[NYTr] A Quechua Christmas Carol ("Don't miss this)

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[This is an excellent and fascinating article on Ecuador's President
Correa. A must-read. - NYTr]

Greg Palast - Dec 24, 2007
http://www.gregpalast.com/a-quechua-christmas-carol/


Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth:

A Quechua Christmas Carol

by Greg Palast

[Quito]--I don’t know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an
hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about
his father.

I’m not Barbara Walters. It’s not the kind of question I ask.

He hesitated. Then said, “My father was unemployed.”

He paused. Then added, “He took a little drugs to the States… This is
called in Spanish a mula [mule]. He passed four years in the states- in
a jail.”

He continued. “I’d never talked about my father before.”

Apparently he hadn’t. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.Sludge
in Ecuador

Correa’s dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his
family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was
the original “banana republic” - and the price of bananas had hit the
floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a tenth of the entire
adult population, fled to the USA anyway they could.

“My mother told us he was working in the States.”

His father, released from prison, was deported back to Ecuador.
Humiliated, poor, broken, his father, I learned later, committed
suicide.

At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by
paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he
took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking
framed note he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and
her grade school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.

“We are writing to remind you that in Ecuador there are a lot of very
poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these
children who are cold almost every night.”

It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a
politician.

Or maybe there was something else to it.

Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this
Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the
streets. He’d won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador,
the owner of the biggest banana plantation.

Doctor Correa, I should say, with a Ph.D in economics earned in Europe.
Professor Correa as he is officially called - who, until not long ago,
taught at the University of Illinois.

And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character. He told George Bush
to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun
don’t shine. He told the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank, which held Ecuador’s finances by the throat, to go to hell. He
ripped up the “agreements” which his predecessors had signed at
financial gun point. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging
Ecuador usurious interest, to eat their bonds. He said ‘We are not
going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people. ” Food first,
interest later. Much later. And he meant it.

It was a stunning performance. I’d met two years ago with his
predecessor, President Alfredo Palacio, a man of good heart, who told
me, looking at the secret IMF agreements I showed him, “We cannot pay
this level of debt. If we do, we are DEAD. And if we are dead, how can
we pay?” Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and
Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He
was sure they would understand. They didn’t. They cut off Ecuador at
the knees.

But Ecuador didn’t fall to the floor. Correa, then Economics Minister,
secretly went to Hugo Chavez Venezuela’s president and obtained
emergency financing. Ecuador survived.

And thrived. But Correa was not done.

Elected President, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for
the Ecuadoran refugees in America - to give them loans to return to
Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity. And there were other
dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental
Petroleum out of the country.

Correa STILL wasn’t done.

I’d returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest - by canoe to a
Cofan Indian village in the Amazon where there was an epidemic of
childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of
open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of
Chevron, and its partners. I met the Cofan’s chief. His three year old
son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water then came outCofan
Leader Criollo vomiting blood and died.

Correa had gone there too, to the rainforest, though probably in
something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that
the company that left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.

But it’s not just any company he was challenging. Chevron’s largest oil
tanker was named after a long-serving member of its Board of Directors,
the Condoleezza. Our Secretary of State.

The Cofan have sued Condi’s corporation, demanding the oil company
clean up the crap it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly $12
billion. Correa won’t comment on the suit itself, a private legal
action. But if there’s a verdict in favor of Ecuador’s citizens, Correa
told me, he will make sure Chevron pays up.

Is he kidding? No one has ever made an oil company pay for their slop.
Even in the USA, the Exxon Valdez case drags on to its 18th year.
Correa is not deterred.

He told me he would create an international tribunal to collect, if
necessary. In retaliation, he could hold up payments to US companies
who sue Ecuador in US courts.

This is hard core. No one - NO ONE - has made such a threat to Bush and
Big Oil and lived to carry it out.

And, in an office tower looking down on Quito, the lawyers for Chevron
were not amused. I met with them.

Chevron Lawyers“And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many
cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?” Rodrigo
Perez, Texaco’s top lawyer in Ecuador was chuckling over the legal
difficulties the Indians would have in proving their case that
Chevron-Texaco caused their kids’ deaths. “If there is somebody with
cancer there, [the Cofan parents] must prove [the deaths were] caused
by crude or by petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that
it is OUR crude – which is absolutely impossible.” He laughed again.
You have to see this on film to believe it.

The oil company lawyer added, “No one has ever proved scientifically
the connection between cancer and crude oil.” Really? You could swim in
the stuff and you’d be just fine.

The Cofan had heard this before. When Chevron’s Texaco unit came to
their land the the oil men said they could rub the crude oil on their
arms and it would cure their ailments. Now Condi’s men had told me that
crude oil doesn’t cause cancer. But maybe they are right. I’m no
expert. So I called one. Robert F Kennedy Jr., professor of
Environmental Law at Pace University, told me that elements of crude
oil production - benzene, toluene, and xylene, “are well-known
carcinogens.” Kennedy told me he’s seen Chevron-Texaco’s ugly open pits
in the Amazon and said that this toxic dumping would mean jail time in
the USA.

But it wasn’t as much what the Chevron-Texaco lawyers said that shook
me. It was the way they said it. Childhood cancer answered with a
chuckle. The Chevron lawyer, a wealthy guy, Jaime Varela, with a blond
bouffant hairdo, in the kind of yellow chinos you’d see on country club
links, was beside himself with delight at the impossibility of the
legal hurdles the Cofan would face. Especially this one: Chevron had
pulled all its assets out of Ecuador. The Indians could win, but they
wouldn’t get a dime. “What about the chairs in this office?” I asked.
Couldn’t the Cofan at least get those? “No,” they laughed, the chairs
were held in the name of the law firm.

Well, now they might not be laughing. Correa’s threat to use the power
of his Presidency to protect the Indians, should they win, is a
shocker. No one could have expected that. And Correa, no fool, knows
that confronting Chevron means confronting the full power of the Bush
Administration. But to this President, it’s all about justice,
fairness. “You [Americans] wouldn’t do this to your own people,” he
told me. Oh yes we would, I was thinking to myself, remembering
Alaska’s Natives.

Correa’s not unique. He’s the latest of a new breed in Latin America.
Lula, President of Brazil, Evo Morales, the first Indian ever elected
President of Bolivia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. All “Leftists,” as the
press tells us. But all have something else in common: they are
dark-skinned working-class or poor kids who found themselves leaders of
nations of dark-skinned people who had forever been ruled by an elite
of bouffant blonds.

When I was in Venezuela, the leaders of the old order liked to refer to
Chavez as, “the monkey.” Chavez told me proudly, “I am negro e indio” -
Black and Indian, like most Venezuelans. Chavez, as a kid rising in the
ranks of the blond-controlled armed forces, undoubtedly had to endure
many jeers of “monkey.” Now, all over Latin America, the “monkeys” are
in charge.

And they are unlocking the economic cages.

Maybe the mood will drift north. Far above the equator, a nation is
ruled by a blond oil company executive. He never made much in oil - but
every time he lost his money or his investors’ money, his daddy,
another oil man, would give him another oil well. And when, as a rich
young man out of Philips Andover Academy, the wayward youth tooted a
little blow off the bar, daddy took care of that too. Maybe young
George got his powder from some guy up from Ecuador.

I know this is an incredibly simple story. Indians in white hats with
their dead kids and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at kiddy
cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.

But maybe it’s just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is
Good and Evil.

Maybe Santa will sort it out for us, tell us who’s been good and who’s
been bad. Maybe Lawyer Yellow Pants will wake up on Christmas Eve
staring at the ghost of Christmas Future and promise to get the oil
sludge out of the Cofan’s drinking water.

Or maybe we’ll have to figure it out ourselves. When I met Chief
Emergildo, I was reminded of an evening years back, when I was way the
hell in the middle of nowhere in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, in
the Chugach Native village of Chenega. I was investigating the damage
done by Exxon’s oil. There was oil sludge all over Chenega’s beaches.
It was March 1991, and I was in the home of village elder Paul Kompkoff
on the island’s shore, watching CNN. We stared in silence as “smart”
bombs exploded in Baghdad and Basra.

Then Paul said to me, in that slow, quiet way he had, “Well, I guess
we’re all Natives now.”

Well, maybe we are. But we don’t have to be, do we?

Maybe we can take some guidance from this tiny nation at the center of
the earth. I listened back through my talk with President Correa. And I
can assure his daughter that she didn’t have to worry that her dad
would forget about “the poor children who are cold” on the streets of
Quito.

Because the Professor Doctor is still one of them.

                              ***

[Watch the Palast investigation, Rumble in the Jungle: Big Oil and
Little Indians, on BBC Television Newsnight, now on-line via
www.GregPalast.com - and Thursday’s US broadcast of Democracy Now.

For a copy of Palast’s prior reports from Venezuela for BBC and
Democracy Now, get “The Assassination of Hugo Chavez,” on DVD, filmed
by award-winning videographer Richard Rowley. ]