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“Go Make Camps Deeper in the Forest.” How the Amazon’s Indigenous People are Handling the Threat of the Coronavirus- Time

A small group of young Waorani men step out of the tiny patch of secondary forest that abuts their precarious settlement here on the outskirts of Shell, a military town named after the oil company in Ecuador’s southern Amazon. The men carry a 20-foot wooden pole and wear enormous grins. “Now we can let our people know that the plague is coming and they should go make camps deeper in the forest,” they shout to me from afar, following up with the classic Waorani hoot: “queeeuuuuu, queeeuuuu, queeeuuuuu” (which means, essentially, “we’re alive, we’re badass, and we’re happy!”).

Within an hour, they had rigged an antenna to the pole and hooked up an old HF radio, tuning into the static-laden frequency that connects dozens of Waorani communities across their 2.5 million-acre rainforest territory. It was 4pm on March 17th, just two days after the Ecuadorian government had decreed a national shutdown, which included road closures, a shelter-in-place order, and a 2pm curfew. At that time, there had only been two confirmed cases of Coronavirus in Ecuador’s southern Amazon, yet the rising number of cases in the booming coastal port town of Guayaquil had led to nationwide quarantine measures.

To read the full article on Time, click here.

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#Factsmatter: An international arbitration panel found ‘no cogent evidence’ supporting #Ecuador’s claim that #Texaco failed to comply with terms of remediation in #Amazon. https://t.co/7TqQ6sJhik
The @WSJ sums this case up nicely, “[Steven Donziger] and his team fabricated evidence, promised $500,000 to an #Ecuadorean judge to rule in their favor, ghostwrote much of the final verdict and took other actions that ‘perverted’ the course of #justice. Mr. Donziger disputes the… https://t.co/soQ1qreULA
Shameless. Disbarred and convicted of criminal contempt of court for bribing an Ecuadorian judge in an attempted extortion scheme, @SDonziger is nonetheless accepting invitations to speak at #climate rallies. Read more about this adjudicated racketeer: https://t.co/5eac0lRmN7
Sworn testimony: While Texaco met its environmental obligations in the Amazon, #Ecuador’s national oil company did “absolutely nothing” to address its own remediation in the area. #FactsMatter:
https://t.co/7TqQ6sJhik
DENIED: @SCOTUS rejects hearing case of Steven Donziger, who bribed Ecuadorian judge in failed effort to bilk Chevron for billions of dollars. https://t.co/zT0dlozk5R

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