Passed on by the lovely Ms. Fox
by Greg Palast
December 24th, 2007
[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.
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 out 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.
“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.
The Cliteratti's Digressions 