Colombia’s state-led oil company Ecopetrol caused more than 600 instances of major environmental damage between 2010 and 2016, according to internal data leaked by one of their former employees. Mongabay contributor Mie Hoejris Dahl reports that the leaked information suggests the company kept track of spills internally but did not adequately report them to the government.
According to data shared by whistleblower Andrés Olarte Peña with the Environmental Investigation Agency, an international environmental NGO, Ecopetrol failed to report about a fifth of these sites, and none have been fully cleaned up. The investigation also reveals that Ecopetrol had a database to map and monitor 1,200 individuals in areas where the company operates.
Peña says he came by the information while serving as an environmental advisor to the vice president of sustainability at Ecopetrol. He told the BBC he realized “something was wrong” shortly after joining the company in 2017. Managers dismissed his concerns when he raised questions about what he called “awful” pollution data, he claims, and spent the next two years gathering internal evidence.
In Ecopetrol’s 2018 Integrated Sustainable Management Report, the company publicly celebrated “over five years with zero [oil] barrels spilled and zero incidents affecting people and the environment.” But its own database contained 218 incidents in 2018 alone.
Ecopetrol’s largest oil refinery is in the biodiversity-rich Middle Magdalena region in northeastern Colombia. It’s also the site where 40% of the company’s 2,000-plus oil spills took place between 2015 and 2022.
Pollution has upended life for the region’s residents and wildlife. Locals tell Mongabay that the air is thick with pollution while fish and rivers are contaminated by relentless oil spills. A fishing union representative also told the BBC that water pollution has led to a “massacre” of fish and the vulnerable West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus).
“There are so many [oil] spills in these waterways,” Óscar Sampayo, an environmental activist from the region, tells Dahl. “There are places where nature is completely degraded and polluted.”
Sampayo was forced to move in 2021 due to the death threats he and his family received after he denounced the contamination caused by the petroleum industry. He suspects he may be one of the 1,200 individuals tracked in the Ecopetrol database. A Global Witness report found 79 environmental defenders were killed in Colombia in 2023, which is roughly 40% of all reported environmentalist killings that year worldwide.
Ecopetrol did not respond to Mongabay’s request for comment but shared that it has filed a complaint with the BBC over “inexact information,” but didn’t specify what was misleading or inaccurate.
Read the full story by Mie Hoeriris Dahl here.
Banner image: An Ecopetrol refinery near Barrancabermeja, Colombia. Image courtesy of EIA.
