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Clean up our polluted forest, Ecuadorians demand in landmark suit
ChevronTexaco could be fined hundreds of millions of dollars and be forced to spend more than $1bn (£590m) cleaning up pollution from 28 years of oil extraction in Ecuador, if a court case which has opened in a small frontier town on the edge of the Amazon forest finds against it.
The class action case against the world’s second-largest oil company is being watched closely by oil firms and indigenous groups around the world. It is being brought by 30,000 people who say their lives and livelihoods were damaged by the company’s operations between 1964 and 1992.
ChevronTexaco had hoped that the case, being heard in Lago Agrio, 115 miles northeast of the capital Quito, would be held in the US, but a New York appeal court ruled last year that it should be decided in Ecuador.
In a landmark decision which shocked the global oil industry, the court also ruled that any judgment against ChevronTexaco would be enforceable in the US. This opens the legal floodgates to claims by indigenous peoples around the world against western oil and mining companies.
According to the original lawsuit, brought in 1993, Texaco extracted 1.5bn barrels of oil during the years it spent in Ecuador, and systematically disposed of its oily waste in up to 600 open, unlined pits, many of which have leaked and affected water supplies.
Lawyers working for the indigenous peoples will argue that Texaco saved $4bn by not reinjecting the toxic waste back into the earth, which is standard practice. They also allege that the company discharged up to 4 million gallons a day of highly toxic wastewater, contaminated with heavy metals, straight into the Amazon wetlands, rivers and estuaries. They allege that this was done on a scale much worse than the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster, which devastated parts of Alaska in 1989 and cost more than $500m to clean up.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,11319,1070782,00.html
Nick Hancock posted the above to his e-list. This was his comment:
If the Equadorians win this lawsuit, I suspect there will be a lot of indigenous peoples mysteriously “disappearing” all over the planet. That and many being shot as “rebels” by various Bush-Cartel-supported dictators.
I heard a rumor Bush’s billionaire minions are working overtime to change the way “class action suits” are allowed to proceed here in the states. The PR campaign has already started for this, sayin “Only Lawyers ever see any of the money from class action suits.” and “Yeah, those greedy lawyers . . .” and through this and other tactics they’ll try for public opinion successes. They’ll say it is for the good of the average man not to force those big conglomerates to pay up for destroying the Earth . . . et cetera. They say those poor persecuted conglomerates are just being forced to charge us more because of all the class action suits against them. “Fewer such suits and prices will go down!”
This makes just as much sense as giving tax breaks to these same millionaires/billionaires. They don’t pump that money back down to the homeless & the penniless who WERE receiving it when Democrats ruled in the Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Carter years — these Republicans just live a more gaudy extravagant lifestyle . . . Nothing ever “trickled down,” as Reagan conned gullible folks into believing. It never will trickle down — that’s just more Orwellian doublespeak. If only Lady Liberty, aka justice — wasn’t so blind sometimes . . . 🙂
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