New twist unfolds in Ecuador v. Chevron

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

New twist unfolds in Ecuador v. Chevron
By DAVID R. BAKER San Francisco Chronicle
March 11, 2010, 11:11PM

Chevron Corp. won a round Thursday in the long legal fight over oil field contamination in Ecuador, with a U.S. judge ruling in New York that the California-based company can pursue arbitration in the case. But the final outcome of the fight, which could cost Chevron $27.3 billion, remains in doubt.

Residents of Ecuador's rainforest are suing Chevron over polluted soil and water, saying contamination from oil wells has sickened and killed people. Chevron argues that the trial, held in the Ecuadoran town of Lago Agrio, has been tainted by government interference and possible corruption.

So last year, Chevron filed an international arbitration claim against the Ecuadorean government, asking an arbitration panel to hold the government and its state-run oil company, Petroecuador, responsible for cleaning up the country's oil fields.

In response, the Ecuadoran government and the lawsuit's plaintiffs asked a U.S. court to block the arbitration request, which they saw as Chevron's last-ditch attempt to derail the lawsuit. The company, plaintiffs said, feared losing in Ecuador and was “shopping” for a friendlier forum.

Read more: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/6909531.html

Chevron was overjoyed to have the case remanded to Ecuador ten years ago, when they had their toady rightwing government running things in Ecuador. Now that the Ecuadoran people have thrown those jerks out, and have an honest government and an honest court system--which is about to rule in favor of the 30,000 Indigenous who have suffered high cancer rates, spontaneous abortions and numerous other health problems, and whose subsistence lives have been destroyed by horrible toxic oil dumping which has killed fisheries and polluted rivers and creeks in an area the size of Rhode Island--a man-made disaster that is often called "the rainforest Chernobyl"--back they drag it to the U.S. to try to evade responsibility once again.

For most of that time, the Indigenous had ONE lawyer--a local self-taught Indigenous lawyer who had personally suffered "oil showers" and drinking "oil water" along with his family. He kept the suit alive without even a fax machine in support, against batteries of Chevron-Texaco lawyers. The Indigenous people would not give up. They fought and fought and fought and fought this huge corporation. Now they have some NGO help, but they are still facing batteries of corporate lawyers, not to mention twelve P.R. firms hired by Chevron to slander the Indigenous plaintiffs. We even have a Chevron-Texaco liar/ apologist right here at DU--'protocol rv'--who says, of a toxic mess that is twice the size of the Exxon Valdez, "there is no 'rainforest Chernobyl' in Ecuador," and who made the racist comment that the testimony of an "Indian" should be questioned because he is an "Indian".

I would sure like to know under what twisted version of the law Chevron has dragged the Ecuadoran government into court in the USA. "Arbitration" of what? There is no case in the U.S. But they'll do anything for greed's sake and so--very unfortunately--will the U.S. 'justice' system. We can be sure that John Roberts--who just the other day ruled in favor of unlimited corporate campaign donations, in effect granting the human right of "free speech" to multinational corporations and inflicting what is likely the final blow to our democracy--is greedily awaiting an appeal of this "arbitration" if it goes against Chevron. And what this means is that the cost of cleaning up this humungous oil spill and the cost of medical care and other help to the affected Indigenous tribes is going to fall on the Ecuadoran people, who are among the poorest in Latin America.

Disgusting!

Chevron accusing someone else of corruption just caused my irony meter to spontaneously combust.