Andrea Frazzetta: Black AmazonArtist Statement: The forest here seems gigantic but it is not. And mo
Andrea Frazzetta: Black AmazonArtist Statement: The forest here seems gigantic but it is not. And most of all its people are getting torn apart and impoverished. More than 70% of the Peruvian wilderness has been lotted and handed down to oil companies. Indigenous populations are opposing this grave invasion of their territory but the government insists that the invasion is below ground level so it does not concern them.In the same way just to across the border: that which, they tell us, would be Heaven on Earth, by Lake Agrio and in the rest of the Sucumbios province, in Ecuador, looks more like a hell of pipes, valves, siloses, burners and piscinas: smelly abandoned oil lakes.There are more than three hundred oil wells in Ecuador and oil related activities cover and area equal to two thirds of the Amazon Forest.For the six million Ecuadorians that live with less than two dollars a day, the promise of development never came through, and neither will it ever, since oil is a resource destined to end soon. The oil rich regions are the poorest, with the highest crime rates and an incidence of cancer three times higher than the national average.This is the story of an ancestral land for the indigenous communities, a land that has the misfortune of being green above and black below.In this Jennuary 2012, thirty thousand campesinos, both indigenous and colonos, with the support of local and international environment protection organizations, won a battle against international oil giant Texaco, inside a judiciary arena that spanned over 18 years between New York courts and Ecuadorian tribunals. It is a historic sentence that makes a clamor. Over 18 billion dollars as a refund for turning a part of the Amazon Forest into one of the “most contaminated industrial areas in the World. -- source link
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