Ecuador: Judge could order Chevron Corp., which now owns Texaco, to pay as much as $27 billion in damages.

Here's a (slightly edited)abstract from a Bloomberg very exhaustive article:

"About 230,000 people live in Ecuador’s northeastern rain forest side by side with oil wells and pools of drilling waste. A gasolinelike smell hangs in the sweltering jungle air. The mess is a remnant of oil drilling in a 120-mile-long swath of the tropical jungle in northeastern Ecuador where Texaco Inc. and Ecuador’s state-run oil company, PetroEcuador, have pumped billions of barrels of crude from the ground during the past 40 years.

That ruined land is part of one of the worst environmental and human health disasters in the Amazon basin, which stretches across nine countries and, at 1.9 billion acres (800 million hectares), is about the size of Australia.
Depending on how an Ecuadorean judge rules in a lawsuit over the pollution, it may become the costliest corporate ecological catastrophe in world history.
If the judge follows the recommendation of a court- appointed panel of experts, he could order Chevron Corp., which now owns Texaco, to pay as much as $27 billion in damages.

Chevron says Texaco had completely cleaned up its mess by 1998. PetroEcuador, which took over Texaco’s operations in 1990 -- and not Texaco -- is to blame for today’s pollution, Chevron says.
From 1990 until 2007, government-owned PetroEcuador released wastewater into the environment, says Fausto Meja, a spokesman for PetroEcuador. He says the company has spent the past 16 years cleaning up, decreasing its dumping each year. It stopped releasing waste entirely by 2008, he says.
The case will be decided in an old concrete building in the Amazonian oil town of Lago Agrio, 37 miles (60 kilometers) north of Cevallos’s former home. With a shoe store, a T-shirt shop and a beauty salon on the street level, the building, which has no elevator, also houses a provincial courthouse.

Here's a Gregg Palast interview with Ecuador's President, Rafael Correa (Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Please take cultural differences into accout, otherwise President Correa over the top boby language will make his country's claim an hard sell. Here's part1 and part2 of Gregg Palast Ecuador Rumble in the Jungle.