By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Aug 17 2011 (IPS)

The diets of people in Ecuador and other countries in South America’s Andean region suffer from chronic deficiency of zinc, a mineral essential to childhood nutrition, as demonstrated by studies led by paediatrician Dr. Fernando Sempértegui.

“World health organisations estimate that 40 percent of children in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia suffer from chronic zinc deficiency, which is related to chronic infections like pneumonia, the main cause of death among that population group,” Sempértegui told IPS.

Dietary deficiency of this key mineral “is also related to stunted growth,” the Ecuadorian doctor said. “If children do not receive enough zinc in the first years of life, they will have short stature as adults, and the situation is not reversible,” he added.

Studies carried out since 1992 by Sempértegui’s team have demonstrated the positive effects of zinc supplements in child nutrition.

He said he had detected a gap in a United Nations report on zinc that stated that the mineral boosted the immune systems of elderly adults, helping to prevent viral infections in that age group.

He and his team were surprised that the report did not refer to studies on the benefits of the mineral in children, especially malnourished children, he said.

So they decided to take on the challenge, and carried out an initial study among malnourished children in a child care centre in a poor neighbourhood in Quito known as the “Comité del Pueblo Número Uno”.

“The children were given zinc syrup, specially prepared for the study by the chemistry department at the Central University,” he said.

The study, which had the support of the National Institute of Children and Family (INNFA), showed that a 10-mg daily zinc supplement led to a decrease in respiratory infections in the study group and strengthened the children’s immune systems overall.

The four-month study, which was published in an international journal, became “the first study in the world to find that zinc reduced respiratory disease and improved immunity,” Sempértegui’said. “Ecuador became a reference point for research on this mineral about which little was known at the time.”

Zinc is found in foods like semi-refined wheat and barley flour, although zinc from plant sources is more difficult to absorb. For example, it is easier to absorb from cooked bran and wheat germ than raw.

“The best source of zinc is offal, like liver, and seafood,” the researcher said.

“The height of a child is determined in the first two or three years of life, by the quality of their diet, and zinc is an important part of the diet,” pediatric cardiologist Diego Dávalos told IPS.

“In the areas of Ecuador with the highest levels of child malnutrition, the problem isn’t hunger per se, but what is known as hidden hunger,” Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) expert Jorge Samaniego explained to IPS.

Rather than a lack of food, hidden hunger refers to a diet and eating habits that lead to a chronic lack of proteins and calories and crucial micronutrients, particularly B-complex vitamins, vitamin C, iron and zinc.

It is referred to as hidden because it often has no visible warning signs. But it can lead to growth stunting, mental impairment, poor health, and even death.

If the necessary proteins and micronutrients are made available and environmental problems are addressed – lack of clean water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene – young children can be put back on track of normal growth development.

But research shows that in people with inadequate dietary intake of zinc in the first two years of life, stunted growth is lasting, said several neonatologists and pediatricians who attended a recent congress on pediatrics organised by the Association of Private Clinics and Hospitals of Ecuador, where Sempértegui presented the results of his study.

Zinc deficiency directly inhibits the growth of cartilage in bone metabolism, while it is “calcium that makes bones strong,” he said.

Height is thus determined by good nutrition, including the intake of zinc, during the first two or three years of life.

The worst levels of chronic zinc deficiency are found in the country’s indigenous rural highlands communities, where up to 45 percent of children have insufficient zinc intake.

“Children who are not well-fed get more infections and are exposed to pneumonia, which affects their growth,” he said, explaining that a bout of pneumonia in children under two is equivalent to nearly one centimetre of lost growth.

That is because pneumonia is an acute infection that diverts proteins and molecules needed for growth towards combating the infection, preventing normal development.

The latest study conducted by Sempértegui and his team was carried out among 2,400 children in Quito, who received zinc and vitamin A supplements.

After monitoring the children for a year, the researchers found a reduction in respiratory disease and pneumonia, corroborating the results of the studies conducted since 1992.

At the congress of pediatrics, Sempértegui also reported a new finding: that the growth of children with pneumonia who did not receive zinc supplements was stunted, but that the growth of young pneumonia patients who did receive zinc was not affected.

However, children who were already malnourished did not enjoy that benefit.

This is a scientific breakthrough of enormous significance, the researcher said: zinc not only prevents respiratory infections but, when they do occur, such as in the case of severe pneumonia, also prevents growth retardation.

“This occurs because the mineral strengthens immunity and enables the child to successfully weather a pneumonia attack without having significant nutritional reserves drawn off to fight the infection,” which enables them to stay on a track of normal growth, he said in his presentation.

The ideal is for children over six months to receive a daily supplement of 10 mg of zinc, which is sufficient to maintain adequate reserves. And before the birth of the child, expectant mothers should also take 10 mg of zinc a day, from the first month of pregnancy.

If the mother receives enough zinc while she is nursing, her breast milk will have sufficient traces of the mineral for the growing child.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Aug 5 2011 (IPS)

Ecuador sees the loans it has agreed with China as “good news,” because they are long-term, and all that is required in return is “oil, and not the horrendous adjustments imposed by the IMF (International Monetary Fund),” leftwing Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa told analysts critical of the size and high interest rates of the loans.

At his first press conference with foreign correspondents in 10 months, Correa said some people “are raising Cain because we have promised to sell 52 percent of our crude oil to China,” as payment for the loans. But “in the past, more than 75 percent (of Ecuador’s oil) went to the United States, with nothing to show for it, and nobody complained,” he said.

Correa said the latest Chinese loan for two billion dollars, divided into two tranches, is to be repaid over eight years at an average weighted interest rate of 6.9 percent.

The total amount China has lent to Ecuador has not been officially disclosed, and analysts’ calculations based on partial data do not tally. According to economist María de la Paz Vela, the sums borrowed come to over 7.2 billion dollars, equivalent to 11.7 percent of GDP.

The latest credit “covers the country’s annual investment programme for 2011,” said the finance minister, Patricio Rivera.

“We won’t be losing any more sleep over how the international markets will treat us,” replied Correa when asked if Ecuador would launch another bond issue, and he added that this Andean country will not be approaching the IMF for credit.

“We will try to re-enter the markets, but if that is not possible, we will carry on as we are,” he said, a possible indication that there may be a pilot plan to issue sovereign debt, but with no rush to do so.

“The big risk now is bonds from the United States, not from Ecuador,” Correa joked, referring to the financial crisis originated in the United States in 2008 which brought that country to the brink of default, headed off at the last minute this week thanks to a decision by the U.S. Congress to raise the country’s debt ceiling.

“The United States debt represents more than 95 percent of its GDP, while Ecuador’s is only 23 percent of GDP,” Correa said.

Correa said that the Jul. 28 summit of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) in Lima decided to study “conjunctural and structural measures” to deal with the fall-out from the crisis in Europe and the United States, which he regards as structural in nature.

Asked by IPS about the secrecy that since 2009 has surrounded the credit arrangements with China, Rivera said that China had requested confidentiality because “the conditions granted to Ecuador are more favourable” than for other countries, and the Chinese government wanted the details kept under wraps.

Rivera confirmed that three billion dollars in debt will fall due on the loans from China in 2011-2012.

The Ecuadorian economy is forecast to grow at over six percent this year and 4.2 percent in 2012, said Correa, a left-leaning U.S.-educated economist, who attended the news briefing straight from a working session with his team of economic advisers that lasted several hours.

At his meeting with the press, Correa seemed taken by surprise when he was told that oil output is expected to fall by two percent next year. “I will check the figures, but I can’t believe that oil production is shrinking,” he said.

Afterwards Minister Rivera told IPS privately that the forecast was based on the planned temporary closure of the Esmeraldas refinery, the largest in the country, to last up to six months. This closure has now been rescheduled for late 2012 or early 2013. “We are planning the government’s cash flow because the closure of the refinery means we will have to import refined fuels,” Rivera said. After 40 years of operation, the Esmeraldas plant is due for a complete overhaul, experts say.

The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), to which Ecuador belongs, predicts that oil prices in 2012 will be much the same as this year, between 90 and 100 dollars a barrel, with global demand growing by around three percent.

Meanwhile the mid-year report of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) predicts that Ecuador’s economy will continue to be one of the fastest-growing countries in Latin America this year. As in other countries in the region, the driving force of its growth is internal demand.

Domestic consumption in Ecuador is driven by public spending, which in turn is kept high by oil revenues and credit from China, some granted for “free disposal” and others earmarked for infrastructure works.

The largest such loan, amounting to 1.67 billion dollars, is for the Coca-Codo Sinclair hydroelectric project, already under construction by China’s Sinohydro Corporation, in the transition zone between the Andes highlands and the Amazon jungle.

In the next few years, Ecuador is also hoping for windfall revenue from large-scale gold, silver and copper mining endeavours, which will involved over 3.5 billion dollars in investment.

But Correa admitted that negotiations with the mining companies, under the new legal framework, are proving “extremely difficult.”

One of the main sticking points is the question of royalties. Correa said the government is demanding eight percent, while the mining companies refuse to pay more than six percent.

“Revenues will be huge, because the royalties will be levied on income, not profits,” the president said. Sources consulted by IPS said another key problem is the issue of dispute settlement. The government wants potential disputes to be worked out in Ecuador, while the mining firms are demanding international jurisdiction.

“Governance is essential to the working of the economy, which is far from being consolidated,” Antonio Rodríguez, a lawyer and political analyst, told IPS. He was referring to the precariously slim margin of victory for governing party lawmakers Sunday Aug. 1, when Fernando Cordero was reelected as president of Congress.

Correa said: “They can accuse me of being an autocrat if they like, but as president I must fulfil the mission of bringing change to this country.”

He went on to say that if opposition lawmakers secure a majority in Congress and obstruct government policies, “not 10 minutes will pass” before he invokes “muerte cruzada”, a constitutional provision authorising the president to dissolve parliament and call fresh general elections.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Jul 21 2011 (IPS)

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador has won a libel suit against the newspaper El Universo over an op-ed column that referred to him as the “Dictator” and accused him of committing “crimes against humanity.”

Wednesday’s ruling was the latest chapter in the clash between the Ecuadorean government and the media.

The judge trying the case sentenced newspaper owners Carlos, César and Nicolás Perez and former editorial page editor Emilio Palacio to three years in prison, and ordered the four to pay Correa 30 million dollars, as well as fining El Universo another 10 million dollars.

In his suit, Correa, a left-leaning economist who took office in 2007, had requested 80 million dollars in damages.

The final hearing before the trial judge was held Tuesday Jul. 19, and the sentence was handed down the next day, with unusual speed.

In a Feb. 6 editorial titled “No to Lies”, Palacio never mentioned Correa by name, surname or elected position. Instead, he called him “Dictator” nine times and referred to his government as the “Dictatorship”.

Palacio’s column was about the violent Sept. 30, 2010 police uprising that almost sparked a coup d’état when rebel police officers held Correa for several hours inside the police hospital, until he was rescued in an operation in which one police officer was killed.

In the editorial, Palacio wrote that “a new president, possibly an enemy of his, could accuse him in a criminal court of having ordered security forces to fire at will and without warning against a hospital full of civilians and innocent people.”

Correa regarded the statement as defamatory, denied that he ordered the security forces to shoot at the hospital where he was held against his will, and demanded that a retraction be published.

The El Universo executives waited until Tuesday’s hearing to read out a letter saying: “Since it is impossible for us to rectify statements that we ourselves did not make – and since we cannot anticipate whether our correction would satisfy you – we propose that you send us the text of the correction you demand, so that we may publish it in its entirety in El Universo, on the day and in the space you choose.”

Correa had said earlier that if a correction had been published, the lawsuit would have been dropped.

But in court, he did not accept the offer. After the hearing, the president said: “It’s too late! The time for us gentlemen who love truth and ethics was over long ago.”

The executives allowed Palacio to publish his op-ed piece, which according to Correa embodied “the abuse and cowardice of a pen-wielding hatchet man, who hides behind an ink-pot so that he can humiliate and denigrate. A decent newspaper should have retracted such a fabrication, but El Universo never did.”

Palacio, whose article concluded by accusing Correa of crimes against humanity, resigned from his position at the newspaper last week.

In the early stages of the trial, which was delayed by changes of the judges in charge of the case, Correa declared that it would be part of his “legacy” against “corruption in the press.”

Diego Cornejo, the head of the Ecuadorean Association of Newspaper Editors (AEDEP), told IPS that El Universo had suggested a settlement that would give “the president every opportunity to make good the moral harm he claims to have suffered.”

“There is a great deal of pressure on the judges,” he added. In his view, if the sentence is upheld, journalism in Ecuador will in future be subject to self-censorship.

“The problem is that journalism has become vulnerable to litigation,” Jaime Mantilla, the editor of the newspaper Hoy, told IPS. On Monday Jul. 18 he had to appear before the Electoral Disputes Tribunal on a charge brought by Policy Minister Doris Soliz of violating the ban on political advertising in the media during the electoral blackout period. He was acquitted.

In the view of Orlando Pérez, deputy director of the state newspaper El Telégrafo, self-censorship is a spectre that has raised its head once more, but has always existed in the journalistic profession.

“The first thing that should be noted is that El Universo’s offer was a belated recognition that it made a mistake. Then, the owners washed their hands of any responsibility and left Palacio to face the music alone,” Pérez, in whose view the retraction should have been published immediately, told IPS.

“If they had done this, and apologised to the president, the outcome would have been very different. But that would have gone against El Universo’s rather arrogant principle that ‘we will not be silenced and we will not apologise’,” Orlando Pérez said.

With their harsh language and name-calling, Palacio and other editorialists “have supplanted the political opposition,” he said, although he admitted that “some of the president’s language is degrading and can wound those at whom it is aimed.”

Correa has brought another libel suit against two other journalists, Juan Carlos Calderón and Cristian Zurita, for 10 million dollars, over a book that revealed a number of state contracts obtained by the president’s brother, Fabricio Correa.

The president denied all knowledge of the contracts, which he said were cancelled as soon as they came to light, and accused the journalists of attempting to discredit his good name and reputation using “false and libellous” information.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Jul 15 2011 (IPS)

Fossil fuels are an energy source condemned by environmentalists, but do not appear to be on the way out in Latin America and the Caribbean, given the rise in the region’s proven oil reserves in recent years.

Known reserves in the region make up 20 percent of the global underground oil reserves of nearly 1.7 trillion barrels. Venezuela leads the world as the country with the greatest oil reserves after certifying 297 billion barrels, thanks to the heavy crude in the Orinoco Belt.

In 2009, confirmed discoveries increased by 20 percent worldwide, while the increase in Latin America and the Caribbean was 40 percent.

Venezuela possesses 85 percent of the region’s crude reserves, and Latin America has the second largest oil reserves in the world after the Middle East, which has 55 percent of the global total, according to figures presented by the Latin American Energy Organisation (OLADE) at a two-day seminar that ended Wednesday in Quito.

Information presented at the First Latin American and Caribbean Seminar on Oil and Gas, organised by OLADE in cooperation with Ecuador’s Non-Renewable Natural Resources Ministry, indicated the region has at least 345 billion barrels of oil available for extraction.

“I’m not sure whether we have 85 percent, but the increase in our proven reserves means our country will continue to be one of the four or five top global players in the oil and gas market for many decades to come,” Nelson Martínez, head of PDVSA America, a division of the Venezuelan state oil company, told IPS enthusiastically.

Brazil recently made large undersea oil discoveries in the waters off its Atlantic coast, like the Tupí oilfield in 2007 with possible reserves of 33 billion barrels, and the Jupiter oilfield in 2008, with 12 billion barrels, raising the country’s share to five percent of Latin America’s reserves.

Third in the regional ranking is Mexico, which in spite of seeing its proved reserves decline over the last 15 years, nevertheless possesses four percent of the region’s reserves thanks to quantifying over 137 billion barrels of crude underground in the Paleocanal Chicontepec oilfield, in 2009.

Ecuador is next, with three percent of the region’s proved crude reserves. Its reserves grew 63 percent in 2008 compared with 2007 figures, partly because of certification of the ITT oilfield complex which has reserves of 960 million barrels.

The heavy crude in this group of oilfields, located in and around a national park in the Amazon jungle, appears to be edging ever closer to extraction, in spite of the Yasuní-ITT initiative aimed at leaving the oil underground in exchange for an international financial contribution.

The rest of the countries in the region presently hold the remaining three percent of oil reserves, but they are constantly seeking new deposits.

Argentina, for example, launched an Exploratory and Productive Development Programme for 2010-2014, run by the Spanish-Argentine company Repsol YPF.

The programme aims to determine potential underground reserves nationwide, and to replace oil as an energy source, geologist Ramón Martínez, adviser to the Argentine Energy Secretariat, told IPS.

According to OLADE, in 2009 Argentina had oil reserves that – without additional discoveries – would last for 11 years, Brazil for 18 years, Colombia for eight, Ecuador for 34, Mexico for 11 and Venezuela for 201. Uruguay is also prospecting for oil both underground and in its exclusive economic zone in the Atlantic, with encouraging early reports.

Mexico has committed to investing more than 27 billion dollars by 2019, in order to develop its potential deepwater and underground reserves.

This will require renewing its drilling equipment, as 80 percent of its 126 drills are between 37 and 52 years old, said Gustavo Hernández García, subdirector of planning and evaluation for the Mexican state oil firm PEMEX.

Meanwhile, the Brazilian state oil company Petrobras is planning investments of the order of 73 billion dollars up to 2015, in conjunction with its partners, in the ocean platform of the Santos basin off southeast Brazil.

Venezuela’s “Magna Reserva” project, carried out since June 2005 to certify crude reserves in the Orinoco Heavy Oil Belt, increased previous proven reserves in that area of central Venezuela 34-fold.

The plans for the Orinoco Heavy Oil Belt, which are “at the stage of visualisation and dividing into sectors,” were presented by PDVSA’s Nelson Martínez at the Quito seminar.

Developing the Orinoco belt will involve drilling 10,500 wells, building two refineries, constructing a new coastal export terminal and upgrading another.

Venezuela has invited every country in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as private transnational corporations, to participate in the exploitation of these new oilfields.

By 2015, “Venezuelan oil output will be 4.5 million barrels per day (bpd), so long as that does not harm the worldwide structure of production and prices, and it will be refining 3.6 million bpd,” Martínez said.

The official emphasised the change in his country’s geopolitical model, which has led it to invest for the first time in oil exploration, production and refining in other countries of South America. It has also just acquired 60 percent of a transport company “which owns 300 barges” on the Paraná river that flows through Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.

“The geopolitical goals are to establish new partnerships, enter new markets and strengthen the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC),” he said.

Meanwhile, PDVSA is reducing its investments in refineries in Europe. “It didn’t make any sense to own refineries in Gelsenkirchen and Karlsruhe, in Germany, to which we had to provide 250,000 bpd in oil swap operations with Russia,” Martínez told IPS in an interview.

“Since they were using Russian oil, it made better sense to sell the refineries to a Russian company, as we have just done,” he said.

As well as producing oil in association with Petroecuador and gas with the Bolivian state company, and carrying out exploration in Argentina and Uruguay, PDVSA is also involved in two large refinery construction projects in South America: Manabí, in Ecuador, which will process 300,000 bpd, and Pernambuco in Brazil, with a capacity of 230,000 bpd.

“We have already formed the Eloy Alfaro Pacific Refinery mixed company with Petroecuador, and we are keeping to the agreed scheme,” said Martínez, who denied the project is behind schedule.

He said once the basic engineering is completed in October, terms of reference can be drawn up to approach financing sources for the 12 billion dollars that will be needed for construction.

Analysis of the activities of the state and private companies at the seminar allowed engineer Benito Cabrera, Petroecuador’s assistant manager of operations, to conclude that Latin America and the Caribbean will be producing 12 million bpd of oil in 2015, compared with 9.6 million bpd in 2009, of which 3.3 million bpd were exported.

Oil production in the region is very uneven, with Venezuela, Mexico and Brazil jointly responsible for 80 percent. A second group of countries, Colombia, Argentina and Ecuador, produce 17 percent of the regional total, while the other countries between them produce three percent.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Jul 14 2011 (IPS)

“Ecuador will not wait ad infinitum” for a decision by the international community, and “at the end of the year” President Rafael Correa will decide whether to extract oil that was to have been left underground at the Yasuní nature reserve, non-renewable natural resources minister Wilson Pástor has announced.

The novelty in Tuesday’s announcement was that Pástor detailed an oil production plan, in the event that drilling goes ahead. He said 14 wells would be drilled, with an investment of 8.6 billion dollars at the extremely attractive internal rate of return of 99 percent.

The minister also gave the possible start date for production in the oilfields as the third quarter of 2012, and added that “the fields are less than 100 km away from an oil pipeline that has spare capacity.”

He was referring to the Heavy Crude Pipeline (OCP), built in Ecuador by private companies to transport oil from the Amazon jungle to the Pacific coast, and mainly owned by the Spanish firm Repsol.

Pástor’s announcement at the opening session of the First Latin American and Caribbean Seminar on Oil and Gas, organised by the Ecuador-based Latin American Energy Organisation (OLADE), was the most detailed so far from a government spokesperson about the option to exploit the crude oil.

The Under Secretariat of Hydrocarbons Policy has already been contacting potential interested parties since March, in case the drilling goes ahead.

The initiative for not extracting the oil was originally proposed 20 years ago by Fundación Natura, the largest environmental organisation in Ecuador, and has since been supported by a number of environmental and indigenous groups defending the Yasuní National Park and its buffer zone, where the oilfields are located.

The Yasuní is one of the world’s most highly biodiverse regions, with more plant and animal species found in one hectare than in the whole of North America, according to scientific studies.

It is also home to the Tagaeri and Taromenane indigenous groups who are living in voluntary isolation from the outside world.

The Yasuní, declared a national park in 1979 and a World Biosphere Reserve 10 years later, covers an area of 982,000 hectares of the Upper Napo river basin.

Leaving one of the country’s largest oil reserves underground would reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gases responsible for global warming, by 407 million tonnes, environmentalists say.

The environmentalists’ proposal was adopted by Correa when he took office in 2007, and he made it official Jun. 5, 2007 at the United Nations as a multifaceted project, combining protection of the environment and of indigenous communities with promotion of renewable energies, to which the funds would primarily be devoted.

The proposal is for Ecuador to forego extracting the oil, in return for the international community contributing 50 percent of the cost of the greenhouse gas emissions that would be saved by not extracting and burning the oil – at least 3.6 billion dollars.

But there are strong supporters for drilling, like the deputy minister of non-renewable natural resources and former manager of the state oil firm Petroecuador, Carlos Pareja, and President Correa himself has talked extensively about “Plan B”.

This is the option to go ahead with drilling if the international community fails to come up with the funds Ecuador has requested for leaving it underground. The authorities announced their goal was to raise at least 100 million dollars by the end of this year.

However, it seems unlikely this amount will be raised, in spite of the fact that U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon promised Correa to make personal calls to all the heads of state of countries that are likely contributors.

The Yasuní-ITT Trust Fund, set up Aug. 3, 2010 and administered by the U.N. Development Fund (UNDP) and the Ecuadorian government, has so far only received pledges for 1.4 million dollars.

“The trust fund contains an amount barely greater than the budget (of one million dollars) allocated to promote it,” says this month’s issue of the economic magazine Gestión. Augusto Tandazo, an oil expert who supports extracting the oil, told IPS “advertising expenditure already exceeds what has been collected for the fund.”

Pástor expressed great satisfaction that after OLADE’s 38 years of existence it was finally holding its first Oil and Gas Seminar.

“I am pleasantly surprised, too, and that’s why I helped organise this seminar, because oil and gas are the main energy sources in Latin America and the Caribbean,” Victorio Oxilia Dávalos of Paraguay, named executive secretary of OLADE six months ago, told IPS.

“The effort OLADE has put into research and development of alternative energy sources is creditable, but we cannot carry on neglecting oil and gas, which are our countries’ top priority,” he said.

“The oilfields known as ITT for Ishpingo, Tambococha and Tiputini have 846 million barrels in proven reserves, double that amount in probable reserves, and triple that amount in possible reserves,” Pástor said.

Back in 2007 Petroecuador was considering “several alternatives for ITT exploitation: oil extraction by the state company directly; strategic alliances with foreign companies or specifically with the Venezuela state oil company PDVSA; organising an international tender; or creating a mixed (public-private) firm,” according to a company board resolution of Mar. 30, 2007.

If Correa gives the go-ahead, the Tiputini and Tambococha (TT) fields “which are outside the Yasuní reserve” will be exploited, but not the Ishpingo field, which is within its borders, Pástor announced.

But environmentalists say the damage will be irreparable, because the TT fields are in the buffer zone which is essential for the park’s conservation.

The estimated oil reserves in the TT fields are 461 million barrels, the minister said.

Meanwhile, the German government said it will not support the Yasuní-ITT initiative, because the precedent might be imitated by other countries. The announcement came as very bad news for the initiative.

Germany’s Secretary for Economic Cooperation and Development Gudrun Kopp told a German parliamentary commission in early June that “a direct payment into a fund of this type would set a precedent that could ultimately prove very costly.”

Kopp said that if Germany supported the “principle of failure to act,” as proposed by Ecuador, by giving official development funds to the Yasuní reserve, it could then come under pressure by other countries to finance similar proposals.

Although German social democratic, Green and leftwing lawmakers are enthusiastic supporters of the Yasuní-ITT initiative, the German government has taken such a firm position against it that it refused to meet with Ivonne Baki, Ecuador’s top negotiator for the initiative, a former minister.

On one of President Correa’s regular Saturday national broadcasts, Baki publicly asked him to stop talking about “Plan B” because it weakens efforts to raise funds for “Plan A.”

Correa cheerfully replied that he would continue to talk about “Plan B” because his main concern is the future of Ecuadorians, and if international cooperation is not forthcoming he will have to authorise it.

In the circumstances, it appears increasingly unlikely that the oil under the Yasuní nature reserve will remain untapped for long.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Jun 8 2011 (IPS)

Catholic bishop emeritus Gonzalo López Marañón has been fasting since May 24 in a park in the Ecuadorian capital to call for peace and reconciliation in Sucumbíos, an Amazon province immersed in a conflict over the Vatican’s decision to put the diocese in the hands of an ultra-conservative Catholic order.

With his habitual smile, the 77-year-old former bishop of Sucumbíos is wrapped in a poncho and wearing a woollen scarf, hat and gloves, despite the sunshine in the park where he is camping out, because he has lost eight kilos in 15 days and can’t shake the cold. In the past two weeks, he has had to put up with several cold, rainy days, and even a hailstorm, even though the dry season starts in June.

But he converses, sitting on the grass, with the groups that continuously show up to greet him, from Quito and Sucumbíos.

The backdrop to the fast is a clash between two very different approaches to the Catholic Church’s pastoral care in Sucumbíos: that of the community-based Discalced (or Barefoot) Carmelites, who work on behalf of the poor and focus on social questions like health and education, and to which López Marañón belongs, and that of the far-right Heralds of the Gospel order.

When López Marañón retired in October as bishop of the province after 40 years in the post, the Vatican turned the diocese – which had been in the hands of the Carmelites for 80 years – over to the Heralds of the Gospel.

The arrival of the Heralds drew widespread opposition in the complex social and political scenario in the northeastern province, which borders civil war-torn Colombia.

In March 2008, Raúl Reyes, a commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, was killed at his camp in the Sucumbíos jungle in a cross-border military raid by Colombia, which triggered a serious diplomatic crisis.

The province is also the site of the largest oil-related environmental catastrophe in the world, caused by U.S. oil giant Chevron.

“I have seen the transformation (of the province) from a jungle area with isolated indigenous communities to a magnet for internal migration after the discovery of oil,” which began to be exported in 1972, said López Marañón, who took over the diocese in 1970, at the age of 37.

He described the broad range of logging, farming and commercial activities in the remote province, which now has airports and paved roads, as well as a wide gap between rich and poor and severe pollution caused by the oil industry.

Because Sucumbíos borders Colombia, the authorities are constantly engaged in the fight against smugglers of products like fuel, and against arms and drug traffickers, which also leads to a heavy military presence. The area is also the main destination in Ecuador for thousands of refugees displaced by the violence in Colombia.

“This isn’t a hunger strike, but a fast,” the bishop emeritus’s spokeswoman, María de los Ángeles Vaca, told IPS. “The difference is that this is a religious act, accompanied by prayer and dialogue, in the search for peace.”

López Marañón is only receiving liquids. “But he is fine, the doctor tells us his vital signs are stable,” she added.

The bishop emeritus says he will continue to fast until there are signs of reconciliation between the groups in conflict.

Left-wing President Rafael Correa has visited the camp in the park twice. López Marañón has also received visits from civil and religious authorities and hundreds of Catholic faithful from Quito, and from delegations of young people, women, peasant farmers, craftspeople and workers from Sucumbíos.

Ecuador’s bishops’ conference, presided over by Antonio Arregui, archbishop of the city of Guayaquil and a member of Opus Dei, another ultra-conservative Catholic order, has not made any official statements on the situation.

“But the bishops have come to my little tent,” López Marañón said.

Indeed, while IPS was in the park, the bishop emeritus was visited by bishops from the northwestern province of Esmeraldas and the eastern province of Orellana, and at least four other bishops had come in previous days. And bishops from countries like Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico and Panama have expressed their solidarity with him by letter.

Moreover, the tent in which the bishop emeritus is fasting, and where he sleeps on the ground, is no longer on its own. It is surrounded by about 10 other tall white tents, some of which have been joined together to create an improvised chapel. “We already have a cathedral,” López Marañón jokes.

The tension among the Catholic community in Sucumbíos began when the priest Rafael Ibarguren, a leading member of the Heralds of the Gospel, was named as the province’s apostolic vicar. The Argentine priest was to be a temporary replacement for López Marañón, at the head of the diocese.

Ibarguren was instructed by the Vatican to bring about a shift in the Church’s pastoral care, away from the social focus taken by the Carmelites for 80 years.

The Heralds of the Gospel priests showed up in the tropical rainforest region wearing their medieval-looking habits, consisting of knee-length black riding boots, a white cassock with a large brown scapular bearing a half white, half red cross extending from neck to hem with arms in the shape of fleurs-de-lys, and chains at the waist.

The fast-growing Brazilian-based order, recognised in 2001 by the Vatican, lives by military as well as religious discipline. Their style and attitude towards the Church’s social work sparked resistance from the local population in Nueva Loja, the provincial capital.

“They had no idea of the strength and capacity of community organising here,” Dolores de León, a Quito resident familiar with the work of the Discalced Carmelites, told IPS.

Meanwhile, the Heralds mobilised demonstrations by wealthy segments of the population in Nueva Loja, who clashed with the people protesting the arrival of the new order.

After several confrontations, six Carmelite priests who were still in Sucumbíos were expelled on May 2 by the order of the Vatican, on the grounds that they were inciting the local population to protest.

Further clashes forced the Heralds to pull out of the area on May 19, after the government gave the Catholic Church 24 hours to clear up the tension in Sucumbíos.

Before that, the government had threatened to refuse to recognise the order, which is not registered in Ecuador.

There are now only diocesan priests – who don’t belong to any order – in the diocese, which is currently being run by the secretary of the bishops’ conference, Ángel Polibio Sánchez, while the members of the two orders in conflict have been kept from returning to the province.

“Bringing the Heralds in was preposterous – it’s a congregation from the south of the continent, without any experience at all in Ecuador, and even less in the jungle, and with an extreme-right position, which puts a priority on cult-like public acts,” Andrés León told IPS.

He and his wife Dolores, who attend a Carmelite church in Quito, explained that the order established the Assembly of the Church of San Miguel de Sucumbíos (ISAMIS), made up of delegates from basic ecclesial communities, pastoral workers, members of missionary orders, diocesan clergy and provincial social organisations.

ISAMIS, which operates as a sort of democratic parliament of the region’s Catholic community, runs a local radio station, day care centres, nursing homes and schools in the province.

The clashes between groups that worked with the Carmelites and organisations called the “Charismatic Renewal” that back the Heralds peaked on May 16, when the latter attempted to take over the Radio Sucumbíos station.

The Heralds decided to sack 16 employees of the radio station, which was still in the hands of ISAMIS, and showed up at the station with dismissal orders signed by Church and labour authorities.

The employees broadcast their dismissal live, prompting hundreds of listeners to flock to the station to defend them. Thanks to the crowd, the police were unable to remove the employees from the station.

“The national and international support was key, because the situation in the radio station immediately reached the attention of radio networks like the Corporación de Radios Populares del Ecuador (which groups community radio stations) and AMARC (World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters),” journalist Blanca Diego, the press coordinator for the fast, told IPS.

However, charges of terrorism were brought against 20 people, in legal action filed by the Heralds. One of the things López Marañón is calling for in his fast is that the charges be dropped.

The withdrawal of the two orders failed to calm things down, and fresh confrontations broke out in Nueva Loja on May 22, between groups disputing control of the cathedral and other Church facilities. It was reportedly this episode that prompted López Marañón to begin his fast.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Jun 3 2011 (IPS)

Recognition of the rights of nature in Ecuador’s 2008 constitution was widely applauded by environmentalists around the world. However, putting them into practice is still problematic due to the lack of legislation and an institutional framework.

It is true that in this country “enshrining the rights of nature has gone beyond philosophical discussion,” and they have passed from being diffuse and vague to being objective and regulated, at least at the level of the constitution, said environmental lawyer René Bedón, dean of the law faculty at the Universidad de los Hemisferios.

“Furthermore, nature is beginning to file lawsuits,” he told IPS, referring to the constitutional court sentence against the Provincial Council of Loja, a province on the border with Peru, 500 kilometres south of Quito.

On behalf of the rights of nature, and particularly of the Vilcabamba river, Richard Wheeler and Eleanor Geer Huddle, foreigners living in the area, asked for constitutional protection against damages caused by the widening of the Vilcabamba-Quinara highway, being carried out without an environmental permit.

The case, the first lawsuit in Ecuador’s history on the rights of nature, was analysed at a seminar on “El derecho y las políticas ambientales más allá del papel” (Beyond the letter of the law and environmental policies), held Tuesday and Wednesday by the Ecuadorian Centre for Environmental Law (CEDA) to commemorate its 15th anniversary.

The meeting was held ahead of World Environment Day, to be celebrated Sunday Jun. 5.

The court ruled in favour of protection as the only effective way to put an end to, and immediately remedy, localised environmental damage, and ordered comprehensive redress of the harm caused to the river, in which stone and excavation materials had been dumped.

Environmental lawyer Mario Melo, one of the driving forces behind the recognition of the rights of nature, said the verdict put into effect the legal standards outlined in the constitution.

Among the standards applied by the court are the enforceability of the rights of nature, the precautionary principle – that is, the duty to protect and make provision against possible harm – and the concern that environmental damages will impact on future generations.

The main thing was the reversal of the burden of proof, said Melo: the plaintiffs did not have to prove harm, but the provincial government of Loja had to provide hard evidence that their work on the road did not, and would not, affect the environment.

In spite of this milestone, the contradictions between the 2008 constitution and national environmental legislation prior to that date continue to provide loopholes for citizens, companies and even the state to evade the regulations, environmental lawyer María Amparo Albán, the head of CEDA, told IPS.

For example, the constitution calls for the appointment of an environmental ombudsperson and the creation of an environmental monitoring and oversight office, but this has not yet been done, said lawyer Ricardo Crespo, an expert on environmental issues.

An environmental code, bringing together all the relevant laws, is also still lacking, although the Environment Ministry is working on it, said Yuri Iturralde, a ministry official.

Special environmental judges have not been appointed, either, “although there has been an interesting experience with the creation of an environmental prosecution service in the Galápagos Islands,” Crespo said. The islands in the Pacific Ocean have a special regime, as they are a national park and marine reserve.

Crespo also pointed to a lack of coordination between economic and environmental policies.

In his view, more political will is needed in order to enforce the laws and provide human, financial and equipment resources for environmental management.

Bedón emphasised the need to make a distinction between environmental damage and personal interest. Many lawsuits are brought by individuals who use the rights of nature as an excuse for “their own enrichment,” he said.

Environmental legislation and policies in Ecuador have expanded to a great extent since international initiatives like the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro or local landmark events like the creation of the Environment Ministry in 1996, said Gabriela Muñoz, the executive director of CEDA.

The country’s legal system has also made steady progress. The peak seemed to have been reached with the 2008 constitution, but secondary legislation still needs to be developed.

The constitution “embodied international trends in environmental policies,” said Muñoz. “It ratified the principles of environmental law and upheld the declaration of public interest in conserving biodiversity, the duty to protect the natural heritage and the recognition of civil and collective rights to a healthy, ecologically balanced environment and to citizen participation in environmental decisions.”

But the constitutional reform also had a profound effect on the country’s laws and regulations in general, including recognition of the rights of nature, a new form of guardianship of environmental rights and an institutional proposal that will reform the present structure.

“This advanced constitutional development poses a challenge for Ecuador: to make these constitutional rights operational, and to serve as a model for other countries, contributing to the development of international environmental law,” she said.

The seminar, attended by experts from several countries, is part of the preparations for the next sustainable development summit, to be held in Rio de Janeiro in 2012 (Rio+20).

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, May 31 2011 (IPS)

The Ecuadorian government sent in the army to shut down illegal gold mining operations in the jungles of the northwest province of Esmeraldas, where the highly polluting activity is associated with drug traffickers and protected by armed militias and hired killers.

The gold-mining activity in eight areas of the cantons of Eloy Alfaro and San Lorenzo in Esmeraldas, which is bordered by the Pacific Ocean and Colombia, was “totally illegal” and violated the country’s mining, environmental and tax laws, Minister of Non-Renewable Natural Resources Wilson Pástor and Environment Minister Marcela Aguiñaga said in a press conference last week.

They also pointed to the serious damages to local populations and the environment caused by unregulated gold mining in those areas.

Aguiñaga reported that arsenic and heavy metals like mercury are found in the waters of tributary rivers that run into the Santiago River, the source of water for local residents in that area. “This will cause cancer and other diseases in the short term,” she said.

“Ecuador is not a no man’s land,” Pástor said indignantly. “Illegal mining has to stop. We have to put a stop to exploitation of the local workforce. We have to put a stop to drug money laundering. And we’re tired of the plundering of our natural resources.”

Illegal mining, he said, generates economic activities that are not controlled by the state and irregularities like tax evasion, smuggling of materials used in the industry, networks of illegal services, capital flight, money laundering, and imports of unregistered machinery.

The military incursion earlier this month in the northern part of the province of Esmeraldas was reported by the government on May 23, in a nationally broadcast report that showed at least six helicopters taking part in the operation, in which a number of large, modern backhoes and other machinery like diesel generators and suction dredges were destroyed in controlled explosions.

The cost of backhoe excavators runs from 100,000 to 200,000 dollars, depending on the size of the engine.

Over the last six months, the heavy machines have opened up dozens of gold-mining pits in remote jungle areas of Esmeraldas that are only accessible by river.

“In the last six months, 130 million dollars worth of gold has been illegally extracted. And one ton of alluvial soil must be removed to obtain 30 just grams of gold,” Pástor reported.

The televised footage filmed by the army showed from the air dozens of pits in at least eight different areas inland from the port of San Lorenzo, near the Colombian border.

In response to a question from IPS on the military’s legal authority to destroy the machinery, Minister Aguiñaga explained that the operation had been authorised on May 19 by a judge, who ordered that it be carried out immediately.

Aguiñaga also noted that a judge in Esmeraldas had banned all mining activity in that province in December.

The military operation “was kept secret” because in December information was leaked “and the illegal miners managed to hide their machinery,” Pástor said.

But some questioned the lawfulness of the operation. Former Ecuadorean president Osvaldo Hurtado (1981-1984), a political scientist, told IPS that President Rafael “Correa and his Defence Minister Javier Ponce should answer in court for the barbaric action.

“In a state with the rule of law, a judge can order the confiscation of assets, whose fate can only be decided by a trial. There is no legal justification for sending in soldiers to bomb assets, whatever their origin,” Hurtado said.

“The responsibility does not belong to the armed forces, which carry out orders, but to those who gave the orders,” he said.

In separate statements, Interior Minister José Serrano said “we aren’t talking here about an irregular or illegal activity, but about criminal activities: tax fraud, mineral smuggling, money laundering, and labour exploitation.”

Pástor said confiscation of assets was not possible in this case, as shown by the seizure of 12 backhoes in a similar operation carried out last year in the Napo River basin in the northeast of the country, where the government had “unfavourable experiences with judges or prosecutors.”

The minister said that in some cases judges or prosecutors have ordered that seized machinery be returned to the owner. “Even prosecutor Gordillo (no first name was given) ordered the return of backhoes when the trial was in its initial stages,” he said.

But lawyer Juan José Montero told IPS “it is a contradiction to justify the destruction with a court order, while at the same time lacking confidence in the justice system to conduct the prosecutions that should arise from these cases.”

The labourers who worked at the mines will be employed “in the clean-up of the environmental damages, which are extremely serious,” Minister Aguiñaga said.

Pástor announced that the eight areas in question will be granted in concession to the state-run mining company, Empresa Nacional Minera (ENM), which will be authorised to sign partnership agreements with small-scale and medium mining outfits.

The minister said he would be meeting with the associations of miners from San Lorenzo and Eloy Alfaro to explain the steps they should take in order to sign contracts with ENM, a process he said would take around six months.

Some 2,000 families depend for a living on illegal mining in the areas targeted by the army operation, Pástor said. “Some of the members of those families had been recruited by force and exploited for ridiculously low pay and under threat,” he said.

The ministers said the tributaries of the Santiago River polluted by the illegal mining activities are the Bogotá, Tululví, Cachaví, Huimbí, Palaví, Zapallito and Estero María Rivers. They also provided a list of 20 affected villages in the area.

With respect to the threat of legal action by the owners of the excavators, or those who were leasing them and complain that they are now in debt, Aguiñaga said “they will first have to respond to the lawsuits we will bring against them for the severe environmental damages caused.”

She said the mining activity had destroyed forest cover and the fertile top layer of soil, and polluted and altered the course of rivers and wetlands – impacts that will immediately begin to be assessed by the Environment Ministry for the purpose of launching a clean-up effort.

The divisions over the question of mining among families, organisations and even local authorities in Esmeraldas have seriously undermined social relations in the area, said the Catholic bishop of the province, Eugenio Arellano.

He also complained about the illegal activities that many local people have fallen into, and about the damages to the health of the local population. “They are poisoning my people,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, May 23 2011 (IPS)

Oil and mineral resources are abundant in several Latin American countries but will not last forever, and should be used to fuel the transition to a more diversified economy.

The warning comes from María del Carmen Pantoja, head of “Extrayendo transparencia” (Extracting Transparency), a programme promoting information and good use of the earnings from non-renewable natural resources, with the participation of the state, civil society and private enterprise, created by the Grupo Faro in Ecuador.

The highest degree of transparency is required for payments made by transnational corporations to the state, and for how this money is used, Pantoja told IPS.

“In Ecuador, oil has been the government’s chief source of revenue for four decades, and we are about to enter a new phase with large-scale mining,” Pantoja said.

“Latin America is the region with the world’s second-largest oil reserves, and several countries in the region depend heavily on fossil fuel extraction,” Akram Esanov, senior economist at the Revenue Watch Institute (RWI), told IPS.

“Oil provides 50 percent of government income in Venezuela, 57 percent in Trinidad and Tobago, and nearly 40 percent in Mexico,” Esanov said. “And the recent offshore oil finds in Brazil may place it among the countries with the largest oil reserves in the world.

“Therefore, transparency in the management of natural resources is essential to ensure that the earnings are used efficiently to boost development in our countries,” he said.

Civil society organisations are attempting to exercise influence on this process in various ways.

In Peru, one of the largest mineral producers in the world, the Propuesta Ciudadana group is pushing for accountability by means of regular reports and monitoring of oil and mining production, the revenue generated and how the government uses such income at national, regional and local levels, Epifanio Rivas told IPS.

They also work with local leaders. “Extractive industries operate in 10 out of Peru’s 25 departments (provinces),” he said, so it is important for local leaders to know about their rights to a share in the income, and plan its use more effectively.

Propuesta Ciudadana also seeks to exert political influence, by proposing laws or tax mechanisms, such as a tax on windfall earnings brought by soaring oil and mineral prices.

To foment regional debate and exchange information and ideas, Grupo Faro held a week of events on transparency of information in extractive industries May 10-13, which drew experts from Latin America and other regions.

RWI grew out of a programme to monitor the income of Central Asian extractive industries, and became an independent organisation in 2006.

Financed by millionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, RWI “has evolved into an organisation with offices in Latin America, Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, as well as New York and London,” Esanov said.

In the Revenue Watch Index for extractive industries developed by RWI, some Latin American countries, like Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru are placed in the upper third, among states that tend to provide public information about the management of their oil, gas and mining sectors.

Bolivia, Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela are in the middle one-third of the index, where states do disclose some information to their citizens but there are significant gaps in public access to data.

“Ecuador used to publish the texts of oil contracts in their entirety, but it may drop down in the index now that all companies are on compulsory service contracts, and contract documents and the criteria for re-negotiation are no longer published,” Katarina Kuai of RWI’s training and capacity building programme told IPS.

A reform of the country’s oil law, approved in July 2010, replaced the current production-sharing agreements with a flat tax per barrel of oil produced, which considerably increased state revenues from the industry.

An analysis by U.S. market research firm Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofAML), released by the Ministry of Non-Renewable Resources, ranks Ecuador fifth in the world for state participation in oil rents (80 percent), after Libya (94 percent), Russia (91 percent), Angola (86 percent) and Nigeria (84 percent).

Ecuador is followed by Bolivia (76 percent), Norway (74 percent) and Peru (64 percent). The Latin American country with the lowest state participation in oil rents is Chile (40 percent), according to the BofAML analysis.

“It’s not just about how much income is derived from the extractive industries, but what is happening to these funds. There are huge gaps in the information some countries provide,” Esanov said. Sharing experiences among different countries is a key to knowing what has worked and to finding ways of empowering civil society to undertake its own investigations, he added.

RWI also promotes the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), made up of governments, oil and mining companies, and multilateral organisations and non-governmental organisations.

EITI provides public information and works to reduce the risk of corruption, but only two Latin American countries – Guatemala and Peru – have joined it.

Both “are on the list of 24 nations committed to implement EITI, while 11 countries are fully compliant,” said Kuai.

“We must continue to work with all stakeholders while getting ready for the transition to a society no longer dependent on the extractive industries, by developing other sectors of the economy,” Pantoja said.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, May 5 2011 (IPS)

Pollsters predict that a majority of voters in Ecuador will approve a package of reforms backed by leftwing President Rafael Correa, in a May 7 referendum that has further polarised the population.

Spokespersons for Consult Marketing Solutions, Informe Confidencial, Perfiles de Opinión and Opinión Pública Ecuador informed IPS that between 51 and 60 percent of respondents were in favour of the proposed reforms. The results of the opinion polls were provided to foreign correspondents for publication outside the country, due to the ban on releasing pre-election poll results in Ecuador.

Voting is compulsory in this South American country except for those over 65 or between the ages of 16 and 18. The pollsters estimate that at least 2.7 million of the country’s 11.2 million registered voters will not cast ballots on Saturday.

Five of the 10 questions in the referendum would amend articles of the constitution, and the rest would require the passage of new laws, on a broad range of issues.

The first two questions would cancel the constitutional limit on the length of preventive detention when detainees purposely delay the judicial process through legal manoeuvres, and would regulate alternatives to remand custody.

The third question asks voters whether they want to amend the constitution to limit private banks to owning companies only in the financial sector and to forbid private media companies from participating in economic ventures in other areas. The aim is to prevent conflicts of interest.

The fourth would create a “transitional” council of the judiciary, made up of one member appointed by the government, another by the legislature, and a third by the Council of Citizen Participation and Social Control, a fourth branch of the state.

The transitional council would have 18 months to completely overhaul the judicial system, which is widely seen as corrupt.

The fifth question would permanently modify the make-up of the council of the judiciary, whose functions include the appointment of judges. The council would no longer solely be made up of members of the judicial system, but would include delegates of the other branches of the state.

The opposition argues that these measures would make it possible for the president to limit the independence of the courts, while Correa says they would make the judiciary more efficient and curtail corruption.

In the sixth question, voters will be asked whether the country’s single-chamber parliament should pass a law to criminalise the illegal acquisition of wealth by individuals in the private sector. Illicit enrichment is already classified as a crime in the public sector.

Casinos and gambling in general would be banned if voters approve the seventh question, and the mistreatment and killing of animals for entertainment, as in bullfighting and cockfighting, would be made illegal by the eighth item.

The ninth question asks voters whether the legislature should pass a law that would create a media regulatory council to monitor violent, explicitly sexual or discriminatory content in broadcast and print media, in order to establish responsibility by communicators or media outlets.

The tenth question would make it a crime for employers not to register their employees in the Social Security Institute.

The polling companies all found the highest level of public support for this last point, with between 60 and 70 percent of respondents saying they would vote “yes” on question 10.

More than 54 percent of those interviewed by Consult Marketing Solutions said they would vote the same way on all questions, whether “yes” or “no”, Blasco Moscoso, the director of the polling firm, told foreign correspondents.

Another 30 percent said they would vote “yes” to some questions and “no” to others.

Between seven and 12 percent of respondents said they were undecided, according to the different pollsters, who rule out any surprise in the results, however.

“The undecided voters are mainly people who never listen to news on the radio or watch the news on TV, and do not even read the newspapers that are handed out for free in bus, train and subway stations,” said Santiago Pérez, director of Opinión Pública Ecuador.

The poor are still the government’s main support base. The pollsters say Correa has lost the middle and upper classes of Quito, the country’s second-largest city, who had backed him in the 2006 and 2009 presidential elections, in the vote for the constituent assembly that rewrote the constitution, and in the referendum in which the new constitution was approved.

“I wouldn’t say he has lost them, but I would agree that there is a higher proportion among those classes who now reject Correa,” said Pérez. “There is an ethical and aesthetic condemnation of the president, which conceals an underlying question: that there are no concrete benefits for these classes in the current government.”

The only question to be decided by voters of each specific province is the ban on public events involving the killing of animals. Off-the-record, some pollsters said question eight might be rejected in Quito and some other areas with strong bullfighting or cockfighting traditions.

The experts say they found no distinguishable voting patterns along gender or age lines, and they point out that Ecuador is a geographically and culturally diverse country, with Amazon rainforest, Andean highlands and coastal lowlands, and a mestizo or mixed-race majority, a large Amerindian minority, and small white, black and Asian minorities.

They explained that a referendum in Ecuador is different than a vote in countries like Uruguay or Costa Rica, which have much more homogeneous populations, and where polls carried out among small samples have higher statistical significance. In Ecuador, polling is more complex, due to the different provincial and regional breakdowns of the population, the pollsters said.

While many observers are describing the referendum as a key test of confidence in the Correa administration, Pérez believes there are people who are interested in the specific content of each question, although the referendum form has lengthy annexes “which 90 percent of the population hasn’t read, and won’t read,” according to Moscoso.

“To portray the referendum as a survey on Correa’s popularity reflects a mistaken and incomplete interpretation,” said Pérez, whose polling company is generally seen as the government’s favourite.

According to his firm, Opinión Pública Ecuador, 28 percent of respondents have taken an interest in the questions and will vote on the basis of whether each one is good for them, their families or the country. Only 25 percent do not care about the content of the referendum, another 25 percent will vote “yes” to support Correa, and 14 percent will vote “no” to punish him, the polling firm found.

The campaign, in which Correa and his party have been very active, while the opposition has been fragmented, ends Thursday.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Apr 14 2011 (IPS)

The four young Haitians told legal authorities that they were offered complete scholarships to the university, but that once they reached Ecuador they were locked up in a house and made to pay 150 dollars a month for rent and board, while given the run around about the promised education.

“Deceived with the prospect of free university studies, 30 people between the ages of 18 and 23, one aged 17 and two aged 28 came from Haiti and were kept locked up in a house in the Consejo Provincial neighbourhood in the extreme north of Quito, some since November 2010,” a member of the migration police present at the legal hearing on the case, who preferred to remain anonymous, told IPS.

The Jesuit Service for Refugees and Migrants in Ecuador (SJRM), which found out about the situation from its contacts among Haitians living in Quito, alerted the police in February, and a Haitian family who ran the house as a de facto prison were arrested.

Apparently all of the young people have relatives in the United States or Canada, which was in fact one of the requisites for selection for the supposed scholarship programme, back in Port-au-Prince.

With great difficulty, their families pulled together the money to pay for the tickets for the trip that took the young people from Havana to Panama City to Quito, plus “a one-time registration fee of 300 dollars.”

But once they got to Quito, they were imprisoned and extorted in different ways, to get their families in North America to send the required 150 dollars a month.

Although some of the Haitians were held since November, most arrived in December and January.

“The hearing was held Friday April 8 in the prosecutor’s office in (the northern province of) Pichincha, and the investigation is ongoing,” Juan Villalobos, with the SJRM, told IPS.

The case, which has received little attention in Ecuador, “is extremely serious,” Jesuit priest Fernando Ponce, the director of the SJRM in Ecuador, told IPS.

He said the trafficking of persons should not be treated with indifference by society.

This case is only one of a number of instances of trafficking of Haitians to South America in the last three years or so.

Edson Louidor, SJRM regional coordinator of advocacy and communication for Latin America and the Caribbean, said that in 2009, there were an estimated 75,000 Haitians in the region, but the number “has climbed fast since then.”

Louidor, who is himself from Haiti, told IPS that while precise figures are not available, “there are constant flows of Haitian migrants towards” South America, and the main entry points are Ecuador and Chile.

According to SJRM statistics, 392 Haitians reached Chile in 2008, 477 in 2009, 820 in 2010, and 125 in January 2011 alone. As for Ecuador, 1,258 Haitian immigrants entered the country in 2009, 1,687 in 2010 and 1,112 in the first quarter of this year.

However, not all of them stay. The SJRM estimates that the Haitian community in Ecuador numbers over 1,000 people. Of that total, 390 were granted an amnesty by the government of Rafael Correa after Haiti was devastated by the January 2010 earthquake that left a death toll of over 300,000.

The 390 Haitians were given legal immigration status and were allowed to bring their families to Ecuador.

Louidor explained that the destination that the Haitian immigrants are trying to reach is not Ecuador or Chile. “Their final goal has always been to reach French Guiana, and head to France or to the United States,” he said.

“The Haitians who came to Ecuador in 2009 went on to Venezuela through Colombia to try to reach French Guiana. But since the earthquake last year, these immigration routes have become more complicated,” he said.

The closure of the borders of French Guiana, an overseas region of France, and the stiffening of U.S. immigration policies have diverted the flow of migrants, to Brazil for example, a country reached by 1,200 to 2,000 Haitians who crossed the border by Amazon jungle routes, Louidor said.

They travel from Ecuador to Brazil, through Iquitos and Madre de Dios in Peru’s northern jungle, or through the highlands and then the Yungas forest region of Bolivia.

“They also try to fly from Chile to Venezuela by plane, and use other transit countries like the Dominican Republic or Cuba,” he added.

An estimated two million Haitians live in the United States, between 500,000 and 750,000 in the Dominican Republic, some 400,000 in Cuba, 200,000 in Canada, 100,000 in France and another 100,000 in the French Antilles, besides the much smaller groups already mentioned in South America.

“For that reason, remittances are still the main source of income in Haiti,” which has an estimated population of 8.5 million, Loudoir said. “In 2010 remittances totalled two billion dollars – much more than the international aid for the earthquake, which amounted to 500 million dollars.”

Ponce said “the SJRM is concerned about the worsening of the humanitarian situation in Haiti, which is forcing people to leave the country,” and about the incapacity of the Haitian government and the international community to respond to the Haitian people’s needs.

Louidor concurred, saying “to this you have to add the slow pace of reconstruction in Haiti, which has fuelled the activities of trafficking networks.”

These networks lure in young trafficking victims in Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and toughened immigration policies have driven up the risks and made victims even more vulnerable, he said.

The SJRM has urged the governments of Latin America to provide a humanitarian response to the plight of Haitian migrants, by granting them humanitarian visas, for example. “Deportation is inhumane in a situation like the one Haiti is experiencing,” Louidor said.

In addition, given cases like the one that was recently discovered in Quito, “a regional network should be created to fight the trafficking of Haitians, making a distinction between perpetrators and victims, and punishing the perpetrators while protecting the victims,” Ponce said.

The SJRM “works with civil society organisations and other bodies that can help protect and assist trafficking victims,” he noted.

“In sheer numbers, the figures might look small, but it is a worrisome situation, because this is a population that is not deportable but whose immigration status is hard to regularise,” the priest said.

“The Ecuadorian government has given assurances that the Haitians won’t be deported because of the situation their country is in. But the new immigration law does not offer viable solutions for this population group,” Ponce added.

Lack of work, limited language skills in Spanish and lack of support networks put Haitian immigrants in a much more difficult position than Peruvian or Colombian immigrants, for instance, making them more vulnerable, he said.

He said the SJRM has set up a school to teach the Haitian immigrants Spanish, and is providing them with legal assistance and helping facilitate the insertion of their children into the educational system. “Ecuador must not be a xenophobic country, a country of discrimination,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Apr 5 2011 (IPS)

The Ecuadorean government declared U.S. Ambassador Heather Hodges “persona non grata” and expelled her from the country in response to a cable released by the Wikileaks whistleblower web site.

Former Ecuadorean foreign minister José Ayala Lasso told IPS “It’s a shame that this has happened. The legitimacy of the documents that gave rise to this situation could be questioned, because they were obtained through a procedure that violated international laws.”

President Rafael Correa was indignant over the July 2009 confidential cable signed by Hodges that was published Monday by Spanish newspaper El País, and by her refusal to refute what she said in the cable.

In the document addressed to the U.S. Department of State, Hodges said embassy officials believed Correa was aware of supposed corrupt practices by former national police chief Jaime Hurtado, but that the president named him to the post anyway because it would make him more easily manipulated.

Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño said Tuesday that although he had communicated Correa’s surprise and annoyance to Hodges, she merely commented that the document had been “stolen” and that she thus had no comment to make.

Patiño said her response was “insufficient and unsatisfactory.”

“The ambassador is in a complicated position; she can’t say anything other than what she has said,” said Ayala Lasso, who criticised Patiño’s “shocking ingenuousness” in expecting the diplomat to take back what she had said.

“I would have done things differently: I would have ordered an immediate, exhaustive investigation, and once it was determined that there was no basis to her claims, then I would have taken a serious step like expelling the ambassador,” he said.

Fernando Carrión, a professor at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), remarked to IPS that he believed the government’s decision was hasty.

“No country affected by Wikileaks cables, which in some cases have been even more far-reaching, has taken a decision like this,” said Carrión.

He said the measure adopted by the government “puts us in the same situation as Venezuela and Bolivia, which also declared the U.S. ambassadors there ‘persona non grata’ and since then no replacements have been named.”

Cut flower exporter Fernando Aulestia criticised the decision due to the negative impact it will have on the extension of the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA), which grants duty-free access to the U.S. market by a broad range of exports from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.

The U.S. Congress is currently considering its extension.

“We are already having problems with exports, and so are broccoli growers,” he told IPS. “Because of this, we might have to say good-bye to the ATPDEA, which would lead to the loss of thousands of jobs in Ecuador’s highlands region.”

Ayala Lasso mentioned two specific factors: that ambassadors have an obligation to inform their government of everything they see in the country to which they have been posted, which they must do in an objective, in-depth manner.

“That is an obligation recognised by international law, and their reports are written for private use by their governments, not for international publication,” he said.

The other factor is that the leaked cable “refers to an issue that is very serious in Ecuador: police corruption.”

The State Department described Hodges as “one of our most experienced and talented diplomats” and called her expulsion “unjustified.” Spokesman Mark Toner said U.S. officials would examine the options they had.

The question is whether the U.S. will expel Ecuadorean Ambassador Luis Gallegos, a career diplomat who has been in the post since October 2005 and was kept on by Correa when the left-leaning president took office four years ago.

Patiño clarified, however, that “this decision is not an action against the U.S. government, but is only targeted at a diplomat who made extremely serious assertions.”

In the cable obtained by Wikileaks, Hodges says corruption is widespread in the national police, and that “Hurtado’s corrupt activities were so well-known” in the upper ranks of the police that “some Embassy officials believe that President Correa must have been aware of them when he made the appointment.”

The cable says that internal investigations by the police found that Hurtado, police chief from April 2008 to May 2009, had been engaged in “corrupt activities within the (national police) since the early 1990s.”

According to Hodges, Hurtado used his position “to extort cash and property, misappropriate public funds, facilitate human trafficking, and obstruct the investigation and prosecution of corrupt colleagues.”

She said the corrupt activities described in the cable hurt U.S. investment in Ecuador, because investors might hesitate to risk their wealth if they knew they could be extorted by corrupt members of the security forces.

In the cable, she recommended that Hurtado be stripped of his U.S. visa, noting that as police chief, he had provided assistance to people traffickers, thus creating opportunities for criminals and terrorists to enter the U.S.

Excerpt:

When the trunks of the trees move with every step you take, you know you are in a swamp. This is what happens when you walk over the seemingly firm and vegetation-covered ground over what was once a pit used to dump oil sludge in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest.

Rosa Tanguila cleaning up oil residue near her rainforest community. Credit: Gonzalo Ortiz/IPS

The extent and impact of oil contamination on the environment and human health in northeastern Ecuador are much worse than anyone could imagine, as Tierramérica discovered during an extensive tour of the area.

This reporter travelled 400 kilometres of highways and roads in the northeastern provinces of Sucumbíos and Orellana and visited six communities affected and 12 sites contaminated by the U.S. oil company Texaco during its oil exploration and production activities between 1964 and 1990.

The swamp with the moving trees was the “pool” filled with oil waste from the Yuca 9 well, one of 162 that Texaco claims to have cleaned up or “remediated” between 1995 and 1998.

These pools or pits, some of them as big as a football field, were used to dump mud and other waste produced by oil drilling, and even human faeces and garbage, since there were no sanitary landfills or wastewater treatment facilities built.

The plaintiffs – indigenous people and farmers organised in the Asamblea de Afectados por Texaco (AAT – Assembly of those Affected by Texaco) – have appealed the verdict, as they consider the amount awarded insufficient to remedy the disaster, including the impacts on human health. Chevron has also appealed, claiming that the lawsuit is “fraudulent”. The case will now move up to the Provincial Court of Sucumbíos.

In an agreement signed in 1995 with the Ecuadorian government, Texaco assumed responsibility for remediation of one third of the environmental liabilities resulting from the oil operations in the rainforest. The other two thirds corresponded to the government. At the trial, Chevron alleged that its clean-up obligations had been satisfactorily fulfilled as of 1998.

But as Tierramérica was able to observe first hand, the “remediation” of the toxic oil waste pools consisted of filling them with sticks, tires, tanks and scrub and then covering it all up with soil.

Over the following 15 years, thanks to the fertile Amazon rainforest climate, these areas have become overgrown with vegetation and even trees – the ones that move with every step you take near them. But you only have to dig down a metre and a half or two to find the oil sludge.

Two members of the Amazon Defense Coalition, the group of Amazonian grassroots organisations and communities that is backing the suit filed by the AAT, drilled holes like these for soil testing in numerous sites visited by Tierramérica, including the former waste pit at the Sacha 53 well, where Chevron claims to have reports attesting to successful remediation.

Texaco admits to having constructed a total of 326 oil waste pits while operating in the region, but court-ordered inspections and surveys established that at least 956 had been dug.

Even before 1995, Texaco had already covered up other pits that the Amazon Defense Coalition calls “hidden pools”.

When these pits were dug, they were not lined with any protective material whatsoever, which means toxic wastes seeped into the soil and eventually filtered into rivers and streams.

Most of the pits had gooseneck drainpipes installed beneath the surface of the sludge. Supposedly, when the level of liquid waste deposits rose as a result of rainfall, the oil residue would float to the top and clean water would wash through the drainpipes towards nearby waterways.

In practice, however, the drainpipes became a channel through which even more toxic wastes were washed into local streams and rivers, and continue to flow through them today.

One of the great paradoxes in this tropical rainforest where water is abundantly plentiful is that many villages and communities have no water for drinking, cooking or bathing, because the nearby rivers and streams are totally contaminated.

“This is the house of María Aguinda, one of the plaintiffs in the original lawsuit against Texaco in 1993. She joined the suit because this river that flows right past her house was contaminated with oil, and she had to walk two hours to fetch clean water from another river,” explained Rosa Tanguila, a Kichwa indigenous woman from the community of Rumipamba in Orellana.

The pollution around here was caused by the Auca Sur 1 well. This is another area supposedly remediated by Texaco, but the toxins produced by oil operations seeped into the river and poisoned it very early on.

Pressured by protests and strikes waged by the local inhabitants, the state-owned oil company Petroecuador is carrying out ad hoc – and clearly insufficient – clean-up efforts in a river basin area the size of several football stadiums.

Tanguila is part of a team made up by indigenous people from the community hired by Petroecuador to clean up the area.

Their work consists of aiming a high-pressure stream of water at the riverbed to remove the sticky black sludge which is then channelled towards a trap, where Tanguila scoops it up with a small hand-held spade and dumps it into a metal tank.

“We’re cleaning up what Texaco says it left clean,” Tanguila quipped to Tierramérica.

The workers wear rubber overalls while they work submerged in the grey and black mud, but they have neither gloves nor goggles, leaving them exposed to contamination. There were also a number of small children playing on the banks of the same river and getting splashed with the same polluted water.

Donald Moncayo, another inhabitant of the area who works with the organisation Selva Viva, told Tierramérica, “At the very beginning, when Petroecuador took back control of the area, they should have conducted an assessment of the environmental liabilities or environmental damages that Texaco left behind here in the Amazon, but they didn’t do it.”

Why not? “Maybe because a lot of Texaco officials went on to join Petroecuador, and they had already planned what they were going to do: make the Ecuadorian government deal with the mess, and let Texaco off the hook,” said Moncayo.

Selva Viva, created by the Amazon Defense Coalition, is working to protect an area of the rainforest, rescue endangered species and promote ecotourism: a formidable task in the midst of so much toxic oil waste.

*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Texaco’s “clean-up” of the toxic oil waste pits in the Ecuadorian rainforest consisted of filling them with sticks, tires, tanks and scrub and then covering it all up with soil.

Rosa Tanguila cleaning up oil residue near her rainforest community. - Gonzalo Ortiz/IPS

The extent and impact of oil contamination on the environment and human health in northeastern Ecuador are much worse than anyone could imagine, as Tierramérica discovered during an extensive tour of the area.

This reporter travelled 400 kilometres of highways and roads in the northeastern provinces of Sucumbíos and Orellana and visited six communities affected and 12 sites contaminated by the U.S. oil company Texaco during its oil exploration and production activities between 1964 and 1990.

The swamp with the moving trees was the “pool” filled with oil waste from the Yuca 9 well, one of 162 that Texaco claims to have cleaned up or “remediated” between 1995 and 1998.

These pools or pits, some of them as big as a football field, were used to dump mud and other waste produced by oil drilling, and even human faeces and garbage, since there were no sanitary landfills or wastewater treatment facilities built.

In a sentence handed down by a judge in Nueva Loja, the capital of Sucumbíos, on Feb. 14, the U.S. corporation Chevron, which now owns Texaco, was ordered to pay 9.5 billion dollars as compensation for the damages to the environment and human health caused by its subsidiary.

The plaintiffs – indigenous people and farmers organised in the Asamblea de Afectados por Texaco (AAT – Assembly of those Affected by Texaco) – have appealed the verdict, as they consider the amount awarded insufficient to remedy the disaster, including the impacts on human health. Chevron has also appealed, claiming that the lawsuit is “fraudulent”. The case will now move up to the Provincial Court of Sucumbíos.

In an agreement signed in 1995 with the Ecuadorian government, Texaco assumed responsibility for remediation of one third of the environmental liabilities resulting from the oil operations in the rainforest. The other two thirds corresponded to the government. At the trial, Chevron alleged that its clean-up obligations had been satisfactorily fulfilled as of 1998.

But as Tierramérica was able to observe first hand, the “remediation” of the toxic oil waste pools consisted of filling them with sticks, tires, tanks and scrub and then covering it all up with soil.

Over the following 15 years, thanks to the fertile Amazon rainforest climate, these areas have become overgrown with vegetation and even trees – the ones that move with every step you take near them. But you only have to dig down a metre and a half or two to find the oil sludge.

Two members of the Amazon Defense Coalition, the group of Amazonian grassroots organisations and communities that is backing the suit filed by the AAT, drilled holes like these for soil testing in numerous sites visited by Tierramérica, including the former waste pit at the Sacha 53 well, where Chevron claims to have reports attesting to successful remediation.

Texaco admits to having constructed a total of 326 oil waste pits while operating in the region, but court-ordered inspections and surveys established that at least 956 had been dug.

Even before 1995, Texaco had already covered up other pits that the Amazon Defense Coalition calls “hidden pools”.

When these pits were dug, they were not lined with any protective material whatsoever, which means toxic wastes seeped into the soil and eventually filtered into rivers and streams.

Most of the pits had gooseneck drainpipes installed beneath the surface of the sludge. Supposedly, when the level of liquid waste deposits rose as a result of rainfall, the oil residue would float to the top and clean water would wash through the drainpipes towards nearby waterways.

In practice, however, the drainpipes became a channel through which even more toxic wastes were washed into local streams and rivers, and continue to flow through them today.

One of the great paradoxes in this tropical rainforest where water is abundantly plentiful is that many villages and communities have no water for drinking, cooking or bathing, because the nearby rivers and streams are totally contaminated.

“This is the house of María Aguinda, one of the plaintiffs in the original lawsuit against Texaco in 1993. She joined the suit because this river that flows right past her house was contaminated with oil, and she had to walk two hours to fetch clean water from another river,” explained Rosa Tanguila, a Kichwa indigenous woman from the community of Rumipamba in Orellana.

The pollution around here was caused by the Auca Sur 1 well. This is another area supposedly remediated by Texaco, but the toxins produced by oil operations seeped into the river and poisoned it very early on.

Pressured by protests and strikes waged by the local inhabitants, the state-owned oil company Petroecuador is carrying out ad hoc – and clearly insufficient – clean-up efforts in a river basin area the size of several football stadiums.

Tanguila is part of a team made up by indigenous people from the community hired by Petroecuador to clean up the area.

Their work consists of aiming a high-pressure stream of water at the riverbed to remove the sticky black sludge which is then channelled towards a trap, where Tanguila scoops it up with a small hand-held spade and dumps it into a metal tank.

“We’re cleaning up what Texaco says it left clean,” Tanguila quipped to Tierramérica.

The workers wear rubber overalls while they work submerged in the grey and black mud, but they have neither gloves nor goggles, leaving them exposed to contamination. There were also a number of small children playing on the banks of the same river and getting splashed with the same polluted water.

Donald Moncayo, another inhabitant of the area who works with the organisation Selva Viva, told Tierramérica, “At the very beginning, when Petroecuador took back control of the area, they should have conducted an assessment of the environmental liabilities or environmental damages that Texaco left behind here in the Amazon, but they didn’t do it.”

Why not? “Maybe because a lot of Texaco officials went on to join Petroecuador, and they had already planned what they were going to do: make the Ecuadorian government deal with the mess, and let Texaco off the hook,” said Moncayo.

Selva Viva, created by the Amazon Defense Coalition, is working to protect an area of the rainforest, rescue endangered species and promote ecotourism: a formidable task in the midst of so much toxic oil waste.

Timeline of Texaco activities in Ecuador

1964: Texaco forms a consortium with Gulf Oil and obtains a 28-year concession to explore for and produce oil in northeastern Ecuador. Their success leads to the expansion of the area under the concession to thousands of square kilometres.

The first successful well is christened Lago Agrio 1 (Sour Lake 1, in Spanish), in memory of the discovery of oil in 1901 in Sour Lake, in the southern U.S. state of Texas, which gave rise to the founding of Texaco.

A town grows up around Lago Agrio which will later be renamed Nueva Loja and become the capital city of the province of Sucumbíos.

1977: The state-owned oil company Corporación Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana (CEPE), the precursor of Petroecuador, acquires 62.5 percent of the consortium, which continues to be administered and operated by Texaco.

1990: The Ecuadorian government takes over the administration and operation of the consortium, assigning this task to Petroecuador, the successor to CEPE. Texaco maintains an ownership interest and continues to receive dividends.

1992: Texaco pulls out of Ecuador when the concession contract ends.

1993: A class action suit is filed against Texaco in a U.S. federal court.

1995-1998: Texaco carries out required environmental remediation activities. The Ecuadorian government declares that it is satisfied with the results, but leaves open the possibility of third-party claims.

By Gonzalo Ortiz
NUEVA LOJA, Ecuador, Mar 25 2011 (IPS)

The appointment of an ultra-conservative priest as apostolic administrator of the diocese of Sucumbíos, in northeastern Ecuador, triggered open rebellion among a large proportion of the area’s Catholics, with the support of civil society organisations and even of President Rafael Correa himself.

The crisis within the Catholic community, which is numerous and influential in this Amazonian province, has stirred up street demonstrations by detractors and partisans of Rafael Ibarguren Schindler, a leading member of the Heralds of the Gospel, a papally-approved far-right Catholic order.

The priest, born in Argentina in 1952 and ordained in 2005, was appointed apostolic vicar of San Miguel de Sucumbíos Oct. 30, 2010, as a temporary replacement for outgoing bishop Gonzalo López Marañón, who was highly respected for the social projects he carried out locally for over 40 years until he resigned at 75, the mandatory retirement age under Church rules.

The Vatican’s decision added fresh controversy to the buzzing provincial capital, Nueva Loja, which is not only the centre of the Ecuadorian oil industry but also a strategic crossover point for refugees and even undercover guerrillas from civil war-torn Colombia, as it is only 18 kilometres from the Colombian border.

The city had already drawn international attention because of the historic Feb. 14 verdict by judge Nicolás Zambrano of the Sucumbíos Provincial Court, who ordered multinational oil giant Chevron to pay 9.5 billion dollars for environmental damage, the largest fine ever imposed on an oil company for pollution. Both sides have appealed the decision.

The popular reaction against Ibarguren Schindler led President Correa, a self-declared “leftwing Catholic,” to say he might even veto the appointment, under a clause of the Modus Vivendi, the 1937 treaty between Ecuador and the Vatican that regulates relations between the Catholic Church and the state.

“In the months since the Heralds of the Gospel and the new administrator took over, they have shown that they are determined to wipe out the whole pastoral ministry that was built up over 40 years in Sucumbíos,” Maritza López, secretary of the ISAMIS Assembly, a body created by López Marañón which is being ignored by the new authorities, told IPS.

The Assembly of the Church of San Miguel de Sucumbíos (ISAMIS) is made up of 120 delegates from basic ecclesial communities (small Christian communities, the cells of the Church), pastoral workers, members of missionary orders, diocesan clergy and provincial social organisations. It operates as a sort of democratic parliament of the region’s Catholic community.

“The founder of the Heralds was an active member and secretary of the ultra-rightwing Tradition, Family and Property, an association formed (in Brazil) to oppose the left and defend private property against the agrarian reform that was making headway throughout Latin America in the 1960s,” said Maritza López.

In January, by an 80 percent majority, the ISAMIS Assembly voted to ask for Ibarguren Schindler’s resignation.

Since then, the controversy has grown steadily. Members of ISAMIS, who have been holding a vigil since January, started a hunger strike on Sunday Mar. 20 to demand the removal of the apostolic administrator. Meanwhile, Ibarguren Schindler and eight other priests of the Heralds order are seeking support from those who question the social projects promoted by bishop López Marañóñ.

“One of the things they do is to go out and celebrate open-air masses for the oil companies, but they won’t agree to carry forward the pastoral plan that has already been approved, nor will they engage in dialogue with the ISAMIS Assembly,” Felisa de Moncayo told IPS.

In contrast, bishop López Marañón “was one of us, alongside us, and would subject new initiatives and appointments to discussion,” she said.

On Mar. 9, Correa stressed that Ecuador is a secular state, which means it respects religious freedom. But he rejected “wiping out the presence of the Discalced Carmelites in Sucumbíos, at the stroke of a pen, and handing over the province to the Heralds of the Gospel, against the opinion of the Catholic base communities.”

He was speaking at a ceremony in Quito where he decorated López Marañón for his distinguished work on behalf of the poor and his defence of human rights during his four decades as bishop of Sucumbíos, as well as his work in education, health and other areas.

The Discalced Carmelites, to which the former bishop of Sucumbíos belongs, has worked in the Amazon jungle region for decades. Among its members are some of Ecuador’s most distinguished progressive church leaders, such as Alberto Luna Tobar, who with others like Leonidas Proaño was actively committed to the cause of the poor in the country.

The president said the missionary work of López Marañón was a lasting contribution, and that he was one of those Christians who would give their life for the gospel. “He fought the oil companies in order to defend life in all its forms,” he said.

“We do not want futile confrontations or controversies, still less with the Bishops’ Conference, but I wish to tell you that the treaty regulating relations between the secular state of Ecuador and the Vatican permits us to veto the nomination of any bishop,” he said.

“This power has never been used; let us not be obliged to use it now. But if an absurd fundamentalism brings to our Amazonian province orders that emphasise ritual and moral fundamentalism, and wear medieval robes in the middle of the jungle, we will have to use the power vested in us by the Modus Vivendi treaty,” he warned.

The “medieval robes” he referred to are the habits worn by the Heralds of the Gospel: knee-length black riding boots, a white cassock with a large brown scapular, bearing a half white, half red cross extending from neck to hem with arms in the shape of fleurs-de-lys. The order, recognised in 2001 by the Pope, lives by a military as well as a religious discipline.

The head of Ecuador’s Bishops’ Conference, Antonio Arregui, responded to the president’s words, indicating it would be a totally unheard-of precedent, in this day and age, for the state to interfere with the appointment of bishops.

Arregui, the archbishop of Guayaquil, said the Modus Vivendi expressly recognised that the appointment of bishops is the Pope’s prerogative.

In what was seen as a conciliatory move, the Vatican announced on Mar. 19 the appointment of the Ecuadorian bishop of Guaranda, Ángel Polibio Sánchez, as apostolic delegate in Sucumbíos, to represent the Vatican in legal matters and government relations.

“We are pleased by this development, but we would like to see the precise scope of this appointment,” said the interim Foreign Minister, Kintto Lucas.

He was well advised to be cautious, as it was later clarified that Ibarguren Schindler would not be withdrawn from his apostolic administrator position, and Sánchez’s appointment merely sought to place an Ecuadorian as representative to the Justice Ministry, which also deals with religion and has refused to formally register the appointment of Ibarguren Schindler.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Mar 22 2011 (IPS)

For one day, civil servants are trading their desks for the chilly highland plains in a rural community 3,500 metres above sea level on the outskirts of the Ecuadorian capital, where they are helping to plant native trees.

Polylepis forest in El Cajas National Park, Ecuador. Credit: Gonzalo Ortiz/IPS

The polylepis tree, which is native to the Andes mountain range and has a trunk composed of multiple thin layers that resemble paper, is the only timber-yielding tree that grows in this high-altitude area. Planting polylepis trees will help improve the retention of water in a vital river basin.

In addition to planting trees, “we are trying to raise the awareness of the state functionaries and to demonstrate to the indigenous communities that the people from the city really are working together with them to preserve sources of water,” FONAG director Pablo Lloret explained to Tierramérica.

Initiatives like these contribute to the success of FONAG, a trust fund financed with both public and private moneys, whose aims include participatory water management, increasing public awareness, and the development of a mathematical model to define the factors that impact on the basin of the Guayllabamba River, which flows from the Andes to the Pacific Ocean.

The Upper Guayllabamba River Basin, located between 5,893 metres and 1,000 metres above sea level, provides water to two million inhabitants of Quito and another 570,000 people in the northern province of Pichincha, as well as supplying irrigation water for smallholders and exporters of flowers and horticultural crops.

It is one of the most densely populated areas of Ecuador, which means it is most heavily affected by the problems of competition over water usage and serious water pollution stemming either from direct causes or as a result of scarcity, according to the FONAG website.

Less than one percent of wastewater in Quito is treated before it is discharged into the Machángara, Monjas and San Pedro Rivers (San Pedro is the name given to the upper stretch of the Guayllabamba).

“The heart of FONAG is the water management programme, and its two arms are the policy and technical branches,” said Lloret. This has led to the establishment of the Guayllabamba Basin Management Board, conceived as a governance system that includes all users.

Over the last four years, with the cooperation of the French Institute for Development Research (IRD), a mathematical model of the watershed has been developed. “Today we can simulate what would happen to the water balance if there is a change in any component of supply or demand,” IRD representative Bernard Francou told Tierramérica.

Concern over rapid, uncontrolled urbanisation worldwide has led the United Nations to devote this World Water Day, Mar. 22, to the theme of “Water for Cities: Responding to the Urban Challenge”.

FONAG was created in 2000 with initial funding of 21,000 dollars and currently holds 9.5 million dollars. Only the yields of the trust are used to finance its operations, and administrative costs cannot exceed 20 percent of the funds invested in projects.

The leading contributor to the fund is the Empresa Pública Metropolitana de Agua Potable y Saneamiento (EPMAPS) of Quito, the public water and sanitation authority, which turns over one percent of its billing to the trust, around 190,000 dollars a month. Other contributors include the city power company, U.S.-based conservationist organisation The Nature Conservancy, the Ecuadorian mineral water company Tesalia Springs, and the Cervecería Nacional brewery, owned by the U.K. corporation SABMiller.

The FONAG model has been replicated in nine other provinces of Ecuador, as well as in Colombia and Peru, while similar initiatives are being developed in Bolivia and the Dominican Republic.

Yet when it was first created, “it was nothing but a bank account where a few funds were deposited” and almost disappeared, recalled Juan Neira, the general manager of EPMAPS between 2000 and 2009.

It was not until 2004, when a number of organisations joined together “and the water company decided to donate one percent of its billing to the trust fund, that FONAG was able to get organised, hire staff and undertake projects,” Neira told Tierramérica. In addition to the simplicity of its functioning, another of the fund’s strong points is its transparency, stressed Jorge Ribera, former operations manager of the Quito water authority. “All of the partners audit the trust, and the results can be seen immediately,” he told Tierramérica.

In pursuit of its educational goals, FONAG joined forces with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) last year to undertake the “Dissemination and Sensitisation Strategy for the Care and Protection of Freshwater and Saltwater Ecosystems – From the Highlands to the Mangroves”, which includes radio spots, bus advertisements and workshops.

*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Mar 21 2011 (IPS)

Now that the wave of water privatisation of the 1980s and 1990s has let up, the main challenge facing water utilities in Latin America is expanding coverage of high-quality water services.

Indigenous women hauling water in Chiapas, Mexico. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

But in other countries, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank recommendations in the last two decades of the 20th century drove the privatisation of water, whose management was handed over in concession to U.S. and European corporations.

However, the poor performance of these companies and soaring water rates rapidly triggered discontent.

One major turning point was the so-called “water war” in Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third-largest city, which broke out in early 2000 with protests against the private management of water services, which were run by the city until a few months earlier.

After receiving the concession from the government of Hugo Banzer (a former dictator in the 1970s who was elected president in 1997), Aguas del Tunari, a consortium led by U.S. water giant Bechtel, raised the minimum water rate to 20 dollars a month – in a country where the minimum wage is less than 100 dollars a month – and threatened to cut off service to customers who did not pay.

A state of siege was declared, but despite the brutal crackdown on the protests in which one demonstrator was killed and around 200 were injured, the uprising continued and the government was forced to cancel the contract.

Another watershed moment was 2006, when the government of Néstor Kirchner in Argentina revoked the concession granted to a consortium led by French utility group Suez, which supplied water and sewage treatment to Buenos Aires and the surrounding suburbs since 1993.

Kirchner cancelled the 30-year contract “for repeated failure by the consortium to meet its contractual obligations,” María Laura Lignini, the head of Espacio Aguas, a non-governmental group that advocates universal access to water and sanitation as a human right, told IPS.

To replace the consortium, the government set up the Agua y Saneamiento Argentinos (AySA) company to serve greater Buenos Aires, home to nearly 10 million people.

In Ecuador, with the exception of two cities – Guayaquil and Machala – water is in the hands of 60 city governments.

Guayaquil, the most populous city in the country, located in the west, granted a concession for drinking water and sewage services to Interagua, a consortium headed by a Spanish company, Proactiva Medio Ambiente. In Machala, in the southwest, the services are run by Triple Oro, made up of the city government and the Empresa Sudamericana de Aguas Oriolsa.

The 2008 constitution establishes that water is a national good for public use, which can only be managed by public or community-run enterprises. The transition of the two companies in question to the new legal framework has not yet been resolved.

“Since the neoliberal government of Sixto Durán Ballén eliminated the Instituto Ecuatoriano de Obras Sanitarias (water and sewage utility) in 1992 as a step previous to the privatisation of the service, this has been blocked by the resistance of the municipalities and the population itself,” Antonio Gaybor, the head of a civil society water rights movement, told IPS.

Since a draft law discussed by Congress in 2010 sparked roadblocks and protests by indigenous people and peasant farmers, “the bill has basically been shelved,” Gaybor said.

Water, a constitutional right

In July 2010, the United Nations declared access to water and sanitation a universal human right.

But several countries in Latin America had already enshrined the right to water in their constitutions. The pioneer was Uruguay which, parallel to the national elections of 2004, held a referendum in which Uruguayans voted to reform the constitution to make water a national asset for the public good.

The constitution now declares that “water is a natural resource essential to life” and that access to piped water and sanitation services are “fundamental human rights”. It also guarantees civil society participation at every level of management of the country’s water resources.

The referendum was promoted by civil society groups, trade unions and the left-wing Broad Front coalition, which won the elections that year and is still governing the country.

In Ecuador, the constitution that went into force in 2008 states that water is a fundamental human right and a strategic national asset for public use “that is inalienable, permanent, cannot be embargoed and is essential for life.”

Bolivia’s 2009 constitution also enshrines access to safe, sufficient, and affordable water as a basic human right.

Expanding coverage

Today, public water utilities in the region are making enormous efforts to live up to these provisions.

But the example of Cochabamba illustrates how some victories have been wasted. In that highlands city, nearly 50 percent of the population still has no running water, the poor must purchase water from tanker trucks at abusive prices, and the municipal water company is heavily indebted, due to cronyism and corruption.

In Buenos Aires, meanwhile, AySA is working to expand the water and sanitation grid, with the target of reaching universal coverage by 2020. Currently coverage of piped water stands at 87 percent and sanitation at 64 percent of the 9.7 million people in the greater Buenos Aires area.

Major public works are underway, like the Juan Manuel de Rosas water treatment plant, the Del Bicentenario sewage treatment plant and the Virrey del Pino reverse osmosis plant, in suburbs of Buenos Aires.

In Uruguay, the companies affected by the constitutional reform were the local branches of the Spanish firms Uragua and Aguas de la Costa, which provided water supplies in the southeastern province of Maldonado, and had racked up complaints for poor service and high rates.

“Under pressure to enforce the constitutional reform and because Uragua had failed to live up to its contractual obligations, OSE (the state water company) decided to revoke the contract,” Adriana Preziosi, a technical consultant to the utility’s management, told IPS.

Since the Aguas de la Costa contract does not expire until 2018, the state gained control over the service by becoming the majority shareholder.

Uruguay has achieved universal coverage of access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

In Ecuador, coverage of potable water is 96 percent in urban areas and 74 percent in rural areas.

But Ecuador and other countries in the region have two problems: water supplies are intermittent in many urban areas, and coverage levels and quality vary widely between rich and poor sectors.

In Mexico, 10 percent of the population has no piped water supply and 13.6 percent lacks sanitation, according to Conagua, the national water authority.

The biggest challenge facing public water companies is bringing high-quality water services to slums and dispersed rural populations.

In addition, water sources are often polluted, and there is competition for water supplies among different sectors, such as hydroelectric plants.

Technological achievements have also been shared in the region: compact water treatment units developed by the OSE utility in Uruguay have been installed in Quito and other cities in Ecuador.

The treatment units, used in eight other Latin American countries, the United States, the Democratic Republic of Congo and India, “are of excellent quality, and helped us resolve emerging problems,” Jorge Ribera, former operations manager at the Quito municipal water utility, told IPS.

* With additional reporting by Raúl Pierri in Montevideo, Marcela Valente in Buenos Aires and Emilio Godoy in Mexico City.

Excerpt:

A fund financed with public and private resources seeks to create a participatory and transparent water management model in Quito.

Polylepis forest in El Cajas National Park, Ecuador. - Gonzalo Ortiz/IPS

Since last November, employees of the state-owned power company, Empresa Eléctrica Quito, have been taking turns to participate in the planting of 10,000 polylepis trees, as part of an agreement with the Quito Water Protection Fund (FONAG).

The polylepis tree, which is native to the Andes mountain range and has a trunk composed of multiple thin layers that resemble paper, is the only timber-yielding tree that grows in this high-altitude area. Planting polylepis trees will help improve the retention of water in a vital river basin.

In addition to planting trees, “we are trying to raise the awareness of the state functionaries and to demonstrate to the indigenous communities that the people from the city really are working together with them to preserve sources of water,” FONAG director Pablo Lloret explained to Tierramérica.

Initiatives like these contribute to the success of FONAG, a trust fund financed with both public and private moneys, whose aims include participatory water management, increasing public awareness, and the development of a mathematical model to define the factors that impact on the basin of the Guayllabamba River, which flows from the Andes to the Pacific Ocean.

The Upper Guayllabamba River Basin, located between 5,893 metres and 1,000 metres above sea level, provides water to two million inhabitants of Quito and another 570,000 people in the northern province of Pichincha, as well as supplying irrigation water for smallholders and exporters of flowers and horticultural crops.

It is one of the most densely populated areas of Ecuador, which means it is most heavily affected by the problems of competition over water usage and serious water pollution stemming either from direct causes or as a result of scarcity, according to the FONAG website.

Less than one percent of wastewater in Quito is treated before it is discharged into the Machángara, Monjas and San Pedro Rivers (San Pedro is the name given to the upper stretch of the Guayllabamba).

“The heart of FONAG is the water management programme, and its two arms are the policy and technical branches,” said Lloret. This has led to the establishment of the Guayllabamba Basin Management Board, conceived as a governance system that includes all users.

Over the last four years, with the cooperation of the French Institute for Development Research (IRD), a mathematical model of the watershed has been developed. “Today we can simulate what would happen to the water balance if there is a change in any component of supply or demand,” IRD representative Bernard Francou told Tierramérica.

Concern over rapid, uncontrolled urbanisation worldwide has led the United Nations to devote this World Water Day, Mar. 22, to the theme of “Water for Cities: Responding to the Urban Challenge”.

FONAG was created in 2000 with initial funding of 21,000 dollars and currently holds 9.5 million dollars. Only the yields of the trust are used to finance its operations, and administrative costs cannot exceed 20 percent of the funds invested in projects.

The leading contributor to the fund is the Empresa Pública Metropolitana de Agua Potable y Saneamiento (EPMAPS) of Quito, the public water and sanitation authority, which turns over one percent of its billing to the trust, around 190,000 dollars a month.

Other contributors include the city power company, U.S.-based conservationist organisation The Nature Conservancy, the Ecuadorian mineral water company Tesalia Springs, and the Cervecería Nacional brewery, owned by the U.K. corporation SABMiller.

The FONAG model has been replicated in nine other provinces of Ecuador, as well as in Colombia and Peru, while similar initiatives are being developed in Bolivia and the Dominican Republic.

Yet when it was first created, “it was nothing but a bank account where a few funds were deposited” and almost disappeared, recalled Juan Neira, the general manager of EPMAPS between 2000 and 2009.

It was not until 2004, when a number of organisations joined together “and the water company decided to donate one percent of its billing to the trust fund, that FONAG was able to get organised, hire staff and undertake projects,” Neira told Tierramérica.

In addition to the simplicity of its functioning, another of the fund’s strong points is its transparency, stressed Jorge Ribera, former operations manager of the Quito water authority. “All of the partners audit the trust, and the results can be seen immediately,” he told Tierramérica.

In pursuit of its educational goals, FONAG joined forces with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) last year to undertake the “Dissemination and Sensitisation Strategy for the Care and Protection of Freshwater and Saltwater Ecosystems – From the Highlands to the Mangroves”, which includes radio spots, bus advertisements and workshops.

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Mar 8 2011 (IPS)

Chevron, the second largest U.S. oil company, believes that to overturn the verdict ordering it to pay 9.5 billion dollars in reparations for environmental and public health damages in Ecuador’s Amazon jungle, the best defence is a good offence.

Chevron spokesman for Latin America James Craig Credit: Courtesy of Chevron Corporation

As it prepares to appeal the sentence, the company has presented a request for clarifications from the acting judge, Nicolás Zambrano. But it has also brought an action against the Ecuadorian state in the Permanent Court of Arbitration, seated at The Hague, and is suing the lawyers and lead plaintiffs in a U.S. District Court in New York, accusing them of inventing a fraudulent case against the company.

Craig claims that the judge failed to take into account “many elements that came out in the proceedings,” that he based his ruling only on the studies submitted by the plaintiffs, and that he ignored the fact that the report presented by Richard Cabrera, the expert witness commissioned to conduct an independent assessment, was actually drafted by the plaintiffs.

Although Zambrano explicitly noted in the ruling that he had ignored Cabrera’s questioned report, Craig insists that “the trial is totally corrupted.”

Texaco conducted oil exploration and extraction operations in northeast Ecuador from 1964 to 1990, in association with the state, and it retained a 37.5-percent share in the business until 1992. In 2001 the company was acquired by Chevron.

According to the reports filed, Texaco drilled around 350 oil wells across an area of approximately 6,900 square kilometres in the Amazon rainforest. It dug out 900 unlined open-air pits for oil sludge disposal, and dumped some 68,000 litres of wastewater discharged by its production processes -a mixture of petroleum, acid chemicals, and other toxic substances known as production water-, which seeped into rivers and streams. What follows is an extract of the interview with Craig.

Q: Even before the ruling had been issued in the first instance, Chevron filed a complaint with the court in The Hague demanding that in the event of an adverse ruling against the company, the Ecuadorian state be held accountable for any damages awarded. Why should the state be made to pay if it was your company that operated in that area from 1964 to 1990? A: Texaco was one of the operators in the consortium from 1972 to 1990, when the government of Rodrigo Borja (1988-1992) decided that it no longer needed a foreign partner. The operator for the last 20 years has been the (state-owned company) Petroecuador.

When Texaco left, it was agreed that a number of remediation actions would be carried out in certain places that had been impacted by the consortium’s operations. The state, as the majority shareholder, and Texaco, as the minority shareholder, then signed an agreement in 1995 whereby Texaco was to cover one third of these environmental liabilities and the state was to cover the other two thirds.

Texaco cleaned 162 ponds and six spill areas, it installed seven produced water re-injection facilities, and invested over five million U.S. dollars in social work. And in the year 1998 the final document releasing the company from any responsibility or obligation was signed. (Craig shows the document executed by Ecuadorian authorities and Texaco executives).

If there are any environmental problems, the only one responsible is the Ecuadorian state.

Q: But that agreement did not release Texaco from third-party liability. The state attorney general, Diego García, says that this is a conflict between private parties and therefore the court in The Hague does not have jurisdiction. A: We have abundant evidence that shows how this case has been influenced by the government and politics. Besides numerous statements by President (Rafael) Correa against Chevron, we have a press bulletin from the presidency where the government not only declares its support for the plaintiffs, it also undertakes to gather proof to help them.

We have a video of Alexis Mera (legal secretary of the presidency) meeting with attorney (Pablo) Fajardo, (activist Luis) Yanza, and attorneys (Julio) Prieto and Alejandro Ponce Villacís (members of the plaintiff’s litigation team) to discuss how they could go about invalidating the 1998 agreement.

Q: How did you obtain recordings of meetings held in the presidency? A: The plaintiffs commissioned a documentary on their “struggle against the evil multinational corporation,” and over the course of two or three years the filmmaker (Joe Berlinger) accompanied them to all their meetings, taping and filming everything for a documentary that was finally released in 2009 under the title “Crude.”

We filed a request with a U.S. court to obtain access to the footage that was not included in the film, and the judge ruled that that material had to be turned over to the company. I have two CDs here -which I’m going to give to you- containing 16 of these videos, although the meeting with Mera is not included. (At the end of the interview, Craig presented a flash drive with images of that meeting).

Q: Before determining whether or not it has jurisdiction, The Hague court ordered the Ecuadorian state to suspend the enforcement of the judgment against Chevron. But any lawyer knows that a judgment cannot be enforced until it becomes final. A: The lawyers for the plaintiffs have said themselves that they were going to take the first instance ruling to international forums to begin seizing our assets. Which is why The Hague court decided to take measures to prevent irreparable damage, such as the seizing of offshore platforms or refineries.

Q: But a statement like that, even coming from the plaintiffs, has no legal basis. A: That question would have to be answered by The Hague court, which has much of that evidence. We have hundreds of thousands of documents, tens of thousands of compromising email messages.

Q: Also obtained through court orders? A: Of course. From hard drives we obtained through several proceedings we initiated last year.

Q: You’ve said that Chevron came in good faith to Ecuador to appear as a respondent in the trial. But when the case was originally brought in the United States, in 1993, you manipulated the proceedings arguing that the case could not be heard in a U.S. court. A: If you say “manipulated” you’re twisting the facts. We defended our position with the argument that the courts of the United States were not the proper forum for resolving an issue that was clearly Ecuadorian.

The first instance court agreed with us. The court of appeals did too, but it added as a condition that we could not oppose Ecuador’s jurisdiction if an action was brought against us there. Which is why Chevron came to Ecuador to respond in good faith to the action.

Q: Where does the case go from here? A: We don’t know. The response to our request for clarification depends on the judge. We will then have three days to appeal. We’ll appeal to the Higher Court of Sucumbíos and, if necessary, to the National Court of Justice and the Constitutional Court, and, if it comes to that, we’ll take our appeal outside the country.

We have another case pending in New York against Fajardo, Yanza, (U.S. attorney Steven) Donziger, who is the leading attorney, and others who participated in the fraud, colluded with the judges, pressured justice, and induced the government to interfere.

Q: What are you accusing them of? A: Fraud, conspiracy and extortion.

Q: And are you suing them for a specific sum of money? A: We’re not asking for a specific sum. It’s a civil action. But we do expect to be reimbursed for what we have spent in our defence.

(*Originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)

Excerpt:

The court ruling ordering Chevron to pay Ecuadorian communities damages arising from its operations is the “product of fraud,” James Craig, a representative of the oil company, says.

James Craig, Chevron spokesperson for Latin America. - Courtesy of Chevron Corporation

The ruling, issued on Feb. 14 by a provincial court in Ecuador, is “corrupt, illegitimate, unenforceable, and the product of a fraud,” according to the company's Latin American spokesperson, James Craig, interviewed by Tierramérica.

As it prepares to appeal the sentence, the company has presented a request for clarifications from the acting judge, Nicolás Zambrano. But it has also brought an action against the Ecuadorian state in the Permanent Court of Arbitration, seated at The Hague, and is suing the lawyers and lead plaintiffs in a U.S. District Court in New York, accusing them of inventing a fraudulent case against the company.

Craig claims that the judge failed to take into account “many elements that came out in the proceedings,” that he based his ruling only on the studies submitted by the plaintiffs, and that he ignored the fact that the report presented by Richard Cabrera, the expert witness commissioned to conduct an independent assessment, was actually drafted by the plaintiffs.

Although Zambrano explicitly noted in the ruling that he had ignored Cabrera's questioned report, Craig insists that “the trial is totally corrupted.”

Texaco conducted oil exploration and extraction operations in northeast Ecuador from 1964 to 1990, in association with the state, and it retained a 37.5-percent share in the business until 1992. In 2001 the company was acquired by Chevron.

According to the reports filed, Texaco drilled around 350 oil wells across an area of approximately 6,900 square kilometres in the Amazon rainforest. It dug out 900 unlined open-air pits for oil sludge disposal, and dumped some 68,000 litres of wastewater discharged by its production processes -a mixture of petroleum, acid chemicals, and other toxic substances known as production water-, which seeped into rivers and streams. What follows is an extract of the interview with Craig.

TIERRAMÉRICA: Even before the ruling had been issued in the first instance, Chevron filed a complaint with the court in The Hague demanding that in the event of an adverse ruling against the company, the Ecuadorian state be held accountable for any damages awarded. Why should the state be made to pay if it was your company that operated in that area from 1964 to 1990?

JAMES CRAIG: Texaco was one of the operators in the consortium from 1972 to 1990, when the government of Rodrigo Borja (1988-1992) decided that it no longer needed a foreign partner. The operator for the last 20 years has been the (state-owned company) Petroecuador.

When Texaco left, it was agreed that a number of remediation actions would be carried out in certain places that had been impacted by the consortium's operations. The state, as the majority shareholder, and Texaco, as the minority shareholder, then signed an agreement in 1995 whereby Texaco was to cover one third of these environmental liabilities and the state was to cover the other two thirds.

Texaco cleaned 162 ponds and six spill areas, it installed seven produced water re-injection facilities, and invested over five million U.S. dollars in social work. And in the year 1998 the final document releasing the company from any responsibility or obligation was signed. (Craig shows the document executed by Ecuadorian authorities and Texaco executives).

If there are any environmental problems, the only one responsible is the Ecuadorian state.

TIERRAMÉRICA: But that agreement did not release Texaco from third-party liability. The state attorney general, Diego García, says that this is a conflict between private parties and therefore the court in The Hague does not have jurisdiction.

JC: We have abundant evidence that shows how this case has been influenced by the government and politics. Besides numerous statements by President (Rafael) Correa against Chevron, we have a press bulletin from the presidency where the government not only declares its support for the plaintiffs, it also undertakes to gather proof to help them.

We have a video of Alexis Mera (legal secretary of the presidency) meeting with attorney (Pablo) Fajardo, (activist Luis) Yanza, and attorneys (Julio) Prieto and Alejandro Ponce Villacís (members of the plaintiff’s litigation team) to discuss how they could go about invalidating the 1998 agreement.

TIERRAMÉRICA: How did you obtain recordings of meetings held in the presidency?

JC: The plaintiffs commissioned a documentary on their “struggle against the evil multinational corporation,” and over the course of two or three years the filmmaker (Joe Berlinger) accompanied them to all their meetings, taping and filming everything for a documentary that was finally released in 2009 under the title “Crude.”

We filed a request with a U.S. court to obtain access to the footage that was not included in the film, and the judge ruled that that material had to be turned over to the company. I have two CDs here -which I'm going to give to you- containing 16 of these videos, although the meeting with Mera is not included. (At the end of the interview, Craig presented a flash drive with images of that meeting).

TIERRAMÉRICA: Before determining whether or not it has jurisdiction, The Hague court ordered the Ecuadorian state to suspend the enforcement of the judgment against Chevron. But any lawyer knows that a judgment cannot be enforced until it becomes final.

JC: The lawyers for the plaintiffs have said themselves that they were going to take the first instance ruling to international forums to begin seizing our assets. Which is why The Hague court decided to take measures to prevent irreparable damage, such as the seizing of offshore platforms or refineries.

TIERRAMÉRICA: But a statement like that, even coming from the plaintiffs, has no legal basis.

JC: That question would have to be answered by The Hague court, which has much of that evidence. We have hundreds of thousands of documents, tens of thousands of compromising email messages.

TIERRAMÉRICA: Also obtained through court orders?

JC: Of course. From hard drives we obtained through several proceedings we initiated last year.

TIERRAMÉRICA: You've said that Chevron came in good faith to Ecuador to appear as a respondent in the trial. But when the case was originally brought in the United States, in 1993, you manipulated the proceedings arguing that the case could not be heard in a U.S. court.

JC: If you say “manipulated” you're twisting the facts. We defended our position with the argument that the courts of the United States were not the proper forum for resolving an issue that was clearly Ecuadorian.

The first instance court agreed with us. The court of appeals did too, but it added as a condition that we could not oppose Ecuador's jurisdiction if an action was brought against us there. Which is why Chevron came to Ecuador to respond in good faith to the action.

TIERRAMÉRICA: Where does the case go from here?

JC: We don’t know. The response to our request for clarification depends on the judge. We will then have three days to appeal. We’ll appeal to the Higher Court of Sucumbíos and, if necessary, to the National Court of Justice and the Constitutional Court, and, if it comes to that, we’ll take our appeal outside the country.

We have another case pending in New York against Fajardo, Yanza, (U.S. attorney Steven) Donziger, who is the leading attorney, and others who participated in the fraud, colluded with the judges, pressured justice, and induced the government to interfere.

TIERRAMÉRICA: What are you accusing them of?

JC: Fraud, conspiracy and extortion.

TIERRAMÉRICA: And are you suing them for a specific sum of money?

JC: We're not asking for a specific sum. It's a civil action. But we do expect to be reimbursed for what we have spent in our defence.

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Feb 23 2011 (IPS)

On Feb. 14, a provincial Ecuadorean court issued the harshest environmental verdict in history against a major oil company, the U.S.-based Chevron. But is there any chance it will be carried out?

Juan Pablo Sáenz, one of the five Ecuadorean attorneys who won the case against Chevron. Credit: Gonzalo Ortiz/IPS

It is the environmental trial of the century. The ruling of the court of first instance orders Chevron to pay 9.5 billion dollars to pay for the damage to human health and the environment in an Amazon forest area of northeast Ecuador, in the provinces of Sucumbíos and Orellana. That is where oil exploration and drilling operations took place for 26 years under Chevron or Texaco, which Chevron acquire in 2001.

At the time that this Tierramérica edition was published, the company had presented a request for clarification and an extension of the ruling, which in practice freezes the 72-hour deadline the parties have to appeal once the verdict is issued.

When the legal battle began in 1993, Juan Pablo Sáenz was just finishing primary school. Now, at age 29, he is part of the legal team that has tallied a major win. He joined them four years ago after winning a contest as he finished his legal studies.

Q: On a scale of one to 10, what would you say are the chances of the ruling being enforced? A: We wouldn’t keep working on this if we didn’t think the chance was a 10. Many people said that this was never going to succeed, that an Ecuadorean court would never rule against a big transnational corporation.

But we have several options and we have the advice of a U.S. law office, Patton Boggs LLP, which is an expert in enforcing this type of sentence. We are absolutely convinced that this can be carried out because it is just.

Q: The reality is that justice does not always win, especially when there are such powerful interests on one side. A: Of course, but we have to believe in miracles. What differentiates us from similar cases is that we are working directly with the communities.

We are dedicated, in the end, to following the decisions that they make, and that gives us strength. As Pablo Fajardo (coordinator of the legal team) said, this is a matter of principles. And even if it takes many, many years, I am sure that we — and I am speaking not just for the attorneys, but especially for the communities — are going to last much longer than our opponents.

Q: It’s clear that the lawsuit did not seek money to distribute to people, and the sentence states that the fines should go to specific rubrics of environmental remediation and health care, and that these resources will be managed by a trusteeship. How many potential beneficiaries are there? A: All of the residents of Orellana and Sucumbíos provinces. A few years ago they talked about 30,000 people. They are directly affected because they live in areas neighbouring petroleum zones. But according to the latest census, we would be talking about around 223,000 people in the two provinces.

Q: How many plaintiffs were there? A: The people who signed the lawsuit, and who have continued with admirable tenacity, are not going to receive any money. This is a collective lawsuit, meaning that it was done in the name of all who live in the area. It is an undefined but identifiable group.

Q: How do you take legal action against Chevron outside the United States to ensure that the sentence is carried out, given that the company has not operated in Ecuador for years? What countries are you considering? A: There is the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, of which Ecuador is a signatory. The easiest would be to look for enforcement in a country that is also a signatory of the treaty, because the process would be faster, but we could focus on any country where Chevron has oil platforms, ships, any type of goods, and seek their embargo until Chevron recognises its obligations.

Q: Do you have a country in mind? A: We have a list of countries, but it would be premature now because it is obvious that they are going to file all possible appeals in the case, and there still are a few higher instances.

Q: The first is before the full court of Sucumbíos. Then, if Chevron continues filing appeals, it would have to take the case to the National Court of Justice for cassation, right? A: Yes, but cassation is a much more limited type of appeal because the deeper issue would not be discussed, but rather three or four specific considerations. The timing would be accelerated because it is a summary verbal judgment for which the law gives judges shorter deadlines.

Q: So a one-year deadline is reasonable? A: Yes. The first appeal should not take longer than six months, because new evidence is presented; it is simply judged based on what exists in the writs.

Q: What is your view of the appeals Chevron filed before the Permanent Court of Arbitration, based in The Hague, and in a New York court to prevent the sentence from being enforced? A: They are suing Ecuador and are trying to re-litigate the whole matter as if the Ecuadorean government were party to it, and it isn’t. It is hard to imagine that the arbitration court of The Hague would ask the Ecuadorean government to interfere in the judiciary’s operations. It is ridiculous to think that.

The court of The Hague cannot prejudge the rulings made by courts in Ecuador, which are independent, and much less tell the government not to respect the judicial rulings.

The cases in New York and The Hague have no chance of interfering in the enforcement of the sentence. There is no supranational forum in which we are going to confront Chevron.

Q: And when the moment comes to enforce the ruling? A: When we request injunctions against Chevron, any judge or court will review whether certain basic requirements were followed: that nobody has been deprived of the right to a defence, that due process was followed, but nothing more.

Q: But Chevron is already taking action in other ways… A: What it is doing is lobbying against Ecuador, for example, trying to prevent the renewal of preferential tariffs. It wants the Ecuadorean government to interfere in due process. Chevron has spent millions of dollars over the past few years to drive a wedge between the U.S. government and Ecuador. They have no interest in this being heard in court: they have no arguments.

(*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.)

Excerpt:

“Many people said that an Ecuadorean court would never rule against a big transnational corporation,” Juan Pablo Sáenz told Tierramérica. He is the youngest on the Ecuadorean prosecuting team against Chevron in the environmental case of the century.

Juan Pablo Sáenz, one of the five Ecuadorean attorneys who won the case against Chevron - Gonzalo Ortiz/IPS

“We wouldn't keep working on this if we didn't think success was possible. On a scale of one to 10, it's a 10,” the youngest of the litigant attorneys, Juan Pablo Sáenz, told Tierramérica in an interview.

It is the environmental trial of the century. The ruling of first instance orders Chevron to pay 9.5 billion dollars to pay for the damage to human health and the environment in an Amazon forest area of northeast Ecuador, in the provinces of Sucumbíos and Orellana, where its current affiliate Texaco has conducted oil exploration and drilling operations for 26 years.

At the time that this Tierramérica edition was published, the company had presented a request for clarification and an extension of the ruling, which in practice freezes the 72-hour deadline the parties have to appeal once the verdict is issued.

When the legal battle began in 1993, Juan Pablo Sáenz was just finishing primary school. Now, at age 29, he is part of the legal team that has tallied a major win, joining them four years ago after winning a contest as he finished his legal studies.

TIERRAMÉRICA: On a scale of one to 10, what would you say are the chances of the ruling being carried out?

JUAN PABLO SÁENZ: We wouldn't keep working on this if we didn't think the chance was a 10. Many people said that this was never going to succeed, that an Ecuadorean court would never rule against a big transnational corporation.

But we have several options and we have the advice of a U.S. law office, Patton Boggs LLP, which is an expert in enforcing this type of sentence. We are absolutely convinced that this can be carried out because it is just.

TIERRAMÉRICA: The reality is that justice does not always win, especially when there are such powerful interests on one side.

JPS: Of course, but we have to believe in miracles. What differentiates us from similar cases is that we are working directly with the communities.

We are dedicated, in the end, to executing the decisions that they make, and that gives us strength. As Pablo Fajardo (coordinator of the legal team) said, this is a matter of principles. And even if it takes many, many years, I am sure that we — and I am speaking for the attorneys, but especially for the communities — are going to last much longer than our opponents.

TIERRAMÉRICA: It's clear that the lawsuit did not seek money to distribute to people, and the sentence says that the fines should go to specific rubrics of environmental remediation and health care, and states that these resources will be managed by a trusteeship. How many potential beneficiaries are there?

JPS: All of the residents of Orellana and Sucumbíos provinces. A few years ago they talked about 30,000 people. They are directly affected because they live in areas neighboring petroleum zones. But according to the latest census, we would be talking about around 223,000 people in the two provinces.

TIERRAMÉRICA: How many plaintiffs were there?

JPS: The people who signed the lawsuit, and who have continued with admirable tenacity, are not going to receive any money. This is a collective lawsuit, that is, it was done in the name of all who live in the area. It is an undefined but identifiable group.

TIERRAMÉRICA: How do you take legal action against Chevron outside the United States to ensure that the sentence is carried out, given that the company has not operated in Ecuador for years? What countries are you considering?

JPS: There is the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, of which Ecuador is a signatory. The easiest would be to look for enforcement in a country that is also a signatory of the treaty, because the process would be faster, but we could focus on any country where Chevron has oil platforms, ships, any type of goods, and seek their embargo until Chevron recognizes its obligation.

TIERRAMÉRICA: Do you have a country in mind?

JPS: We have a list of countries, but it would be premature now because it is obvious that they are going to file all possible appeals in the case, and there still are a few higher instances.

TIERRAMÉRICA: The first is before the full court of Sucumbíos. Then, if Chevron continues filing appeals, it would have to take the case to the National Court of Justice for cassation, right?

JPS: Yes, but cassation is a much more limited appeal because the deeper issue would not be discussed, but rather three or four specific considerations. The timing is accelerating because it is a summary verbal judgment for which the law gives judges shorter deadlines. TIERRAMÉRICA: So a one-year deadline is reasonable?

JPS: Yes. The first appeal should not take longer than six months, because new evidence is presented; it is simply judged based on what exists in the writs.

TIERRAMÉRICA: What is your view of the appeal Chevron filed before the Permanent Court of Arbitration, based in The Hague, and in a New York court to prevent the sentence from being enforced?

JPS: They are suing Ecuador and are trying to re-litigate the whole matter as if the Ecuadorean government were party to it, and it isn't. It is hard to imagine that the arbitration court of The Hague would ask the Ecuadorean government to interfere in the judiciary's operations. It is ridiculous to think that.

The court of The Hague cannot prejudge the rulings made by courts in Ecuador, which are independent, and much less tell the government not to respect the judicial rulings.

The cases in New York and The Hague have no chance of interfering in the enforcement of the sentence. There is no supranational forum in which we are going to confront Chevron.

TIERRAMÉRICA: And when the moment comes to enforce the ruling?

JPS: When we request injunctions against Chevron, any judge or court will review whether certain basic requirements were followed: that nobody has been deprived of the right to a defense, that due process was followed, but nothing more.

TIERRAMÉRICA: But Chevron is already taking action in other ways…

JPS: What it is doing is lobbying against Ecuador, for example, trying to prevent the renewal of preferential tariffs. It wants the Ecuadorean government to interfere in due process. Chevron has spent millions of dollars over the past few years to drive a wedge between the U.S. government and Ecuador. They have no interest in this being heard in court: they have no arguments.

The plaintiffs in the case against Chevron tried in Ecuador, who won a historic 9.5 billion dollar verdict after a nearly 18-year struggle over environmental and health damages caused in a quarter-century of oil operations in the Amazon jungle, are not disheartened by the road still ahead.

Plaintiffs belonging to the Asamblea de Afectados por la Texaco at a press conference. Credit: Gonzalo Ortiz/IPS

Chevron announced that it would appeal the sentence handed down Monday by Judge Nicolás Zambrano in Nueva Loja, the capital of the northeastern Ecuadorian province of Sucumbíos, which found the U.S. oil company guilty of an environmental disaster in the Amazon jungle, as locals have been arguing in legal action that began in 1993.

“This was a trial on behalf of the people, and the beneficiaries are not just the (30,000) plaintiffs but all of the inhabitants of the provinces of Sucumbíos and Orellana,” some 223,000 people, Juan Pablo Sáenz, one of the members of the plaintiffs’ legal team, told IPS.

Chevron tried to shield itself behind two last-minute legal decisions, issued by a court in the United States and by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which were received with a dismissive attitude by authorities in Ecuador.

On Feb. 9, the court in The Hague ordered Ecuador “to take all measures at its disposal to suspend or cause to be suspended the enforcement or recognition within and without Ecuador of any judgment against” Chevron.

And on Feb. 8, a federal judge in New York issued a temporary restraining order barring the plaintiffs from seeking to enforce any judgment against Chevron in the case.

Although the order expires on Feb. 22, the judge will hold a hearing to decide whether to impose a more concrete injunction, based on what he called “serious questions” raised by Chevron with regard to the enforceability of such a judgment, based on the company’s arguments that the ruling was procured by fraud.

That the firm does not plan to rest was underscored by an incident that occurred just after the press conference given Tuesday in Quito by leaders of the Asamblea de Afectados por Texaco (AAT – Assembly of those Affected by Texaco), and some of their lawyers, where they celebrated the victory but also mentioned the fight still ahead.

A man who was likely employed by a private postal delivery service pushed his way through the journalists to reach the head of the AAT, Luis Yanza, with an envelope containing documents, which the activist refused to take.

The messenger then sought out other leaders of the group and lawyers who had dispersed around the room to make statements to the media. But they also refused to take the package.

The envelope contained a summons from a U.S. court. “This is not how we summon people to court in Ecuadorian territory,” Yanza told IPS. “We will only accept a summons if it comes through diplomatic or judicial channels, and in accordance with Ecuador’s legal order.”

Finding no one who would take the package, the carrier put it on the floor and left.

The lawsuit against Chevron was filed on behalf of 30,000 indigenous and mestizo (mixed-race) members of some 80 Amazon jungle communities who are demanding that the company clean up the pollution and pay reparations for the health damages caused by Texaco during eight years of prospecting and 18 years — 1972 to 1990 — of oil drilling in the rainforest of northeastern Ecuador.

Texaco was acquired by Chevron in 2001. But even before then, Chevron was operating in the Ecuadorian region in question as a partner of the state-run Petroecuador, after Texaco pulled out.

The trial, which opened Nov. 3, 1993, suffered multiple delays. After nine years in the U.S. courts, it moved to Ecuador in October 2003.

It has been described by environmentalists and legal experts as the environmental “case of the century.”

“This was a historic ruling for all humankind,” said Alberto Acosta, former president of the constituent assembly that rewrote Ecuador’s constitution in 2008 and a former minister of energy and mines.

“This is a clear announcement to all oil and mining companies that the damage they cause to the environment will not go unpunished,” he told IPS.

Acosta pointed out that the sum Chevron was ordered to pay was the biggest ever, for the world’s worst oil-related disaster, “which was not even surpassed by the Gulf of Mexico” — the 2010 oil spill that resulted from an explosion of a BP deepwater drilling rig — or by the 1989 oil spill by the Exxon Valdez tanker on the coast of Alaska.

“The damage caused by Chevron was 10 times worse,” he said.

The judge in Nueva Loja ordered Chevron to pay 8.6 billion dollars in fines, clean-up costs and reparations, plus another 10 percent as established by the law on environmental management.

To come up with that figure, Judge Zambrano took into account 100 studies and reports by experts, many of them provided by Chevron itself, according to Pablo Fajardo, the plaintiffs’ lead lawyer.

Most of that total, nearly 5.4 billion dollars, is to go towards soil restoration, while 1.4 billion dollars is for health care in response to ailments like cancer, reported by the plaintiffs, 800 million dollars is to establish a long-term health fund, and 600 million dollars is to clean up groundwater.

In his ruling, Zambrano also ordered the company to issue a public apology to local indigenous people for the pollution of the rainforest where they live. If Chevron fails to do so within 15 days of the verdict, the fine will be doubled.

The oil firm announced that it would appeal the ruling, which it described as “illegitimate and unenforceable.”

The judgment “is the product of fraud and is contrary to the legitimate scientific evidence,” Chevron said in a news release Monday.

The emphasis on the unenforceability of the ruling was met with sarcasm on the part of authorities in Ecuador. In a statement issued Sunday, before the verdict was handed down, prosecutor general Diego García said that any lawyer knows that a first instance court judgment is subject to appeal and thus unenforceable.

Yanza and Quichua indigenous leader Guillermo Grefa from Sucumbíos said the corporation was pressuring the Ecuadorian government of centre-left President Rafael Correa to interfere in the process.

“It’s obvious that Chevron is lobbying the U.S. Congress to adopt retaliatory measures against Ecuador, Grefa said.

Fajardo said the company has spent between 800 million and one billion dollars “to defend itself and attack the plaintiffs and their lawyers,” while the expenses of the plaintiffs “amount to no more than 20 million dollars,” covered by Ecuadorian and international non-governmental organisations and by “the efforts and sacrifices of the affected parties.”

But the AAT lawyers are also considering filing an appeal, because they consider the sum insufficient to cover the environmental damages and the cost of the health care needed by people suffering from leukaemia and other kinds of cancer, liver ailments, and respiratory and skin problems, which studies attribute to the pollution caused by the oil company.

“No amount in the world can bring people back to life,” Yanza said. “But this amount is inadequate to redress all of the damages caused by the pollution: to the water, to the soil, to life itself. We have to remember that many people died, which is why we believe the amount should be revised.”

Sáenz said the second instance court “should take no more than six months, or in the worst case, a year,” to hand down a verdict. After that, Chevron would still have the possibility of turning to the National Court of Justice.

“We believe that the end of the trial is near, compared to the nearly 18 years of struggle, and that justice will be done,” Fajardo said.

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Feb 16 2011 (IPS)

Major progress has been made in Ecuador over the last few years in reducing child malnutrition and expanding educational coverage.

This was one of the conclusions reached at civil society forums organised in Guayaquil, Quito and Cuenca, Ecuador’s three largest cities, by the Observatory for the Rights of Children and Adolescents (ODNA), a social monitoring body founded by a coalition of non-governmental organisations.

Now, responsibility for protection of children and adolescents will no longer fall only to municipal governments, but will be expanded to the provincial level.

There is concern that the change in jurisdiction might reverse the positive results of recent years, which show a clear decline in malnutrition and child labour and increased educational coverage, according to the First Civil Society National Survey of Childhood and Adolescence, carried out by ODNA in 2010.

Chronic malnutrition, measured as low height-for-age or stunting, fell from 33 percent of children under five in 1998 to 22 percent in 2010. For the same age group and time period, the incidence of malnutrition measured as low weight-for-age or wasting dropped from 11.4 to 6.1 percent.

The survey found that 38 percent of Ecuador’s population are children and teenagers. Three out of four live in urban areas, while 51 percent live in the coastal region, 43 percent in the Andean highlands and the remaining six percent in the Amazon jungle region. According to the study, 83 percent of respondents under 17 described themselves as mestizo (of mixed ancestry), 10 percent as indigenous people and six percent as Afro-Ecuadorian.

The proportion of children aged 11 to 12 not attending school dropped from 7.5 percent in 2004 to 3.4 percent in 2010.

The survey, carried out to assess the results of the Social Agenda for Children and Adolescents 2007-2010, was funded by a group of organisations including Save the Children, Care, Plan International, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The study’s results and the challenges it identified were analysed at the forums, along with the changes introduced by the new code on Land Use, Autonomy and Decentralisation (COOTAD), which grants powers at provincial level for protecting children and teenagers, whereas formerly only the municipalities had this responsibility.

“The local level of government is close to citizens, and therefore it is in a position to back the strong Ecuadorian movement for children’s rights,” ODNA technical secretary Margarita Velasco told IPS.

ODNA has been active in lobbying and proposing public policies for 20 years.

Ecuador has 226 municipalities and 24 provinces. “Approval of the 2008 constitution strengthened the state, which was fragmented and in retreat,” Santiago Ortiz, coordinator of the course on local territorial development at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), told IPS.

Although Ortiz acknowledged that the municipalities have not in fact lost jurisdiction, he said COOTAD has restricted their potential expansion because the provinces have been granted powers to plan, develop and regulate land use, formulate policies and boost the economy. The defence of children’s rights is included within this new authority.

“Children’s rights were already enshrined in the 1998 constitution, but now they have been expanded and given higher stature in the legal system,” said Ortiz, who believes that there are more opportunities today for organising, managing and influencing public policies and planning with a focus on human rights.

However, he warned that the “citizen councils” created for protecting children and adolescents “are at risk of losing their identity, because their role is limited to consultation and making proposals,” while there is no law to support their role in holding the authorities accountable for public policies.

According to UNICEF’s representative in Ecuador, Christian Munduate, the country has made remarkable progress. “When we compare indicators, some of my colleagues in the region are envious of me,” she said, attributing the improvement to “a sustained civil society movement on behalf of children, together with considerable public spending over the last four years of the leftwing government of (President) Rafael Correa.”

However, the country still has some pending issues in terms of protecting the rights of children and adolescents, she said.

Velasco, who presented the results of the national survey, spelled them out.

“Now that coverage has been extended, it is essential to improve the quality of education, in terms of content, which must be relevant to life, as well as methodology, so that children and young people can become active learners; and in terms of the atmosphere in the classroom, where the value of each of the students and their diversity must be recognised,” she said.

The survey found that the percentage of five to 17-year-olds complaining of harsh treatment from teachers increased from 20 to 32 percent between 2001 and 2010.

Patricia Sarzosa, national head of the government Institute for Children and Families (INFA), told IPS: “The proportion reporting good treatment also increased, from 47 to 56 percent, and what shrank was the group reporting neutral answers, but a lot of work needs to be done on the way children are treated.

“The fact that the proportion of respondents who said that when a child misbehaves, the teacher responds with corporal punishment, rose from 20 to 30 percent between 2004 and 2010 is a serious concern,” said Sarzosa, adding that the subject has been raised with the Education Ministry.

The mistreatment is marked by discrimination: while 23 percent of indigenous children and 17 percent of Afro-Ecuadorians reported being hit by their teachers, only seven percent of white or mestizo children made this complaint.

“As a society, we need to ensure we treat children better, at school, among peers (bullying of children who are ‘different’ is frequent), at home within families, and in public spaces,” Sarzosa said.

As for the institutions involved, it has been clarified that the municipal Councils on Children and Adolescents (CCNA), in operation since 2002, will continue to function. However, at the forum in Guayaquil it was highlighted that the municipality of Ecuador’s largest city has never permitted the formation of the local CCNA.

“There is a good argument in favour of letting the provincial governments take a hand in the process: in Guayas (the province where Guayaquil is located) it is the provincial governor who has led the cause,” Velasco told IPS.

“But the provincial governments can play a lesser role where there are strong, active municipal CCNA,” she added.

The issue still requires further discussion, participants at the forums in the three major cities concluded.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Feb 14 2011 (IPS)

“Good morning. I’ve come to see a friend,” says a young man in a brown cap carrying a small plastic bag of apples. The receptionist opens the iron-barred door and lets him in to the aged, third-rate hotel in Quito’s historic centre, rented in its entirety by the Ecuadorian state to house undocumented immigrants.

A member of the migration police posted there said he was not allowed to make statements, but chatted anyway. About 30 people, mainly from Cuba and Colombia, were lodged at the hotel, he told IPS.

More than a hotel, though, it is a detention centre, because no one can leave. It has been housing immigrants since January, when relatives and civil society organisations staged protests for several weeks over the poor conditions in which the immigrants were formerly being held in migration police jails on the north side of Quito.

The mounting protests outside the jails prompted the Interior Ministry to rent the hotel. “We did it because we wanted to treat them with dignity,” National Secretariat for Migrants Minister Lorena Escudero told IPS.

“There are televisions in the rooms, and they get three meals a day,” the police officer went on. “They stay here until they are deported.” “Or until they can legalise their status,” chipped in the young man with the brown cap, in a Cuban accent.

Severo Padrón (not his real name) has come to visit a friend who was detained in a migration police raid in November. Padrón is a legal resident of Ecuador, but his friend is not.

The situation runs counter to Article 416 of the Ecuadorian constitution of 2008, which upholds the principle of “universal citizenship” — meaning that everyone in a country should enjoy the same rights as citizens — the free movement of all people on the planet, and the gradual elimination of the status of alien or foreigner.

In accordance with this principle, the government of President Rafael Correa waived visa requirements for all foreigners visiting Ecuador for up to 90 days.

When the measure came into force on Jun. 20, 2008, Correa stated he was determined to “dismantle those 20th century inventions, passports and visas.”

But subsequently, the government backtracked. In December 2009 it reinstated visa requirements for Chinese citizens, and in September 2010 for nationals of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan and Somalia.

The measure was taken “after detecting an unusual migratory influx of persons from those countries,” according to Leonardo Carrión, under secretary of migration and consular affairs at the Foreign Ministry.

Carrión told IPS that Ecuador was being used as a transit country for people trying to enter the United States and Brazil.

Ecuador’s liberal migration policy caused enormous concern, from the month following its entry into force, at the United States embassies in Quito, Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Nigeria, according to U.S. State Department cables made public by the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.

Mario Zamora, formerly head of immigration and the current deputy Security Minister of Costa Rica, told the U.S. embassy in San José in November 2008 that “Ecuador is provoking instability throughout the Americas” with its visa exemptions, according to a cable obtained by Wikileaks and quoted by Spain’s El País newspaper.

The waiving of visa requirements also encouraged a flow of migrants from Cuba. An estimated 70,000 Cuban citizens have come to Ecuador, and between 5,000 and 8,000 have stayed, many of them without the proper documents.

The migration police carried out raids to check passports and visas, following a wave of complaints about insecurity in the western city of Guayaquil, and after the detection in July 2010 of more than 100 marriages of convenience between Ecuadorian and Cuban citizens with fake documents.

“I’ve been in Ecuador for a year,” Raúl Castillo (not his real name) told IPS in a long conversation in a Quito café. “I came with a letter of invitation that I bought in Cuba, through intermediaries, for 2000 convertible Cuban pesos (2,100 dollars).”

Castillo is deeply disillusioned with Cuba, but also about Ecuador: “There’s no future on the island, and I thought I would be able to build a life here in Ecuador, but I haven’t been able to get legal immigrant status, and now I’ve lost my job.”

He said his employer fired him after President Correa included a proposal, in a referendum that is expected to be held in April, that if approved would criminalise the hiring of workers without registering them with the social security system and paying the appropriate contributions.

Why don’t Castillo and other Cubans apply for refugee status, as some 58,000 Colombians have done? “They will never accept Cubans as refugees, because Ecuador is a friend of the Cuban regime, and to accept refugees would reflect badly on that regime,” Castillo said.

Lenin Daza, legal adviser to the Jesuit Service for Refugees and Migrants (SJRM), told IPS: “Immigrants to Ecuador, just like Ecuadorians who have emigrated to the United States or Spain, are going to stay, with or without papers.”

Daza wondered whether it would not be easier and safer to legalise undocumented immigrants en masse.

A member of Correa’s cabinet, who preferred to remain anonymous, told IPS that a mass amnesty or legalisation of migrants “may be safer and easier, but I don’t think it is possible given the current political climate, with the hypersensitivity about public safety.”

For his part, Juan Villalobos, coordinator of public relations for SJRM, told IPS that in Ecuador there is a contradiction between the constitution, which upholds people’s right to mobility, and the legal system and police, which in fact have not changed their practices.

In Villalobos’ view it is right to put a stop to fraudulent marriages of convenience involving Cuban citizens, but he rejects police prejudice when they investigate crimes, and the ignorance shown by health care and education personnel who refuse services to refugees and their children.

“The discretionary powers of civil servants are at odds with the proclamation of universal citizenship,” he said, insisting that “regularising immigrants has the comparative advantages of preventing labour exploitation, and of the state knowing who are in its territory, where they are and what they are doing.”

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Jan 25 2011 (IPS)

Seven of the 16 foreign oil companies operating in Ecuador have decided to pull out of the country in disagreement with a reformed oil law that turned the firms into providers of services to which the government will pay a fixed tariff for operating the fields.

“To the companies that do not accept the new conditions, we’ll say to them good-bye and good luck,” Correa has said since 2008, when international oil prices hit a record high.

Of the nine companies that renegotiated their oil contracts, five have large oil and gas fields: Andes and Petroriental from China, Agip from Italy (which belongs to the state-run Eni), Spanish-Argentine Repsol-YPF, and Chile’s Enap. They have a combined output of 251 million barrels.

The other four, which operate marginal fields and have a combined production of 43.5 million barrels, are Petrobell, a subsidiary of Brazil’s Petrosynergy, U.S.-Colombian Pegaso, Petrosud-Petroriva of Spain, and Tecpecuador, a subsidiary of Argentina’s Tecpetrol.

The firms that decided on Sunday to stop operating in Ecuador are the U.S. Bellwether, and the mixed-capital consortiums Gran Colombia and Petróleo Amazónico, which operated marginal fields.

They thus joined the ranks of Brazil’s Petrobras, the U.S.-based EDC, South Korea’s Canada Grande and China’s CNPC, which refused in November to accept the conditions set by the government.

After four years of presidential decrees and negotiations, Non-Renewable Natural Resources Minister Wilson Pástor was finally able to announce that “now the oil produced in Ecuador belongs to the Ecuadorean state.”

From now on, “the state will receive 100 percent of any rise in oil prices,” Pástor said.

The aim of boosting the government’s share of oil revenue and guaranteeing that any windfall profits would go to the state has been a top priority of centre-left President Rafael Correa, who has replaced his energy minister five times due to the failure to come up with a mechanism to reach that goal.

A formula was finally created by a reform of the country’s oil law, approved in July, which replaced the current production-sharing agreements with a flat rate per barrel of oil produced.

The new legislation gave the companies holding the largest concessions 120 days to renegotiate their contracts, while firms operating on marginal fields were given 180 days.

The former deadline expired in November and the latter on Sunday Jan. 23.

Five percent of the country’s total national output comes from marginal fields, which are called that because “they had already been exploited for 15 to 20 years by the state-run oil company and have difficult drilling conditions,” oil expert Carlos Izurieta told IPS.

Because some firms operate more than one oil field, the government managed to renegotiate seven contracts for marginal fields and seven for large fields. Prior to the reforms passed in July, 25 agreements with private companies were in force.

“Although the contracts in effect before the renegotiation had different modalities, under all of them the companies extracted the crude, sold it on the international market, received the earnings, and paid the state a fixed share,” Izurieta explained.

Under the new contracts, Ecuador will receive all the proceeds from production while paying a per-barrel service fee for the operation of the fields, which also takes into account past and future investments.

The fees agreed with the companies range from 24 to 31.90 dollars a barrel for companies with marginal fields in the Amazon jungle region, and from 35 to 41 dollars for firms operating large fields.

“To obtain higher profits, the private companies that will receive a fixed tariff will have to cut costs, which will lead, in turn, to an increase in income taxes for the state,” Pástor said.

The text of the contract is the same for every company, and only the per-barrel service fee, the amount of investments already made or planned, and the life of the contract — which is linked to the original concession — differ.

“If we hadn’t set a deadline for the negotiations, we would never have finished,” said Pástor, who had a renegotiation team working for six months, in shifts, with the representatives of the oil companies.

“The government’s team was of high professional quality and inflexible,” a source with one of the oil companies, who could not reveal his identity because of the confidentiality clause he signed, told IPS. “A target fee was set for them to achieve, and they didn’t have a problem ignoring figures on oil reserves and other statistics that the government itself had used.”

Pástor, meanwhile, stressed that the companies promised to increase investment, which would revert the decline in oil investment seen in the last few years in Ecuador.

“If we add up the investments pledged in marginal and large oil fields, in 2011 alone the private companies are going to invest 403 million dollars in production and 42.5 million in exploration, which means nearly 450 million dollars,” Pástor announced with satisfaction.

Investment fell from 770 million dollars a year in 2006 to 400 million in 2009 and 2010, as a result of the Correa administration’s repeated announcements of changes in oil legislation, said analyst Stephan Kueffner.

The drop in investment brought with it a fall in output.

Now, the nine companies that have decided to stay have promised to make investments of 1.117 billion dollars until their contracts expire, in five, 10 or 12 years, depending on the firm.

The minister said the private firms will produce a total of 150,000 barrels a day, which under the new rules “will bring additional daily benefits for the state of 2.1 million dollars and 766.5 million dollars a year, based on the current price of West Texas Intermediate, used as the benchmark for Ecuador’s crude, of 90 dollars a barrel.”

He also announced that the Pucuna oil field operated by the Gran Colombia consortium, which did not reach an agreement with the government, “will now be operated by the (state-run) Petroecuador,” while the Armadillo, Singue and Charapa fields, left behind by the Petróleo Amazónico consortium and Bellwether, will be put up to tender in April.

In November, Ecuador produced 15.23 million barrels of oil, an average of 510,000 barrels per day.

The state-owned Petroecuador and Petroamazonas, and Río Napo, which is a joint venture with Venezuela’s state oil giant PDVSA, produced 10 million barrels, an average of 334,500 barrels per day, while the private firms produced a daily average of 175,500 barrels, or 5.26 million barrels a month.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Jan 24 2011 (IPS)

Ecuadorean immigrants have been put in an even more vulnerable position by the lingering economic crisis in the industrialised world, especially in Spain and the United States, the main destinations for migrants from Latin America.

This year will be decisive for Latin Americans living in those two countries, but not so much because of a massive return by migrants to their countries of origin or to the decline in remittances sent back to their families — phenomena discussed by observers since the crisis broke out in the United States in 2008.

Experts who spoke to IPS said the crucial situation has to do with the increase in vulnerability of migrants, a greater loss of rights and more sacrifices demanded of them. In addition, the phenomenon of relatives joining other family members abroad will slow down, they said.

“The difficulties that (the Spanish and U.S.) economies are experiencing aggravate the vulnerability of Latin Americans living there, regardless of their immigration status, as well as that of the millions of Latin Americans who receive remittances back home,” Nelsy Lizarazo, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the World Social Forum on Migrations, told IPS.

Lizarazo also said that she perceives “a more clear intention to return, on the part of immigrants abroad.” And that desire is even shared, she added, “by members of young generations born overseas or who left very young, from Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia or Central America.

“That wasn’t the case until 2009, but over the last year, they have felt that doors have been closing on them,” she said.

For her part, Lorena Escudero, minister of the National Secretariat for Migrants (SENAMI), told IPS that “the crisis of capitalism in the countries of the North has triggered a gradual and significant — but not massive — return of Ecuadoreans, especially from Spain. In 2011, we expect more to return, but it won’t be an exodus.”

SENAMI was created by the government of President Rafael Correa, a left-leaning economist who took office in January 2007 and promised during his election campaign to reach out to migrants abroad.

An estimated three million Ecuadoreans currently live overseas, out of a total population of 14 million. Although Ecuadoreans have been migrating to the United States and other countries since the 1970s, the numbers going abroad began to soar in the 1990s, a decade marked by economic and political turbulence in this South American country, and the proportion heading to Spain surged.

The remittances sent home by migrants have become a mainstay of the economy, and are second only to oil revenue as a source of foreign exchange for Ecuador.

Escudero said the crisis in Europe will last a while longer. And whereas overall unemployment in Spain is 20 percent, it stands at “more than 28 percent for Latin American immigrants, among whom the half a million Ecuadoreans form the largest group,” she said.

The industries hit hardest by the rise in unemployment, she noted, are the ones where the largest numbers of Ecuadorean workers are employed, like construction and services.

On the ground floor of the building where SENAMI has its offices, a young couple with a baby are waiting their turn. “We came to find out about the loan we asked for,” Joselino Mayorga told IPS. He said they came back from Spain “where things didn’t go well for us; both of us were fired.”

Mayorga applied for a loan from SENAMI’s “Migrant Bank”, a government initiative that is not actually a bank, but a 12 million dollar trust set up to extend soft loans to returning immigrants through qualified financial institutions. So far, 1,700 credits have been granted.

The Mayorgas returned earlier than they had planned. After just five years in Spain, they accepted the Spanish government’s facilitated return programme, which includes one year of unemployment benefits in two payments, on the condition that they return to their home countries.

“Returning is a right,” Escudero said. “SENAMI isn’t inducing Ecuadoreans to return, nor are we in alliance with European countries to facilitate their expulsion of our people.

“We have neither a paternalistic nor a welfare-oriented focus,” she added. “What we do is give a hand to those who want to exercise their right to return to their homeland.”

Under the “Welcome Home” programme, returning migrants are offered a series of incentives: low-interest loans, tax exemptions and grants of seed money to start up new businesses, a waiver on duties for household furnishings and other belongings they bring home, one-way plane tickets, and financial assistance to purchase or build a home.

But only 14,000 families have taken advantage of the SENAMI programme to return to Ecuador since 2008.

“Given the fact that half a million Ecuadoreans live in Spain alone, that is a small number,” the minister said. “But our most important effort is establishing ties and reaching out through the Casas Ecuatorianas that we operate abroad.”

It is in the Casas centres and the government’s diplomatic offices and consulates that the growing vulnerability and problems of migrants has been noted. “But they find a way to survive, even in the midst of the crisis,” Escudero stressed.

The economic troubles in the industrialised world do not seem to automatically drive immigrants to return home. “Although economic questions do play a decisive role when it comes to leaving your country, once you are installed in another country, a new world opens up to migrants,” Lizarazo said.

She pointed out that children’s ties to their new country and culture, as well as opportunities for their education and health care available in developed countries, are strong motivations for families to stay.

In addition, “for women, who make up a majority of Ecuadorean migrants in Spain, Italy and the Netherlands, it is a great chance to find freedom and autonomy,” she said.

But, she added, “if the opportunities are shut off, the dilemmas of finding solutions or weighing whether the conditions are right for a return to the homeland emerge.”

Escudero concurred, and also mentioned the problems with mortgages. “Financial institutions in Spain are not giving migrants a break,” she said. “Many homes have already been foreclosed on, and in some cases part of the family has returned. If the ones who stayed behind don’t find work soon, they will return to the country this year.

“People are admirable,” she said. “Some have chosen to go to work in Germany, Switzerland or the Nordic countries, and now there are flows of remittances from those countries to Spain, where many have their families, on top of the traditional money orders to relatives in Ecuador.”

Lizarazo said the critical situation faced by migrants in the midst of the crisis in the industrialised North and the proposals for urgently needed public policies and measures to protect them were discussed at the Fourth World Social Forum on Migration held in October in Quito.

The conclusions from that gathering have been presented in different meetings and conferences, and will be shared at the next World Social Forum, to run Feb. 6-11 in Dakar.

The World Assembly of Migrants will be held Feb. 2-4 on the Senegalese island of Gorée, ahead of the annual global civil society meeting in the country’s capital.

The Assembly is writing a World Charter for Migrants, a commitment to global principles like freedom of movement and choice of residence.

The Charter, an initiative of a collective of migrant organisations, began to emerge in 2006, and the text has been discussed over the Internet and in physical meetings, by migrant groups and individuals alike.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
CUENCA, Ecuador, Jan 6 2011 (IPS)

Outside the modest two-story adobe house, a flag of Ecuador flutters alongside a large sign that reads “Ikat: weaving demonstrations and sales.” Hanks of yarn and colourful fabrics hang from the handrail running around the edge of the courtyard and balcony, and weaving looms can be seen inside.

José Jiménez working at his backstrap loom. Credit: Gonzalo Ortiz/IPS

“There are just a few of us left who still do this, maybe 15,” Jiménez commented to IPS. “And to think that 40 years ago this craft was widespread in Gualaceo!”

Located along the road running from Cuenca — Ecuador’s third-largest city — to Gualaceo and Chordeleg, towns in the south of the country that are well-known for their weaving, embroidery and pottery, Jiménez’s house serves as his family’s home, workshop and store.

His wife Ana María Ulloa, a skilled embroiderer of black shawls with colourful flowers, also works in the business.

Jiménez and Ulloa, their four children and four employees are dedicated to “one of the most complicated approaches to dyeing found anywhere in the world,” in the words of the Smithsonian Centre for Education and Museum Studies.

In ikat, a Malay-Indonesian term, some sections of the yarn are knotted and covered prior to dyeing. This tie-dye technique, one of the oldest forms of textile design, is common to many cultures around the world, including Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico in Latin America.

“The paint brushes are in my head, because the design that the fabric will have comes from the way I have dyed the yarn, and how I have distributed the yarn on the loom,” said Jiménez, who added that the specific technique used by him and “the few of my fellow craftspeople who are left is unique in South America.”

Sitting on the floor, with his traditional backstrap loom wrapped around his waist, he tightens the warp, just as weavers in Latin America did for thousands of years before the arrival of the Spaniards.

For woven pieces over 75 centimetres wide, Jiménez uses the foot pedal loom, introduced by the Europeans.

“There aren’t only 15 of them left. Fortunately dozens of men and women are still dedicated to ikat,” anthropologist Gabriela Eljuri, regional director of the National Institute of Cultural Heritage, told IPS.

But she said that production of ikat fabrics is indeed in decline, especially due to the plunge in demand for the “macana”, a traditional cotton shawl with a knotted fringe.

The colourful macana was typically worn by “cholas”, women of mestizo (mixed-race, basically Spanish-Amerindian) descent, a social class that emerged in the mid-17th century, according to ethnohistorian Joaquín Moreno, the vice rector of the University of Azuay.

In the rigidly stratified society of the time, the Spaniards wanted cholas to be easily distinguished from both indigenous and white women, in their way of dress.

For centuries, the macana or “paño de Gualaceo” was a key element in the outfit of the “chola Cuencana” or chola from Cuenca, along with the Panama hat, an embroidered, pleated blouse, and two skirts, including an undergarment whose lower embroidered edge shows underneath the outer pleated skirt.

“The term ‘chola Cuencana’ does not have pejorative connotations, but has been a sign of regional identity. However, that is also being lost to globalisation,” Moreno said.

Emigration has played a key role in these changes. An estimated 200,000 people have left the southern provinces of Azuay and Cañar over the last two decades, mainly heading for the United States.

Although typical cholas Cuencanas can still be seen in Cuenca, there is a generational divide. “In this area, there are hardly any young people who wear the traditional dress,” Jiménez said.

Eljuri concurred: “In more remote villages like Sígsig or Nabón, young women still wear the dress of cholas, but in the rest of the region, almost no one under 30 wears the macana.

“Luckily, ikat textiles have survived thanks to the far-sighted work that CIDAP (Inter-American Centre for Crafts and Popular Arts) began in the early 1980s, anticipating the slow disappearance of the garment,” the anthropologist said.

María Leonor Aguilar, CIDAP assistant director of promotion, told IPS that for over 20 years the state agency, which was created in 1975, has supported projects and campaigns to keep the ikat tradition alive.

CIDAP has also helped solve problems with middlemen and supplies, in the provision of raw yarn and assistance in the sale and marketing of the finished product through fairs, exhibitions and warehouses in Cuenca and Gualaceo.

In addition, CIDAP has helped make haute couture designs and hold fashion shows in Ecuador, the United States and several European countries, “to generate a different kind of demand,” Aguilar said.

“Jiménez and dozens of craftsmen and women from Gualaceo have received scholarships from CIDAP to learn to use their marvellous art to weave a range of different articles,” she said.

Using the ikat technique, craftspersons in this area now weave scarves, shirts, vests, jackets, capes, purses, briefcases, billfolds, table runners and tablecloths, which are eagerly snatched up by foreign tourists and “well-heeled Ecuadorean city-dwellers, who appreciate the complexity of the technique and the artistic value of the work,” Aguilar said.

Jiménez himself is preparing a 30-metre long tablecloth and a dozen smaller ones to present to Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, to be used at dinners and parties in the presidential palace.

“I told the president that it was painful to me to see only factory-made tablecloths, in TV shots, even if they were produced nationally,” he said. “And I asked him why he wasn’t proud of our tradition. He listened to me, and ordered the tablecloths, so I will go to Quito on Jan. 21, because we’re almost finished with them.”

But Jiménez did not want to show this reporter the tablecloths. “The first one to see them will be Mr. Correa,” he said, laughing.

“Many people think the design has been printed onto the fabric, and don’t realise that it emerges as a result of the tie-dye and weaving. The president will have to explain it to his visitors,” said Eljuri.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
MANTA, Ecuador, Jan 3 2011 (IPS)

“This year there haven’t been many ‘dorados’, but they’re beginning to appear now,” Ramón Díaz says hopefully as he disembarks with his fellow fishermen after spending the entire night out on the water.

Fishing at Manta's Tarqui beach. Credit: Gonzalo Ortiz/IPS

In the course of the night, the drag net used by Díaz and his fellow fishermen has caught a wide variety of fish, including “15 to 20 big dorados.”

According to the FishBase.org database, the maximum length reported for a dorado is 210 centimetres, the maximum weight 40 kilograms, and the oldest age five years.

But “big” for Díaz is a dorado that reaches 100 cm, and he points out that in Ecuador it is illegal to fish for dorado measuring less than 80 cm.

Biologist Jimmy Martínez, a technical advisor to the Undersecretariat, explains that “We have to ensure its sustainability as a species, and following the code of conduct of the FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation) we believe that the fish should have the chance to lay eggs at least once in its life before being captured.

“As we know, sexual maturity in this species is not reached until they are 50 to 60 centimetres long. At 80 cm, we are giving them the opportunity requested by FAO,” he says.

The size limit was put in place, according to an official from the National Fishing Institute, after it was found that some boats in a fishing cove on the Santa Elena peninsula, northwest of Manta, were using smaller hooks, and 95 percent of their dorado catch was juvenile fish.

“We had to stop that kind of fishing, even though the fish were being exported to Peru and were generating revenue. To that end, ministerial agreement Number 31 was issued Oct. 8, 2004, banning the intentional catch, transport, and foreign or domestic sale of dorado smaller than 80 centimetres,” Martínez says.

The species, that has many names throughout the eastern Pacific — dorado, mahi-mahi, dolphin-fish, doradilla, perico — is also found in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Although it is a coastal species, it breeds out in the open seas.

“Until 2000, the dorado fishing season in the equatorial Pacific was from December to May, and the boats took five to six day trips in coastal waters. But since 2001, the season lasts from November to February, and boats spend 10 to 16 days out at sea,” the expert says.

The fishing season coincides with the rainy season in Ecuador’s coastal region, but the dorado are available all year long during an episode of El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) — the cyclical meteorological phenomenon caused by warm surface currents flowing west-to-east across the Pacific Ocean.

But Ecuador currently finds itself in the opposite phase of El Niño. “We are experiencing La Niña, despite it being one of the rainiest seasons in Ecuador’s inter-Andean region,” Martínez says.

“At sea, it doesn’t rain, because there isn’t as much evaporation as in the warm current years. The rains in the Andes are coming from the Amazon,” he says.

According to the expert, dorado shortages occur in cycles. While 1997 was a bad year, 1998 was excellent, “because we fished for dorado 11 months,” but then in 1999 came “the worst crisis.”

Something similar is happening now: the 2008-2009 season went poorly, 2009-2010 was good, while the current period is “terrible, because the cold currents have not permitted the dorado to reproduce or grow,” he says.

The figures seem to corroborate his assessment. Ecuador exported 21.7 million dollars of dorado (in the form of frozen fillets) in 2007, and 38.5 million dollars worth two years later.

The dorado makes up 40 to 60 percent of the volume caught by artisanal fishers.

“For them, the dorado is the most important resource, because of the size of the catch and because they really know how to fish for it,” Martínez says.

“Artisan fishers are those who, despite having some very sophisticated technology, continue to do the actual fishing by hand,” he says.

For example, they use GPS and satellite information, and some of the boats have what are known here in the fishing community as “electronic” nets.

According to fishermen consulted by IPS, these are nets made of nylon cord that shines underwater to attract the schools of fish.

Their other fishing techniques are of the more traditional order, with the most popular being longline (a main line with baited hooks) and throw nets.

According to the Undersecretariat’s records, the annual dorado catch in a “normal” year ranges from 12,000 to 15,000 tonnes.

“The dorado is in first place (35 to 45 percent) in Ecuador’s white fish exports (both fresh and frozen) so far this century,” biologist Luis Arriago, former deputy secretary of fishing resources, tells IPS.

It is also widely consumed in Ecuador. “Its raw meat is whitish, tending to pink, and of excellent quality,” says Julio Pincay, chef at one of the restaurants on Manta’s El Murciélago beach.

But if no dorado are caught, the whole chain of marketing and consumption comes undone. “The problem is that the scarcity of dorado will affect the 35,000 artisan fishers along the entire Ecuadorean coast,” Martínez says.

Relying on those fishers are, of course, their families, but also — indirectly — the truckers, intermediaries and vendors, as well as the processing industry and exporters.

“A bad year for the dorado is a bad year for tens of thousands of people in Ecuador,” he says, stressing that “We have to speed up plans for sustainable management of the dorado, a resource of vital importance to the country.”

The plan is based on regulation and monitoring of dorado offloading from fishing vessels in Ecuador’s main ports, for industrial and artisan fishing alike, and further biological research of the species. “We will be the first country to have a dorado management plan,” Martínez says.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
MANTA, Ecuador, Dec 28 2010 (IPS)

Although domestic consumption of seafood is low, Ecuador has a large fishing fleet, and is home to the main port for tuna and white fish in the eastern Pacific.

Part of the Manta fleet in the fishing terminal. Credit: Gonzalo Ortiz/IPS

“We must not forget about other industries, like vegetable oils and tagua (ivory-nut palms, which produce vegetable ivory, used mainly for buttons),” he said.

But the city’s main asset, according to Andrade and local politicians, is its strategic position.

Manta is located on one of the most westernmost points of mainland South America, and has a natural deep-water port and a first-rate international airport, where a U.S. air base operated for a decade, until 2009.

With a population of 260,000, Manta proclaims itself “the world capital of tuna” In one of the gazebos on the waterfront drive there is even a monument with sculptures of a yellow fin tuna (Thunnus albacares) and a tin can.

According to official figures, Ecuador takes the largest tuna catch in the eastern Pacific, followed by Mexico. In the first seven months of this year, this country exported 105,000 tonnes of canned tuna. The record year was 2008, when exports of canned tuna totalled 815 million dollars.

That figure dropped to 632 million in 2009. To that were added 74 million dollars in exports of fish meal and 173 million dollars in exports of other seafood products.

Most of that activity was concentrated in Manta, while the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest port, is the leader in aquaculture (shrimp and prawns).

Ensuring traceability

Little fish is consumed in Ecuador despite the diversity of fauna in its ocean waters, which are home to between 1,500 and 1,700 species of bony fish, including more than 100 kinds of sharks.

Annual per capita consumption is six to seven kgs, compared to a Latin American average of 15 to 16, said biologist Jimmy Martínez, a technical adviser at the Under-Secretariat of Fishing Resources, whose main offices are based in Manta.

“That’s why it’s very important for the government’s food security programme to insist on the direct human consumption of fish, which is healthier and more nutritional than beef or chicken,” he said.

The government’s task, besides oversight, regulation, health controls and the provision of services, “is to guarantee that demand will always exist,” Martínez said. “For that reason, national consumption must be encouraged, while our markets in Europe, Asia and North America must be secured.”

“Those regions are demanding that our countries certify our fisheries. That is, we need to demonstrate that our seafood is ocean-friendly,” he said. Research and control plans have been launched to that end.

“Ecuador is a world leader in shark management and the indefinite ban on fishing for manta rays has bolstered that leadership position,” Maricela Zambrano, a communications officer at the Under-Secretariat of Fishing Resources, told IPS.

Two international workshops have been held in Ecuador, where experts from 16 countries have prepared Ecuadoreans to train people in shark management, she pointed out.

“Measures like banning the catch of immature specimens, for example, are being strictly enforced,” Martínez said.

“There will always be people who try to get around the rules, but we have steadily improved the traceability of the product. In sharks, for example, we know who captured a shark whose fin was exported, as well as when and where it was caught,” he said.

Day to day

Under the lights of Manta’s busy, modern fishing terminal, veteran exporters can be seen standing next to the boats that have just come in with their catch, calling Tokyo or Miami, Florida by cell phone to arrange a shipment of fresh tuna for sushi.

It’s a complex operation, because after they are cleaned, the headless tuna must be packed in insulated polystyrene boxes lined with polythene sheets and filled with gel ice, where they are preserved for three or four days at a temperature no higher than four degrees Celsius.

“These boxes have to be in the airport at 4:00 in the morning,” Omar Díaz explains to IPS, setting aside his cell phone for a moment. “The plane will land in Miami at 9:00, at 11:00 they will be at the broker’s, and probably by 3:00 in the afternoon they’ll be in the restaurant or supermarket.”

Meanwhile, 1,500-ton ships with installations for freezing tuna at 60 degrees below Celsius are arriving in the port.

“At that temperature, the tuna still conserves all of its organoleptic properties, which means that weeks later, when the fish is thawed, the consumer in Japan, South Korea or China will be able to appreciate its full flavour, odour and texture,” Martínez told IPS.

A couple of kilometres from the fishing port, on Tarqui beach, under an unusual drizzle, Edison Chica is waiting for buyers for an enormous blue marlin (Makaira mazara) that he has purchased from small-scale fishermen for 450 dollars. “It weighs around three quintals (300 kgs),” he says.

A fish cleaner has shown up and gutted the blue marlin right there on the beach for free, in exchange for the viscera and head, which he carries off to a truck that buys fish waste per kilo for a fish meal factory.

Hundreds of small trucks are lined up at the water line, ready to take off for markets in the interior of Manabí, the province where Manta is located, or more distant markets in the Andean highlands.

Edison tells IPS that he has bought and sold fish in the same spot for 30 of his 40 years of life. He hopes to sell the blue marlin “for 480, or if I’m lucky, 500 dollars,” to a trader from Portoviejo, the provincial capital, which is not on the sea.

The government has chosen Manta as the site of a new petrochemical complex and oil refinery, to be built 18 km south of the city, at a cost of over 10 billion dollars. The studies for the project are moving along, most of the land where the refinery will go up has been acquired, and the road to the site is under construction.

“In 20 years the population of the city will double in size, and we have to get ready for that,” Andrade said.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Dec 21 2010 (IPS)

A referendum on reforms to the new constitution and criminal law is to be held in Ecuador in response to the mounting public security crisis, giving left-wing President Rafael Correa an opportunity to canvass public opinion on these thorny issues.

The date of the referendum and the wording of its questions are still unknown, but last Friday Correa said on his regular national radio and television broadcast that he would go to the people about reforms he wants to introduce in the constitution in force since October 2008, which he had personally backed.

The proposed constitutional amendments will be on issues of law enforcement, such as the possibility that convicts should serve sentences consecutively (rather than concurrently), which has been unconstitutional for decades, and the organisation and management of criminal courts.

Bringing out the ballot boxes “is Correa’s favourite game,” economist and banker Ramiro Crespo told IPS. Since taking office in January 2007, the president has called for four popular votes.

“As well as developing a closer relationship with the military (by means of a bill sent to Congress to expand the participation of the armed forces in law enforcement), he will campaign for constitutional and penal reforms with plenty of populist rhetoric,” Crespo said.

“But this is not the best way to solve problems like insecurity. The criminal code has already been partially reformed 17 times in five years,” added Crespo, who is a partner in Analytica Securities, an investment bank.

Public security appears to have gone downhill in recent months. The young son of well-known sports commentator Rómulo Barcos was killed by a stray bullet in a firefight among criminals in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s main port. His death sparked protest marches in November in the southwestern city.

The press and television news channels fill their pages and airtime with accounts of “express kidnappings”, in which the abducted person is forced to hand over his or her own cash and jewelry in return for release a few hours later, as well as murders, contract killings, and gang warfare.

El Universo, a Guayaquil newspaper, stirred up controversy when it stated there was an “express kidnapping” every hour-and-a-half in the city.

Public perception of insecurity is damaging Correa’s popularity ratings, especially in Guayaquil, where right-wing mayor Jaime Nebot loudly pins the blame on the national government.

Last week, Nebot called for the government to require visas for Colombians crossing Ecuador’s borders, arguing that criminal gangs are finding their way into the country from abroad.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, provoked into a response, said that the 700,000 Colombians who visit neighbouring Ecuador each year are tourists or on business trips, and he offered Nebot technical cooperation to cope with the crime wave.

From 2003 to 2009, the murder rate per 100,000 population rose to 26.6 in Guayaquil, whereas in Quito it fell to 10.6, lawmaker and retired general Paco Moncayo, who served as mayor of the capital city for eight-and-a-half years and developed a public security plan there, told IPS.

“Could this not be, to some extent, a consequence of the president and the mayor of Guayaquil being unable to sit down together and work for a cause that is not the preserve of any one political party or ideology?” Moncayo said.

“The problem is all of a piece: the prosecution service is not working properly, and neither are the judges, the police or the (Interior) Ministry,” said Moncayo, who acknowledged that the legislature, too, has its failings.

In 2009, the national homicide rate was 18.6 per 100,000 population, and government sources estimate the figure will rise to 20 in 2010. This is still well below the homicide rate in countries like Honduras and El Salvador, where there are more than 60 homicides a year per 100,000 population.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported this year that Latin America has the highest homicide rates in the world. The region, which is home to eight percent of the world population, accounts for 40 percent of the global total of murders.

The murder rate in Latin America is 25.6 per 100,000 population, compared to 8.9 per 100,000 in Europe; 5.8 in Southeast Asia, and 3.4 in the Western Pacific region.

In Ecuador, the proposal that sentences should be “accumulated” and served sequentially is “absurd,” according to lawyer Jorge Crespo Toral, head of the Confraternidad Carcelaria del Ecuador, a non-governmental organisation working for prison reform and rehabilitation of prisoners.

“Longer sentences have never helped reduce the crime rate in any country,” Crespo Toral said, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Confraternidad’s voluntary work in prisons.

“A person committing a crime imagines they will not be caught; it does not enter their head to worry that their crime now carries a heavier sentence,” said Crespo Toral. “The only solution is to help offenders turn over a new leaf and rebuild their lives, along with their families, by recuperating their capacity for productive and honest work,” he argued.

Another facet of the problem is the administration of justice. A report by the Justice Studies Centre of the Americas indicates that in the period 2005-2008, 646,451 crimes were reported in Ecuador, but only 76,120 came to trial, and sentences were handed down in just 7,930 of these trials. A total of 462,371 investigations were left unresolved.

The Justice Ministry acknowledges that the criminal courts in Ecuador have an average backlog of 20,000 cases.

According to Professor Farith Simon, an expert on human rights, the Judicature Council, which is supposed to administer the court system and discipline judges, has failed in its task. “It does not assess judges’ productivity, nor does it identify critical points. It only demands more resources, without producing results,” he said.

Corruption and inefficiency are rife. The Correa administration has appointed a new police chief every seven months, and faced a serious police mutiny on Sept. 30 that almost toppled the government.

The incident “affected not only confidence in the police and the country’s international image, but also our goals and programmes. Six generals were cashiered and the top commanders in every province had to be replaced,” then Interior Minister Gustavo Jalkh said Dec. 12, before he in turn was relieved of his post Friday Dec. 17.

Jalkh’s successor is Alfredo Vera, a long-time member of the now all-but-defunct social democratic party Izquierda Democrática. Correa appointed retired admiral Homero Arellano, who he named his intelligence secretary after the Sept. 30 police mutiny, as Minister Coordinator of Internal and External Security Policy.

Correa gave details of only one of the questions to be included in the referendum, about bullfighting.

“In response to the demand by thousands of young people who marched to the government palace, we will also ask the Ecuadorian people if they are in agreement with holding spectacles, like bullfights, in which animals are tortured,” the president announced at the swearing-in ceremony for the new ministers.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Dec 17 2010 (IPS)

On a clear day, hundreds of families pull over in their cars and snap pictures of the column of smoke spewing out of the Tungurahua volcano in central Ecuador.

Tungurahua volcano Credit: Government of Ecuador

Since late November, some 1,500 people have once again left the towns of Bilbao, Choglontús, Cusúa, and Chacauco, at the foot of the western flank of the volcano, when it began to spit out more fire, lava and ash than normal. And when it began to erupt in early December, dozens of villages were destroyed, although only six people were killed.

In the last few years people living on the slopes of the volcano have moved downhill as far as possible. But they continue to farm and graze their livestock higher up.

“What they have done is keep a distance,” says Sergio Páez, a small farmer from Pelileo, the capital of the canton or county where Cusúa is located. “They go up to work during the day and come back at night,” he explains to IPS.

“What else can we do, sir?” Carmela Cando, in Cevallos, a town 18 km northwest of the volcano, asks IPS. “This is all we have, our few cows and potatoes. How else can we get by?”

Cevallos, the site of shelters for people displaced by the volcanic activity, has taken the lead in focusing on new productive activities for local residents, to enable them to survive despite the effects of the volcanic ash.

“I wasn’t happy with the lines of people outside the city government offices, waiting for food rations,” Cevallos Mayor Bayardo Constante tells IPS. “We had two options: to become beggars or start to produce different things.

“The ash has hurt the production of our fruit orchards,” he says. “This area used to produce peaches, pears, apples and plums, but when ash falls during flowering season, which has happened in 10 of the last 12 years, it ruins the entire year’s harvest.

“It’s not like short-cycle crops, potatoes for example, where you just plow and plant again and have a new harvest in three months,” he adds.

The mayor has spearheaded projects to organise the community and obtain and distribute technical assistance and financing, and today the canton of Cevallos is known for its crafts, especially sandals and other footwear. “That has also led to a not insignificant influx of tourists drawn by our crafts, who have other needs we meet as well,” he says.

“We have also dedicated ourselves to the production of small livestock, especially pigs, rabbits and guinea pigs,” Constante says.

Because they are raised in sheds and other roofed areas and fed on fodder, these barnyard animals are not affected like animals in pastures, which risk fluoride poisoning and death from grazing on ash-covered grass.

The 5000-metre-high Tungurahua volcano, in the eastern cordillera of the Andes mountains 160 km south of Quito, is one of Ecuador’s most active volcanoes.

“Between 1918 and 1925, it had a very active phase, but it calmed down after that,” says Hugo Yépez, director of the Geophysical Institute of the National Polytechnic School (IG-EPN), which monitors the country’s volcanoes. “In 1999 it became active again, spewing mainly ash at first,” the engineer tells IPS.

Since then, there have been periods of strong activity interspersed with periods of relative calm, although the volcano has continuously thrown up a column of smoke and ash, of varying height.

The degree to which the ash affects the areas around the volcano depends on wind direction. But because the wind mainly blows from the east, areas in the adjacent provinces of Tungurahua and Chimborazo are frequently affected. Even the more distant province of Bolívar, in the centre of Ecuador’s Andes mountain chain, has suffered the effects.

In 1999 the entire population around the volcano was evacuated, including 15,000 people from the town of Baños de Agua Santa, one of the most popular tourist destinations in Ecuador’s Andean highlands.

Baños, located 1,800 metres above sea level, offers a broad range of ecotourism and adventure tourism activities in a narrow valley with abundant waterfalls and hot springs in the northern foothills of Tungurahua.

When local residents were given permission to return after the 1999 evacuation, they decided, in a ceremony in the town’s famous basilica, to turn the danger of the volcano into an additional tourist attraction.

In the town’s bars and hostels, once again packed with tourists, visitors can now enjoy “volcanic salad” (fresh vegetables presented in the form of an erupting volcano), “volcanic fondue”, “Tungurahua glacé” ice cream, or the cocktails “night temblor”, “tremor”, “incandescent”, and “the volcano” (a flaming drink).

Yépez was declared “persona non grata” in Baños when he warned, in mid-2006, that the signals detected by the IG-EPN’s instruments and studies by its geologists and volcanologists indicated that an eruption was imminent.

The authorities placed the region on red alert and ordered the evacuation of high-risk areas.

The eruption began on Aug. 16, 2006. The pyroclastic flows — fast-moving currents of extremely hot gas and rock — came to a halt 800 metres from Bascún, an outlying area of Baños that had been evacuated, and destroyed the water supply system and hot spring pools in that area.

The flows also demolished hostels in the area of Los Pájaros, as well as bridges and lengthy stretches of road between Baños and Riobamba.

Dozens of villages on the volcano’s western slopes were seriously damaged or destroyed, and six people were killed in the village of Palitahua.

“There were few victims because of the successful early warning,” Yépez said.

The mayor of Penipe, Fausto Chunata, said “We would have preferred no deaths of course, but if you compare it to the latest eruption of the Merapi volcano in Indonesia, which claimed 200 lives in November — that’s a huge difference.”

The city government of Baños admitted its error and publicly thanked Yépez, who has also issued warnings in the past about the Pichincha volcano, at whose foot Quito lies, and Cotopaxi, one of the world’s tallest active volcanoes, which is currently calm but could “wake up” at any time.

Other major eruptions by Tungurahua occurred in February 2008 and May 2010.

Since the Dec. 4 eruption, volcanic activity has continued at “moderate to high” levels, according to the IG-EPN, which stressed in a statement issued Wednesday that because the activity level has not declined as it did on previous occasions, the area is still on orange alert.

Excerpt:

By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Dec 7 2010 (IPS)

Approximately 300 Cuban and 30 Venezuelan volunteer “brigadistas” have departed Ecuador, marking the end of the first phase of the “Manuela Espejo Mission,” conducting a complete study of disabilities in this country over the past year and a half.

Vice-President Lenín Moreno greets attendees of Saturday's TV broadcast about the Manuela Espejo Mission. Credit: Office of the Vice-President of Ecuador

As expected, the provinces with highest populations also have the most people with disabilities: 74,833 in Guayas, on the Pacific coast, where the city of Guayaquil is located; and 45,098 in Pichincha, in the Andean sierra, home to the capital, Quito.

However, the highest prevalence of disabilities was found in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where the rate is 2.68 percent, resulting from conditions of extreme poverty and isolation.

The gender difference, meanwhile, is minimal: of those with disabilities, 50.43 percent are male, 49.57 percent female.

“The ‘brigadistas’ studied the biological, psychosocial, clinical and genetic aspects of the disabilities, going house-to-house in the 221 cantons of the 24 provinces in Ecuador, travelling by land, air and river over the course of 487 days,” said Vice-President Lenín Moreno.

Moreno, who coordinated the mission, uses a wheelchair since becoming paraplegic in 1998 when he was shot in the spine during a street mugging. The mission had the personal support of Cuba’s President Raúl Castro, and his brother and predecessor Fidel Castro, as well as of the Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez.

The Cuban and Venezuelan volunteer brigades — men and women — were accompanied by Ecuadorians who shared their specialties: physicians, geneticists, and psychologists, with logistical support and security provided by Ecuador’s armed forces.

Also participating were several government ministries and institutions, particularly the National Council on Disabilities (CONADIS), which for the last 20 years has coordinated policy and actions in this area and certifies individuals with disabilities so they have access to government services and exemptions.

Officials from the different entities, health specialists and the national and foreign volunteers took part in a rally on Friday, Dec. 3, in which the campaign’s results were presented.

An Ecuadorian physician from the Ministry of Health, who requested anonymity, told IPS at the event, “It was not necessary to bring in the Cubans and Venezuelans. We have enough people in Ecuador and the technical abilities necessary to carry out this work.”

The next day, on the national television, the vice-president applauded the foreign brigadistas and thanked the Cuban and Venezuelan presidents for their support. Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, of the leftist PAIS Alliance party, was in Argentina at the time for the 20th Ibero-American Summit.

Moreno noted that Venezuela had donated approximately 20 million dollars in materials that had gone unused in similar mission in that country.

“Today we end an important phase in our work, presenting the country and the world with precise data and concrete figures about the reality of disabilities in Ecuador,” he said.

The volunteers found people with severe disabilities living in situations of extreme neglect, “including in cages or in holes in the ground,” according to a video documentary. Those individuals were relocated to hospitals and appropriate institutions.

The mission also distributed 76,000 units of mobility aids (crutches, canes, wheelchairs) and other necessary equipment (beds, mattresses, bedsore- prevention devices, stoves).

The results of the study will help the government determine policies for preventing disabilities and providing the appropriate services for those living with disabilities, whether physical or mental, said Moreno. He announced that the National Plan for Prevention of Disabilities would begin implementation in January.

Mercedes Gámez, head of the Cuban volunteer brigades, said in the final report about the effort that they visited about one million homes and assessed nearly 300,000 people with disabilities.

She insisted that disabilities should not be seen as inabilities “because the human organism generates neurological adaptive mechanisms.”

Her detailed report listed the different types of disability found in Ecuador, their causes, and degree, cross-referencing the data with information about housing, family income and access to health services.

Gámez also called for changing the environmental conditions and public policies in order to confront the problems associated with disabilities.

Milton Jijón, president of the National Association of Geneticists, told IPS, “Despite having highly qualified geneticists in Ecuador, we do not have the laboratories that would allow us to carry out the complete studies.” He said this lack of adequate labs justified the fact that more than 600 diagnostic tests were conducted in Cuba.

However, he said, “in the next phase I will demand that they provide us with the appropriate laboratories for determining the causes of the disabilities and to carry out prevention work.”

Moreno said that in the visit he made to Cuba to see Fidel Castro on Oct. 21, 2009, the octogenarian former president had showed him a detailed map of Ecuador and the various reports of what the brigadistas were doing.

“He knew more details than I did about what was happening in the mission,” said the vice-president. “We talked at length and he had thousands of questions about each province. How erudite the elderly become, don’t they,” he quipped.

The vice-president of Colombia, Angelino Garzón, requested help from Ecuador for a similar campaign in his country. As did Peru, which had sent observers who accompanied the brigadistas, said Moreno.

From Thursday to Saturday, Dec. 9-11, Moreno will host the first summit of Latin American vice-presidents titled “Americas Without Barriers,” to adopt measures that promote democracy and regional solidarity — and Moreno will use the event to share Ecuador’s unprecedented experience.

“This is a great achievement of our country, because now we have a baseline from which we can plan,” physician Xavier Caicedo told IPS. He is the executive director of the non-governmental De Waal Foundation. However, he complained that the government did not include civil society organisations like his in conducting the mission.

“I have tried all sorts of way to approach the effort, to provide our independent support, because we have 10 years of experience in disabilities prevention in Ecuador and 25 years worldwide, but they have turned us down,” he said.

“My attempts (to be part of the campaign) were both formal and informal, written and in person, over months, but they were useless. The mission was a closed effort, and as far as I know, NGOs were not given any space, and are not part of the discussion about the national prevention plan that I’ve heard is going to be launched,” Caicedo said.

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By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Dec 1 2010 (IPS)

As the dust settles following contract negotiations with foreign oil companies, Ecuador is looking at a new map for its petroleum industry and trying to determine what it will mean in economic terms for this OPEC-member nation.

Though details and smaller deals continued in talks this week, four foreign companies failed to reach an agreement with the government last week about services contracts, while five others did agree to the requirements established by a new Ecuadorian law.

The fields exploited by Brazil’s Petrobrás, South Korea’s Canada Grande, the U.S. Energy Development Company (EDC), and the China National Petroleum Company will be turned over to the Ecuadorian government “in an orderly process,” announced Wilson Pastor, minister of non-renewable natural resources.

Ecuador’s state-owned oil company Petroamazonas took control Nov. 25 of the Petrobrás fields, and will have to pay the Brazilian giant 163 million dollars for unrecovered investments. A sum that “is quite attractive,” said economic analyst Walter Spurrier.

Meanwhile, in the name of the Ecuadorian government, the oil ministry signed eight services contracts with the five oil companies that accepted the new rules established in July by a reform of the Law on Hydrocarbons.

The five are Chile’s Enap-Sipec, China’s Andes Petroleum Ecuador and PetroOriental, Spain’s Repsol, and Italy’s Agip Oil.

Minister Pastor said the eight petroleum blocks exploited by these five companies represent 86 percent of Ecuador’s private-sector oil production.

The new contract model created by the reform establishes the government as owner of oil drilled in Ecuador, and the private contract-holders will receive a fixed payment for each barrel produced. This means that Ecuador also keeps the benefits associated with increasing oil prices.

The flat rate per barrel will be 35 to 41 dollars, said Pastor, depending on the company, and was a key point in the negotiations that took place behind closed doors at a luxury hotel in Quito over the last four months.

“These are exorbitant rates given that the production costs of a barrel of oil by Petroecuador and Petroamazonas in 2009 were five and seven dollars, respectively,” said Henry Llanes, former union leader at Petroecuador.

The agreed payments “surpass Petroecuador’s costs (per barrel) by 700 to 800 percent. In other words, the petroleum reforms spurred by the Correa administration’s ‘socialist revolution’ ended up benefiting the oil companies,” said Llanes, who is also a former lawmaker.

“Such an analysis is simplistic,” an executive from one of the oil companies that participated in the talks told IPS. Due to the confidentiality clause of the negotiations, the executive asked not to be identified.

The costs that Llanes spoke of “do not include the recouping of investments made, or the calculation of the payments we have committed to make,” said the source.

The renegotiated deal will bring Ecuador investments of more than 1.2 billion dollars for production and exploration. This comes as a relief after facing a declining curve in fresh capital in the hydrocarbons sector — the country’s main source of revenues.

It is also a boon to the gross added value of the petroleum industry, which the Central Bank reported had been falling at a quarterly rate of about four percent since 2008.

According to Pastor, if the companies fail to meet their commitments in their annual investment plans, the government will begin withholding those sums from the per-barrel payments.

He noted that the government’s share in the petroleum contracts is increasing, on average, from 70 to 80 percent.

In a look at who is staying and who is leaving, analyst Spurrier said, “Sipec, affiliate of the Chilean state-owned Enap company, has only small fields, which have to be developed. Chile seeks to strengthen relations with Ecuador, in the context of its maritime disputes with Peru. This oil agreement was never in doubt.”

Spurrier sees EDC’s departure as more complicated: “It was in charge of block 3 in the Gulf of Guayaquil, where the Amistad gas field is located, and which feeds a thermoelectric plant owned by Machala Power, a subsidiary of EDC.”

Petroecuador does not have experience operating in offshore natural gas fields, he pointed out.

Minister Pastor asserted that the transfer of that company “is going well,” and that EDC’s decision to leave Ecuador includes selling the gas-fired electrical plant to the Ecuadorian government, though he did not disclose the value of that transaction.

He said that everything will be in the government’s hands within 120 days, however, he did not specify which entity would take over operations.

The government will have to look for a new operator, said Spurrier, who believes it could be Chile’s Enap, “which has natural gas fields in the Strait of Magellan, and has developed its own technology.”

The oil executive who took part in the negotiations stressed that the companies “were not pleased with the change in the contract model, but it was quite unlikely that the government would let China go, because it is Ecuador’s main creditor and the biggest investor in petroleum and in the not- yet-finalised plans in mining.”

“The companies, especially Repsol, could not be leaving Ecuador happy, because they have major investments, including the heavy crude pipeline,” said the executive. The pipeline system was built earlier this decade by a consortium of private firms.

According to analyst Spurrier, it isn’t that the left-wing administration of President Rafael Correa has forced the countries “to accept draconian conditions,” because the official information itself “suggests that there are indeed compensations” included in the agreements.

Compensation could be, apart from the payments, time extensions for operating rights and the incorporation of new drilling areas.

For example, he said, “Agip could receive the Oglan heavy crude field, discovered in the early 1970s, which is once again attractive because of current prices and thanks to the secondary pipeline that the Italian company built to exploit Villano,” a nearby field.

Repsol, which reached an agreement at the last minute, was reportedly offered block 31, currently in hands of the state. The new law gives the Ecuadorian government greater flexibility to hand over blocks without going through a bidding process.

Now what is left for the government is to renegotiate the contracts for marginal fields, which IPS found out began in secret on Monday, Nov. 29. In this case, the law authorises a period of 60 days more.

Those contracts protect the fields under special conditions, especially for secondary recovery after drilling by Petroecuador. These fields represent less than 10 percent of Ecuador’s daily oil output of about 481,000 barrels.

These contracts will also have to shift to a fixed rate, or, in the words of President Correa, the foreign companies will have to go, like the four leaving now, wishing them “a fare thee well.”

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By Gonzalo Ortiz
QUITO, Nov 23 2010 (IPS)

The office is chaotic. Huge piles of T-shirts and boxes of ballpoint pens are piled high on desks where indigenous men and women are busy packing these articles, together with placards, leaflets and fliers, at the headquarters of their National Commission on Statistics.

Census-takers at a CONEPIA training session. Credit: Courtesy of INEC

“Identify Your Family Proudly as Afro-Ecuadorian”, one of the fliers says, while a leaflet in comic strip style explains the issue of self-reporting one’s descent in Shuar, an Amazonian indigenous language.

The office belongs to the National Commission on Statistics for Indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorian and Montubio Peoples (CONEPIA), and the goal of the feverish activity is to despatch all the promotional material to Ecuador’s 24 provinces in time for the Seventh Population Census and Sixth Housing Census, to be carried out Sunday Nov. 28.

The coming census is especially important for indigenous people.

While native people’s organisations, like the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), claim that 40 percent of the country’s population is indigenous, in the previous census in 2001, only 6.8 percent of people identified themselves as such.

Since then, native people have campaigned for the next census to include a further battery of questions. Two key questions are about the languages spoken by the respondent, and the languages spoken by both parents, which appear as items 14 and 15 on the census form.

Questions 16 and 17 are also crucial. Item 16 asks interviewees how they would identify themselves according to their culture and customs: as indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorian or Afro-descendant, black, mulatto, Montubio, mestizo (of mixed ancestry), white or other.

If they identify themselves as indigenous, question 17 asks which indigenous people or nationality they belong to. The census contains a list of specific nationalities, including Achuar, Awa, Cofan, Chachi, Epera, Huaorani,Secoya, Shuar, Siona, Tsátchila, Shiwiar, Zápara and Andoa, most of which are based in the Amazon jungle region; Quechua, the main ethnic group in the highlands; and three coastal peoples.

After the questionable results of the 2001 census, Silverio Chisaguano was appointed by the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INEC) and the native people’s organisations to work out ways for the census to identify minorities more accurately in this “intercultural and plurinational” country, as it is defined in the 2008 constitution.

The issue is vital for the associations that represent ethnic minority groups and the public institutions that work with them, because higher statistical representation in the population will entitle them to more state support.

“This was in fact the goal when CONEPIA was created in 2007. We consulted with INEC and the indigenous organisations, at the regional, provincial and local level, and came to a consensus about what questions should be included in the census,” said Chisaguano, the head of CONEPIA, after finding a relatively quiet corner in the office, away from the bustle.

“We have field tested the questions in pilot trials, they have been incorporated in the census form and they have been made known to the public,” said Chisaguano, a teacher of Quechua descent who has worked with INEC since 1993.

CONEPIA was founded at a national meeting of 50 organisations, including CONAIE, the Council of Evangelical Indigenous Peoples and Organisations of Ecuador (FEINE), the National Confederation of Peasant, Indigenous and Black Organisations, and the most active Afro-Ecuadorian and Montubio associations.

Indigenous lawmaker Gerónimo Yantalema said census-takers should speak the native languages. “That is the only possible way to include and identify thousands of indigenous people who were not recorded in previous censuses,” he told IPS.

In contrast, Lourdes Tibán, another indigenous legislator, said the widespread use of Spanish and the high percentage of bilingual native people, a “consequence of the continuation of the colonial state,” would overcome the problem of the census being conducted in Spanish.

“Consultations, workshops and regional meetings were held to discuss the issue of self-reporting ethnicity, and how the issue of identity should be tackled in the census,” Byron Villacís, the head of INEC, told IPS. “It was a profound and extensive process that allowed us to reach a consensus on how to measure ethnicity.”

Villacís said the methodology was chosen to match that of the United Nations, which is recognised for its concern for indigenous peoples and minorities.

In his view, part of the under-registration of indigenous people in the 2001 census was due to people “closing their doors” against the census-takers in many communities. “Not enough information reached these groups,” he said.

But that will not happen this year. He confirmed that “between three and four million dollars” has been spent on publicity, using a “different concept” compared to the previous census. Television is being used for generic messages directed at the entire population, which INEC estimates at 14.2 million people.

In addition, specific spots are aimed at indigenous, black and Montubio populations, using testimonials by well-known members of the different ethnic groups. In rural areas, community radios have been enlisted to broadcast the messages in different native languages.

“We have also held concerts, artistic parades, theatrical performances, and ads on public transport, both urban and long-distance, and since Nov. 21 we have sent out text messages to cell-phones,” Villacís said.

However, the campaign in the countryside has been criticised as not effective enough. Some people are afraid census information will be used “to take away the Human Development payment,” a conditional cash transfer of 35 dollars a month that the government provides to more than 1.4 million people with low incomes.

There have always been problems in the rural areas, ever since the first census of modern times in 1950. In 1970, three census-takers were killed in a remote location.

“Rejection of the census goes back to colonial roots,” historian Guadalupe Soasti, a professor at the Simón Bolívar Andean University, told IPS. “Indigenous people believed that any kind of head count during the colonial administration was for tax purposes.”

This time the process is “very different, because native people’s organisations have participated, and much more information has been given to the public,” anthropologist Fernando García of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) told IPS. “I don’t think there will be resistance this time around.”

“In the rural areas, the census will take from Nov. 28 to Dec. 5. We want to know how many of us there are, but also what our living conditions are, so that we can fight poverty, because indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian people have the highest poverty rates in the country,” Chisaguano concluded.

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