Ecuador: National Organization for Women under fire from Indigenous groups for accepting money from Chevron

NEW YORK, N.Y., Oct. 17 /CSRwire/ – The legal arm of the National Organization for Woman (“NOW”) is under attack from rainforest indigenous villagers and their allies for accepting a large donation from Chevron and then filing a legal brief in favor of the oil company in its campaign to evade an Ecuador court judgment ordering it to clean up extensive oil contamination in the Amazon.

The NOW legal group never disclosed its financial ties to Chevron in the “friend of the court” brief filed recently before the United States Court of Appeals in New York, raising ethical concerns and infuriating women in Ecuador who have battled for two decades to hold Chevron accountable for dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste onto their ancestral lands.

“This is a very disturbing example of how NOW’s legal advocates are both deceiving courts and openly betraying the women of Ecuador who have suffered hugely at the hands of Chevron,” said Mariana Jimenez, a resident of Lago Agrio, a small town in the rainforest that served as the headquarters of Chevron’s operations in the country from 1964 to 1992. Read Article