Ecuador: 2008 Interview in English with President Rafael Correa

INTERVIEW WITH PRESIDENT RAFAEL CORREA IN 2008 DISCUSSING THE CHEVRON LAWSUIT AND OTHER ISSUES IN ECUADOR
INTERVIEW BEGINS AT 47.52 IN THE VIDEO

GOING TO MOVE OR VISIT ECUADOR – READ THIS BOOK

democracynow.org reported …. play highlights of an exclusive interview with Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa. In a wide-ranging conversation with journalist Greg Palast, President Correa talks about the $12 billion lawsuit against Chevron, ending his country’s debt, and his relationship with the United States and Venezuela. [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Ecuador, where the government, led by President Rafael Correa, has announced that on February 1st it’s revoking as many as 587 concessions for transnational mining corporations. Over the past year, President Correa has called for renegotiating Ecuador’s debt, opposed a free trade pact with the US, set up a constitutional assembly. As finance minister in 2006, he helped Ecuador’s contract with US oil giant Occidental. Since being elected president, he has also pledged to shut down the sole U.S. military base in South America. Last year, Ecuador’s Cofan Indians filed a $12 billion lawsuit against oil giant Chevron for environmental and social destruction in the Amazon.

Today, we bring you an excerpt of an exclusive interview with Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, who talks about the lawsuit against Chevron with Greg Palast, who does his pieces for the BBC and Democracy Now!

GREG PALAST: But let me ask you, there’s a massive multibillion-dollar lawsuit against ChevronTexaco for supposedly destroying your rainforest. What if every little nation on the planet decided to sue oil companies for billions? Wouldn’t that disrupt oil production worldwide?

PRESIDENT RAFAEL CORREA: Well, with these lawsuits, well, they don’t go to interrupt the oil production in the third world. They go to push these big international companies in order to be a lot more careful when they want to extract our oil, because they did and they do in the third world things that they don’t do in the first world. So it’s a double standard that they have. Read Transcript of Interview