Vanity Fair Celebrates Pablo Fajardo

Posted May 2nd, 2007 by Anonymous
in

May 3, 2007

Dear Friends,

ELAW partner Pablo Fajardo on the Aguarico River with a villager from Secoya
ELAW partner Pablo Fajardo on the Aguarico River with a villager from Secoya.

This month`s "Green Issue" of Vanity Fair includes an excellent investigative report on the work of Pablo Fajardo, an ELAW partner working to hold oil companies accountable for decades of polluting activities in the Ecuadorean Amazon.

Jungle Law by William Langewiesche

Pablo embodies the spirit of hundreds of ELAW partners around the world. We are inspired by Pablo’s commitment to justice for disadvantaged communities in Ecuador, and thank Vanity Fair for getting the word out about this decades-long struggle. I paste below a compelling excerpt from the Vanity Fair report.

Thank you for your interest!

Sincerely,

Bern Johnson
Executive Director
Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide

Langewiesche writes: “If Chevron can convince the court of the validity of even a few of those points, it will win the case and leave town. Given the resources that Chevron has brought to bear, it seemed for a while that this indeed would happen—and for various reasons it may yet. But over the past two years there has been a change that, metaphorically, looks something like an inversion of Tiananmen Square, in which a lone man stands resolutely in front of a maneuvering tank, not to hold it off but to keep it from escaping. In Lago Agrio that lone man is a mestizo named Pablo Fajardo, aged 34, who was born into extreme poverty and toiled for years as a manual laborer in the forest and oil fields, yet managed by force of intellect to complete his secondary education in night school, and through a correspondence course to earn a degree in law. He became a lawyer only three years ago, in 2004, yet has assumed the lead in the suit against Chevron in this, his very first trial. Chevron is represented by lawyers from Ecuador`s ruling class, an oligarchy whose women fondly sing "Y Viva España" at Quito garden parties. They may have assumed that they could run Fajardo over. No one makes that assumption now.”