Violence in the Amazon – 1 dead, dozens injured in Indigenous Protests

Ecuador
Support Indigenous Protesters;
Stop Government Repression

Oct. 2, 2009

Ecuadorian police have attacked peaceful Shuar Indigenous protesters near the town of Macas in the southern Ecuadorian Amazon, leaving at least one Shuar teacher dead.

Please join Cultural Survival in condemning this state violence and urge Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa to refrain from further violence, investigate the Macas violence, and negotiate directly with Indigenous organizations to address their concerns and uphold their rights.

Indigenous Peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon launched protests early this week against a new Water Law and the Mining Law. These laws, they charge, ignore the rights of Indigenous Peoples as stated in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and in the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169, both of which have been ratified by Ecuador. They endanger the Ecuadorian Amazon’s vast tropical rainforest by facilitating further encroachment by mining, oil and logging companies, construction of hydroelectric dams, and privatization of water.

Tito Puenchir, President of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENIAE), called for “permanent protests” until changes are made in the water and mining laws to protect the natural resources of the Amazon region and recognize the rights of its Indigenous inhabitants. CONFENIAE also asked the United Nations and the Organization of American States to intervene.

Following the violence at Macas, President Correa offered to meet with CONFENIAE and the national indigenous organization CONAIE, but the Indigenous organizations insist that the talks take place in the Amazon. So far, Correa has not agreed to meet outside the capital.

TAKE ACTION:
For a model letter click here

Please send letters to President Correa. The fastest way to reach him is via the Ecuadorian Ambassador to the United States (see email, fax and address below). Use this model letter or write your own polite message. Postage to Ecuador is 98 cents.

Thank you for standing with the Amazon’s Indigenous Peoples to defend their rights and to prevent corporate sacking of the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

Addresses:

Economista Rafael Correa Delgado
Presidente Constitucional de la República del Ecuador
García Moreno y Chile
Palacio de Carondelet
Quito, ECUADOR

Ambassador Luis Benigno Gallegos Chiriboga
2535 15th Street NW
Washington, DC 20009
Telephone: [1] (202) 234-7200
FAX: [1] (202) 667-3482
Email: embassy@ecuador.org

(Photo: www.servindi.org)

Chevron, Pollution and Misinformation – Andy Rooney Speaks Out

A fresh animation narrated by Andy Rooney, speaking truth to Chevron, phoney journalists and corporate executives concerning Ecuador and its Indigenous Population.

Ecuador, with its President, Rafael Corea, is a country at odds with itself. An amendment to the Constitution recently included the rights of the environment to exist, yet the Administration of Corea continues to push for expansion of oil and gas mining into the Ecuadorian Amazon, poisoning communities today and threatening to displace tens of thousands of Indigenous persons. The Indigenous People need and deserve our support, as they continue mobilizing communities to ensure their rights are not abused.

To find out more, visit chevroninecuador.com

http://www.chevroninecuador.com/2009/08/chevron-gets-no-love-from-andy-rooney.html

Oil and Indians Don’t Mix: Greg Palast on the Indigenous Struggle against Big Oil

Friday 12 June 2009
by: Greg Palast | Visit article original @ GregPalast.com

There’s an easy way to find oil. Go to some remote and gorgeous natural sanctuary, say Alaska or the Amazon, find some Indians, then drill down under them.

If the indigenous folk complain, well, just shoo them away. Shooing methods include: bulldozers, bullets, crooked politicians and fake land sales.

But be aware. Lately, the natives are shooing back. Last week, indigenous Peruvians seized an oil pumping station, grabbed the nine policemen guarding it and, say reports, executed them. This followed the government’s murder of more than a dozen rain forest residents, who had protested the seizure of their property for oil drilling.

Again and again, I see it in my line of work of investigating fraud. Here are a few pit stops on the oily trail of tears:

In the 1980s, Charles Koch was found to have pilfered about $3 worth of crude from Stanlee Ann Mattingly’s oil tank in Oklahoma. Here’s the weird part. Koch was (and remains) the 14th richest man on the planet, worth about $14 billion. Stanlee Ann was a dirt-poor Osage Indian.

Stanlee Ann wasn’t Koch’s only victim. According to secret tape recordings of a former top executive of his company, Koch Industries, the billionaire demanded that oil tanker drivers secretly siphon a few bucks worth of oil from every tank attached to a stripper well on the Osage Reservation where Koch had a contract to retrieve crude.

Koch, according to the tape, would “giggle” with joy over the records of the theft. Koch’s own younger brother Bill ratted him out, complaining that, in effect, brothers Charles and David cheated him out of his fair share of the looting, which totaled over three-quarters of a billion dollars from the native lands.

The FBI filmed the siphoning with hidden cameras, but criminal charges were quashed after quiet objections from Republican senators.

Then there are the Chugach natives of Alaska. The Port of Valdez, Alaska, is arguably one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on earth, the only earthquake-safe, ice-free port in Alaska that could load oil from the giant North Slope field. In 1969, Exxon and British Petroleum companies took the land from the Chugach and paid them one dollar. I kid you not.

Wally Hickel, the former governor of Alaska, dismissed my suggestion that the Chugach deserved a bit more respect (and cash) for their property. “Land ownership comes in two ways, Mr. Palast.” explained the governor and pipeline magnate, “Purchase or conquest. The fact that your granddaddy chased a caribou across the land doesn’t make it yours.” The Chugach had lived there for 3,000 years.

No oil company would dream of digging on the Bush family properties in Midland, Texas, without paying a royalty. Or drilling near Malibu without the latest in environmental protections. But when natives are on top of Exxon’s or BP’s glory hole, suddenly, the great defenders of private property rights turn quite Bolshevik: Lands can be seized for The Public’s Need for Oil.

Some natives are “re-located” through legal flim-flam, some at gunpoint. The less lucky are left to wallow, literally, in the gunk left by the drilling process.

Chief Emergildo Criollo told me how oil company executives helicoptered into his remote village and, speaking in Spanish – which the Cofan didn’t understand – “purchased” drilling rights with trinkets and cheese. The natives had never seen cheese. (“The cheese smelled funny, so we threw it in the jungle.”)

After drilling began, Criollo’s son went swimming in his usual watering hole, came up vomiting blood and died.

I asked Chevron about the wave of poisonings and deaths. According to an independent report, 1,401 deaths, mostly of children, mostly from cancers, can be traced to Chevron’s toxic dumping.

Chevron’s lawyer told me, “And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States? … They have to prove that it is our crude,” which, he noted with glee, “is absolutely impossible.”

Big Oil treats indigenous blood like a cheap gasoline additive. That’s why the Peruvians are up in arms. The Cofan of Ecuador, unlike their brothers in Peru, have taken no hostages. Rather, they have heavily armed themselves with lawyers.

But Chevron and its Big Oil brethren remain dismissive of the law. This week, Shell Oil, got rid of a nasty PR problem by paying $15 million to the Ogoni people and the family of Ken Saro-Wiwa for the oil giant’s alleged role in the killing of Wiwa and his associates, activists who had defended these Nigeria Delta people against drilling contamination. Shell pocketed $31 billion last year in profits and hopes the payoff will clear the way for a drilling partnership with Nigeria’s government.

Congratulations, Shell. $15 million: For a license to kill and drill, that’s a quite a bargain.

This article first appeared on Truthout.org:

http://www.truthout.org/061209A