- A newly released investigation by the Environmental Investigation Agency and Earthworks into the workings of Colombia’s largest company, oil and gas giant Ecopetrol, reveals a pattern of environmental negligence and corporate misconduct.
- The investigation relies on the Iguana Papers, a collection of leaked documents and databases that show more than 600 instances of major environmental damages caused by Ecopetrol between 2010 and 2016. The company concealed about a fifth of these cases from the authorities, according to the report.
- The investigation also reveals that Ecopetrol maintained a database to map and monitor 1,200 individuals in areas where the company operates. Mongabay talked to environmental defenders who have felt threatened by Ecopetrol.
- Despite these findings, Colombian authorities have not responded to complaints about Ecopetrol, which continues to operate unhindered.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — A green iguana rests above the letters spelling Ecopetrol at the headquarters of Colombia’s largest company, located in the heart of Bogotá, the capital city. In 2021, this petroleum giant became the first in the oil and gas industry in Latin America to pledge a commitment to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Yet, a recent investigation shows that the company’s operations appear far less green than the color of its iguana logo suggests.
Under President Gustavo Petro, Colombia has positioned itself as a green leader in the region, and in 2023 announced it would halt new oil and gas exploration contracts. The same year, Petro replaced the longtime CEO of the 88% state-owned oil company with his campaign manager, Ricardo Roa Barragán (who the Colombian National Electoral Council is investigating for excessive campaign spending), and tasked him with accelerating the green transition.
However, a newly released report reveals that Ecopetrol has systematically underreported its emissions, covered up environmental damages from both Colombian authorities and international shareholders and collaborated with national security forces and armed groups. The report suggests the company has wielded undue influence over regulators and targeted environmental leaders perceived as threats to its operations.
Ecopetrol operates petroleum refineries across Colombia, Brazil, Peru and the United States and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Its minority shareholders include BlackRock Inc., Vanguard Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. The investigation portrays how the company’s sheer size and economic significance seem to have rendered it almost untouchable.
In the report titled Crude Lies, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an international environmental NGO, and Earthworks, a U.S.-based environmental advocacy group, expose shocking practices at Ecopetrol, based on a series of internal files known as the Iguana Papers. These files were shared by a whistleblower, Andrés Olarte Peña, who worked at Ecopetrol between January 2017 and January 2019, first as an analyst and then as an environmental adviser to the vice president of sustainability at Ecopetrol, Eduardo Uribe Botero.
A track record of environmental damage
The leaked information includes an environmental noncompliance database containing environmental damages information as well as an environmental liability database created to mitigate corporate risk. Executives such as the president and vice presidents of the company had access to the databases and used them to decide how to respond to court cases and public reporting, the investigation shows.
According to EIA, the environmental noncompliance database highlights that Ecopetrol caused more than 600 cases of major environmental damages such as contamination of soil and waterways between 2010 and 2016, hiding about a fifth of them from the Colombian authorities. Between 2016 and 2018, Ecopetrol internally recorded 328,779 environmental noncompliance cases, while failing to report 89% of the environmental damages it was aware of in 2016 and 2017 to its shareholders. In Ecopetrol’s 2018 Integrated Sustainable Management Report, the company mentions “over five years with zero [oil] barrels spilled and zero incidents affecting people and the environment,” while its own database contains 218 incidents for 2018 alone, according to the report.
The data suggest that Ecopetrol systematically concealed cases of environmental damage and noncompliance from the authorities and shareholders. In the noncompliance database, a red alert column records the “legal risk” for each noncompliance case. Next to this column, an “evaluation of the legal risk” appears. There is a common pattern in the database in which cases that are recorded as “only Ecopetrol knows about this internally” are evaluated as a “minimum” legal risk.
In February 2022, Colombia was the first country in the region to pass a law regulating methane emissions from oil and gas. Nevertheless, EIA investigators and Earthworks experts found methane emissions at Ecopetrol sites in March and April 2023, suggesting Ecopetrol has continued illegal practices of venting (releasing methane gas into the air) and inefficient flaring (burning methane without fully combusting it).
Living in the aftermath of oil spills
Barrancabermeja, known as the oil capital of Colombia, is home to the country’s largest oil refinery, an Ecopetrol facility with 54 processing units and more than 300 storage tanks. Located on the banks of the Magdalena River in the Middle Magdalena region in northeastern Colombia, in the department of Santander, the refinery supplies 80% of fuel demand in the interior of the country. It has operated here for 100 years and continues to be an important part of Colombia’s biggest company.
The Middle Magdalena region is rich in biodiversity and endemic species. It serves as a key wintering habitat for migratory birds and is home to more than 630 bird species. But the department of Santander was also home to about 40% of Ecopetrol’s more than 2,000 officially recorded oil spills between 2015 and 2022. The company’s operations have left locals around Barrancabermeja breathing a permanently dense and polluted air and fishing from a deteriorating marine population in contaminated waterways.
Colombians in the Middle Magdalena region have long known that Ecopetrol discharges pollutants into their river. “There are so many [oil] spills in these waterways,” says Óscar Sampayo, an environmental activist originally from Barrancabermeja, who has been displaced since 2021 due to death threats after denouncing contamination caused by the petroleum industry.
“There are places where nature is completely degraded and polluted” from oil extraction and refining, Sampayo says.
According to the investigation, Ecopetrol developed a sophisticated technology-based system to map and track 1,200 individuals from areas where Ecopetrol operates. Sampayo was likely one of them.
“It’s been very difficult,” Sampayo says about the multiple threats he and his family have received.
According to an internal email obtained by the EIA and Earthworks, in 2018 alone, Ecopetrol spent $22 million on national security forces to protect its operations. Environmental defenders who have opposed Ecopetrol’s operations report being targeted by armed groups. In Sampayo’s case, he received death threats on pamphlets signed by Águilas Negras, a paramilitary group.
According to a Global Witness report, 79 environmental defenders were killed in Colombia in 2023, accounting for 40% of all reported killings that year globally.
“Colombia is a really dangerous place to be an environmental defender,” says Laura Furones, a senior adviser at Global Witness.
Similarly, André Olarte, the whistleblower behind Iguana Papers, says he received death threats both by phone and in writing.
“Corporate interests can be quite ruthless about what they want to do,” Furones says. “The underlying problem is impunity,” she adds.
“There is an intentional policy of profiling, locating, surveilling and repressing, or using illegal actors to contain the resistance to extractivism in the territory,” says Amarilys Llanos Navarro, an activist with the Cesar Without Fracking and Gas Movement, an environmental advocacy group in Colombia’s department of Cesar. Several members of her organization have been displaced or exiled due to threats for their work.
About the effect of such threats and intimidations, she says: “They always succeed in instilling fear in the population, and then the resistance groups struggle to continue their opposition, or they are left with fewer members.”
All of this “was part of a deliberate corporate strategy,” Llanos argues. “What is in the report is not a new situation for us [environmental defenders], but it shows that the company is aware of this and that it is intentional,” she says.
It shows “how so-called security becomes just another cold corporate decision for the company owners,” Llanos concludes.
Too big to fail
The whistleblower behind Iguana Papers appealed to more than 100 Colombian authorities, including the prosecutor’s office, the labor ministry, governorships and mayor’s offices, to investigate environmental crimes and persecution of social leaders by Ecopetrol. None of the petitions had consequences for Ecopetrol.
In a written response to Mongabay, the Ministry of Mines and Energy says it was not able to find any complaints about Ecopetrol in its databases and that the ministry does “not have the authority to exercise disciplinary powers over officials of this entity [Ecopetrol].”
Despite inaction against Ecopetrol, the ministry says it “ensures the diligent enforcement of current environmental laws and works jointly with the competent authorities to guarantee that all incidents affecting the environment are properly investigated and penalized.”
According to Llanos, Ecopetrol is almost untouchable. “There is no response, not even any reaction,” she says.
In 2024, the company generated more than 111,000 jobs and it is responsible for more than 6% of Colombia’s gross domestic product.
Llanos says it is not that she wants the company to close or collapse, “rather, the goal is to make it a responsible company that makes a responsible transition.”
She explains that she wants the company to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources — which Ecopetrol already has stated as a goal in its 2040 Strategy. “And this [transition] shouldn’t represent a danger to the farmers, fishermen and environmental defenders in these areas,” Llanos says.
Llanos says there is an urgent need to cut ties to criminal groups and “tackle the root causes of this,” explaining rural areas in Colombia need more economic alternatives, more diversified sources of income.
When Mongabay asked Ecopetrol about the Iguana Papers, the company declined to comment.
“In the territory, this dynamic continues where Ecopetrol remains more powerful than the state,” Sampayo says.
Banner image: Example of a chronic oil spill incident in the Middle Magdalena region. Image courtesy of EIA.
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