Maria - who has written 8 posts on Rainforest Action Network Blog.
Maria Lya Ramos is a campaigner on Rainforest Action Network’s Change Chevron program. She has worked alongside Indigenous and rural communities across Latin American and has engaged the top echelons of major banks and corporations. She has served as a consultant to the Center for International Environmental Law and the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala on strategies to curtail metal mining in the Guatemalan highlands. Previously she served as the Southern Amazon Program Coordinator at Amazon Watch, where she led advocacy efforts to protect Indigenous peoples and their territories from harmful extractive industry projects in the Peruvian Amazon.Diego Borja must come clean — that was the decision that came down yesterday from Judge Edward Chen in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Borja, a self proclaimed “dirty tricks” operative for Chevron, has been on the run from a subpoena filed by the Ecuadorean government and the Indigenous and campesino plaintiffs in the [...]
Continue reading...By Maria, February 11 2011
Oh, the irony. Chevron filing a racketeering lawsuit against the impoverished Indigenous and campesino Amazon residents who are suing the oil giant in Ecuador for plundering their rainforest land over several decades of reckless oil drilling would be all too fitting for the satiric geniuses at the Daily Show — if it weren’t nauseatingly insulting. [...]
Continue reading...By Maria, January 26 2011
If you’ve been following the dramatic turns of the historic class action environmental lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador, then you’re aware of Chevron’s aggressive public relations and legal campaign to derail the case. Their latest antic, though, is as morally reprehensible as any I’ve seen. Chevron is claiming that some of the plaintiffs’ signatures on [...]
Continue reading...By Maria, December 17 2010
The mighty Aguarico River is where the Cofán people have fished, bathed, and washed for many generations. The river also traditionally provided the community’s main source of drinking water. It was the lifeblood of the Cofán. But the Aguarico now holds a very different meaning for the Cofán and for Emergildo Criollo, a leader in [...]
Continue reading...By Maria, December 16 2009
Amazon Defense Coalition House Members Express “Concern” About Oil Giant’s Effort to Use Trade Policy to Deny Due Process in Environmental Lawsuit WASHINGTON–Chevron has been dealt a major setback in the Congress as more than two dozen representatives, led by Rep. Linda Sanchez and including powerful senior members, have signed a letter urging that the [...]
Continue reading...By Maria, November 24 2009
November 23, 2009 Published in the Huffington Post by Han Shan Chevron is piling on the lobbyists and PR firms in an extraordinary effort to evade responsibility for its massive toxic contamination of the Ecuadorian Amazon. But in a recent article for Politico, Kenneth Vogel, who tracks the confluence of money, politics and influence for [...]
Continue reading...By Maria, November 21 2009
November 20th, 2009 Published in the Huffington Post By Trudie Styler Actress, director, producer, and humanitarian The following post was originally delivered at the UN General Assembly’s meeting on climate change on Thursday, November 19th. It has been 20 years since Sting and I first visited Brazil, and met some of the people [...]
Continue reading...Mr. Watson, how will you respond? Yesterday Rainforest Action Network’s executive director Mike Brune sent a letter to Chevron’s incoming CEO John Watson and made him an offer. Come with us to Ecuador. To our knowledge no senior Chevron official has toured Texaco’s former oil installations in Ecuador’s rainforest. [Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001, and [...]
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By Maria, February 17 2011
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