Mapuche, Human Rights Activists Slam Argentina’s Chevron Deal

18 July 2013 The Argen­tine government’s long-sought deal with Chevron Corp.

18 July 2013 The Argen­tine government’s long-sought deal with Chevron Corp. to exploit shale oil reserves in Patag­o­nia was strong­ly crit­i­cized Wednes­day by Mapuche Indi­ans, human rights activists, envi­ron­men­tal­ists and left­ists who called it a sell­out to the U.S. that could drain and pol­lute the nation’s resources.

The $1.5 bil­lion joint ven­ture with Chevron was made pub­lic in a brief announce­ment by the state-owned YPF oil com­pa­ny Tues­day night. Pres­i­dent Cristi­na Fer­nan­dez said the deal will pro­mote ener­gy inde­pen­dence for Argenti­na, but many of her one-time allies warned that it would do the oppo­site.

“It’s an irre­spon­si­bil­i­ty and a lack of con­scious­ness that the nation­al gov­ern­ment hands over these resources to Chevron,” said Nilo Cayuqueo, who leads a Mapuche com­mu­ni­ty in Neuquen province, where the Vaca Muer­ta shale oil basin is. “We’re talk­ing about mon­ey here, noth­ing else. They don’t talk about the envi­ron­ment, or of future gen­er­a­tions.”

Mapuch­es say the land belongs to them and con­tend they weren’t con­sult­ed about the deal in vio­la­tion of inter­na­tion­al treaties cov­er­ing indige­nous peo­ples. YPF denied that claim Tues­day.

Adol­fo Perez Esquiv­el, an Argen­tine rights activist award­ed the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980, said the deal would hurt the coun­try.

“We Argen­tines,” he said, “are giv­ing our resources to the Unit­ed States and con­vert­ing YPF into a high­ly pol­lut­ing com­pa­ny that will use this method known as frack­ing,” which requires mil­lions of gal­lons of fresh water pumped at high pres­sure to extract oil and nat­ur­al gas from oth­er­wise unpro­duc­tive wells deep under­ground in shale deposits.

Perez Esquiv­el said he would file suit demand­ing to see envi­ron­men­tal impact stud­ies and try to block the oil devel­op­ment. But he said he had lit­tle hope of suc­cess since the court sys­tem recent­ly over­turned an injunc­tion seiz­ing any Chevron prof­its in Argenti­na if the com­pa­ny didn’t pay a $19 bil­lion dam­age judg­ment won by plain­tiffs in Ecuador, where the Tex­a­co oil com­pa­ny since bought by Chevron was judged to have con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed parts of the Ama­zon.

The deal reached with Chevron is the biggest for­eign invest­ment that Argenti­na has attract­ed since expro­pri­at­ing YPF from con­trol of the Span­ish com­pa­ny Grupo Rep­sol last year. Rep­sol is demand­ing $10 bil­lion in com­pen­sa­tion and threat­ens to sue any oil com­pa­ny that takes over the wells.