The open wounds of the Amazon. Credit:Rolly Valdivia/IPS

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, Apr 9 2014 (IPS)

Indigenous leaders are warning of increased violence in the fight to save their dwindling forests and ecosystems from extractive companies.

Indigenous representatives and environmental activists from Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas met over the weekend here to commemorate those leading community fights against extractive industries. The conference, called Chico Vive, honoured Chico Mendes, a Brazilian rubber-tapper killed in 1988 for fighting to save the Amazon.“Right now in our territory we can’t drink the water because it’s so contaminated from the hydrocarbons from the oil and gas industry." -- Chief Liz Logan of the Fort Nelson First Nation in BC, Canada

The gathering also recognised leaders who are continuing that legacy today.

“His struggle, to which he gave his life, did not end with his death – on the contrary,” John Knox, the United Nations independent expert on human rights and the environment, said at the conference. “But it continues to claim the lives of others who fight for human rights and environmental protection.”

A 2012 report by Global Witness, a watchdog and activist group, estimates that over 711 people – activists, journalists and community members – had been killed defending their land-based rights over the previous decade.

Those gathered at this weekend’s conference discussed not only those have been killed, injured or jailed. They also shared some success stories.

“In 2002, there was an Argentinean oil company trying to drill in our area. Some of our people opposed this, and they were thrown in jail,” Franco Viteri, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, told IPS.

“However, we fought their imprisonment and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in our favour. Thus, our town was able to reclaim the land and keep the oil company out.”

Motivated by oil exploration-related devastation in the north, Ecuadorian communities in the south are continuing to fight to defend their territory. Viteri says some communities have now been successful in doing so for a quarter-century.

But he cautions that this fight is not over, particularly as the Ecuadorian government flip-flops on its own policy stance.

“The discourse of [President Rafael] Correa is very environmentalist, but in a practical way it is totally false,” he says. “The government is taking the oil because they receive money from China, which needs oil.”

China has significantly increased its focus on Latin America in recent years. According to a briefing paper by Amazon Watch, a nonprofit that works to protect the rainforest and rights of its indigenous inhabitants, “in 2013 China bought nearly 90% of Ecuador’s oil and provided an estimated 61% of its external financing.”

The little dance

Many others at the conference had likewise already seen negative impacts due to extractives exploration and development in their community.

“We have oil and gas, mines, we have forestry, we have agriculture, and we have hydroelectric dams,” Chief Liz Logan of the Fort Nelson First Nation in British Columbia, Canada, told IPS.

“Right now in our territory we can’t drink the water because it’s so contaminated from the hydrocarbons from the oil and gas industry … The rates of cancer in our community are skyrocketing and we wonder why. But no one wants to look at this, because it might mean that what [extractives companies] are doing is affecting us and the animals.”

Logan described the work of protecting the community as a “little dance”: first they bring the government to court when they do not implement previous agreements, then they have to ensure that the government actually implements what the court orders.

Others discussed possible solutions to stop the destruction of ecosystems, and what is at stake for the communities living in them. The link between local land conflicts and global climate change consistently reappeared throughout many of the discussions.

“My community is made up of small-scale farmers and pastoralists who depend on cattle to live. For them, a cow is everything and to have the land to graze is everything,” said Godfrey Massay, an activist leader from the Land Rights Institute in Tanzania.

“These people are constantly threatened by large-scale investors who try to take away their land. But they are far more threatened by climate change, which is also affecting their livelihood.”

Andrew Miller of Amazon Watch described the case of the contentious Belo Monte dam in Brazil, which is currently under construction. Local communities oppose the dam because those upstream would be flooded and those downstream would suddenly find their river’s waters severely reduced.

“People are fighting battles on local levels, but they are also emblematic of global trends and they are also related to a lot of the climate things going on,” Miller told IPS. “[Hydroelectric] dams, for example, are sold as clean energy, but they generate a lot of methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas.”

According to Miller, one value of large gatherings such as this weekend’s conference is allowing participants to see the similarities between experiences and struggles around the world, despite often different cultural, political and environmental contexts.

“In each case there are things that are very specific to them,” Miller said. “But I think we are also going to see some trends in terms of governments and other actors cracking down and trying to limit the political space, the ability for these folks to be effective in their work and to have a broader impact on policy.”

Yet activists like Viteri, from Ecuador, remain determined to protect their land.

“We care for the forest as a living thing because it gives us everything – life, shade, food, water, agriculture,” Viteri said. “It also makes us rich, even if it is a different kind of richness. This is why we fight.”

Outside the New York federal courthouse, Ecuadorians and their supporters gather to protest the Chevron lawsuit. Credit: Samuel Oakford/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Oct 15 2013 (IPS)

Two years after they were awarded 18 billion dollars by an Ecuadorian court for environmental damage caused by Chevron in the Amazonian rainforest, a group of indigenous villagers and their U.S. lawyer went on trial Tuesday in New York, accused by the oil company of bribery and racketeering.

Chevron was found liable in 2011 for an ecological catastrophe caused by pollution released in the 1970s and 1980s by Texaco, which Chevron acquired in 2001 and for which they agreed to assume legal obligations.“Every day, family members and loved ones are sickened because of the contamination." -- Javier Piaguaje, a Secoya Indian from Ecuador

Chevron has refused to pay the penalty.

Because Chevron has no assets in Ecuador, the plaintiffs have attempted to collect the fine abroad.

The New York suit, filed under the RICO statute, a strategy made famous during Mafia prosecutions in the 1970s, seeks to block enforcement of the 2011 decision in U.S. courts, where Chevron maintains ample reserves to foot the bill.

The complaint claims the lawyer, Steven Donziger, and a group of Ecuadorians representing the 30,000 original Amazonian plaintiffs attempted to persuade and corrupt a series of Ecuadorian judges who heard the case in an attempt to extort Chevron.

Donziger and the Ecuadorian defendants deny any wrongdoing and assert the lawsuit is another expensive legal distraction that the 230-billion-dollar corporation can afford to tack onto what has become a 20-year saga of litigation.

Outside the courthouse, Ecuadorians and their supporters gathered to protest the case.

Demonstrators chanted and held photographs depicting shiny, blackened earth, open runoff pits and frail jungle residents who they said were dying from cancers that resulted from the estimated 18 million gallons of crude oil and 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater that was leaked or illegally pumped into pristine jungle ecosystems around the Lago Agrio field the northwest of the country.

“We’re here in front of the courts against this large corporation,” said one of the defendants, Javier Piaguaje, a Secoya Indian who lives along the heavily polluted and now-ironically named “Aguarico” River.

Dressed in traditional Secoya garb, Piaguaje told the crowd the lasting effects of the spill were ravaging his community.

“Every day, family members and loved ones are sickened because of the contamination,” said Piaguaje.

“We’re here to show what’s really going on in the Amazon,” he added, before turning to enter the courthouse and mount his defence.

The judge in the case, Lewis Kaplan, has long been a thorn in the side of indigenous plaintiffs.

Earlier this month, Kaplan decided Donziger and his co-defendents were not entitled to a trial by jury.

“This trial is a travesty of justice,” said Paul Paz y Miño of Amazon Watch, an environmental justice group that assists the Ecuadorian claim.

“Chevron has spent years to have a trial where the original plaintiffs are not allowed to discuss the evidence,” Paz y Miño told IPS.

“There is absolutely no evidence of fraud on behalf of the plaintiff,” he added.

A spokesperson for the defendants in the New York case, Han Shan, told IPS the lawsuit took a lot of chutzpah on the part of Chevron.

“They’ve done a great job of media and political jujitsu in taking things that we were alleging, Chevron being totally corrupt, putting pressure on judges, bribery, trying to entrap people, using dirty contracters and said that we did it,” said Shan.

In 2009, Diego Borja, a Chevron contractor in Ecuador, was caught trying to entrap the presiding judge, Juan Nunez, by videotaping himself offering Nunez a bribe. Chevron has since paid for Borja to move to the United States and supplies him with a monthly stipend.

The Chevron media relations website was down for maintenance at the time of this article and IPS was unable to reach the company for comment.

However, on the company’s website devoted to the lawsuit, Morgan Crinklaw, a spokesman for Chevron, says, “We believe that any jurisdiction that observes the rule of law will find that the judgment is illegal and unenforceable because it’s a product of fraud.”

The trial taking place in Manhattan hinges in large part on Donziger’s personal diary and hours of outtakes from Joe Berlinger’s 2009 film, “Crude,” which Chevron claims show Donziger considered some of the environment evidence in the lawsuit to be “all smoke and mirrors.”

Donziger has said his quotes were taken out of context.

Judge Kaplan has already decided in favour of Chevron once.

In March 2011, Kaplan issued a global injunction that blocked enforcement of the Ecuadorian judgment, effectively kneecapping indigenous claims.

In January 2012, however, the 2^nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York overturned the injunction, which opened the door once more for the original plaintiffs to enforce the 18-billion-dollar decision in U.S. courts.

That decision led Chevron team of over 100 lawyers to cobble together a last ditch defence strategy in form of the RICO suit, which they worked hard to have heard in Kaplan’s courtroom.

Shan isn’t optimistic about Kaplan presiding over the case.

“I don’t feel Kaplan will give us a fair hearing,” said Shan. “I think he’s already made up his mind.”

But should Kaplan rule against the indigenous community and issue a global injunction once more, Shan is confident the 2^nd Circuit will strike it down.

“The 2nd Circuit has been clear that the U.S. District Court is not an appellate court for the Ecuadorian judiciary and there’s absolutely no jurisdiction for that kind of injunction,” said Shan.