Word: burma
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Texaco has long been a leader in corporate exploitation and environmental devastation, especially in developing countries such as Ecuador and Burma. Although its practices have little effect on Americans except to lower the price at the pump, any responsible citizen of the world should be out-raged at the company's reprehensible outward behavior as well as the racism within...
Although it has sold most of its interests in Ecuador, Texaco has not been content to leave the developing world alone. In 1991 it became the lead operator in a multinational consortium of oil companies searching for natural gas off the coast of Burma...
...Burma, a country of about 45 million between Thailand and India in southeast Asia, has been under military rule for the past 34 years. The present military junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), killed an estimated 10,000 nonviolent democracy demonstrators when it came to power in 1988. The SLORC has been repeatedly condemned by the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Australia for its rampant human rights abuses and is widely considered one of the most oppressive regimes in the world...
Texaco has drilled several exploration wells in Burma's Gulf of Martaban and is planning a pipeline project to transport natural gas from the gulf across Burma into Thailand. Other oil companies--Unocal and the French company Total--are currently constructing a pipeline in the same area, and although Texaco will probably construct a new pipeline, it will run a similar route and use much of the infrastructure of the Total-Unocal project...
Much like the Ecuadorian Amazon, the area of Burma across which the pipelines cut is biologically rich and home to many disenfranchised ethnic minority groups. The Tenasserim rain forest is the largest intact rain forest in southeast Asia, home to such endangered species as the white rhinoceros and the tiger. Texaco's track record in Ecuador demonstrates that the corporation is not likely to be a good environmental steward; no independent environmental impact assessments have been conducted in the pipeline region...