میرا نقطہ نظر

[emanParticipant]

PROLOGUE:

The writer also described the beauty of the Quito, Ecuador’s capital. He described volcanic valley, surrounding peaks, a beauty of the roads. He said that to journey from one city to the other, you must travel a road that is both tortuous and breathtaking. You experience all four seasons in a single day. The writer told that although he has driven this road many times, he never tire of the spectacular scenery, Sheer cliffs, punctuated by cascading waterfalls and brilliant bromeliads rise up one side. On the other side, the earth drops abruptly into a deep abyss where the Pastaza River, a headwater of the Amazon, snakes its way down the Andes. The Pastaza carries water from the glaciers of Cotopaxi, one of the world’s highest active volcanoes and a deity in the time of the Incas, to the Atlantic Ocean over three thousand miles away.

In 2003, he departed Quito in a Subaru Outback and headed for Shell on a mission that was like no other he had ever accepted. He was hoping to end a war he had helped to create. He was on his way to determine the tribes to prevent oil companies from destroying their homes, families, and lands. For them, this is a war about the survival of their children and cultures, while for us it is about power, money, and natural resources. It is one part of the struggle for world domination and the dream of a few greedy men, global empire.

EHMs are an elite group of men and women who utilize international financial organizations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to running biggest corporations, government, and banks. Like our counterparts in the Mafia, EHMs provide favors. These take the form of loans to develop infrastructure — electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports, or industrial parks. A condition of such loans is that engineering and construction companies from their own country must build all these projects. Despite the fact that the money is returned almost immediately to corporations that are members of the corporatocracy (the creditor), the recipient country is required to pay it all back, principal plus interest. If an EHM is completely successful, the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia they demand their pound of flesh. Of course, the debtor still owes us the money — and another country is added to our global empire.

In 1968, Texaco had only just discovered petroleum in Ecuador’s Amazon region. Now oil accounts for nearly half the country’s exports. After a few time, three hundred-mile pipelines constructed by an EHM – organized consortium promises to make Ecuador one of the world’s top ten suppliers of oil to the United States. Vast areas of rain forest have fallen, macaws and Jaguars have all but vanished, three Ecuadorian indigenous cultures have been driven to the verge of collapse, and pristine rivers have been transformed into flaming cesspools.

The suit asserts that between 1971 and 1992 the oil giant dumped into open holes and rivers over four million gallons per day of toxic wastewater contaminated with oil, heavy metals, and carcinogens and that the company left behind nearly 350 uncovered waste pits that continue to kill both people and animals. Knowing the part he had played in destroying this beautiful country was once again taking its toll. Because of his fellow EHMs and he, Ecuador is in far worse. Since 1970, during this period known euphemistically as the Oil Boom, the official poverty level grew from 50 to 70 percent, under- or unemployment increased from 15 to 70 percent, and public debt increased from $240 million to $16 billion. Third world debt has grown to more than S2.5 trillion, and the cost of servicing it — over $375 billion per year as of 2004 — is more than all third world spending on health and education, and twenty times what developing countries receive annually in foreign aid. Over half the people in the world survive on less than two dollars per day, which is roughly the same amount they received in early 1970, it as a symbol of EHM accomplishments.

Because of EHM projects, Ecuador is awash in foreign debt and must devote an inordinate share of its national budget to paying this off, instead of using its capital to help the millions of its citizens officially classified as dangerously impoverished. The only way Ecuador can buy down its foreign obligations is by selling its rain forests to the oil companies. Indeed, one of the reasons the EHMs set their sights on Ecuador in the first place was because the sea of oil beneath its Amazon region is believed to rival the oil fields of the Middle East. The global empire demands its pound of flesh in the form of oil concessions. These demands became especially urgent after September 11, 2001, when Washington feared that Middle Eastern supplies might cease.

The EHMs had failed in Iraq and Venezuela, but they had succeeded in Ecuador. All of those people — millions in Ecuador, billions around the planet —are potential terrorists. Not because they believe in communism or anarchism or are intrinsically evil, but simply because they are desperate.

0

0

[Author]

Posts