Irene León on the project of Buen Vivir as a challenge to corporate transnationalism

Abstract

The following conversation took place in October 2015, in Toronto, succeeding an event at Beit Zatoun, a community space open to dialogs that address current political and cultural issues from a framework of social justice and human rights. An Ecuadorian based author, journalist and political activist, Irene León held at the time an advisory position for the Ecuadorian Minister of Foreign Affairs on issues of strategic and transnational interest. Her work was mainly centered on the legal-juridical matters that surrounded the Chevron versus Ecuador legal case. In Ecuador, the Texaco/Chevron oil exploitation between 1964 and 1990 contaminated the Amazonian rainforest, polluted the drinking water and negatively affected the local agriculture. Chevron was sentenced in 2011, by an Ecuadorian court, to pay damages totalling 9.5 billion dollars to the affected Indigenous communities. However the company liquidated all its assets in Ecuador, and the judgment could not be enforced. The Chevron – Ecuadorian plaintiffs litigation issue ended up being disputed in Canada, where the Supreme Court has unanimously voted (in September 2015) that Ecuador’s Indigenous communities have the right to pursue the judgment at the Ontario Court of Appeal. Chevron also filed, in 2009, an international plea against Ecuador, at The Hague, for private arbitration. Irene León was invited by the Anti-Chevron Canada (a grassroots group), to talk about the case, and to broadly contextualize it within the topic of transnational corporate responsibility. The day after her talk at Beit Zaton, Irene León continued the discussion. She spoke about the ideological shift brought forward by the transnational capital interests and practices, about the alternative efforts carried out in Latin America to resist the intrusions of multinational corporations, and about developing unorthodox relationships of exchange that would steer away from the ‘market’ and would organize different ways of economic (re) production. Latin America has been long involved in a political project of ideological change. We can only think of the Pink Tide movements that started in the 1990s, which included working class and Indigenous campaigns against neoliberalism and against American imperialism, while simultaneously promoting anti-capitalist structural reforms, particularly against the IMF, privatization and social restructuring (Prashad, 2013). By now, many South American nations have elected governments from the left side of the political spectrum (Prashad, 2013): Brazil (2002), Argentina (2003), Uruguay (2004), Bolivia (2006), Chile (2006), Ecuador