"(Chevron) always show(s) you the shirt the coat and the tie. They never show you the tumor underneath the shirt."Miami Herald reporter Jim Wyss has caught Chevron in yet another lie about its so-called “remediation” agreement. Wyss toured one of the oil well sites, Sascha 53, that Chevron told both U.S. and Ecuadorian courts had been cleaned.
He described what he saw after a man with him dug just a few inches below the ground in today’s Miami Herald article:
“Within a few inches the dirt gives off the pungent odor of petroleum. Within a few feet the dirt glistens with oil residue. When a few handfuls of the soil are dropped into a bucket of water, a thick oil-slick coats the surface.”Chevron claims it is not guilty of the contamination in Ecuador because the remediation agreement between Chevron and the Ecuadorian government releases it from any responsibility. However, scientific tests have proven that Chevron has never cleaned up the oil sites mentioned in the agreement.
Today the Amazon Defense Coalition released this press release that argues the reporter’s eye-witness account of the contamination is further evidence that Chevron has lied to U.S. Judge Lewis Kaplan who has, by and large, accepted Chevron’s statement that it remediated a small percentage of the oil sites.
The only response Chevron’s spokesperson could come up with was accusing Ecuadorians of “spiking” the ground with oil themselves.
Wyss quoted Donald Moncayo, a representative of the Ecuadorians, saying:
"They (Chevron) always show you the shirt the coat and the tie," he said of the area, called Sacha 53, which is now pastureland and spindly trees. "They never show you the tumor underneath the shirt."
"This is their remediation effort," Moncayo says. "They're no better than animals."Exactly.