Ecuador wants military base in Miami

Ecuador's leftist President Rafael Correa said Washington must let him open a military base in Miami if the United States wants to keep using an air base on Ecuador's Pacific coast.

Correa has refused to renew Washington's lease on the Manta air base, set to expire in 2009. U.S. officials say it is vital for counter-narcotics surveillance operations on Pacific drug-running routes.

"We'll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami -- an Ecuadorean base," Correa said in an interview during a trip to Italy.

"If there's no problem having foreign soldiers on a country's soil, surely they'll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States."

[...]

Bank of the South, championed by Venezuela, begins to take form

Seven South American countries are expected to inaugurate the new bank at a ceremony on Nov. 3 in Caracas, Venezuela's capital, where it will be based. At a meeting here last week the countries - Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela - agreed to create an institution with up to $7 billion in initial capital, paving the way for the bank to begin operating as early as 2008.

An eighth country, Colombia, said last week that it wanted to be included as well. Its president, Álvaro Uribe, said that his country would join as long as the new bank was an "expression of solidarity and brotherhood," and not a rejection of the international lending institutions.

The Bank of the South will be designed to promote investment in infrastructure and could help stimulate greater regional trade and integration. Chávez sees it as an alternative financing institution to the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund, all of which have significant Washington involvement.

Ecuador's Correa celebrates 'win'

Amazon toxic waste case may set a legal precedent

According to Amazon Watch, an environmental and human rights organisation based in San Francisco, “of 45 oil production sites inspected by court-appointed technical experts, many of which were part of an earlier remediation, several show concentrations of carcinogenic chemicals at hundreds and sometimes thousands of times higher than US norms.”
In November 1993, a class-action lawsuit on behalf of residents of the rain forest area known as ‘Oriente’ was launched in a US District Court in New York.
Although the plaintiffs wanted the case to be tried in New York, a federal appeals court in New York ruled that it should be conducted in Ecuador. But in a significant decision, the court also stated that any judgment against the oil company would be enforced in the US.
US courts will also reassert jurisdiction if Chevron refuses to co-operate with the litigation in Ecuador.
The suit charges that Texaco dumped nearly 70mn liters of toxic waste into hundreds of unlined open pits, and from there the waste seeped into estuaries and rivers thus exposing residents to carcinogenic pollutants.