New twist unfolds in Ecuador v. Chevron

[Judi Lynn]

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.

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

[Judi Lynn]

1. Closely related: Big Oil Wreaks Havoc in the Amazon, But Communities Are Fighting Back

By Kelly Hearn
Big Oil Wreaks Havoc in the Amazon, But Communities Are Fighting Back

This time it's not Chevron in Ecuador but Occidental Petroleum in Peru. And the local community has had enough of giveaways to corporate polluters.
March 11, 2010

On Wednesday the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco heard oral arguments in Tomas Maynas Carijano v. Occidental Petroleum, a case in which the defendant resides just miles from the courthouse in a plush office building and the plaintiff in a wooden hut in the Peruvian Amazon.

At issue before the court is whether a U.S. district court was right to send the pollution and public health lawsuit against the California-based oil company to Peru rather than keep it in the U.S. where it was filed. But, considering the unprecedented oil boom in the Peruvian Amazon, there is more at stake right now than just this lawsuit.

~snip~
Oxy wants the trial in Peru. Plaintiffs say that while they'll fight anywhere, their chances of getting relief seem slimmer in one venue than another.

"I want the case to stay in the United States," Apu Tomas (Apu means leader or chief) told me when I visited his village. "Natives can never get justice in Peru."

People who watch this sort of thing see parallels to a similar case in the Ecuadorian Amazon where 30,000 ethnic natives are suing Chevron for polluting their rainforest homes. The plaintiffs in that case years ago filed suit in the United States, but Chevron convinced a judge that it belongs in Ecuador. After years of bitter litigation, the Ecuadorian courts appear poised to slap a $26 billion judgment on the company later this year. But Chevron is now indicating that it won't comply with the judgment of the Ecuadorian court because it was denied due process. Send us down there. No, things didn't work out. Take us back.

~snip~
The oil boom in the Peruvian Amazon also makes this lawsuit particularly important. Thanks in part to outsiders, natives are learning to use GPS units, Google Earth, blogs and lawsuits to fight back. But most would agree that the lawsuits are really what change Big Oil's behavior.

Carter Beasley is an engineer who has worked on South American oil projects for 25 years. He once told me that these kinds of suits are making oil companies pay far more attention to how things get done. In the past, they hid their sins in the Amazon's remoteness.

~snip~
I'd be willing to bet that Oxy's chief executive has more money than all of Peru's natives put together. It is hard for me to understand how one of the world's richest and most powerful companies can dump billions of gallons of toxins into the environment and raise their hands and say "We hate this, we really do, but we sold all this stuff to another company and we aren't responsible."

Several years ago, at the height of Ecuador's oil boom, oil companies were taking over the traditional lands of Amazonian Cofan Indians until Randy Borman, the son of white U.S. missionaries (who had lived his life as a Cofan) organized them into gun-toting groups that kidnapped oil workers. The Cofan got their land back. A few years ago, I spoke on the phone with Borman and he told me that "companies only understand force. That's just how it is."

I hope the oil outsiders and developers learn to do what they do in an environmentally sound way, in ways that respect the people who have lived on the land for countless generations. I hope the people of Peru can benefit from the jobs and oil royalties generated by environmentally sound extraction methods (like horizontal drilling) and that companies will consider natives as real stakeholders. And I hope that Oxy has to pay big. I hope its gazzillionaire executives have smaller bonus checks and are forced to one day explain to their children why their massive company wasn't able to correct such a giant injustice.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/145968/big_oil_wreaks_havoc_in_the_amazon,_but_communities_are_fighting_back?page=1