Selling The Amazon For A Handful Of Beads

Big Oil and the Ecuadorian military team up to coerce, swindle and generally rob the indigenous people living in the Amazon that “unfortunately sit atop 4.4 billion proven barrels of oil, the 26th largest reserve in the world.”

70% of Ecuadorians live below the poverty line.

Scanning bookshelves in his tiny law office in Quito, Ecuador, Bolivar Beltran’s disdain for Big Oil is as legible as the contracts that map their nefarious ways.

“These were all negotiated in secret,” says the soft-spoken attorney and Ecuadorian congressional aide, explaining how he used a lawsuit last year to obtain pages of once-classified contracts between the Ecuadorian military and 16 multinational oil companies.

In November, when I visited him, Beltran handed me a grainy photocopy of a contract dated 2001. Then another bearing an official government seal. Soon a small table is covered, his finger running down keywords that spill off the page. Occidental Oil. Ecuadorian Ministry of Defense. Counterintelligence. Kerr-McGee. Armed Patrols. Military detachments. Burlington Resources.

The contracts come to light as an oil boom bears down on the Ecuadorian Amazon. Ecuador’s 100,000 square kilometers of the world’s richest rainforests unfortunately sit atop 4.4 billion proven barrels of oil, the 26th largest reserve in the world. Since the 1960s, state and private companies have taken oil from Ecuador’s eastern province, known as the Oriente, and sent much of it to the United States, leaving behind environmental and public health disasters. And on top of all else, serious poverty: Despite their country’s…

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