60 Minutes travels to Ecuador, where Amazonian indigenous communities are suing oil company Chevron for $27 billion.

Over several decades, energy multinational Texaco exploited Ecuador’s oil reserves, buried underneath the rainforest. In 1992, Texaco left Ecuador, leaving behind hundreds of toxic pits: unlined, open-air dumps containing oil sludge and other byproducts of the extraction process. In the years since, these toxic materials have been seeping into the printine rainforest environment, poisoning the streams and lakes that the area’s indigenous communities rely on for their survival.

In 1993, the Amazonian communities filed a lawsuit against Texaco. In 2001, Chevron aquired Texaco, along with the lawsuit. The multinational’s lawyers argued that the suit should be heard in Ecuador, instead of in the US, and they got their wish. Now, reports 60 Minutes, the fate of the multi-billion dollar lawsuit depends on the ruling of a single Ecuadorian judge, who is not expected to be overly sympathetic to Chevron’s claims that it should be absolved of responsibility.

Meanwhile, an article in The New York Times reports on another potentially explosive lawsuit being brought against Shell, another oil multinational. The suit, brought before a US federal court in New York, accuses Shell of crimes against humanity in relation to the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa. Saro-Wiwa, a member of the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta, whose land was exploited by Shell, was one of the oil company’s leading critics before he was eventually executed by the Nigerian regime.

“If a jury found Shell guilty,” Arvind Ganesan of Human Rights Watch told the NYT, ”this would change the behavior of the industry pretty quickly.”

Video via cbsnews.com.