We served an arrest warrant for Chevron CEO John Watson today. Brazilian prosecutors have issued criminal charges against Chevron and several of its employees, including the chief executive of Chevron’s Brazil unit, in response to the company’s November 2011 oil spill off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. It’s refreshing, to say the least, to [...]
Continue reading...Thursday, March 15, 2012
We brought some Chinese journalists out to Rumipamba yesterday, a Quichua village spread along a recently paved road in the Auca Sur oil field. The journalists were looking for the tabloid version of what happened here, and Rumipamba is a gold mine in that regard. There was an oil spill in Rumipamba back in 1976 [...]
Continue reading...Friday, March 9, 2012
That’s the tagline for a new documentary being made about the Yasuni national forest in Ecuador, which has been called “Earth’s Eden” because of its stunning beauty and incredible biodiversity. I’m willing to bet many RAN supporters would go very far indeed to save this pristine region of Amazon rainforest, but supporting this documentary, Yasuni [...]
Continue reading...Wednesday, March 7, 2012
…a local man named Donald Moncayo showed me around. Wearing white surgical gloves, he dug up a fistful of black mud and held it so that the sunlight caught the telltale blue-orange tint of petroleum. At one fetid pit in a jungle glade, he stepped gingerly onto the surface of the pool, where the solid [...]
Continue reading...Friday, March 2, 2012
This morning I accompanied Emergildo Criollo, leader of the Cofan people, from his home in the dusty outskirts of Lago Agrio (the oil camp turned boom town that Texaco founded) to a press conference in Quito regarding a ruling issued late yesterday afternoon by the appellate court in Sucumbios rejecting Chevron’s latest attempt to block [...]
Continue reading...Wednesday, February 22, 2012
How low can Chevron go? It seems the company is determined to find out. Having lost a major environmental lawsuit in both US and Ecuador courts based on the merits of the case, Chevron has resorted to a secret international arbitration panel to evade paying an $18 billion judgment in Ecuador. Apparently the way Chevron [...]
Continue reading...Friday, February 17, 2012
The secret arbitration panel convened by Chevron in Washington, DC last week has issued its ruling — and not surprisingly, the trio of corporate lawyers has found that they have jurisdiction to review the civil suit brought against Chevron in the public court system of the sovereign nation of Ecuador. I say it’s not surprising [...]
Continue reading...Friday, February 10, 2012
Chevron’s kangaroo court is meeting this weekend in a rented room in Washington, DC. We thought they might need an actual kangaroo for the meeting, so we brought one. It wasn’t a real kangaroo, it was an activist in a kangaroo costume. But that’s okay, this isn’t a real court of justice, either. In fact, [...]
Continue reading...Thursday, February 9, 2012
It may sound like the plot of some hackneyed corporate espionage thriller, but it’s all too true: Having lost a massive environmental lawsuit in two different countries based on the merits of the case, Chevron is now resorting to a secret international arbitration panel made up of pro-corporate lawyers to evade responsibility for the environmental [...]
Continue reading...Thursday, January 26, 2012
Diego Borja is Chevron’s “dirty tricks guy” — that’s not an allegation, that’s how he once described himself. Recent court documents reveal that Chevron has paid Borja $2.2 million for his work. You have to wonder: What exactly is Chevron paying Borja to do? Ostensibly, that $2.2 million is for retainer fees, living expenses, income taxes [...]
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Wednesday, March 21, 2012
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