Sending out an S.O.S.
felix
I left my native Ecuador in 1989, to pursue my college education in Southern California. What little I knew back then about my country’s indigenous communities had been filtered through the prism of hundreds of years of colonialism and one of its most insidious aftermaths, a national inferiority complex. In Joe Berlinger’s documentary Crude, indigenous people from the Ecuadorean Amazon are the protagonists of the largest class action suit against corporate power: 30,000 rain forest inhabitants banding together against U.S. oil company Chevron in a lawsuit that has yet to be decided.
Among the charges against Chevron are three decades of toxic contamination of the region and, most devastatingly, its water. Expert testimony from Chevron’s investigators claimed with certainty that there was no evidence of contamination. That 15 out of 20 newborns would develop skin rashes, the corporation attributed not to oil spillage seeping into the region’s rivers, but rather to poor sanitation.
Characters in the film kept framing this case as “David versus Goliath.” To me, it was more resonant to witness the continuous resistance of indigenous people against their decimation. Thus, the film loses steam once Trudie Styler and Sting make cameos in support of the plaintiffs. The focus temporarily shifts to the celebrities instead of the victim/heroes whose quality of life has been severely compromised.
Even among the current wave of eco-themed documentaries, Crude’s depiction of this epic tale is impressive. The case will be setting precedent for potential other such cases worldwide and will be decided any minute now.
No Comments
|
| Posted on March 3, 2010
Comments