THE WAIT MAY END SOON. The remaining inspections are expected to happen this year, giving way to a period of damage assessment in which the court will analyze the results and figure out whether the pollution is significant and can be traced to Chevron. If so, a judge will decide on the scale of cleanup. Perhaps it will be Novillo, perhaps not; the chief judge's position rotates every two years, with Judge Gérman Yáñez now presiding.

One morning, I met Emergildo Criollo, a leader of the Cofán Indians. A short man in his late thirties, he was dressed in city clothes. We drove from Lago Agrio for a half-hour, turned onto a dirt road that led into secondary jungle, and soon reached a tributary of the Río Aguarico. Behind the village of Dureno, we boarded a canoe with an outboard motor and glided through a maze of narrow canals covered by a canopy of vines and branches low enough to smack your head. We emerged onto the Aguarico itself, a dirt-brown waterway as wide as the Mississippi. After ten minutes, we got out and walked a half-mile to Criollo's village, an assemblage of houses built upon stilts, with roofs of thatch and tin. Its population of about 350 makes it the largest Cofán community, according to Criollo. When I asked how long the village had existed, he smiled.

"It has been here forever," he said.

At the start of the oil era, the gringos drilled wherever they pleased; the Cofán could not make their objections known, because they didn't speak Spanish or English. Occasionally the river turned black and fish rose to the surface, belly up. Villagers began to die of new diseases that had the symptoms of cancer, though the Cofán didn't know what cancer was.

Criollo waved at the jungle around us. The colonists—the settlers who cleared the jungle for ranches and coffee plantations—were even worse than the oilmen, he said.

"We didn't have borders," he explained. "Everything belonged to everyone. But the colonists converted it to private property. We cannot fish outside the borders of our community. We have to ask permission. Everything has an owner."

The rest is familiar history for indigenous peoples from Alaska to Australia. The village was recently connected to an electrical grid. Kids watch TV. Food comes from Lago Agrio—rice and beans and chicken. Asked whether any of the youths know how to hunt, Criollo shrugged. "Once in a while they go into the rainforest," he said.

As the sins of the past are weighed in Judge Novillo's chambers, another drama is unfolding a few hundred miles south, in Ecuador's last remaining swath of untouched Amazon jungle.

When I left Criollo, I drove south, as far as the frontier town of Puyo; as in the Oriente of a generation ago, there are no roads into this vast basin, a homeland of the Shuar and Achuar tribes. Consortiums of oil companies—Argentinian, Brazilian, Chinese—are lobbying to drill here. They promise that the rainforest and the Indians who live in it will prosper, gaining money and schools and hospitals while retaining their cultural identity, drinking their pure waters, and hunting in jungles that, thanks to newer, cleaner technologies, won't be polluted.

It escapes no one's notice that a generation ago these same promises were made when drilling began in the Oriente.