Since 2008, this blogger has said that the Ecuador land damage that Chevron was blamed for was really the fault of the state-run oil company called Petroecuador, and because Chevron has not operated in the country since 1992, and over that time Petroecuador and other oil companies were and were using those oil lands that Chevron turned over to the state in 1992. This has been mentioned many times..
This video was posted in 2009:
And this one in 2008:
Petroecuador plans Amazon clean-up
Ecuador’s state oil company Petroecuador announced plans on Monday to clean up parts of the Amazon jungle at the heart of a lengthy legal battle in which Chevron was ordered to pay $18 billion damages.
Upstream Online, December 15, 2011
Locals accuse Texaco, which was bought by Chevron in 2001, of dumping oil-drilling waste in unlined pits, polluting the forest and causing illness and deaths among indigenous people in the 1970s and 1980s, Reuters reported.
A judge ordered Chevron in February to pay environmental damages and clean up the old drilling sites. Chevron denies the charges, and the 18-year-old legal saga looks set to continue after both sides appealed.
“The pollution is in areas assigned to us and we’ve got the obligation to clean them up,” Petroecuador’s general manager Marco Calvopina told reporters, adding that cleaning the areas would not amount to taking responsibility for the pollution.
“We’re going to record all the cleaning up that we do because we obviously know that there’s a court case going on.”
Calvopina said Petroecuador plans to spend some $70 million to clean up pollution in the Amazon jungle, including some areas involved in the Chevron case.
Chevron says Texaco cleaned up all waste pits for which it was responsible before turning the sites over to Petroecuador, which still operates in the area.
A New York judge sought to freeze the $18 billion judgment against the supermajor earlier this year, but the decision was later overruled on appeal.
Of course, as my videos show, the main polluter was Petroecuador. They’re just cleaning up their own mess. But they’ve always had the PR strategy of, in some way, blaming American business. What a sham.
Stay tuned.