Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth: A Quechua Christmas Carol

Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth: A Quechua Christmas Carol

By Greg Palast

Created Dec 25 2007 - 9:18am

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.

--

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson