It was being dubbed the Amazonian Chernobyl. Alarming reports of toxic sludge, contaminated drinking water, and congenital birth defects were springing from Lago Agrio, an Ecuadorian province near Colombia. Since oil was first discovered in the 1960s, Lago Agrio had undergone tremendous change. The environment and local ecology became scarred by oil operators hungry for black gold. Now, it seemed, their actions were catching up with them.

Steven Donziger, a Harvard-educated lawyer and social activist, quickly descended upon the scene. He arrived with the hopes of righting perceived wrongs, holding the tycoons accountable for their environmental transgressions. In 1993, a class-action lawsuit was brought against Texaco by 30,000 indigenous residents. By 2003, Donziger was their primary representative, spotlighting their plight by roping in celebrities like Sting and Darryl Hannah and pushing 60 Minutes to broadcast the dispute.

In this David vs. Goliath arena, Donziger won an improbable victory. In 2011, he extracted a $19 billion settlement from Chevron (Texaco having merged years ago), the biggest environmental damages settlement in history. But all was not as it seemed. Chevron and its litany of lawyers wouldn't give up. "We’re going to fight this until Hell freezes over—and then we’ll fight it out on the ice," said one representative.

As their probe deepened, Chevron revealed the underbelly to Donziger's success. To win over the Ecuadorian court, he bribed expert witnesses, coerced judges, and falsified information. Having spotted an errant thread in Donziger's actions, Chevron yanked it until decades of work became undone, lying in a tangled mess on the floor.

Paul Barrett, author of Glock: The Rise of America's Gun and American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion, followed the Lago Agrio case to its dramatic conclusion and has shaped its contours into a spellbinding biography, out this week, titled Law of the Jungle. For a sample of Barrett's expert storytelling, enjoy the exclusive excerpt below.

Exclusive Excerpt from Law of the Jungle by Paul Barrett

Chapter Twenty: POLLUTION

To visit the Cofán village at Dureno one drives for thirty minutes along a twisting road out of Lago Agrio to a compound where the tribe operates a canoe-building business in several interconnected sheds on a landing above the Aguarico River. Workers fashion water-tight boats from strips of fiberglass, using industrial-strength ad­hesives. Tribal leader Emergildo Criollo noted that one of his sons worked in the shop. “We make the best canoes,” Criollo explained in Spanish, “not just for the Cofán, but all the people in the area.”

On the drive to this spot in the spring of 2011, Criollo told me the story of the arrival by helicopter of Texaco explorers, the rice and cheese handed out by company men, the drilling for oil, the poisoning of rivers, and the death of his first two sons. We boarded a narrow twenty-foot canoe for the trip down the muddy Aguarico and around a bend to the Cofán hamlet. For twenty-five minutes, the breeze provided welcome relief from the late-morning heat. Lush greenery framed the waterway and insulated us from the oil zone. Gone were the chemical fumes of the Indian boat shop and the smell of petroleum so common throughout the region. Except for the snarling outboard motor, the rain forest seemed at peace.

My canoe ride to the Cofán encampment was reminiscent of travels depicted in Crude and on 60 Minutes. Similar river commutes appeared in newspaper and magazine articles describing the battle against Chevron. In one slight variation, I was the first journalist to make the river jaunt after the $19 billion verdict. I may have been imagining it, but Criollo and my other local hosts exhibited a mea­sure of confidence absent from earlier accounts. “We have won,” he told me. “When are they starting the cleanup?”

The Cofán leader made the trip standing in the canoe, a vinyl satchel filled with court papers slung over his shoulder. He wore dark slacks, a short-sleeved shirt, and polished black shoes. “We are here,” he announced, as the boat’s prow nestled into a rocky, un­marked beach. Accompanied by a welcoming committee of mangy dogs, we clambered up the riverbank to the dirt-path entrance to the village. A couple hundred people lived in wooden houses, some built on stilts, spread around a central clearing. Next to the clearing stood several concrete communal buildings, one of them a schoolhouse with broken benches. The structures lacked indoor plumbing. Small gas generators provided electricity for televisions and hot plates. In nearby fields, the villagers grew banana, yucca, and cacao. They hunted, but with rifles, not the blowguns of Crio­llo’s youth. Jaguars skulked near the village, he said, and occasion­ally snatched chickens.

Asked to point out his home, Criollo said that he and his wife had opted some years ago for the relative comfort of a house in Lago Agrio. He said he sometimes received consulting fees and re­imbursement of expenses for his work on the legal case. He still came to the village frequently, and he moved comfortably among the people he represented.

For my exclusive benefit, an open-air artisan market mate­rialized. Criollo sat down in the shade as women wearing color­ful blouses displayed necklaces, earrings, and purses made from brown and orange beads. The women had straight, jet-black hair and wore bright crimson nail polish. For $25, I obtained a bagful of delicate trinkets. Criollo got up, indicating that my visit would now continue.

We walked a short distance to examine a new water-filtration unit. “Trudie came to our village, and she paid for these,” Criollo said. More precisely, the Rainforest Foundation that Trudie Styler and Sting cofounded collaborated with the United Nations to fund a clean-water project at the Cofán village. Elevated on a two-story wooden tower, the tank bore its manufacturer’s name, Rotoplas, and a label identifying it as “Plastico/Anti-Bacterias.”

“It didn’t work at first,” Criollo said, because no one had taken responsibility for maintaining the large black plastic container that collected rainwater and filtered it through layers of sand and quartz. So he assigned specific families to look after the equip­ment. Five tanks were set up, and two were operational, each sup­plying enough water for twelve people. Criollo had been told that five more were on the way, but he was not sure when they would arrive. In the meantime, most people were still drinking from the streams, which he said remained contaminated. Some families boiled the stream water.

Criollo introduced me to Eduardo Chapal, the schoolteacher. Chapal wore a necklace of crocodile teeth over a yellow Washing­ton, D.C., tourist T‑shirt. The teacher expressed concern that fewer and fewer children were learning the tribe’s native language. Span­ish was fine for those who wished to know it, he said. Like Criollo, he spoke Spanish. But “if our language changes, you cannot say you are Cofán anymore.” An even bigger worry, Chapal said, was unemployment. The Cofán needed jobs to generate cash for con­sumer goods.

That’s where the lawsuit came in, Criollo interjected. “We do not want money to get rich,” he said. “We want to clean up the en­vironment, which is a big project.” Remediation would be “good for the people because it would provide jobs for many years.” The village leader looked to the litigation, not the local or national leg­islature, to finance public works.

*****

The plaintiffs’ “toxic tour”—a term used matter-of-factly in Lago Agrio—took me to the homes and fields of numerous residents of the northeastern Oriente. My guide for some of the expedition was Donald Moncayo, an employee of the Frente who lived with his wife and infant daughter in a tiny run-down house near Lago Agrio. A mestizo, Moncayo was born in the area in 1973 and worked on a farm as a young man. Some of his schoolmates and friends got jobs with oil companies or subcontractors. “I was one of the naïve people, too,” he said one day over a lunch of arroz con pollo. “I did not think about the causes and effects in our lives. I did not think about what man can do to nature or what corporations can do to the people.”

A stint as a volunteer with the Frente changed that. He greatly admired Pablo Fajardo. The Frente sent Moncayo to a leadership academy to learn how to organize. Now, as part of his paid job, he escorted outsiders on visits to the region. Money Steven Donziger raised in the United States, Moncayo said, provided for his educa­tion and now for his modest salary. “Steven,” he added, “is a very good man. We all respect him.”

Moncayo’s political awakening caused him to reevaluate his parents’ premature deaths, which he came to blame on the oil in­dustry. “My dad died when I was eight years old,” he said. “They killed him with alcohol.” His mother died five years later, in 1986. She washed clothes all day in a stream. “The produced water from the oil operations made her sick,” Moncayo said. One day, she had a seizure. Her family took her to the hospital. She died soon after, leaving an adolescent Donald and four siblings orphaned.

He introduced me to poor campesinos. Some, like José Antonio Bricerio Castillo, the elderly farmer who had salved aching joints with warm petroleum, held mixed views about the oil industry. Bricerio balanced the advantages of road construction against the ills of contamination. Others were unambiguously bitter. Mar­lene Parades Cabrera, thirty-three, stood outside her house on a scrubby hill as she described how her mother-in-law, father-in-law, and brother-in-law had all died of cancer in the past year. The ex­tended family grew sugarcane and raised farm animals. Now her eleven-year-old son, Willington, one of five children, had stomach problems. Doctors in Quito had removed his appendix, but the ill­ness persisted. She feared he, too, suffered from cancer. “Cancer,” I discovered, was the all-purpose diagnosis for serious illness. As a puppy, a piglet, and a toddler boy circled her legs, all vying for attention, Parades noted that her husband had pancreatic cancer. She blamed the oil pollution. “A lot of companies leave waste, not just one company,” she said. “We don’t know which one is which.”

In the community of Patria Nueve, Moncayo ushered me into the two-room home of Santos Darwin Calero Pardo. The thirty-one-year-old husband, father, and former oil company security guard reclined in a hammock. Once a vigorous 196-pound man, Calero now weighed 112 pounds. He shook hands weakly, sweating and wheezing.

Calero could substantiate his diagnosis. His barefoot wife dis­played medical records from a clinic in Quito where doctors had said Santos had stomach cancer. Pharmacy bills indicated hun­dreds of dollars a month spent on “natural treatments.” Neighbors helped defray the costs. In a raspy whisper, Calero blamed “the oil company” and the government for his sickness. “They don’t give anything to the affected,” he said. “Look at me. I am nothing. I count only on God.”

Sitting nearby, Calero’s mother said that her husband had died of stomach cancer several years earlier. Doctors said it was a kidney ailment, she noted, but the family knew it was cancer, attributable to the waste oil spread on the roads in the 1970s and 1980s.

I asked Calero’s mother what kind of contacts she had had with Texaco and Petroecuador over the years.

She snorted derisively. “They don’t speak to us,” she said. “We didn’t know about the oil contamination, but it was all around us, under our feet.”

Did oil bring any benefits?

“Personally, I don’t see anything better from the oil,” she said. “Someone makes money. Not me.” Her son died several months later.

*****

As the February 2011 ruling detailed, no shortage of human mis­ery existed in proximity to the petroleum business in the Oriente. Many of the unfortunate understandably connected the suffering to the industry, even if they had little scientific evidence of a link. As far as Donald Moncayo of the Frente was concerned, any doubt about causation ought to be resolved against the oil company. The Lago Agrio court decision had adopted the same presumption.

Moncayo said that a visit to Sacha 53 would help me under­stand the situation. He referred to the site as “Chevron’s pride and joy,” because the panel of court-appointed experts had concluded in 2006 that, despite the presence of contamination at the site, they could not hold the company culpable. As the Frente’s Toyota pickup pulled up to Sacha 53, Moncayo practically jumped from the front passenger seat, eager to show me around. “These are the hidden pits,” he declared, “the ones covered over before the 1994 remediation process even began. Aerial military photos showed us these hidden pits. There are five hundred pits like this.”

We pulled on yellow rubber boots and marched single-file through forest and underbrush. “No one talks about these,” Moncayo continued. “Did Texaco show you this? No, of course not. For Texaco, these pits are remedied, and this is imaginary.”

In a wooded area, he showed me a swimming pool–sized patch where no trees stood, only tall grass and broad-leafed ferns. “That’s the hidden pit,” he said, “covered over with a thin layer of dirt.” We moved forward, and the ground grew spongy. A half-buried truck tire poked out of the muck. A rusted oil barrel stood nearby. They looked like theatrical props.

Moncayo plunged a two-handled awl into the soil, twisted it violently back and forth, and brought up a plug of petroleum-infused dirt from a few feet beneath the surface. He thrust the plug under my nose. It smelled like oil. “This is the ‘clean’ pit, okay?” he said, sounding angry. “This is Chevron’s remediation. And for this the judge found them guilty. We seek justice for this atrocity.” He paused. “I wish Judge Kaplan could take a toxic tour. Then he would see the real Chevron. He can come first with Chevron people, and then I will take him here. It will change his mind.”

I promised that if I ever met Kaplan I would pass along the in­vitation.

Moncayo laughed joylessly.

As we drove away, a larger four-wheel-drive vehicle crossed our path. “That’s Jim Craig with the Chevron toxic tour,” Moncayo said. “Jim Craig will tell you lies tomorrow.”

I had already met Craig earlier that week. A former wire service reporter with Reuters and Bloomberg News, he had left journal­ism for corporate crisis management and now worked for Chevron. Craig divided his time between a family in Lima, Peru, his child­hood home in Connecticut, and Chevron-related assignments in Ecuador. He spoke Spanish fluently. In Ecuador, he traveled with armed former soldiers and policemen who provided security for Chevron. Craig told me he was one of the company employees be­headed in effigy during the 2009 demonstration in Lago Agrio. He interpreted that, reasonably enough, as a threat. Craig took me to a central “pit farm” in the Sacha fields oper­ated by Petroecuador and the Venezuelan national oil company, known by the initials PDVSA. American producers haven’t oper­ated in Ecuador for many years. Rather than dig waste pits next to operating oil wells, the Ecuadorian-Venezuelan venture trucked waste to one location, which resembled a graveyard for giants, each buried pit marked by a soil mound and a small wooden cross indi­cating the well from which its contents had come. Craig stressed that scores of fresh Petroecuador pits, brimming with drilling muds and waste petroleum, were unlined. “The technology,” he said, “hasn’t changed one bit.”

What about the produced water?

He acknowledged that Petroecuador and its foreign partners from Venezuela, Spain, and China had adopted reinjection meth­ods that buried most of the salty produced water back into emp­tied oil reservoirs. “But that change was completed only five years ago,” he said. “Until then, the state of the art in Ecuador was the way Texaco handled produced water in the 1970s.”

We drove along roads bordered by pipelines, whose hot liq­uid contents caused steam to rise after each downpour. Children splashed in streams next to their mothers washing clothes, the pipelines snaking around them and overhead. Gas flares fired above the tree line.

“ ‘Amazon Chernobyl’?” Craig asked at one point. “For the last hour, is that what you’ve seen?”

No, it did not look like lifeless, radioactive Chernobyl (which I knew only from photographs). The Oriente pulsed with people, vehicles, and farm animals. Evidence of commerce and industry was everywhere. It resembled a rain forest version of Gulf Coast Texas in the unregulated era of Buckskin Joe Cullinan. It was not the worst or poorest place I had ever seen. It was, at the same time, no place I’d want to live.

Craig’s driver pulled into the Sacha 53 site. We examined the pits that the neutral panel had deemed adequately remediated. Once the experts reached that conclusion, Craig said, the plaintiffs “suddenly wanted to stop the judicial inspection process and bring in their corrupt ‘global expert.’ ”

Didn’t the panel find contamination at Sacha 53, which they attributed to an oil spill?

Yes, Craig said. “But it wasn’t clear whose oil spill that was, and Texaco wasn’t given responsibility for cleaning that up in the Re­mediation Action Plan.”

Were there hundreds of hidden pits, as the plaintiffs alleged?

“That’s a myth,” Craig said. “They see shadows on an aerial map and talk about ‘hidden pits.’ There are no hidden pits. There might be oil on the ground at Sacha 53. There’s certainly oil on the ground in other places. But there’s no way to say that it’s Texaco’s oil.” He even suggested that in recent years, the Frente had tried to incriminate the company by spreading new oil at some of the sites Texaco remediated.

Craig had two modes. In one, he discounted any evidence of contamination. Rogue oil from the Texaco era, he said, by now would have degraded into asphalt, and wasn’t dangerous. “You have a chunk of asphalt in a swimming pool, you could still go swimming,” he added. “I wouldn’t eat it, but it’s not going to do any harm at the bottom of the pool.” Even in liquid form, waste oil from pits or spills couldn’t move very much, he argued, because of the impermeability of the region’s dense clay soil.

His other mode was more measured, if not exactly empathetic: “You have poor people. I assume if they say they are sick, they are in fact sick. Fine. But the idea that this is all the fault of the evil oil company is just not true. In fact, it is a fraud. Texaco did what it was asked to do, and it did not leave behind dangers to health. Oil drilling is a dirty business. It is going to create a mess. But the Ecuadorians were in charge. Texaco didn’t sneak in one night and start drilling in the Oriente.”

What about the water?

“I do not want to bathe in these streams,” Craig admitted. “I do not want to drink from these streams. I do not want to live next to an oil drilling operation with a natural gas flare going all the time. But this is the deal that Ecuador made to join the modern world.” Texaco signed contracts with a national government responsible for protecting the interests of indigenous tribe members and mi­grant farmers. “Texaco invested hundreds of millions of dollars that Ecuador did not have and brought business expertise that Ec­uador did not have. Ecuador got billions of dollars in taxes, royal­ties, and profits. That was the deal.”

Contaminated streams and rivers were part of the deal?

Craig said that the plaintiffs exaggerated the petroleum con­tamination. Local agricultural practices and the dumping of raw municipal sewage into streams and rivers had tainted water sup­plies with hazardous levels of fecal bacteria. He took me to a spot not far from the center of Lago Agrio where gray untreated sew­age flowed into the muddy brown Orienco River, which snaked through town and then joined the Aguarico. “This is the same kind of water that finds its way to San Carlos, where the plaintiffs did their famous study finding a supposed cancer cluster,” Craig said.

As we stood on a small bridge overlooking the stinking intersec­tion of filthy streams, area residents came out of their homes and made cell phone calls. Within minutes, a man drove up in a Chev­rolet SUV and identified himself as David Pinzón, the president of the neighborhood association. He pointed to a weather-beaten street sign that said, bien venidos al barrio san valentin. Without asking who we were, Pinzón launched into a description of how he had tried for years to get the sewage treated and the stream cleaned up. No one in the local or national government seemed to care.

“All of the waste from all of those houses goes into this stream,” he explained, gesturing as we walked for several blocks. Making matters worse, a slaughterhouse nearby dumped its cuttings into the water, he said. Despite all of these disgusting contents, people drew their drinking water just a little ways downstream. “We have rashes, stomach problems, children’s noses itch,” he said. Pinzón took off a shoe and pulled down his sock to display a partly ban­daged infection running from his ankle to his knee. He attributed the ugly condition to polluted water.

We were walking on an unpaved side street, past crumbling con­crete homes. “I could show you oil contamination,” Pinzón said. There had been a series of Petroecuador spills near Pablo Fajardo’s hometown of Shushufindi. “It happens regularly,” Pinzón said, as if describing a local weather pattern.

Not long after I had returned to New York, some sixteen thou­sand people in Shushufindi lost access to publicly supplied drink­ing water because of the leakage of reddish-brown fluids from Petroecuador drilling-waste pits into the Shushufindi River. El Universo reported that the town’s mayor declared a “state of emer­gency.” At a public meeting, municipal officials in Shushufindi demanded that the state-owned company improve its notoriously poor performance. After all, one council member said, “this is not the first time this has happened.”

Reprinted from LAW OF THE JUNGLE: The $19 Billion Legal Battle Over Oil in the Rain Forest and the Lawyer Who'd Stop at Nothing to Win. Copyright © 2014 by Paul Barrett. Published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of Random House LLC.