Indigenous Amazon community files lawsuit against Chinese oil company
By Bhavya Singh| Published: 12th December 2020 2:12 pm IST
Leaders of the Waorani village filed a lawsuit in a court in Francisco de Orellena.
The community is objecting to the process of gas flaring where oil producers burn off millions of cubic metres of natural gas produced from oil wells. The community says that the process is contaminating their land and water sources.
“[The oil companies] say that we want oil. But we don’t want that. What we want is them to pay for the flaring,” Juana Mintare, a Waorani woman told AFP.
Amazon community files lawsuit against Chinese firm over gas flaring
Listen | Print By Diego SÁNCHEZ (AFP) Dec 10, 2020 in Environment
Indigenous Waorani from Ecuador s Amazon filed a lawsuit Thursday against state-owned Chinese oil company PetroOriental, accusing it of contaminating their ancestral lands by burning off natural gas from oil wells in a process known as flaring.
Leaders of the Waorani village of Miwaguno went to a court in Francisco de Orellana, the main town of Orellana province east of Quito, to file the lawsuit as victims. We have seen our way of life altered forever, the community stated in the complaint. Our very survival is threatened as a result of climate change.