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By Kelly Hearn, The Christian Science Monitor, April 9 2008
On a chaotic street in this sweltering jungle town, Emergildo Criollo spent several days near the entrance to a courthouse
that looks more like a run-down mall.
He was, he says, "vigilando" – watching.
"We waited to know the moment he arrived," says the middle-aged indigenous man who was raised in this oil-rich Amazonian rain
forest near Ecuador's northern border with Colombia.
The man Mr. Criollo and his friends were waiting for is Richard Cabrera, a court-appointed expert who last week poured fuel
on an epic environmental lawsuit filed by Ecuadorean indigenous groups against US-based Chevron-Texaco.
Mr.
Cabrera, an Ecuadorean geological engineer, recommended to an
Ecuadorean judge last Tuesday that Chevron pay $8 billion to $16
billion for environmental damages if the company loses a bitterly
contested case that started in 1993 with a lawsuit in New York courts,
which ruled that the case should be tried in Ecuador.
The Ecuadorean case, which Chevron has
repeatedly rejected as flawed, is one of the largest environmental
suits against an oil company and could raise the political risks for
multinationals extracting resources from similar remote and pristine
regions.
"The litigation is terribly important," says
Professor Robert Benson, law professor emeritus at Loyola Law School in
Los Angeles. "If Chevron loses the case there, certainly a historic
precedent will be set putting oil companies on notice."
Read more.
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