Tag Archives: Oil exploitation

We Meet a Living Legend

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(Versión en español aqui). Pocho Alvarez is arguably Ecuador’s best known film maker. Specialising in political, social and environmental content, he is one of the country’s most prolific and well respected documentary makers. In his 30-year career he has created more than 50 films.

crude-movieProbably the best known of these is “Crude” (2009), which documents a 2-year period of the still-ongoing class action lawsuit against Chevron Texaco. The film follows the progress of the plaintiffs, 30,000 indigenous Ecuadorians whose ancestral homeland was polluted in what was, and continues to be, one of the worst environmental disasters on the planet. “Crude” is said to be the most uncomfortable audio visual record which exists for Chevron Texaco, due to the media coverage it received.

The two-minute trailer for “Crude” (in English) can be watched here:

 

In another documentary, “Toxico Texaco” (2007) Pocho speaks to the communities whose lives have been destroyed by Chevron Texaco’s environmental crime. If you are sitting on the fence about the damage caused by oil exploitation, I would recommend watching “Toxico Texaco”. For me personally, whenever I have an exhausted moment of doubt about the mission I have chosen, I think of the mother and daughter featured in the film, both dying of cancer due to living in a contaminated environment and it spurs me on. “Toxico Texaco” can be watched online (with English subtitles) here.

Following our meeting that morning, Manolo Sarmiento had introduced us over email to Pocho, who had very graciously invited us to his home that evening. We were extremely excited to meet him. As well as being dazzled by his impressive filmography, I knew that Pocho had been personally denounced during one of the President’s weekly public addresses. I was fascinated to know more.

DSC00019Pocho’s apartment was full of intriguing artefacts from around the world. The man himself was a welcoming host and a dream interviewee, offering us whisky and setting us up with extra lighting and a tripod.

Pocho has made a number of short videos encouraging people to sign the petition for a public consultation on whether to drill for oil in Yasuni National Park, so we started off by asking him why the signature collection is important. We loved what he had to say.

 

We asked for Pocho’s opinion on the government’s claim that oil exploitation will be conducted with environmental and social responsibility, bringing economic benefit to the people of Ecuador.

 

We finished with the question we ask everyone: how can people all over the world support the fight against oil exploitation in the Amazon?

 

We did speak with Pocho about his denouncement by the President and government oppression of activists, but those videos will be published in a future blog entry about resistance against mining. Watch this space!

Before we left, Pocho gave us copies of his DVDs and shared some of his contacts with us, including the email address of one of my heroes, Patricia Gualinga of the Sarayaku tribe. We thoroughly enjoyed our meeting with Pocho, finding him to be outspoken and engaging, with a twinkle in his eye suggesting a constant source of inner mirth.

From the Frontline of the Battle for a Referendum

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(Versión en Español aqui).“Do you agree that the Ecuadorian government should keep the crude in the ITT, known as block 43, underground indefinitely?”

This is the question that will be put to a national referendum in Ecuador if 584,000 valid signatures are collected before the deadline of 12th April 2014.

For those new to this blog, ITT (Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini) refers to oil fields within the Yasuní National Park. After abandoning an initiative to save Yasuní from oil exploitation, in October 2013 the Ecuadorian government announced drilling plans within the Park, which is not only a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve and the most ecologically diverse spot on the planet, but home to the last two indigenous tribes in Ecuador living in voluntary isolation.

In response, civil society came together to call for a national referendum, which is constitutionally guaranteed if 5% of registered voters request it by signing a petition.

YasunidosThe signature collection effort has been led by YASunidos, a collective whose name is a word play of ‘Yasuní’ and ‘unidos’, Spanish for ‘united’. This alliance has quickly become a national movement, consisting of different environmental, animal protection, feminist and indigenous groups as well as individual volunteers.

YASunidos this morning (10th April) announced that they have so far collected 727,947 signatures, but the battle is not yet won. Whilst only 584,000 signatures are needed, the government has set extremely stringent rules on the validity of signatures, meaning that many will be rejected.

When we handed in the signatures we had collected, it was heartbreaking to see that the pile of invalid forms was thicker than the pile of valid ones. Hundreds of thousands of people who signed the petition in good faith will have their voice ignored because there is a smudge on the signature form, someone has signed outside the box, used the wrong colour ink, or the paper has been folded.

It is going to be an anxious wait to find out whether enough valid signatures have been collected. The aim was to collect 1 million signatures to allow a sufficient margin for error.

In addition to the rules about validity, the government is thwarting the signature collection in other ways. As well as attempting to discredit YASunidos by levelling accusations of violence at its members, the government is using intimidation tactics against them. Last month, a signature collector was detained and beaten after giving a thumbs down sign to the Presidential motorcade as it passed.

We’d met briefly with YASunidos during our December trip to Quito and we returned to interview Ivonne Yanez, a member of the collective and a founder of one of Latin America’s most well respected environmental groups, Acción Ecológica. For the last 20 years, Acción Ecológica has been a key player in the struggle against oil and mining exploitation in Ecuador, through tactics of nonviolent direct action and supporting local communities.

We spoke with Ivonne about the importance and challenges of the Yasuni signature collection and how, apart from signing the petition, Ecuadorians can support the struggle against oil exploitation in the Amazon.

 

It’s not just Yasuni which is under threat of oil exploitation in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In fact, a much bigger disaster is looming. With the XI Oil Round, the Ecuadorian government is in the process of auctioning off all the country’s remaining virgin rainforest, 8 million acres, to oil companies. Indigenous communities have vowed to resist the advance of oil companies into their ancestral territories. We spoke to Ivonne about this resistance and how non-indigenous people can also resist.

 

We finished by asking Ivonne the question which we put to everyone: “How can people all over the world support the struggle to save the Amazon from oil exploitation?”. This is what she had to say:

A Historical Perspective

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P1020158(Versíon en Español aqui). We woke up to this beautiful view on the first day of our second trip to Quito. We made our way to the Parque La Carolina for our first interview of the day, with Ecuadorian film maker Manolo Sarmiento, best known for his documentary “La Muerte de Jaime Roldós” (“The Death of Jaime Roldós”). This masterpiece of a film looks at the mysterious death of Jaime Roldós, who was President of Ecuador from 1979 until his death in a plane crash two years later.

Jaime Roldós became known for his firm stance on human rights. In his short tenure, he reduced the workweek to 40 hours, doubled the minimum wage and proposed a Charter of Conduct with Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru, in which the principles of universal justice and human rights were re-affirmed. In an era in which most Latin American countries were military dictatorships, Roldós became a moral compass for the region, antagonising neighbouring military governments and going out of his way to reveal evidence of the “dirty wars” in several countries.

In one widely reported incident at an international summit in Colombia, El Salvador’s Napoleón Duarte (a U.S.-backed dictator) accused Roldós of being young and inexperienced, to which Roldós responded: “I may be inexperienced, but my government perches on a mountain of popular votes, while yours is perched on a mountain of corpses.”

La Muerte de Roldos

Manolo Sarmiento’s award winning film, “La Muerte de Jaime Roldós”

The crash in which Roldós died left no survivors: killed along with the president were the First Lady Martha Bucaram, the Minister of Defense and his wife, as well as two aides and three other passengers.

The American author and activist John Perkins, in his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, concludes that Roldós was assassinated by the U.S. government, allegedly by a bomb located in a tape recorder, because his plan to reorganize the oil industry would have threatened U.S. interests. Just months after Roldós died, Panama’s leader Omar Torrijos, who had been at odds with the U.S. over control of the Panama Canal, died in another plane crash, perceived by some to have been a CIA-conducted assassination.

 

Manolo is a great person to talk to about history, so we also spoke with him about the indigenous uprising of 1990, an event that forever changed the country. After that day of massive actions in cities across the nation, Ecuador’s native peoples could no longer be ignored.

CONAIE (The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) organised the uprising with 16 demands, amongst them:

  • A public declaration that Ecuador is a plurinational country (to be ratified by the constitution).
  • The government must grant lands and titles to lands to the nationalities.
  • Solutions to water and irrigation needs.
  • Free commercial handicraft activities.
  • Official recognition of Indian medicine.
  • The government should grant funds for bilingual education.
  • Respect for the rights of the child.

Early in the morning on June 4th 1990, thousands of indigenous Ecuadorians blocked the access routes to the capitals of seven provinces with boulders and trees. They also blocked routes into Quito and cut off travel along the Pan-American highway.

Food supply to the cities was cut off and the country was effectively shut down for a week. The majority of the indigenous actions were peaceful, often including dancing and music, which proved disconcerting to the police forces.

The uprising caused so much disruption to federal commerce and social order that the government relented and met with the leaders of CONAIE. Although the movement did not gain the indigenous peoples much ground in terms of agrarian reform, it shook Ecuador’s white elite power base. “It was because of the uprising that they began to recognise us as people, as human beings, and that we had a voice and we could take action,” commented Norma Mayo of CONAIE.

The uprising also triggered a wave of sympathy among the urban middle class. “I love the indigenous part of me,” was painted on many walls in Quito.

Over the next two decades, CONAIE led a dozen more uprising and mobilisations. Election after election, indigenous Ecuadorians took power in more and more local governments — which had been unthinkable prior to the 1990 uprising.

Today, in 2014, as the government’s extractivist policies threaten the environment and human rights to an ever greater degree, resistance is building.

We asked Manolo about the significance of the 1990 uprising and whether he believes that the current resistance to oil exploitation could lead to a similar event.

 

We finished by asking Manolo the question which we put to everyone: “How can people all over the world support the struggle to save the Amazon from oil exploitation?”. This is what he had to say: