Of all of the myriad twists and turns of the 22-year-long struggle to win legal compensation from Chevron for despoliation of large swathes of Ecuador’s Amazon, perhaps the strangest is the personal appeal by President Rafael Correa to the Hollywood actor Brad Pitt not to make a film out of a book which details the colossal fraud perpetrated by the lawyer representing Ecuador’s indigenous communities and peasants to extract a multi-billion dollar payout from the US oil giant. Correa, who invited Pitt to the Amazon to see for himself the environmental damage caused between 1964 and 1992 by Texaco (acquired by Chevron in 2001), argues that the book provides a skewed version of events because it focuses on the legal fraud which led to Chevron being fined US$8.6bn in November 2013 rather than the plight of the indigenous who suffered from Texaco’s gross negligence. End of preview - This article contains approximately 942 words.
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