Ecuador court rules pollution violates rights of a river running through capital, Ruling, based on constitutional rights for natural features like Quito’s Machángara River, appealed by government by Associated Press in Quito, 7 Jul 2024, The Guardian
A ruling described by activists as “historic,” a court in Ecuador has ruled that pollution has violated the rights of a river that runs through the country’s capital, Quito.
The city government appealed the ruling, which is based on an article of Ecuador’s constitution that recognizes the rights of natural features like the Machángara River.
“This is historic because the river runs right through Quito, and because of its influence, people live very close to it,” said Darío Iza, whose group Kitu Kara filed the complaint on behalf of the river.
Thank you!
The court ruled that while appeals proceed, the government will have to come up with a plan to clean up the Machángara.Courageous court!
The city of 2.6 million people dumps all sorts of effluents and contaminants into the Machángara, which starts high in the Andes mountains. But by the time it runs through Quito, it encounters problems such as a near-total lack of treatment of the waste water that is dumped into it.
“The river carries away tons of garbage that comes down from gullies and hillsides,” according to the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature.Humans do not deserve life on this planet; the sooner our species wipes itself out, the better (before we take all life and water with us in our ravenous filthy lawyering greed and idiocy.
The river has average levels of 2% oxygen, which makes it difficult for aquatic life to thrive.
In some parts of Latin America and North America, inhabitants have constitutional rights to a clean environment, but Ecuador is one of the few countries that recognize the rights of natural features not to be degraded or polluted.
And yet, look what Encana (now Ovintiv) and the company’s Chief Officer of Pollution and Human Rights Abuses, Gwyn Morgan, got away with in Ecuador where they pulled incredibly nasty criminal shit. I highly recommend this film.
Between Midnight and the Rooster’s Crow Trailer:
Rent the film online for $3.99
In the aggressive search for the ‘black gold’ that drives Western economies, multinational corporations are working to extract billions of dollars of oil reserves from beneath Ecuador’s rainforest. This film investigates the operations of the EnCana Corporation, a firm that, despite proud public declarations of its social responsibility, is shown to be answerable for widespread environmental contamination and human rights violations.
Nadja Drost, Canada, 2005,
All proceeds generated from the streaming of this video are split between the artists/rights holder and Cinema Politica
Between Midnight and the Rooster’s Crow
Directed by Nadja Drost
66 minutes / Color
Release: 2005
Copyright: 2005
In the aggressive search for the ‘black gold’ that drives Western economies, multinational corporations are working to extract billions of dollars of oil reserves from beneath Ecuador’s rainforest. BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND THE ROOSTER’S CROW investigates the operations of the EnCana Corporation, a firm that, despite proud public declarations of its social responsibility, is shown to be answerable for widespread environmental contamination and human rights violations.
BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND THE ROOSTER’S CROW focuses on EnCana’s development of a heavy crude oil pipeline from the Amazon across the earthquake-prone Andes to the Pacific coast for export. Since oil exploitation represents a solution for Ecuador’s economic crisis, the government has gone out of its way to facilitate EnCana’s plans, disregarding protests about property destruction and contamination. The government has even lauded EnCana for its supposed responsibility (the film’s title refers to a government decision to present EnCana with an environmental award).
Filmmaker Nadja Drost follows the cross-country route of the pipeline, along the way interviewing farmers, indigenous community representatives, environmental activists and others, who recount forced relocation, imprisonment, and intimidation, including shootings and beatings by the Ecuadorian police and army who protect EnCana’s pipeline.
Avoiding government and corporate security agents, Drost documents unsafe construction, toxic waste, and contamination of rivers, as well as the affects on Ecuadorians (skin cancer, miscarriages and birth defects) and the destruction of wildlife and natural preserves. Occasionally dredging up a lump of foul-smelling crude on the end of a stick, the filmmaker here becomes, literally, a muck-raking journalist.
We also see Drost presenting evidence of corporate misdeeds to Ecuadorian government bureaucrats, and confronting EnCana’s CEO at a stockholders’ meeting.
Ultimately, BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND THE ROOSTER’S CROW is a revealing case study of the troubling connections between multinational corporations, insatiable Western consumption patterns, and the resultant devastation wrought on the social, economic, and environmental conditions of foreign countries and populations.
