ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE!
PROTEST CHEVRON, URIBE, AND BACHELET!
DEMAND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE!
On September 23rd, Chevron, Barrick, and Freeport McMoRan, and the Council
of the Americas will sponsor a dinner featuring Chilean president Michelle
Bachelet. On September 24th, Chevron, Mizuho Bank, Telefonica, Bunge, and
Sikorsky will host Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. Many of these companies
and presidents have an ugly record of human rights and environmental abuse!
Wednesday, September 23 :
Protest Bachelet, Chevron , Barrick Gold, and Freeport McMoRan
6:30PM-9:30PM at AS/COA, 680 Park Avenue (at 68th Street), Manhattan, NYC
(6 Train to 68th St./Hunter College)
Thursday, September 24:
Protest Uribe, Chevron, Bunge, Sikorsky, and Mizuho Bank
11:30AM-2PM at Essex House Ballroom, 160 Central Park South (between 7th Ave
and 6th Ave/Ave of Americas), Manhattan, NYC
(Q to 57th Street/7th Ave or F to 57th Street/6th Ave)
Sponsored by TradeJustice NY Metro, Global Justice for Animals and the
Environment, Comun-er@s, NY Committee in Solidarity with the People of El
Salvador, Wetlands Activism Collective and ProtestBarrick.net
More Info: activism@wetlands-preserve.org
About the Presidents:
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet In Chile and Argentina, there is
growing public indignation and opposition to huge, transnational metals
mining operations and exploration. Pres. Bachelet, however, is ignoring the
growing droughts, shrinking glaciers and threats to ecosystems and
lifestyles of indigenous, campesino, farmers and other groups and she is
handing over entire Chilean, Andean, Argentine mountain ranges and river
headwaters to multinational metals mining corporations,
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has waged an intense lobbying campaign to
pass the Colombia U.S. Free Trade Agreement, a deal that would have
devastating impacts on poor and rural communities in Colombia and on the
Amazon and Andean people, ecosystems, and wildlife. As indigenous people
rise up to protest the government’s complicity in the destruction of their
lands by extractive industries, they face massacres and targeted
assassinations of indigenous leaders and their family members, often at the
behest of paramilitary death squads with ties to Uribe allies.
About the Corporate Sponsors:
Barrick Gold, the world¹s largest gold mining company, is accused of
avoiding responsibility for the destructive environmental legacy of their
projects of aligning itself with corrupt politicians, and of employing
police who violently suppress (and sometimes kill) organizers in the
indigenous communities harmed by these projects.
Bunge benefits from the global food crisis, the use of slave labor in
Brazil, and deforestation of the Amazon rainforest and the adjacent Cerrado.
The Brazilian NGO FUNAGUAS, which successfully sued Bunge for using native
wood from the Cerrado to power its soy facility. Bunge is the largest
exporter of soy from Brazil, where the crop has become the greatest driver
of deforestation in the Amazon and the Cerrado.
Chevron is responsible for human rights and environmental atrocities around
the world:
Ecuador: While drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazon from 1964 to 1990, Texaco
which merged with Chevron in 2001 deliberately dumped more than 18
billion gallons of toxic wastewater, spilled roughly 17 million gallons of
crude oil, and left hazardous waste in hundreds of open pits dug out of the
forest floor. Contamination of soil, groundwater, and surface streams has
poisoned wild and domestic animals and caused local indigenous and campesino
people to suffer a wave of mouth, stomach and uterine cancer, birth defects,
and spontaneous miscarriages.
Burma: Chevron has refused to acknowledge both the widespread human rights
abuses caused by its Yadana project and the destructive effects that revenue
from the project has had in Burma.
Canada: Chevron is involved in two separate projects in the tar sands, the
Athabasca Oil Sands Project (AOSP) and the Ells River Project. In addition
to direct human exposure, oil contamination from these projects in the local
watershed has led to arsenic in moose flesh up to 33 times acceptable
levels. Drinking water has also been contaminated. The energy intensive
process used to produce synthetic crude oil from tar sands generates three
to five times more global warming pollution than does conventional oil
production.
Nigeria: Chevron has been complicit with and benefited from human rights
violations committed by security forces against local communities protesting
effects of extractive activities. Chevron continues to employ and pay the
notoriously brutal Nigerian military to provide it with security services.
The military are known to violently repress peaceful protest by villagers
from the Delta communities.
Freeport-McMoRan’s mine in Indonesia has been criticized for stealing the
region’s wealth, evicting local people from ancestral lands and polluting
the environment. The company has also been criticized for paying Indonesian
security forces to guard the mine. In West Papua, Freeport dumped a billion
tons of mine into a jungle river in what had been one of the world’s last
untouched landscapes.
Mizuho Bank is a financier of The Kashagan oil field in the Caspian Sea, one
of the largest oil fields discovered in the last few decades. An
international Fact Finding Mission in the Northern Caspian region, conducted
in September 2007, found evidence of extremely high environmental and social
impacts and risks, and violations of international standards, including the
Equator Principles and IFC Performance Standards, in the development of
Kashagan’s offshore and onshore operations.
Sikorsky, a major defense contractor, lobbied heavily for US military aid to
Colombia and managed to include the sale of at least 18 of its expensive
Black Hawk helicopters to the Colombian military as part of the aid package.
U.S. helicopters assist in aerial fumigation of fields of coca, devastating
the Amazon rainforest and destroying the crops of farmers growing food for
local consumption. Activists believe the Colombian military is using the
Blackhawk to provide surveillance for paramilitaries before and after
massacres.
Websites with More Information:
http://protestbarrick.net
http://chevrontoxico.org
http://texacotoxico.org
http://tradejustice.net
http://freetradekillsanimals.org
http://amazonwatch.org
http://snipurl.com/bunge1
http://snipurl.com/freeport
http://snipurl.com/mizuho
http://snipurl.com/sikorsky
http://snipurl.com/uribe
-graysea
