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See "Crude: The Real Price of Oil" (about Ecuador's "rainforest Chernobyl") “A Herculean work of investigative journalism.” -Ed Gonzales, Village Voice"A sprawling legal thriller with rare depth and power.” -Stephen Holden, The New York Times"A forceful, often infuriating story about Big Oil and little people.” -Manohla Dargis, The New York Times“Gripping…cinematic. The most urgent film I’ve seen at Sundance this year.” -Scott Foundas, LA Weeklyhttp://www.crudethemovie.com/------------------------ You want the corpo-fascist press to make Chevron's dirty underside real for you? Ha-ha! Well, let's see what we can find, hm? You said 'there is no 'rainforest Chernobyl' in Ecuador." Are you denying that there is a massive Chevron-Texaco oil spill in Ecuador? It wouldn't surprise me if you were. I don't think I've ever run across a more uninformed, clueless blogger at DU. So I have to ask: Do you also deny the evidence for Darwin's theory of evolution? How about global warming? You deny that? As for the World Wildlife Fund, they are closely allied with the World Bank, so I wouldn't expect them to expose Chevron's disaster in Ecuador. http://www.worldwildlife.org/what/globalmarkets/forests/worldbankalliance.htmlHow about Amnesty International USA? Would you accept them as "valid"? Here's what they report about Chevron... -- Chevron (CVX) in the Amazon – Oil Rights or Human Rights? Texaco's legacy, Chevron's responsibility
"'Our health has been damaged seriously by the contamination caused by Texaco. Many people in our community now have red stains on their skin and others have been vomiting and fainting. Some little children have died because their parents did not know they should not drink the river water.'"
Excerpt: Affidavit of the Secoya tribe given by Elias Piaguaie -Aguinda, et al v. Texaco Inc. - Case # 93-CV-7527.
The human rights situation of Indigenous peoples and environmentalists in Ecuador continues to be a serious concern for Amnesty International. For over four decades, Indigenous communities have witnessed multinational oil companies cut through the Ecuadorian Amazon and their ancestral lands in search of the country's vast petroleum resources. Testimonies by members of these communities, verified by independent health studies and reports (including "Amazon Crude" by Judith Kimerling) have described how oil companies have left dead rivers, road-scarred forests, polluted air, and daily discharges of millions of gallons of toxic waste in their wake that are affecting the daily lives of the communities in the area.
Operating in a region of the rain forest known as the ‘Oriente' both transnational and domestic oil companies threaten the survival of Indigenous populations as well as those who seek to protect their communities and the environment. Over the past four decades, a succession of U.S. petroleum companies including Texaco (now owned by Chevron Corporation), Occidental Petroleum, ARCO, and Maxus Energy Corporation, among others, have come to Ecuador in search of oil. Environmental and human rights defenders claim that these companies have left behind a trail of destruction, posing a serious danger to people's survival.
Northern Amazon:
The Chevron Pollution and Three Decades of Neglect
Texaco, currently owned by Chevron Corporation (CVX), began prospecting for oil in Ecuador in 1964, becoming the first company to discover commercial quantities. Subsequently, Texaco's joint venture with Petroecuador, in which the U.S. company was an operating partner, set the standards for operations in the region. According to the 1993 report "Crudo Amazónico" (Amazon Crude) by the environmental lawyer Judith Kimerling, from 1972 until it left Ecuador in 1992, Texaco intentionally dumped more than 19 billion gallons of toxic wastewaters into the region and was responsible for 16.8 million gallons of crude oil spilling from the main pipeline into the forest. By comparison, the infamous Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in 1989 spilled 10.8 million gallons off the coast of Alaska. The report alleges that these actions contaminated both the soil and the groundwater of the communities in the area and will continue to threaten the economic and cultural bases of Indigenous peoples' survival.
According to the authors of the 1999 "Yana Curi" Report, which details the impact of oil development on the health of the people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, living in proximity to oil fields seems to have increased the risk of residents developing health problems. For instance, based on the characteristics of the population, cancer rates are statistically higher in the oil producing village of San Carlos than should be expected. Another study published in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health points out the relationship between higher spontaneous abortion rates and living in the proximity of contaminated water streams. In some streams, the levels of oil chemicals like hydrocarbon concentrations was as high as 280 times the permitted levels in the European Community. Meanwhile, Chevron (CVX) has not only refused to acknowledge any link between the public health hazards and the environmental problems caused by its drilling policies in the Ecuadorian Amazon, but has also refused to clean up the pollution, claiming that a ‘clean up' agreement with the Ecuadorian Government has released it of any further liability. The company has further denied direct compensation to the affected communities for threatening their health and their economic and cultural survival by polluting their environment.(MORE) http://www.amnestyusa.org/business-and-human-rights/chevron-corp/chevron-in-ecuador/page.do?id=1101670------------------------------- But you are obviously in Chevron-Texaco oil spill denial. So there is no pleasing you. How come you are such an apologist for oil giant Chevron-Texaco, hm? I would believe the Indigenous people of the Ecuadoran rainforest and the EVIDENCE OF MY OWN EYES in the numerous documentaries and on-line photos of the devastation that Chevron-Texaco has inflicted on them, before I would believe the New York Times on any subject, let alone an oil giant's horrors--given their active support and publication of damned lies in promotion of Bush-Cheney's oil war! But you apparently need the New York Times to make things real for you. So here it is: -- Texaco Goes on Trial in Ecuador Pollution Case
By JUAN FORERO
Published: October 23, 2003
LAGO AGRIO, Ecuador, Oct. 22— When René Arévalo draws water from his well, it is brown and gummy, requiring him to run it through a makeshift filtering system outside his wood-plank home in the jungle outside this town.
Like thousands of other people here, he suspects the water was fouled by the waste an American oil company dumped across miles of Amazonia in its 20 years of operations. After all, he and his five children live across from a separation plant once operated by a Texaco affiliate, their house built on a mound of dirt that covered a pit where wastewater was dumped.
''If you dig here just a meter deep, you hit oil,'' Mr. Arévalo said, moments after probing into the dirt outside his house to show visitors the gooey slime. ''The water is contaminated, very contaminated. But we drink it. What else can we do?''
Now, about 30,000 people affected by the waste are hoping that a lawsuit, accusing ChevronTexaco of dumping 18.5 billion gallons of waste into open, unlined pits, will lead to a full-scale cleanup. This week, the California-based company, an energy giant created in 2001 when Chevron merged with Texaco, went on trial here in a case that, if successful for the plaintiffs, could establish a new way for American companies to be held accountable for environmental degradation in foreign countries.(MORE) http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/23/business/texaco-goes-on-trial-in-ecuador-pollution-case.html?pagewanted=1-- Or will the Washington Post do ya? -- In Ecuador, High Stakes in Case Against Chevron
LAGO AGRIO, Ecuador -- Deep in the northern Ecuadoran rain forest, next to pits filled with noxious sludge, a lawyer on his very first case argued that a U.S. oil company had deliberately fouled a swath of jungle nearly the size of Delaware during two decades of production.(SNIP) If the judge rules against Chevron, the company could face the largest damages award ever handed down in an environmental case, dwarfing the $3.9 billion awarded against ExxonMobil for the 1989 spill in Alaska.
A report by a court-appointed team last year concluded that pollution caused mainly by Texaco's Ecuadoran affiliate, Texaco Petroleum, had led to 1,401 cancer deaths in this stretch of Amazonian jungle. The team's leader, Ecuadoran geologist Richard Cabrera, reported finding high levels of toxins in soil and water samples near Texaco's production sites and assessed damages at up to $27.3 billion.
"This is a simple case," said Fajardo, 37, a former oil worker. "We ask, is there damage or not? If there is damage, who pays? And if there is payment, how much and to whom?"
For Fajardo and his team, two 20-something lawyers financed by a Philadelphia law firm, the blame rests squarely with Texaco and, now, Chevron. They say that for 18 years, from the time Texaco started full-scale production in Ecuador in 1972, the company unloaded drilling mud and wastewater into hundreds of unlined pits or directly into waterways. They accuse Texaco of choosing savings over safety, and say the company botched a highly publicized cleanup of its production sites in the 1990s.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/27/AR2009042703717.html----- And how about "Politico"? Here's one you really ought to pay attention to, cuz it's about oil corp propaganda... -- Chevron's Lobby Campaign Backfires
By Kenneth P. Vogel , Politico
16 November 2009
Facing the possibility of a $27 billion pollution judgment against it in an Ecuadorean court, Chevron launched an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign to try to prevent the judgment as well as reverse a deeply damaging story line.
Chevron's tactics — ranging from quietly trying to wield U.S. trade policy to compel Ecuador's government to squelch the case, to producing a pseudo-news report casting the company as the victim of a corrupt Ecuadorean political system — were designed to win powerful allies in Congress and the Obama administration as well as to shape public opinion and calm shareholders.
But many of the company's moves have backfired, drawing fire from environmentalists, media ethicists, state pension funds, New York's attorney general, members of Congress and even Barack Obama when he was a senator.
"Their lobbying and PR efforts are really clumsy and very heavy handed, and I think that that's why they're experiencing a degree of backlash," said Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), who is circulating the first of what she promises will be three letters to colleagues blasting what she calls the company's "misguided approach" to dealing with the case.
The case stems from a class action suit brought by well-connected U.S. trial lawyers on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadoreans alleging that from 1964 to 1990, Texaco — which was purchased by Chevron in 2001 — dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into Ecuador's Amazon rain forest, leaving behind an unprecedented environmental and public health disaster including a wave of cancers, birth defects and miscarriages.
Chevron has been pushing the U.S. government to revise Ecuador's trade preferences since soon after the lawsuit was filed in Ecuador in 2003 (it originally had been in U.S. federal court in 1993). But with a years-long trial in a tiny courtroom in the Ecuadorean rain forest expected to culminate in a ruling early next year, Chevron has turned up the heat, arguing that it can't get a fair trial in Ecuador, an assertion that Sanchez and other Chevron critics point out seems to conflict with the company's previous efforts to move the trial from U.S. courts to Ecuador.
(MORE) http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29560.html-- Is it real for you now? But, frankly, I'd trust this site more than I'd trust the New York Slimes and the Washington Psst: http://chevrontoxico.com/(great logo!) |
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