Source – mintpressnews.com
– In 2011, Amazon Watch received a mysterious package from a Chevron whistleblower. There was no return address, just dozens of DVDs and a note saying “I hope this is useful for you in the trial against Texaco/Chevron! Signed, a friend from Chevron”. Chevron, which bought Texaco in 2001, had just been found guilty for one of the worst environmental disasters on the planet in Ecuador’s rainforest. Chevron was ordered to pay $9.5 billion to clean up their contamination, but instead fled the country and sued the communities in the U.S. for extortion. Wow, isn’t Chevron awesome?
After legal efforts by Chevron to keep these from seeing the light of day, here they are for the first time. The tapes are internal company videos documenting Chevron’s efforts to hide contamination during the trial. All were titled “pre-inspection” with dates and places of the former oil production sites where Chevron sought to plan its sampling strategy to mislead the Ecuadorian court during the judicially-supervised site inspections. As you can see in the video above, is a small sampling edited for time. Even with the edit, the video provides enough evidence to persuade the viewers that Chevron is obviously an evil doer hard at work. The family in this video persuaded me enough to decide that Chevron doesn’t have their priorities straight. Three little girls died from the lack of care that Chevron was going to give this family as compensation for the all the oil they spilled. Not to mention the cows and any other animals that drank from the contaminated waters.
Chevron technicians are secretly surveying the company’s former oil fields and well sites it allegedly cleaned up in advance of a site visit by the presiding judge in the Ecuador trial. They hope to find areas free of crude waste so on the day of the judicial inspection Chevron can take “clean” soil and water samples to submit to the court as evidence. The task was harder than they had thought. I mean, if you’re trying to cover up something that’s been problem for over 20 years, there’s probably going to be a zero percent chance you’re going to succeed in the first place. Chevron also conducted interviews with residents living on or near contaminated sites that the company claims to have cleaned up in 1998. After 22 years of litigation, Chevron has vowed to fight the Ecuadorian indigenous and farmer communities until “hell freezes over” and then “fight it out on the ice.” Meanwhile, the affected people continue to live with the pollution and lack potable water and health care.
After all of this being said, I still cannot fathom the mentality these people had going into Ecuador expecting to get off scot-free after all the pollution and contamination they’ve caused. Tell us what you think about it.
RIELPOLITIK 