From The Boston Globe, with a reviewer who strikes a tone we hadn’t see in the other reviews of the anti-Chevron movie, a world-weary cynicism. The inaccuracies are still the same, though.
From “An ecological disaster meets a media circus“:
In “Crude,’’ the anger onscreen spreads as slowly and inexorably as toxic sludge. The documentary follows a pending class-action lawsuit filed by 30,000 Amazon tribespeople against the US petro-giant Chevron for contaminating an area of land the size of Rhode Island.
But it’s not a class-action suit and it wasn’t filed by 30,000 Amazon tribespeople.
Even the Amazon Defense Coalition’s PR person, Karen Hinton, eventually admitted this basic fact — a basic fact that the Globe gets wrong.
Gee, if the reviewer starts off with a glaring error, wonder what else in wrong in the piece?
P.S. Today is the movie’s last day in Washington, D.C. It had a two-week run at the E Street Cinema, which the producers must regard as a success.
December 16th, 2009 on 4:12 pm
Oh brother. Who cares if Ecuador is a nation of laws?
So how many critical comments you allow on the Amazon Watch blogs there?
December 16th, 2009 on 3:59 pm
As usual, Mr. Wood zeroes in on technicalities about the case to argue that the plaintiffs and their supporters are guilty of distortion, while studiously avoiding addressing the real issue at hand: that Texaco (now Chevron) made a colossal mess of the Ecuadorian Amazon between 1964 and 1990.
Who cares if it’s technically called a class-action suit according to Ecuadorian law? Ecuador doesn’t have a mechanism for a lawsuit to be filed that names 30,000 people as plaintiffs, unfortunately… but the bottom line is if you go to the affected region in Ecuador and ask people in the communities whether they see themselves as represented by the lawsuit, they’ll generally say yes. This lawsuit originated with the communities affected by Chevron’s pollution, not with scheming lawyers as you seem to think.
Carter, I wrote recently about you and the obfuscation-based style of argument you seem so fond of. You and your readers might be interested: http://bit.ly/5pyDOe
November 5th, 2009 on 7:22 pm
You keep insisting that this is not a class action suit, as if just by force of repetition you could make that true. But it is a class action suit, and you have to know that by now. Even the comment that you link to by the ADC’s spokesperson says the opposite of what you’re pretending that it says, since all she does is explain that it’s called something different in Ecuador but it’s the same thing (they don’t speak English down there, you know).