The reason industry can get away with this has little to do with what is legal and everything to do with raw political power: isolated, often impoverished Indigenous peoples generally lack the monetary resources and social clout to enforce their rights, and anyway, the police are controlled by the state. Moreover the costs of taking on multinational extractive companies in court are enormous. For instance in the landmark “Rainforest Chernobyl” case in which Ecuador’s highest court ordered Chevron to pay $9.5 billion in damages, a company spokesman famously said: “We’re going to fight this
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