by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Oct 31, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Toxification
By Darrin Mortenson / Alianza Arkana
Even as indigenous people struggle to cope with current levels of contamination and illness caused by years of oil production in the Amazon, the governments of Peru and Ecuador are preparing to sell off even more Amazonian territory to the oil industry in coming months.
Starting in November, Peru’s state-run leasing agency Petroperu plans to start auctioning licenses to 36 new oil blocks for exploration, 19 of them in the northern region of Loreto. Just across the border, Ecuador is set to lease at least 13 blocks on or near waterways that eventually flow south into Peru and join the Amazon River.
Many of the blocks overlap or abut protected areas and indigenous territories and threaten the forests and rivers that indigenous people and other river people depend on for their lives.
Indigenous groups are rallying to stop their governments’ plans, and some talk of making a stand for a total moratorium on all exploration until both countries come up with a regional environmental plan.
“Oil production is an activity that definitely alters our territory, our environment, our health and our culture,” said Alfonso Lopez Tejada, leader of the federation of 57 indigenous Kukama communities along the Maranon river region in Peru, where three new lots overlap Kukama communities and threaten the famous Pacaya Samiria National Reserve.
“Again they impose these lots on us just as they did not consult us when they leased our territories before,” Lopez said.
In Ecuador, indigenous groups are planning demonstrations and marches to protest the new round of concessions begin on November 28.
“We are defending our land. We won’t allow oil activity,” said Franco Viteri, president of a Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorean Amazon (Confeniae), according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.
Ecuadorian indigenous leaders say they will make an appeal to the country’s Constitutional Court.
From Alianza Arkana
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Oct 10, 2012 | Lobbying, Toxification
By Jeff Gray / The Globe and Mail
Chevron Corp. has lost a bid to have the U.S. Supreme Court consider its call for a worldwide ban on attempts to collect on a controversial $19-billion (U.S.) environmental judgment levelled against the company in Ecuador.
The decision comes with lawyers in Canada poised to battle in a Toronto courtroom next month over an attempt by the Ecuadorean plaintiffs to seize Chevron’s considerable Canadian assets to cover at least part of the massive judgment – a judgment the oil giant dismisses as fraudulent.
In the latest twist in a tangled legal saga, Chevron was trying to revive a preliminary injunction issued last year by a federal judge in New York. That injunction was later overturned on appeal. It purported to block the plaintiffs and their lawyers from trying to enforce the 2011 Ecuadorean court ruling not just in the U.S., but anywhere outside of Ecuador.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused on Tuesday to hear the case. It issued no reasons, as is customary, leaving the appeal court decision that quashed the injunction in place.
The news comes as lawyers for the plaintiffs – a group of villagers in the Amazon rainforest – have stepped up their campaign to force the oil company to pay for environmental damage from oil pollution in the Lago Agrio area of Ecudaor.
Chevron, based in San Ramon, Calif., has said it has virtually no assets remaining in Ecuador, and the plaintiffs have vowed to chase the company’s assets elsewhere. Their first stop, earlier this year, was Canada.
In May, they announced they had retained prominent Toronto lawyer Alan Lenczner, of Lenczner Slaght Royce Smith Griffin LLP, to try to have the judgment recognized by the Ontario Superior Court and force Chevron to fork over its Canadian assets, which include oil sands holdings. The plaintiffs have also filed a similar collection effort in Brazil.
In sprawling litigation in the United States, both sides have accused each of fraud and bribery in connection with the Ecuadorean ruling, allegations they both deny.
Chevron said Tuesday in an e-mailed statement that the company was disappointed with the decision but “will continue to defend against the plaintiffs’ lawyers’ attempts to enforce the fraudulent Ecuadorean judgment, and to further expose their misconduct in our pending [litigation] in New York and other proceedings.”
The plaintiffs’ say the ruling is the latest in a series of defeats for Chevron in U.S. courts.
“Chevron’s latest loss before the Supreme Court is an example of the company’s increasingly futile battle to avoid paying its legal obligations in Ecuador,” Aaron Marr Page, a lawyer for the Ecuadoreans, was quoted as saying in an e-mailed statement.
Read more from The Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/the-law-page/chevron-loses-bid-to-have-ecuador-case-heard-by-us-supreme-court/article4599707/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 18, 2012 | Lobbying, Toxification
By Amazon Defense Coalition
A new financial analysis has found that Chevron’s $18 billion Ecuador environmental liability poses a threat of “irreparable damage” to the oil major’s global operations if the plaintiffs make good on their promise to launch legal actions to enforce the judgment in countries where Chevron has billions of dollars in assets.
The report, by social investment analyst Simon Billenness, notes that the long-running case (Aguinda v. ChevronTexaco) “is reaching its most risky phase” for Chevron after an appeals court in Ecuador upheld the judgment in January and rendered it immediately enforceable. The report notes that Chevron’s defenses have been “severely compromised” because of a separate ruling by a New York federal appellate court that vacated a preliminary injunction purporting to bar worldwide enforcement of the judgment.
The Billenness Report also notes that Chevron has yet to disclose in its public filings that its own comptroller, Rex Mitchell, quietly submitted a sworn affidavit to U.S. federal court that concluded any enforcement of the judgment will cause “irreparable damage” to the company. Chevron has been trying to downplay the risk posed by the judgment in its public filings and press releases, concluded Billenness in the report, titled An Analysis of the Financial and Operational Risks to the Chevron Corporation from Aguinda v. ChevronTexaco.
“In sworn legal statements, Chevron has admitted that the company faces ‘irreparable injury’ to [its] business relationships’ [from any enforcement of the Ecuador case] yet has consistently refused to fully characterize these risks to its shareholders,” he wrote in the report. “Shareholders are rightly questioning whether the board and management are fulfilling their fiduciary duties to properly manage the significant risks to the company’s business and value.”
The report also concluded “the enormous breadth of Chevron’s global business operations makes the company particularly vulnerable to enforcement. There are many jurisdictions around the world in which the plaintiffs could seek court recognition and enforcement of the judgment, including many where Chevron has substantial reserves and that are of strategic importance.”
Key findings of the Billenness report include:
- The Ecuador judgment poses serious risks to Chevron’s worldwide operations, with the possibility of asset attachments and loss of social license to operate in new areas and markets;
- Chevron’s principal legal defenses against enforcement have either been severely compromised or have failed. These include the reversal of a preliminary injunction barring enforcement and the rejection by Ecuador’s government of a private investment arbitration that tried to halt the litigation;
- Chevron’s shareholders are stepping up calls for more transparent disclosure of the Ecuador liability, leading to increased pressure on management; and
- Chevron risks violating securities laws for withholding material information from shareholders.
Shareholders have been speaking out against Chevron management on the Ecuador issue for some time.
Last year, New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli blasted the company for “doing grave reputational damage” to itself by pursuing more legal proceedings “that only delay the inevitable…it’s time to face reality…[t]he entire case is looming like a hammer over shareholders’ heads.” And in a letter last May, several prominent institutional investors called on Chevron “to fully disclose … the risks to its operations and business from the potential enforcement” of the Ecuador judgment.
Chevron refused to even acknowledge or answer either the investor letter, according to the shareholders.
The plaintiffs have said they plan to enforce the judgment in various countries, but they have not announced any specifics other than to say Venezuela and Panama are being considered. Chevron has billions of dollars of assets in Australia, Kazakhstan, Singapore, Brazil, and Venezuela and operates in dozens of countries around the world, said Karen Hinton, the spokesperson for the Ecuadorians.
Billenness specializes in analyzing how environmental, social, and governance factors pose risks to shareholders. He has worked as an analyst and advisor to Trillium Asset Management and the Office of Investment of the AFL-CIO. He is a member of the U.S. Social Investment Forum and consults with entities that focus on social investing.
From Chevron Toxico: http://chevrontoxico.com/news-and-multimedia/2012/0517-chevron-faces-irreparable-damage-from-18-billion-judgment.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 19, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Rhett A. Butler / Mongabay
More than 150 new dams planned across the Amazon basin could significantly disrupt the ecological connectivity of the Amazon River to the Andes with substantial impacts for fish populations, nutrient cycling, and the health of Earth’s largest rainforest, warns a comprehensive study published in the journal PLoS ONE.
Scouring public data and submitting information requests to governments, researchers Matt Finer of Save America’s Forests and Clinton Jenkins of North Carolina State University documented plans for new dams in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. They found that 40 percent of the projects are already in advanced planning stages and more than half would be large dams over 100 megawatts. 60 percent of the dams “would cause the first major break in connectivity between protected Andean headwaters and the lowland Amazon”, while more than 80 percent “would drive deforestation due to new roads, transmission lines, or inundation.”
“These results are quite troubling given the critical link between the Andes Mountains and the Amazonian floodplain,” said lead author Finer in a statement. “There appears to be no strategic planning regarding possible consequences to the disruption of an ecological connection that has existed for millions of years.”
Finer and Jenkins note that the Andes are a critical source of sediments, nutrients, and organic matter for the Amazon river, feeding the floodplain that supports the rich Amazon rainforest. The Amazon and it tributaries are critical highways for migratory fish that move to headwaters areas to spawn.”Many economically and ecologically important Amazonian fish species spawn only in Andean-fed rivers, including a number that migrate from the lowlands to the foothills,” the authors write. “The Andean Amazon is also home to some of the most species rich forests and rivers on Earth. The region is documented to contain extraordinary richness for the most well studied taxa… and high levels of endemism for the understudied fishes. Therefore, any dam-driven forest loss or river impacts are of critical concern.”Finer and Jenkins conducted a meta-analysis of river connectivity and infrastructure to produce an “ecological impact score” for all 151 dams. 47 percent of the dams were classified as “high impact” while only 19 percent were rated “low impact”. Eleven of the dams would directly affect a conservation area.
The hydroelectric projects would also have social impacts. Forty dams would be constructed “immediately upstream or downstream” on an indigenous territory.Worryingly the authors conclude that there is seemingly no basin-wide policy assessment of the potential social and ecological impacts of the dam-building spree.“We conclude that there is an urgent need for strategic basin scale evaluation of new dams and a plan to maintain Andes-Amazon connectivity,” said study co-author Jenkins in a statement. “We also call for a reconsideration of the notion that hydropower is a widespread low impact energy source in the Neotropics.” Finer and Jenkins warn that the perception dams in tropical forest areas are a clean energy source could lead to perverse subsidies for the projects via the carbon market.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 15, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Toxification
By Amazon Defense Coalition
A lead Chevron lawyer has made the preposterous claim that the 30,000 Ecuadorian victims of the oil giant’s contamination are “irrelevant” to the court case that led to an $18 billion judgment against the company.
Doak Bishop, a Chevron lawyer from the American firm King & Spalding, said the following before a panel of international investment arbitrators on February 15th:
“The plaintiffs are really irrelevant. They always were irrelevant. There were never any real parties in interest in this case. The plaintiff’s lawyers have no clients… There will be no prejudice to [the rainforest communities] or any individual by holding up enforcement of the judgment.”
Meanwhile, the Huffington Post published over a dozen photos of Ecuadorians who have died or have severe medical problems resulting from Chevron’s contamination. See here for photos, taken by Lou Dematteis.
By arguing that no Ecuadorians had been harmed or were in danger of being harmed, Bishop was trying to convince the panel of arbitrators that they should block the Ecuadorians from enforcing their judgment against Chevron in other countries, a strategy that has failed for multiple reasons. See here.
Chevron has a long history of trying to dehumanize the Ecuadorians by denying their very existence or by belittling their culture, said Pablo Fajardo, the lead lawyer for the communities.
In 2010, Chevron tried to claim the signatures of 20 of the 48 named plaintiffs in the lawsuit had been forged by their attorneys. The charge was quickly rebutted after the plaintiffs appeared before a public notary to affirm their signatures were legitimate. See here. Chevron engineers also belittled Ecuadorian indigenous leaders by making them wear Western clothes and suggesting that oil-laden streams were actually full of vitamins, according to published reports.
The existence and relevance of the Ecuadorians has been affirmed by multiple independent journalists, including those working for 60 Minutes, The Sunday Night Show in Australia, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
The $18 billion damage award, levied by an Ecuador court, will be used to clean up Chevron’s deliberate contamination of the rainforest and provide clean drinking water and health care to the residents of the company’s former concession area. The damage decimated indigenous groups and caused an outbreak of cancer, according to evidence relied on by the court in issuing the judgment. See this video for more information.
Chevron, under the Texaco brand, operated in Ecuador from 1964 to 1992. Chevron admitted dumping 16 billion gallons of toxic drilling fluids directly into waterways and streams relied on by local residents for their drinking water.
From PR Newswire: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chevron-lawyer-claims-that-victims-of-rainforest-contamination-are-irrelevant—-amazon-defense-coalition-147441865.html
