Bryant-15+quotes

Ecuador Constitution Grants Rights to Nature
1)News accounts of Ecuador’s vote on Sunday approving a new Constitution mainly focused on how its terms could help the country’s leftist leader, Rafael Correa, an American-educated economist, gain and hold more power.

2)“has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”

3)"The language in these provisions was written by Ecuador’s Constitutional Assembly with input from the [|Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund], a Pennsylvania-based group providing legal assistance to governments and community groups trying to mesh human affairs and the environment."

4)"Simon Romero, my colleague covering the news, told me in e-mail Sunday night that this particular provision “has been derided within Ecuador” given the history of pollution from state-run and private oil companies in the Amazon and the government’s need to keep oil flowing to sustain the economy."

=In Ecuador's Banana Fields, Child Labor Is Key to Profits=

5)"The modern 3,000-acre hacienda in this steamy corner of Ecuador, one of the most efficient in Latin America, employs some 1,300 workers to tend banana plants fed by a state-of-the-art irrigation system."

6)" a dozen children and many adults spoke of child laborers at Los Álamos, among them a spindly-armed 10-year-old, Esteban Menéndez. I come here after school and I work here all day, Esteban said. I have to work to help my father, to help him make money.

7)They fired all the children, but the work they did helped us, complained María Narváez, 31, whose two sons, Néstor and Luis Boa, 12 and 13, were dismissed from a big hacienda where they earned $3 a day. The situation is such that we all have to pitch in.

8)That is the life of my sons, working in the bananas at such a young age, said Esteban's mother, Benita Menéndez, 36, who has had three sons working at Mr. Noboa's plantation, only one of them an adult. I did not want them to work when they were little, but this is the reality. =Ecuador's Top Banana=

9)Gutiérrez campaigned on a populist platform, promising cheap health care and housing for the poor, though he took time from the campaign trail to visit the United States, where he assured international investors he planned no radical moves if elected.

10)"focus on reducing corruption, dismantle monopolies to lure more capital and seek greater foreign investment in the electricity and oil sectors."

11)He also plans to boost tourism, mining, and agriculture to reduce Ecuador's dependence on oil. =**[[http://archives.newyorker.com/?i ** =
 * 1941-04-12#folio=042| “THE HEAD-HUNTERS OF THE QUITO HILLS,”]] **= 12)Ecuador where visitors are offered to buy shrunken heads at every turn. A day in Guayanquil, luncheon with the head of the Department of Immigration and the experience of lighting a cigarette with Ecuadorian matches. Trip to Quito. A visiting diplomat told about head-shrinking. Though he had never witnessed the actual shrinking of a head he described the process in detail. He also took author to visit a manufacturer of fake shrunken heads. They are made of goat skin, stretched over a clay figure

=CORRECTIONS=

13)Ecuador's government declared the International Monetary Fund's representative in that country "persona non grata." The designation was leveled against the World Bank representative. Ecuador's government asked the IMF representative to leave the premises of the Central Bank, where the fund's office was located. The fund says its financial problems contributed to its decision to leave Ecuador.

**Ecuador's oil pollution fears**
14) "At one point the pipeline has to go over a ridge that is only 80 centimetres wide, and that is just impossible," he said. "This is also an area of much seismic activity and we are only a few kilometres from two active volcanoes."

15) Activists say that more oil has leaked into the ground as a result of accidents, incompetence or sheer indifference in the 30 years since oil exploitation began in Ecuador, than was spilled in the Exxon Valdez super tanker disaster off Alaska in 1989.