First Chapter: Vampire of Macondo by Deborah Dupre

Title of Book: VAMPIRE OF MACONDO
Genre: Nonfiction
Author: Deborah Dupre
Website: www.deborahdupre.com
Publisher: Duprevent Publishing

PURCHASE VAMPIRE OF MACONDO HERE

SUMMARY:

The untold story of psychopathic genocide of Americans by the petrochemical military industrial complex, of how BP’s Deepwater Horizon catastrophe has sickened and killed thousands of people on the Gulf of Mexico Coast and government covered it up. Hear heart-rending cries of the victims. Read thoroughly documented evidence of crimes by Big Oil, the military, the seafood and tourism industries, health care providers, and corrupt government leaders.

FIRST CHAPTER

The Land Where Not Only Women Bleed

It’s ‘Very Scary’

“I’m having, I guess you can describe it as female problems,” the young Cajun with long, brown, curly hair and big brown eyes named Jessica Hagan said during a radio interview, hesitantly.

“They’re rampant here, but I won’t go into that,” the 13-year-old added hurriedly, embarrassed.

“Here” is a community about as far south on Louisiana land as one can travel before entering the Gulf of Mexico. The little fishing village where Jessica lives is called Grand Isle.

“Nosebleeds are pretty regular now. It’s happening a lot. Everybody,” she said. “It’s happened to me.”

Gaining confidence during her radio interview, Jessica announced, “Lots of women are having miscarriages who never had problems before.”

Jessica was unknowingly concurring with reports by women in other Gulf communities after the April 20th Deepwater Horizon explosions over Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico began the world’s largest toxic chemical catastrophe in history. She was also bringing back my own nightmarish experiences of Big Oil feeding off of me.

Heavy bleeding, embarrassment and pain had marked puberty for me, too. Through the years, that became less manageable. I’d been exposed to oil. I had not been exposed, however, to Corexit-dispersed oil, eleven times more lethal than crude alone.2 Corexit is the mixture of compounds applied in the Gulf region after the April 2010 oil gusher.

Blood streaming down my legs and onto the crowded Los Angeles airport floor combined with pain was almost unbearable that day in 1984. With my two little boys and suitcases by my side, I frantically looked around but saw no airport assistant. Simple lifting on our way back from Australia where I’d been ten years was enough for me to bleed. That, and rarely feeling great those days at age 34 made life extra challenging. I’d promised that if Mama ever needed me, I’d be back. That time had come. She was dying of cancer.

“Boys, I need you to stay right here together and not move. I’ll be right back after I go to the ladies’ room,” I reluctantly told my sons.

Bleeding for BP and other oil companies – internal hemorrhaging, miscarriages, next-of-kin dropping dead as Jessica described her village neighbors – were all too familiar to me growing up in south Louisiana’s Cancer Alley. Her account was even worse.

Born in New Orleans, when I was only three months old, my parents, brother and I moved to south Baton Rouge, a block from an oil refinery. We were in Cancer Alley, the 85-mile stretch of refineries lining the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. In 2002, Louisiana had the nation’s second-highest cancer death rate.

Fever, incredible fatigue, and often feeling like I had the flu kept me from playing with cousins we’d visit at Grandma and Grandpa’s house in New Orleans. Upon arriving there, Mama and Daddy would immediately tuck me into a couple of overstuffed armchairs in the living room where they could keep a watchful eye on me. To get there from Baton Rouge, we passed mile after mile of refineries’ thick, ominous, toxic clouds.

“We don’t know what’s wrong with her,” I remember Mama telling my grandparents. “Doctors say they can’t find anything wrong.”

A few years later, my throat hurt so much and so frequently, I missed many school days. I was due for tonsillectomy. Mama and Daddy didn’t want to subject me to the surgery due to my poor condition and missing too much school. After many earnest prayers, they cancelled the operation. At an early age, however, I knew what pleurisy was. It struck me occasionally.

Over fifty-five years later, young Jessica said on the radio, “Right after the oil started washing up on the beach, most of the kids at school were missing. Some of the classes only had four kids in them. But everyone got sick at the same time. And it was the same thing with bronchitis. That was the main thing.

“They’re still sick, but they’re just brushing it off, like maybe a cold or something like that,” she said. Attributing being poisoned to a cold or flu was happening straight across the Gulf. “But it’s worse than regular.”

“That’s how it starts,” Mark Sircus would later explain. “Chemical exposure symptoms feel like a flu.”3 2010 was a “bad year for flu” and allergies straight across the Gulf Coast.

“I’m having breathing problems,” Jessica said, as she listed ways people in her small Cajun community suffered.

Salt-of-the earth folks, who before the Gulf catastrophe rarely complained about the oil industry, urgently requested help soon thereafter. Staff at schools along the Gulf requested donations of breathing apparatus for the children. Some schools had closets cleared to fill with respirators, tubes and other makeshift breathing aids for suffering children.

While media focused on dead and threatened wildlife, they blacked out air monitoring data and human suffering showing people seriously threatened by airborne chemicals emitted by the deep- water volcano.

“Folks, this is so startling that people down there should at least be warned by this 13-year-old adult we call President of the United States of America,” Pastor Lindsey Williams told Alex Jones in a bone-chilling interview June 10, 2010.4 “The people should at least be told by this man what they’re breathing, what they’re facing, and that 2, 3, 5, 10 years from now, we are going to have deformed babies, and people with respiratory problems, and people dying.”

Williams said he’d obtained EPA test results withheld from the public. Some of the most toxic compounds spewing out of the oil volcano were airborne, inhaled by Gulf coast residents, according to those EPA tests. The volatile compounds included:

“Hydrogen sulfide: EPA safe level 5-10- parts per billion (ppb), EPA tested 1000 ppb; benzene: EPA safe level 0 – 2 parts ppb, EPA tested 3000 ppb; methylene chloride: EPA safe level 61 ppb, EPA found 3000 to 3400 ppb.”

“And the American people are not being warned they are breathing this stuff,” asserted Pastor Williams.

“EPA’s air monitoring conducted through June 12, 2010, found air quality levels for ozone and particulates are normal on the Gulf coastline for this time of year,” EPA reported. Based on award-winning analytical chemist Wilma Subra’s work, Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN) 5 released its analysis of EPA’s air monitoring test results from Venice, near Jessica’s hometown.

LEAN’s findings showed chemical levels people were breathing far exceeded state standards “safe for human exposure.”

For example, concentration threshold for people to experience physical symptoms from hydrogen sulfide is about 5 to 10 ppb. EPA had recently measured levels at 1,000 ppb. Highest levels measured at that time were on May 3 at 1,192 ppb. April 30 showed 3,084 ppb and May 2 showed 3,416 ppb.6

“It is shocking to just see the immediate symptoms just a few months after the BP oil spill and to track this into the future and to project,” former NASA scientist astronaut Dr. Brian O’Leary, now working to help alleviate oil industry human rights violations in Ecuador, told radio host. David Gibbons. “It’s very scary. We’re talking about long-term effects.”7

Scientist-philosopher with fifty years’ experience in academic research, teaching, frontier science and energy policy government service during the Apollo program, O’Leary was the first person selected for a planned Mars mission. He participated in unmanned planetary missions as an Ivy League professor. Now in Ecuador, he’s found many health problems due to oil industry contamination of the water supply and environment in general, were delayed, in some cases for decades. Today, 10,000 Ecuadorans have died due to oil-related cancer and many survivors are sick from other oil-related diseases.

“There are some people still ill and still losing children,” O’Leary said about Ecuador. “And my heart goes out to you folks on the Gulf Coast. We need to work together on this on a global level.”

“People can’t concentrate anymore,” Jessica said, again unknowingly confirming brain fog impacting many chemically poisoned Gulf Coast residents since the oilrig exploded. “People can’t concentrate on anything anymore.”

Then Jessica said that there was a lot of nausea in her community, but was unsure if “that counts.” She then said, “Nausea – even me.”

As O’Leary warned, Jessica described only the beginning of millions of Gulf region

Americans’ bloody nightmare, eerily similar to the fate of those in other oil-cursed regions that the military-backed petrochemical-industrial-complex destroyed for oil, blood of the global capitalist economy. Caught in the sophisticated militarized petrochemical Gulf Operation after Mother Earth’s heart was stabbed April 20, 2010, the operators carefully hid people’s suffering.

Most of the nation does not know about that suffering, even today, almost two years after this horror story began. There has been no human face to this ongoing atrocity. I aimed to help change that with this book.

While many Gulf victims, collateral damage of the petrochemical-military-industrial complex (PMIC), bled from all orifices, the PMIC continued gassing them, combining one of the most carcinogenic substances known, crude oil’s benzene, with lethal Corexit. Benzene is a toxin released by fossil fuel oil, lethal enough for public health concern and action even without Corexit. A colorless, flammable liquid or gas, benzene causes severe human injury, including chromosomal injury and cancer, as determined by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

Exposure to high levels of Benzene is associated with leukemic cancers: acute myelogenous leukemia, acute lymphocytic leukemia, and chronic myelogenous leukemia.11 Benzene-related leukemias have developed as early as nine months after exposure to fossil fuel, according to IARC. In the Gulf area, that none-month mark would be as early as January 2011. Using the dispersant Corexit, that makes crude oil more than eleven times as deadly,12 would mean that more people would develop cancer sooner or later.

Toxic air, water and food posed increasingly serious health risks to all people of the Gulf, particularly pregnant women, the elderly and people with health vulnerabilities, such as asthma and emphysema, as Dr. Gina Solomon, NRDC Senior Scientist had outlined and warned Louisianans and other Gulf Coast residents.

A memorable opportunity arose in the south of France during the spring of 2011. There, at Cannes Film Festival, in discussion with actor and environmentalist Peter Fonda about the suffering of both Gulf dolphins and Gulf women, I told him about young Jessica’s account of miscarriages and other reproductive health problems in her village.

“I’m glad she’s on video saying that,” Mr. Fonda told me, adding that he was proud of Jessica Hagan and all the other people speaking truth about the Gulf environmental and humanitarian catastrophe.

As the PMIC sucked blood from its Gulf prey, young and old, males and females, and gassed them all, their desperate cries were neither heard nor answered by other Americans or the government. The historic phrase that Germans used over and over again about the Nazi holocaust was tragically repeated about the land where not only women bleed: “Wir wissten nicht, es.” (“We did not know it.”)

BP’s role in the Petrochemical-Military-Industrial-Complex

“I can’t go into the sun anymore, Mama,” my daughter-in-law Becca told me. “If I go into the sun, my skin starts to burn.”

Almost two years after her encounter with Gulf poisons, Becca’s heightened photosensitivity and bed-ridden bouts continued. Exposed to sun, Gulf Plague victims’ skin begins burning and cracking. Sometimes pus-filled lesions appear. Even with no sun exposure, large purple spots appear, blood beneath the skin. Like many swampland mortals closer to the Gulf, Becca’s life had changed forever after the Day of Fire sacrifice 2010, Earth Day, the first day of violence against Mother Earth’s womb, resulting in uncontrollable bleeding into what could more aptly be called the Gulf of Blood.

The name of the Gulf prospect that exploratory oil-drilling turned into an oil volcano on Earth Day 2010, Macondo, won selection in a BP employee contest as part of an internal United Way campaign. Macondo is the fictitious cursed town in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Colombian Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

When European pioneers first arrived on the Gulf coast, they marveled at its thick jungles, overwhelming variety of wildlife, yellow canaries and wondrous array of other exquisite birds and other fauna. One pioneer wrote in his diary about shrimp as large as his open hand. Others complained of sleep deprivation caused by loud slapping and splashing of fish jumping throughout the night.

My family is deeply rooted in south Louisiana. The Duprés, De LaBarres and Chauvins settled in the region hundreds of years ago. Some arrived via Acadiana in Canada, refusing to sign the oath of allegiance to the British. Some, such as De LaBarre, on Daddy’s side, came directly from France in the late 1700s to escape the French Revolution. He bought his way onto the first New Orleans City Council, the Cabildo. In those days, becoming a city councilman required either being elected or having enough funds to buy the position, like today, albeit more transparent.

Mama was reared in New Orleans, Daddy on Grand Bayou, first on a “coteau,” an island in the swamp. Daddy traveled to school in a pirogue, not unusual back then. When my grandparent’s big, old, cypress house on the coteau burned down, his family moved to slightly higher ground and began their new sustainable life there. Life there was still paradise, so much so that my great grandfather bought a showboat and named it The Floating Paradise. It traveled Louisiana waterways many moons ago. It has since disappeared, unlike its show tunes down in those parts, same as French, Cajun and even German tunes that linger. You can still hear them down there sometimes, if you’re lucky.

After oil barons discovered oil on our bit of swampland, my folks leased it to them. The bayou we cherished would never be the same: not the fish, fauna, water, music, laughter, frog hunts or anything else that nurtures health and longevity. In less than 75 years, our paradise became uninhabitable. My very favorite homes of Papère, Aunt Lou, Uncle Howard J. and Aunt Ally – even much of the land itself – are gone. How could Louisiana sweet crude oil have ruined what we most treasured?

The answer to that is in the sordid tale that began long ago, featuring primary characters in the Gulf of Mexico Operation today: Big Oil and the U.S. military (PMIC) – its intelligence, troops and codependent contractors and subcontractors. Southerners who’d still not cottoned onto that tale’s messages were learning them the hard way, as of April 20, 2010.

“When you lose your fish, you lose your culture,” said Margaret Curole, explaining south Louisiana’s culture in the shadow of the Gulf oil volcano.15 “Your way of life starts to change; your quality of life starts to change. A fishing community and the men who fish – it’s like a continuous chain and now for the first time in five, six generations, the chain is breaking and it’s on their watch and that’s something that goes to the core of who you are as a man and the core of who you are as a community and it’s, it’s, it’s – devastating.” By this time, her voice was cracking with emotion and she struggled to maintain her composure.

The BP – U.S. military story began when British geologists discovered Iran sat on an ocean of oil. Craving this black gold, the Brits decided to steal Iran’s oil. To do so, they formed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and made a corrupt deal with Iran’s monarchy, guaranteeing itself all of Iran’s oil. The British government soon bought 51% of that oil company. At Winston Churchill’s suggestion, the British Navy switched from coal to oil. War ships projecting British power across the world were then run one hundred percent on Iranian oil.

In 1952, the Iranians decided to take back their oil. Their democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Mossadegh banished the British diplomats as well as the secret agents who’d been secretly plotting his overthrow. Prime Minister Churchill, therefore, asked President Eisenhower to overthrow Mossadegh on their behalf.

The CIA and the British soon helped stage a coup in Iran, ending Iran’s last democratic government. After Mossadegh was overthrown, he was sentenced to three years in prison and house arrest for life. The CIA deposed him and placed Mohammed Reza Shah in power. He ruled 25 years with increasing repression, finally provoking the 1979 Islamic revolution.

With fundamentalist clerics in power, the company eventually known as “BP” was forced to look elsewhere for their oil. The Gulf of Mexico was one place they found it.

Louisiana was not given white pristine beaches like those states east of it along the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, Louisiana got dead dinosaurs, fossil fuel. Millions of years later, it would also get well-armed pirates of the PMIC. In 1938, the first offshore oil discovery in the Gulf was made, the Creole Field, near Cameron, Louisiana.

Drilling then was in about twelve feet of water. Today, over 4000 oil production platforms and oil drilling rigs are off Louisiana’s coast, drilling down in as much as 5,000 feet of water.

“It’s like a steel forest out there,” stated Times-Picayune outdoor editor, Bob Marshall.

“Originally, the rigs were right off the coast, but as those fields played out, they began moving further and further as they developed the technology to have these huge drilling platforms.” Marshall has also described the cozy relationship between politicians and the oil industry.

Today, Iranian oil is again triggering a war. As usual, media portray the violence as necessary for security. Commander-in-Chief, Barack Obama, however, is leading the latest war against Iran to secure its petroleum resources.

“We have Barack Obama in the White House; a fraudster who promised ‘hope and change’ and instead led his willfully blind constituents into embracing the third term of a George W. Bush administration,” wrote journalist Tom Burghardt of Antifascist Calling.17 U.S. and NATO naval forces on high alert again threaten Iran’s free flow of oil.

As I write, Iran is ringed with military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, and American, British and Israeli submarines equipped with nuclear cruise missiles in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. Aircraft carrier battle groups are conducting provocative maneuvers. U.S. and Israeli drones routinely overfly Iran, Iranian scientists are murdered in orchestrated terror attacks, and defense installations are bombed.

Burghardt continues: “Economic sanctions, universally recognized as a prelude to war, strangle the Iranian people and their economy, all in the quixotic hope of coercing ‘regime change’ in Tehran.” America’s media is predictably spewing scare stories that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is preparing to conduct terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States. Iran has never attacked another nation, although it has sponsored terrorism on a much smaller scale than the United States.

“In effect, the Obama administration appears to be giving Israel a tacit green light for an illegal, unprovoked attack on Iran.” History is repeating itself with the PMIC aiming to topple Iran for its oil – regardless of consequences, including collateral damage.

Same old story: kill innocent foreigners – families, lovers, and children minding their own business. Difference today is that if one dare look, it’s easy to see the same illegal, unprovoked threat tactics used in full force against America’s deepest southern culture, due to the same blood thirst for oil.

— Excerpted from Chapter 1, Vampires of Macondo by Deborah Dupre

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