QUITO (AP) — Ecuador and the American company Chevron celebrated on Tuesday a ruling by a European court that ordered the South American country to pay $220 million in a judicial dispute that has been going on for more than 30 years.

“Chevron is pleased with the resolution of this matter,” said that company in a statement sent to The Associated Press in which it assured that the decision “has strengthened the rule of law globally.”

For its part, the The State Attorney General's Office highlighted in a bulletin that the resolution “has avoided the payment of more than 3.13 billion dollars in international arbitration” and that it will continue to pay attention to the process of determining legal costs and arbitration expenses, which could take between six and nine months.

Until this new ruling, revealed in Europe on Monday night, Ecuador was weighed by a ruling from 2018 for the payment of 3.35 billion dollars issued by the same court in La Beech.

This long judicial process began in 1993 when a group of indigenous people and farmers from the Ecuadorian Amazon sued the Texaco company—acquired by Chevron in 2001—for alleged contamination of the jungle and rivers due to discharges of polluting materials during its oil extraction work in Ecuador between 1970 and 1992.

In 2011, an Ecuadorian court set a compensation amount for the plaintiffs of $9.5 billion, which was questioned by Chevron, which submitted the case to arbitration in The Hague, where it was established that the ruling in Ecuador had been the product of judicial fraud, corruption and bribery. The decision was ratified in Ecuador.