October 17, 2012
Ecuadorian plaintiffs, seeking to collect $19 billion in damages from Chevron, will be able to seize some $200 million of the company’s assets in Ecuador, a court ruled Monday. Reuters reports that the court in Lago Agrio, Ecuador ruled that assets, including money in Chevron bank accounts in Ecuador and money the Ecuadorian government owes to Chevron, be turned over to the plaintiffs. Just last week the U.S. Supreme Court dealt Chevron another blow, rejecting an attempt to block enforcement of the $19 billion ruling in the U.S. The plaintiffs have filed suits in Brazil and Canada to try and enforce the ruling. On the victory Monday, Pablo Fajardo, the lead lawyer for the affected Ecuadorian communities, told Reuters, “This is a huge first step for the rainforest villagers on the road to collecting the entire $19bn judgement.”
Chilean student leaders, Camila Vallejo and Noam Titelman, are in the United States this week where they will receive the 2012 International Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award presented by the Institute for Policy Studies. Democracy NOW! speaks with the two student leaders, who have helped organize some of the largest protests in Chile since the Pinochet dictatorship. Titelman said, “our public education is dying, we have only 36 percent of students going to public schools. Here in the States, it’s almost 90 percent. It’s really a very special example of how privatized can a state become.” Meanwhile, back in Chile, thousands of students took to the streets in Valparaiso to demand urgent action on education reform, reports the Associated Press.
State intervention is back in Latin America, and helping to create social policies and reduce inequalities, according to the regional director of the UN Development Program, Herlado Muñoz reports Mercopress. As opposed to the 90s when the Washington Consensus dictated that the government was the problem, Muñoz notes that, “For the first time in many decades the State is back in Latin America.” CEPR research has shown that there is a relationship between moving away from the Washington Consensus and reducing inequality. Juan Montecino, using econometric techniques to look at the data, determined that left-of-center governments have on average decreased inequality more than their counterparts.
As Colombian government and FARC negotiators head to Norway to begin peace talks, a judge in Colombia ordered the return of some 160 acres of land to 14 families in the country’s first land restitution ruling. President Santos enacted the Victims and Land Restitution law last year, yet since then progress has stagnated and violence against those seeking restitution has continued. The issue of land reform is one of the main demands being sought by the FARC in peace negotiations.
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