"Colombia’s top oil company concealed environmental damages: Investigation", 20 March 2025

...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...

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...

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...

The data suggest that Ecopetrol systematically concealed cases of environmental damage and noncompliance from the authorities and shareholders...

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...

When Mongabay asked Ecopetrol about the Iguana Papers, the company declined to comment...