nigerian government. The ambassador reported that she continued, saying that Shell “had seconded people to all the relevant ministries and that Shell consequently had access to everything that was being done in those ministries.” With such information and Shell’s proposed knowledge of and influence on the inner workings of the government, Nigeria is not a wholly autonomous entity.

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When unrest began in the Delta over the drilling of oil and the repercussions it was having on the lives of individuals during the 1970s, the government was quick to outlaw public gatherings, and any form of interference with the oil companies—whether that be mass protests outside facilities or attempts to have the people’s voices heard in the Nigerian court system—was labeled as treason. People were imprisoned, and a few killed by the private army Shell had hired to protect its investments. The dozens of ethnic groups in the region were left voiceless in the face of large oil companies drilling in what was supposed to be their land. The largest group, the Ogoni people, was most severely impacted, both socially and environmentally, by Shell’s operations. After all, the Ogoniland, their Delta territory within Nigeria, rests directly atop some of the largest oil beds in the country.

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The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) formed after the Nigerian government’s promise of compensation for the Ogoni’s confiscated land proved fabricated and fruitless. Under the leadership of author Ken Saro-Wiwa, MOSOP in 1990 drafted the Ogoni Bill of Rights, which established measures for environmental protection, cultural rights, and control of the natural resources in their land. In an effort to gain international attention to his people’s plight in 1992, Saro-Wiwa addressed the UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples, saying that the Ogoni had “been gradually ground to dust by the combined effort of the multi-national oil company, Shell Petroleum Development Company . . . and the country’s military dictatorships . . . an estimated 100 billion dollars worth of oil and gas has been carted away from Ogoniland. In return for this the Ogoni people have received nothing.” To this day, despite the profitable oil industry, 61% of Nigerians live on less than one dollar per day.

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After no reconciliation by the government or the oil companies, the Ogoni began civil protests, with MOSOP organizing and mobilizing its supporters into the largest demonstration against an oil company ever. During the rally, an Ogoni leader summarized the depth of his peoples’ exploitation, saying, “We have woken up to find our lands devastated by agents of death called oil companies. Our atmosphere has been totally polluted, our lands degraded, our waters contaminated.” The mass rally, which was supposed to gain attention for the exploited Ogoni, was met with violence from the Nigerian military (which Shell allegedly colluded with in the attacks), leaving as many as 2,000 civilians dead and more than 100,000 new internal refugees displaced.

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The situation soon turned worse: a few months later, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists were hanged without due processes on charges of the murder of four Ogoni chiefs. Such a trial was found to have violated Article 10 of the Human Rights’ Declaration (access to a fair and impartial trial), and Nigeria was immediately suspended from the Commonwealth of Nations, with the United States on the verge of imposing economic sanctions on the country.

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What has now come to light is the large role that Shell may have played in the abuses in the region and in the execution of the Ogoni activists. In 1995, Shell decided not to plead for clemency for its critics, noting that the affair was a “matter of the state,” even when many facts point to the disregard Shell has had for national sovereignty (see Endnote 12). In addition, a few witnesses who testified against Saro-Wiwa came forth: they had been bribed with money and job offers by Shell to deliver false testimonies. Further, the very Lt.-Col. Okuntimo who arrested Saro-Wiwa and whose troops were responsible for the looting, burning, murder, and rape in the Ogoniland region was found—and confirmed by officers—to be on Shell’s payroll.

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Although Shell has not confessed to any of its alleged roles in the human rights violations in the Niger Delta, the company did pay Ken Saro-Wiwa’s son $15.5 million in an out-of-court settlement in which he agreed not to press charges in a New York trial against Shell.

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Shell’s history in Nigeria can inform the nascent problems in the Patagonia region now. The series of events that led up to the tragedies in Nigeria suggest early warning signs of a similar humanitarian disaster in Patagonia. The current incidents in this region of Argentina are mirror images of the small events that later exploded: the beginning of environmental degradation, higher levels of pollution in water systems (impacting people and wildlife), and other disturbances in the everyday lives of the native people.

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Shell is looking into new ventures in shale gas and oil, and Argentina happens to hold the third largest underground store of such unconventional fossil fuels. In July 2013, Argentina also invited oil companies to dig for shale gas (without any form of public approval). Shale gas and oil is one of a number of different fossil fuel retrieval methods, and its rise marks a large shift in the investments of oil companies. As standard oil wells begin to dry up, methods such as oil extraction from tar pits and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) are being used to try and squeeze as much fossil fuel out of the Earth as possible. Yet these methods are sometimes considered more dangerous than conventional techniques. For fracking, more than 600 chemicals (known carcinogens and toxins ranging from methanol and lead to mercury and radium) are used, warranting the protests of people from around the world and spurring on a wealth of research on the increase of cancer and birth defects near fracking zone. In addition, more than 15 million liters of fresh water is used in each fracking operation, with the vast majority of it left contaminated and unusable. Troublingly, Shell has begun using fracking as its fuel attainment method in the pristine, once- untouched Patagonia.

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In Patagonia, farmers, residents, and herders have already recognized the problems arising with Shell’s plans for the region. Water saturated with the used fracking chemicals stagnates in ground pits dug in and around settled communities. Volatile organic compounds are being evaporated into the environment of the region. Further, groundwater supplies are often contaminated through fracking (with groundwater methane levels in surrounding sites around seventeen times higher than normal), another problem for the locals who depend on their wells in their everyday lives. Article 25 of the Declaration of Human Rights, which defines the rights of all individuals to health (clean water), has again been broken.

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This is no new problem for Argentina. Oil companies have largely polluted the water of the Nequen area to such an extent that drinking water itself could actually be ignited due to the high oil residue concentrations. Yet national health agencies purposefully withheld and prevented research on water testing in fear of loosing funding from the oil-dominated government. The same oil-backed ignorance to humanitarian problems caused by such lucrative operations seen in Nigeria is currently developing in Patagonia.

 

Shell has largely remained focused on its operations in the region, delivering little assurance to the individuals near fracking zones. Maria Flores, a major local farmer in Patagonia, explains: “They promised to check the water quality every month… Now they haven’t been [here] for a year, so we don’t know if it’s safe enough to drink,” continuing, “This is how Shell works; the affected area is enormous.” The “affected area” stretches from Nequen to the “protected” nature reserves of Auca Mahuida.

 

Within such “preserved” lands, Shell has shown disregard for tribal borders and territories, a violation that has angered the native Mapuche tribe of the region and has done nothing to faze the government’s support of oil operations. The Mapuche people heavily rely on goat rearing, which has become harder in the wake of higher water prices (fracking requires millions of liters of fresh water) and fewer pasture lands due to the desertification of many parts of their territory by Shell’s procedures. In a survey conducted by the Center for Human Rights of Indigenous People, more than one-third of the Mapuche communities in Patagonia are directly affected by struggles relating to oil and gas operations on their territories.

 

Farmers, like Maria Flores, are also bearing the heavy price of Shell’s ground work, as cattle-grazing has now become dangerous due to the hazardous water, as noted by the sharp decline in Flores’ cattle from “5000 animals” a few years ago to “260 today.” The locals have no representative to go to, and no near government building to post their grievances on. The government, once again, lies at the hands of the oil industry.

 

In 2014, the documentary, Fracking Patagonia, exposed the unlawful land intrusions and the disruption of local communities and the Mapuche by large oil companies. In the film, Alfred Swampa, a fruit farmer, echoes the inequalities of the oil trade in his land, saying, “We have all this wealth under our feet but we are still poor.” Shell is offering jobs and training programs for the new industry in the region, but the company has not actively carried out the consulting process with local farmers and seems little concerned by the impact the shale gas operations have had on the fields and people around the sites.

 

As in Nigeria, the promises of ecosystem preservation and the respect for the condition and livelihood of the people in oil-rich regions have rapidly dissolved, and the voices of the people have rung largely unheard in their own government.

 

To combat the intrusion of oil companies and the inefficacies of the government, the Mapuche and other exploited groups formed the “Multisectional Against Fracking,” an organization established as a way to bring together affected communities. Just as in Nigeria, the repression by oil companies like Shell has sparked public organizations to reclaim rights. Only time will tell how far Shell is willing to go for its revenues and the people for their basic human rights to clean water and to social security in land and way of life.

 

 

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