Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalSludge Match: Inside Chevron's $9 Billion Legal Battle With Ecuadorean Villagers
Sludge Match: Inside Chevron's $9 Billion Legal Battle With Ecuadorean Villagers
For more than two decades, energy giant Chevron and Ecuadorean activists, led by American lawyer Steven Donziger, have been embroiled in a contentious lawsuit about who is responsible for contaminating a vast swath of the Amazon
By Alexander Zaitchik | August 28, 2014
On March 4th, a federal judge in New York City blocked one of the richest and most scrutinized judgments in the annals of class-action law from being enforced on U.S. soil. The announcement of that decision, a closely watched event in legal and environmental circles, further muddied the future of $9.5 billion in damages the Ecuadorean Supreme Court in 2012 ordered the oil giant Chevron to pay for the systematic contamination of a patch of Amazon rainforest the size of Rhode Island. In his decision capping a seven-week trial, Judge Lewis Kaplan declared the Ecuadorean judgment null and void. The ten-figure fine, he concluded, was the fruit of a jungle shakedown — the result of a "five-year effort to extort and defraud Chevron."
The oil company cheered Kaplan's decision as "a resounding victory for [us] and our stockholders." Steven Donziger, the warhorse lawyer for the Ecuadorean plaintiffs, decried the judge as an accomplice in "the biggest corporate retaliation campaign in history."
The New York trial marked more than a possible turning point in the no-holds-barred battle-royale pitting Chevron against homesteading farmers and a union of five Amazonian tribes. It was also a surprise homecoming. More than a decade ago, the same court ruled to move the case out of New York, where the plaintiffs thought it belonged, and down to Ecuador, where Chevron had cozy relations with key officials in government. The subsequent seesaw between sovereign legal systems is uncommon. So too Chevron's decision to counterattack the Ecuadorean decision using the RICO Act, a collection of racketeering laws usually employed in the prosecution of meth-dealing biker gangs and famous Italian crime families. Which isn't to say Chevron's RICO suit lacked Sicilian-accented echoes with mob cases. The oil company's sole witness to its central charge of bribery was a corrupt Ecuadorean ex-judge named Alberto Guerra, whose entire family has been naturalized and relocated on Chevron's dime. The entire case turned on the testimony of a witness living under a corporate protection plan. (Chevron has stated that the company has taken "reasonable measures, based on third-party assessments, to protect Guerra's safety and security."
The RICO decision put another wrinkle in a case defined by unprecedented international sprawl. What began around the time of Bill Clinton's first inauguration as a class-action suit filed in a New York court has ramified into an overlapping thicket of legal systems and mutual corruption allegations playing out from Buenos Aires to Gibraltar, from Washington D.C. to the Hague. So far, half a dozen legal authorities have been called on to adjudicate the main-event suit and its related cases. Law professors call it a "challenging paradigmatic interface," but it's best described as an extraordinary jurisdictional clusterfuck.
"This drama is in unchartered territory," says Josh Galperin of Yale's Center for Environmental Law and Policy. "We don't have much to compare it to." Marco Simons, legal director of EarthRights International, notes a disorienting, mildly hallucinogenic aspect. "We could be looking at an Alice in Wonderland scenario of never-ending litigation," he says. "It's hard to see where this ends."
More:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sludge-match-chevron-legal-battle-ecuador-steven-donziger-20140828#ixzz3Blzvze9s
To See The Danger Of Militarizing America’s Police Forces, Look South
To See The Danger Of Militarizing America’s Police Forces, Look South
by Steven Cohen - Guest Contributor Posted on August 22, 2014 at 10:55 am
Neither the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager shot six times by a white police officer, nor the events that have since unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri have taught us anything about American race relations that hasn’t been abundantly clear since for decades. What Ferguson has done is expose, in unprecedented public fashion, the shadowy osmosis of military tactics and equipment into local and state police departments. And one needs only look to one of America’s closest allies in the hemisphere for how badly this could turn out.
The tactics used in Ferguson are not a particularly new phenomenon, but images of armored vehicles spewing tear gas and Army-grade assault weapons being pointed at civilians, combined with the momentum the story has built on Twitter, has turned police aggression into a national issue, even for people who aren’t moved by the simple fact of Brown’s death. In that sense, June’s ACLU report on the subject seems rather prescient. “By invoking the imagery of war, aggressively funding the enforcement of U.S. drug laws, and creating an over-hyped fear of siege from within our borders,” it reads, “the federal government has justified and encouraged the militarization of local law enforcement.”
What the study doesn’t discuss at length is that the federal government has already experimented with similar approaches in countries across the world, affording all manner of political support and military aid to repressive autocratic regimes from Indonesia and Iraq, to South Africa, Egypt, and Guatemala, sometimes with even less oversight than has been exercised back home. These and other historical examples provide the best indicators available of what unchecked fear-mongering and the continued militarization of law enforcement could mean for U.S. democracy over the long term.
In no place are the lingering effects of this “paramilitary police juggernaut” more evident than Colombia, which has, for at least the last 20 years, been by far the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid, equipment, training, and tactical guidance of any country outside the greater Middle East, and which remains — some would say as a result — one of the most entrenched human rights crises in the world.
Since the mid-1980s, Colombia has been a key staging ground for the so-called wars on drugs and terror, but U.S. military involvement in the country actually predates even the 50-year armed conflict often used to justify it. Regardless of the true motives, the reliance of institutionalized right-wing paramilitary violence as an institutionalized strategy in the Colombian conflict has been more or less consistent — from the mid 1960s, when U.S. “special advisors” began advocating for the creation of just such a “guerrilla/terrorist” counterinsurgent structure, all the way up to the early 2000s, when Presidents Clinton and Bush both waived human rights restrictions on massive Plan Colombia aid packages, despite overwhelming evidence that the Colombian state was working hand-and-hand with narcotrafficking death squads throughout much of the country.
More:
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/08/22/3474309/colombia-ferguson/
Uribe’s brother promises not to leave country amid criminal investigations
Uribe’s brother promises not to leave country amid criminal investigations
Aug 28, 2014 posted by Victoria McKenzie
Santiago Uribe sent a letter to Colombia’s Prosecutor General Wednesday promising not to skip the country while he is under criminal investigation for founding a paramilitary group.
Uribe, the younger brother of former president Alvaro Uribe, is accused of creating and leading a paramilitary group called “Los 12 Apsosteles,” associated with the AUC, which operated for almost 20 years in the north of Colombia.
Although the investigation opened one year ago, the Prosecutor General has not yet decided whether to hold Uribe in custody pending trial.
In May, the key witness in Uribe’s case refused to continue cooperating with authorities until the Prosecutor General’s Office guaranteed his safety.
Retired National Police Major Juan Carlos Meneses, who openly admits to being involved with Los 12 Apsosteles while acting as police chief, repeatedly accused Santiago Uribe of links to the former paramilitary organization.
More:
http://colombiareports.co/uribes-brother-promises-leave-country/
Pablo Escobar's Right-Hand Man Explains Why The Drug War Is Unwinnable
Pablo Escobar's Right-Hand Man Explains Why The Drug War Is Unwinnable
Michael B Kelley, provided by
| August 27, 2014
In a five-part series about lessons learned from the failed war on drugs, Jochen-Martin Gutsch and Juan Moreno of Der Spiegel explore possible solutions to a campaign that's had "devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world."
The person who helps them establish the problem is legendary druglord Pablo Escobar's former security chief, Jhon "Popeye" Velásquez, who currently resides in a Cómbita maximum-security prison outside of the Colombian capital of Bogotá.
Popeye helped Escobar industrialize cocaine production, seize control 80 percent of the global cocaine trade, and become one of the richest people on the planet by kidnapping, torturing, and murdering hundreds of people who obstructed the Medellín cartel's business.
When asked: "How can we stop people like you?" Popeye responds:
"People like me can't be stopped. It's a war. They lose men, and we lose men. They lose their scruples, and we never had any. In the end, you'll even blow up an aircraft because you believe the Colombian president is on board. I don't know what you have to do. Maybe sell cocaine in pharmacies. I've been in prison for 20 years, but you will never win this war when there is so much money to me made. Never."
More:
http://www.chron.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Pablo-Escobar-s-Right-Hand-Man-Explains-Why-The-5717249.php
Colonization by Bankruptcy: High-Stakes Chess for Argentina
Colonization by Bankruptcy: High-Stakes Chess for Argentina
Posted on Aug 28, 2014
By Ellen Brown, Web of Debt
This piece first appeared at Web of Debt.
If Argentina were in a high-stakes chess match, the country’s actions this week would be the equivalent of flipping over all the pieces on the board.
– David Dayen, Fiscal Times, August 22, 2014
Argentina is playing hardball with the vulture funds, which have been trying to force it into an involuntary bankruptcy. The vultures are demanding what amounts to a 600% return on bonds bought for pennies on the dollar, defeating a 2005 settlement in which 92% of creditors agreed to accept a 70% haircut on their bonds. A US court has backed the vulture funds; but last week, Argentina sidestepped its jurisdiction by transferring the trustee for payment from Bank of New York Mellon to its own central bank. That play, if approved by the Argentine Congress, will allow the country to continue making payments under its 2005 settlement, avoiding default on the majority of its bonds.
Argentina is already foreclosed from international capital markets, so it doesn’t have much to lose by thwarting the US court system. Similar bold moves by Ecuador and Iceland have left those countries in substantially better shape than Greece, which went along with the agendas of the international financiers.
The upside for Argentina was captured by President Fernandez in a nationwide speech on August 19th. Struggling to hold back tears, according to Bloomberg, she said:
When it comes to the sovereignty of our country and the conviction that we can no longer be extorted and that we can’t become burdened with debt again, we are emerging as Argentines.
. . . If I signed what they’re trying to make me sign, the bomb wouldn’t explode now but rather there would surely be applause, marvelous headlines in the papers. But we would enter into the infernal cycle of debt which we’ve been subject to for so long.
The Endgame: Patagonia in the Crosshairs
The deeper implications of that infernal debt cycle were explored by Argentine political analyst Adrian Salbuchi in an August 12th article titled “Sovereign Debt for Territory: A New Global Elite Swap Strategy.” Where territories were once captured by military might, he maintains that today they are being annexed by debt. The still-evolving plan is to drive destitute nations into an international bankruptcy court whose decisions would have the force of law throughout the world. The court could then do with whole countries what US bankruptcy courts do with businesses: sell off their assets, including their real estate. Sovereign territories could be acquired as the spoils of bankruptcy without a shot being fired.
More:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/colonization_by_bankruptcy_high-stakes_chess_for_argentina_20140828
Colombia arrests 32 politicians over paramilitary ties (U.S. South American right-wing ally)
Source: Agence France-Presse
Colombia arrests 32 politicians over paramilitary ties
AFP
August 29, 2014, 4:22 am
Bogota (AFP) - Colombian authorities have arrested 32 local politicians for alleged ties to right-wing paramilitary groups that fueled the country's 50-year conflict before being disbanded a decade ago, prosecutors said Thursday.
Current and former mayors, ex-town councilors, civic leaders and former Senate candidates were among those arrested in the region of Uraba in the violence-torn country's northwest.
~snip~
Rendon is accused in the killings of 4,301 people during a wave of massacres and violence that swept the Uraba region in the 1990s and 2000s, when paramilitary groups waged a campaign of terror aimed at intimidating local voters.
The groups, originally formed in the late 1980s to fight Colombia's leftwing guerrilla groups, ended up forging an alliance with like-minded politicians and turning on the local population.
~snip~
The Colombian conflict, the longest in Latin America, has killed 220,000 people and caused more than five million to flee their homes since it erupted as a left-wing guerrilla uprising in the 1960s.
Read more: https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/world/a/24843468/
32 politicians arrested on paramilitary commander’s testimony, at least 23 more to go in northwester
32 politicians arrested on paramilitary commander’s testimony, at least 23 more to go in northwestern Colombia
Aug 28, 2014 posted by Steven Cohen
The capture of some 32 local politicians in northwestern Colombia Wednesday is only the start of a much larger purge ordered by the state on the strength of testimony provided by a demobilized paramilitary commander, local media reported.
For years, Freddy Rendon, alias “El Aleman,” led the Elmer Cardenas bloc, one of the most powerful and violent regional units in the now-defunct AUC national paramiltary umbrella. El Aleman alone is thought to have ordered and participated in dozens of murders and massacres, displacing thousands in the nortwest coastal region of Uraba, the birthplace of Colombia’s modern paramilitary phenomenon.
~snip~
On the basis of his testimony, judges have now issued some 50 new warrants for the arrests of various local politicians previously backed by the AUC during the group’s “For a Strong Uraba, Unity and Peace” inititative, which attempted to infiltrate local power structures by placing AUC allies in office.
~snip~
Indeed, El Aleman has testified that Santiago Uribe, the brother of the former president, facilitated meetings between regional paramilitary commanders and the Chiquita Brands multinational fruit company, which is facing a class action suit in the United States launched by victims of parmailitary violence.
Other multinatioanls in the region, including Coca Cola and Dole Fruits, face similar charges, and there is extensive evidence that former President Uribe himself, now a senator, played an integral role in promoting paramilitarism, especially in Antioquia, where he served as governor.
http://colombiareports.co/32-politicians-arrested-paramilitary-commanders-testimony-least-23-go-northwestern-colombia/
US starts extradition process for Colombia ex-Minister of Agriculture
Source: Colombia Reports
US starts extradition process for Colombia ex-Minister of Agriculture
Aug 28, 2014 posted by Victoria McKenzie
The US has begun the process of extraditing Andres Felipe Arias, the former Colombian minister sentenced to 17 years in prison for embezzling $25 million in government funds.
The US Supreme Court unanimously decided to transfer of Arias’ case to the Ministery of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Justice on Wednesday, although his asylum request is still pending investigation.
Arias fled Colombia after he was found guilty of embezzling over $25 million through an agricultural subsidy program called Agro Ingreso Seguro (AIS) under the Uribe administration.. Arias filed a request for asylum in Florida on July 7, arguing that he was being politically persecuted.
Arias was nowhere to be found at the time of his June sentencing, leading to suspicions that he escaped the country to avoid imprisonment, as had former intelligence director Maria del Pilar Hurtado, who also served under ex-President Alvaro Uribe.
Read more: http://colombiareports.co/us-starts-extradition-process-for-colombia-ex-minister-of-agriculture/
Earlier:
~snip~
Arias was found guilty of embezzling over $25 million through an agricultural subsidy program called Agro Ingreso Seguro (AIS).
Prosecutors successfully demonstrated that the former minister under ex-President Alvaro Uribe had funneled state subsidies from the Agro Ingreso Seguro (AIS) program that were intended for poor farmers, but instead were given to wealthy and politically powerful families, a beauty queen, and even former paramilitaries.
Colombia’s Inspector General Alejandro Ordoñez banned Arias from office for 16 years after the scandal broke. If Arias returns to Colombia, he will be facing 17 years, 5 months and 8 days in prison for his role in the AIS scandal.
http://colombiareports.co/colombias-ex-minister-arias-convicted-corruption-sought-asylum-united-states-prosecutor-general-confirms/
The Fall and Rise of Investigative Journalism
Published on Tuesday, August 26, 2014 by TomDispatchThe Fall and Rise of Investigative Journalism
From Asia to Africa to Latin America, muckrakers have corrupt officials and corporate cronies on the run
by Anya Schiffrin
In our world, the news about the news is often grim. Newspapers are shrinking, folding up, or being cut loose by their parent companies. Layoffs are up and staffs are down. That investigative reporter who covered the state capitol -- she’s not there anymore. Newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune have suffered from multiple rounds of layoffs over the years. You know the story and it would be easy enough to imagine that it was the world’s story as well. But despite a long run of journalistic tough times, the loss of advertising dollars, and the challenge of the Internet, there’s been a blossoming of investigative journalism across the globe from Honduras to Myanmar, New Zealand to Indonesia.
Woodward and Bernstein may be a fading memory in this country, but journalists with names largely unknown in the U.S. like Khadija Ismayilova, Rafael Marques, and Gianina Segnina are breaking one blockbuster story after another, exposing corrupt government officials and their crony corporate pals in Azerbaijan, Angola, and Costa Rica. As I travel the world, I’m energized by the journalists I meet who are taking great risks to shine much needed light on shadowy wrongdoing.
And I’m not the only one to notice. “We are in a golden age of investigative journalism,” says Sheila Coronel. And she should know. Now the academic dean at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Coronel was the director of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, whose coverage of the real estate holdings of former President Joseph Estrada -- including identical houses built for his mistresses -- contributed to his removal from office in 2001.
These are, to take another example, the halcyon days for watchdog journalism in Brazil. Last October, I went to a conference of investigative journalists there organized by the Global Journalism Investigative Network. There were 1,350 attendees. In July, I was back for another conference, this time organized by the Association of Brazilian Investigative Journalists and attended by close to 450 reporters. Thanks in part to Brazil’s Freedom of Information Act and the “open budget” movement that seeks to shed light on the government’s finances (and let people have a say in how their tax dollars are spent), journalists there have been busy exposing widespread corruption in local government as well as a cash-for-votes scheme that resulted in the arrest of nine senior politicians.
More:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/08/26/fall-and-rise-investigative-journalism
The Latin Americanization of U.S. Police Forces
August 27, 2014
A Warning
The Latin Americanization of U.S. Police Forces
by COSME CAAL
Guatemala City.
From Guatemala City I have been keeping up with the events in Ferguson, Missouri and my heart goes out to those United States citizens who are actively resisting a brutal local police state. I sit awake at night and contemplate how one of the greatest nations in the world has become militarized and despotic. Impunity is now normalized in most police departments across the United States and in the minds of many Americans. I did not know I would live to see this phenomenon, yet, the more I peruse online news feeds, the more evident it is to me that Americans, especially minorities, are in great danger of militarized suppression as a matter of state policy.
From our experience in half a century in Latin America I can tell you that, once the human rights of a minority are compromised, it is only a matter of time before they are compromised for an entire nation. From that same experience I can tell you it will take decades before they can be regained. Militarized police forces take on a life of their down, at the expense of the society’s well-being. The social contract that gives the state the duty to organize police forces itself becomes obsolete, almost a joke. Citizens begin to obey agents of the state not out of respect or cooperation, but out of fear of those sworn to protect them. Eventually, the militarized power of the police reaches such magnitude that political leaders lose all ability to rein them in. We experienced this USA-backed militarized transformation of the police in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Chile, and Colombia. What the U.S. helped do to Latin America, it is now doing to itself.
Even when there will officers who want to adhere to the law, militarized policing organizations become an unstoppable and despotic force. The very ideologies that give them life become obsolete, as do all existing laws that protect citizens. Central American dictatorships backed and armed by the United States government in the 1970’s built police forces, outfitted them with military gear, and allowed them to brutalize and kill with impunity. The murder or incarceration of progressive democratic leaders who resisted this transformation was sanctioned by United States intelligence agencies.
I call out to white United States citizens, and those police officers that believe in democracy and the rule of law, to unite with racial minorities who are now being suppressed, and to resist the catastrophic militarization of police forces across the United States. For white Americans to think that their race makes them immune to police brutality is a mistake that cannot be afforded. Central American urban mestizo masses ignored the genocide of hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples. They saw these massacres as not their problem. Today we all suffer militarized suppression. Racial division was our greatest weakness.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/27/the-latin-americanization-of-u-s-police-forces/
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