You Won't Believe What Julie Christie Did to Ecuadorians over Oil: Watch Afectados Here

By Deborah Dupré

America’s Chevron Oil Company attacked The Afectados filmmakers Wednesday for their new short documentary, featuring actor Julie Christie reading a famous Pablo Neruda poem as it relates to the oil giant’s catastrophic human rights abuses of the Amazon’s Ecuadorians. Christie has stood firm, asserting that the fossil fuel transnational has violated rights of now impoverished indigenous people for 65 years. Chevron says the filmmakers ignored in their movie the country’s state oil producer pollution.

“I find it both striking and distressing that in 2015, a poem written by Pablo Neruda in 1950 can still be a fitting statement on the relationship between a transnational company and poor, indigenous Latin Americans,” said Christie in an interview with The Guardian.

Through interwoven powerful interviews with Ecuadorian villagers, poetry recitation by Christie, and rich Amazon rainforest flora and fauna imagery, The Afectados filmmakers capture the story before and after Chevron. The film, available to view in full below on this page, highlights that until Texaco arrived, indigenous inhabitants of the pristine Amazon rainforest lived healthy traditional lifestyles, largely untouched by modern civilization.

The Amazon’s pristine forests and rivers provided all the indigenous people knew, a physical and cultural subsistence base for daily survival. Those people negatively affected by the fossil fuel industry, “afectados,” had little idea what to expect or how to prepare when oil workers moved into their backyard and founded the town of Lago Agrio. The town is named after Texaco’s birthplace of Sour Lake, Texas.

“Now, all we have left is contamination,” says one village afectados.

Rainforest Chernobyl: 18bn gallons toxic waste dumped on Ecuadorian Afectados

The Afectados short film documents the 22-year-long series of legal fights in US, European and Latin American courts over US oil company Texaco, now Chevron, deliberately dumping 18bn gallons of toxic waste water and crude oil into the forest near Lago Agrio between 1964 and 1992. A year ago, Chevron’s “friendly New York judge ruled against Ecuadorians, in favor of the oil giant. This ongoing human rights abuse has killed and continues killing indigenous Ecuadorians with new environmental diseases, mainly cancer. The catastrophe has been called Rainforest Chernobyl. The only commentary in the short is Christie reciting Neruda’s 42-line poem and “afectados” telling their story.

“The film uses the Neruda poem to give a historical context to the relationship between foreign corporations and indigenous and other local peoples,” the Guardian reports. “The poem by the Chilean Nobel literature prizewinner, called United Fruit Company, suggests that US corporations treated the Latin American countries as empty ‘banana republics.’”

“Despite much legal chicanery across many years and in many territories, the real people at the heart of this story and the precious Amazon environment that was so badly impacted by what was an astounding level of pollution are both still neglected,” Christie asserted.

Alejandro Soto, an Ecuadorian interviewee in the film says, “Chevron is a company with a lot of economic power and they think they are God on Earth.”

Pablo Neruda, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, was the pen name and later legal name for Chilean poet-diplomat and politician Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. Neruda’s poem concludes:

“Meanwhile Indians are falling into the sugared chasms of the harbours, wrapped for burials in the midst of the dawn… a body rolls, a thing that has no name, a fallen cypher, a cluster of the dead fruit thrown on the dump”.

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