Yesterday in one of the comments to Eric’s post, Fe Bongolan brought to our attention a story on The Daily Kos about protests at a Chevron shareholder meeting leading to the new CEO’s loss of control of the meeting (his first as CEO) and arrests. According to to an Amazon Watch press release quoted in the Daily Kos story, 27 protesters held legal proxies to vote in the meeting, but only seven were allowed in. They were there specifically to vote on a resolution regarding an Ecuadorian oil spill court case and protest Chevron’s practices.
In an interview today on Democracy Now!, Antonia Juhasz, one of the five protesters arrested at the meeting and the director of Global Exchange’s Chevron Program, stated that shareholders traveled to Chevron’s Houston, TX headquarters (in the former Enron building, no less) from far-flung communities suffering environmental and human rights abuses at the hands of Chevron. The protesting shareholders’ homelands include Nigeria, Angola, Ecuador, Burma, the Phillippines, Australia, Kazakhstan and more domestically, Alaska and California.
Juhasz described her arrest to Amy Goodman: