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Woes mount for oil firms in Ecuador
(Kelly Hearn, The Christian Science Monitor, February 9, 2006)
In eastern Ecuador,oil companies face daily threats - from kidnappings of workers to sabotage of installations. Tuesday, hundreds of protesters seized a pumping station, causing state-run Petroecuador to shut down one of its two main pipelines. . . . In August, oil opponents brought almost all of Ecuador's oil production to a halt. Protesters invaded oil camps, destroyed equipment, and blocked highways, prompting the defense minister to threaten force to stop them. One oil executive says he knows of 19 kidnappings of oil-industry workers in recent years. . . . Protecting oil installations here calls for robust security measures, but recently publicized contracts mapping oil industry ties to the Ecuadorean military have raised concerns in a country where populism runs deep and three presidents in the past decade have been forced out of office amid popular unrest. . . . The contracts highlight the troubles facing many multinational energy companies as they seek to diversify drilling sources away from the Middle East and into countries where extractive industries have been linked to environmental and human rights concerns. Critics here say the rarely seen documents - some of which detail company mandates for soldiers to conduct countersurveillance operations on the local population - are proof that Ecuador's military is a private army for oil firms. . . . "If you cut through the clinical language of the contracts, what you have are agreements that allow American companies to spy on the lawful activities of local citizens in foreign countries," said Steven Donziger, a US attorney working on behalf of groups in the region that are opposed to oil drilling. . . . The documents, some marked classified and negotiated in secret, were released in late November in connection with lawsuits here, and all have either expired or were nullified by a Dec. 8 decision by the Ecuadorean military. . . . The military and 16 multinational oil firms, including US-based companies Kerr-McGee, Burlington, and Occidental Petroleum, signed one contract that was dated July 2001 and marked classified. It established "terms of collaboration and coordination of actions to guarantee the security of the oil installations and of the personnel that work in them," to include the control of arms, explosives, and undocumented persons in areas of oil operations. It also instituted communication networks and required military personnel to periodically update oil firms on army activities. . . . Another contract marked classified and signed in April 2001 by California-based Occidental Petroleum required soldiers "to carry out armed patrols and checks of undocumented individuals" within the company's operating area. It also mandated that soldiers "plan, execute, and supervise counterintelligence operations to prevent acts of sabotage and vandalism." . . . Counterintelligence operations in Latin America have long been linked to human rights violations, says Keith Slack, a senior analyst for Oxfam. "That Occidental contracted with the military to do this near its installations seems fraught with potential for abuse." . . . Another contract required US-based Chevron Corp. to build a villa on an Ecuadorean military base located near Lago Agrio, a notoriously dangerous jungle outpost where an environmental lawsuit against the company has been under way since 2003. Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, operated as a minority partner in a government oil consortium there from 1964 to 1992, and is being sued here for environmental damage. . . . Lawyers representing indigenous groups say Texaco dumped 18 billion gallons of pollutants into the environment during its stay, causing an environmental and public-health crisis. . . . Randy Borman, the son of white missionaries who was raised with the Cofan indigenous group, has led his tribe on armed raids against oil firms. . . . He says rogue officers "on the take" sometimes cause problems, but that soldiers often side with indigenous groups. . . . "In our dealings, the oil companies would often bring in the military as backup for their position, but most of the time, if we treated them properly, [the soldiers] wound up on our side."

posted by LoZo 9:56 AM