The populace may hiss me, but when I go home and think of my money, I applaud myself.Horace, c. 25 bc.
I came across this passage last evening at a particularly timely, if not utterly heartbreaking moment. I had just been sent video footage from the Ecuadorian Amazon. The footage was rough and sincere, almost bleak. There in the small clearing of a forest was a group of Quichua indigenous people. Their clothes were tattered from labor and the intense Amazonian sun. In the video (see below) they are being told that the American oil company – the very same company that had decimated their lives with oil contamination, and against whom they had been waging a lawsuit for the last 18 years, demanding clean-up – had now filed a lawsuit against them, accusing them of engaging in an international racketeering and extortion conspiracy.
It is hard to know what to make of such a patently absurd and egregious insult as this; Big Oil suing the victims of their contamination. Texaco (later acquired by Chevron) created one of the worst oil-related disasters in history, deliberately dumping an estimated 18 billions of gallons of toxic wastewater into rivers and streams, and spilling roughly 17 million gallons of crude oil into the ancestral territory of six indigenous tribes. Now, as the communities continue to suffer a public health crisis, Chevron is pouring ghastly sums of money into a scorched-earth legal and public relations strategy designed, essentially, to destroy the hopes of the plaintiffs.
In its latest abusive action, Chevron is suing its victims in Ecuador under the RICO statute – originally enacted to prosecute the Mafia and other organized crime. Essentially, Chevron and its cabal of lawyers are suing the impoverished indigenous and campesino residents of the Oriente for having the gall to demand justice for all these years.
And so, yes, we live in a strange and harsh world – a world where the victims become the accused and power topples truth. A world where Chevron executives and Gibson Dunn lawyers can return to their gated homes, relish in thoughts of their own wealth, and applaud themselves for a hard day’s work, despite the pain and suffering they are causing in far away places…
Note: To see English subtitles on the video, click on the “closed captioning” (cc)
button below the video frame.
