Oil companies everywhere are suspect for things they've done to places like ecuadorean Amazonia ... it's a two-way street, anyway isn't the current state of the Lago Agrio dispute a product of the US tradition of extreme litigation, US lawyers and NGOs leading, it all got started in New York and is run out of there ... there was a canuck funeral outfit once name of Loewen, that got hit by a Mississippi jury awarding 500 millions, or somesuch ridiculous figure, to one of their local doofi plaintiffs, who may or may not [i forget which] have had a legitimate case for maybe around a hundred grand tops
Recent experience with big oil, combined with burned-in memory of the effects of crude mining, from inca times through the spanish and into the independence period, forms the national attitude that modern miners are up against ... resource extraction doesn't have to be brutal, using clean safe modern methods it isn't, but good luck getting that thought through to people to whom it always has been
Miner startups down there should maybe considering suing Chevron too, for the damage Texaco did to the reputation of all industry ... correction - is doing - a lot of the crap they pumped out to surface is still there ... check google images for 'lago agrio', many of those fotos are recent |
