Environmental Activist Forcibly Removed from Chevron-Sponsored Event in Oakland for Mocking the Company's 'News' Website

Re-posted from John Geluardi of the East Bay Express on April 16, 2014

Security guards forcibly removed Paul Paz y Miño, an employee of the environmental group Amazon Watch, from a Chevron-sponsored event today in Oakland because he was carrying flyers that he said he had planned to distribute outside the building after the program. When Paz y Miño, who had paid $75 for a ticket to the public event, refused to leave, guards forcibly removed him.

Called the “Illuminating Ideas: ENERGY & Sustainability Summit,” the economic development event was held at the Oakland Marriott. It was organized by the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and primarily sponsored by Chevron. PG&E, Bank of America, and Merrill Lynch were also sponsors. The event offered several panel discussions on green infrastructure, energy smart cities, and private and public partnerships. The keynote speaker was Jon Wellinghoff, the immediate past president of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan was also a speaker at the event.

Paz y Miño had brought along numerous copies of a handout that mocked the Richmond Standard, an online “newspaper” that is operated by Chevron’s public relations firm and covers news in the city of Richmond where Chevron operates a large refinery. The publication has been criticized for being little more than a promotional newsletter for the multinational corporation, which has been widely criticized for a refinery explosion in 2012 that sent 15,000 people to the hospital complaining of respiratory problems. Chevron later pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor criminal charges and paid $2 million in fines related to the explosion.

In the Amazon Watch version of the newspaper were stories that mocked Chevron. Under a sub banner that reads “What Oakland’s Chamber of Commerce needs to know about the tactics of its “presenting sponsor,” was a story with the headline “Chevron creates its own news outlet for a poor city that it pollutes.”

Only one woman had noticed the flyers and asked Paz y Miño for one, which he gave her. But about twenty minutes after he arrived, several security guards came up to him and asked him to leave. According to
Paz y Miño, the guards said that “Amazon Watch was not welcomed at the event.” When Paz y Miño refused to leave, three security guards physically escorted him from the building.

Paz y Miño said he was convinced Chevron was behind his ejection and was not surprised by the action. “Chevron has been out to crush free speech in relation to its policies for years and now apparently opposing views are not even allowed in the room,” Paz y Miño said. “It’s outrageous. They want to crush any kind of open discussion or debate about their actions here or anywhere in the world.”

Dan Quigley, the director of the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce issued a written statement about the incident claiming that Paz y Miño was forced to leave as a preemptive action. “We’re sorry to have asked a paying attendee to leave, and have reimbursed the cost of his ticket,” the statement read. “Previous actions by Amazon Watch in other venues and their social media messaging in advance of our conference raised out concern that this attendee (an employee of Amazon Watch) intended to be disruptive.”

Paz y Miño scoffed at the idea that he had any intention of being disruptive. “There was absolutely nothing that I did, or was there anything in our social media, that suggested Amazon Watch intended to be disruptive,” Paz y Miño said, adding that he has yet to receive reimbursement for his ticket.

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Take That Chevron: There's A First Amendment After All

Chevron took a severe punch yesterday in its home state of California when a judge there ruled to ditch the oil giant's subpoena against an environmental group that has been highly critical of the company concerning its massive contamination of the Ecuadorian rainforest. See Reuters story below.

"I must err on the side of protecting the First Amendment activity," wrote California Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins.

The subpoena request results from a Chevron lawsuit in a New York court, where the company is arguing that Amazon Watch and others, including Chevron's own shareholders, are part of a grand conspiracy to "extort" money from it by applying public pressure through protests, advocacy in front of elected officials and negative media coverage.

An Ecuador court issued an $19 billion damage award against Chevron in February 2011 and an appeals court upheld the verdict, but Chevron has refused to pay, leading the Ecuadorians to file lawsuits to seize company assets in Argentina, Canada, Brazil and the little that's left in Ecuador.

Memo to Chevron: The First Amendment is in the Bill of Rights.

Judge rejects Chevron subpoena of advocacy group in Ecuador case

SAN FRANCISCO | Wed Apr 3, 2013 7:57pm EDT
By Braden Reddall

(Reuters) - A U.S. judge has rejected efforts byChevron Corp to secure documents from a California environmental advocacy group in a fraud case related to a $19 billion award for rainforest pollution in Ecuador.

Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins on Wednesday quashed Chevron's subpoena for a deposition and documents from Amazon Watch, which the group's own lawyer described as the U.S. oil company's "sharpest critic."

The subpoena was related to a case scheduled to go to trial on October 15 in which Chevron accuses Ecuadorean residents, their lawyers and advisers of fraud in obtaining a multi-billion dollar judgment from a local court.

Cousins said he had to weigh the free speech rights of Amazon Watch under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment against the possibility of Chevron uncovering evidence for its case.

"I must err on the side of protecting the First Amendment activity," he said in his ruling in San Francisco federal court, although he left open the possibility that Chevron could seek documents under a narrower scope.

The parties are racing to gather evidence ahead of a May 31 deadline for discovery, Chevron lawyer Ethan Dettmer said.

The start of the trial in October will come almost exactly two decades after Ecuadoreans first filed their case in New York against Texaco, which was bought by Chevron in 2001. Texaco spent years pushing for the case to be moved to Ecuador, which eventually happened a decade ago.

Texaco was accused of contaminating the jungle around Lago Agrio, Ecuador, from 1964 to 1992. Chevron says Texaco cleaned up all the waste pits for which it was responsible before turning the sites over to state-owned Petroecuador, which still operates there. The Ecuadorean court in Lago Agrio issued its judgment against Chevron in February 2011.

Chevron then sued the Ecuadoreans and their long-time legal adviser, Steven Donziger, in Manhattan federal court. Chevron accuses them of illegally pressuring the Ecuadorean court to render a judgment in their favor, making fraud and racketeering conspiracy claims under the U.S. Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Donziger and the Ecuadoreans deny they acted improperly.

On Wednesday, Dettmer argued for Chevron that Amazon Watch became part of the fraud by publicizing the Ecuadorean plaintiffs' arguments in an effort to put enough public pressure on Chevron to force the company to settle the case.

But Richard Herz, a lawyer for Amazon Watch, said Chevron had already amassed ample evidence with more than 100 subpoenas, 20 more depositions scheduled, on top of 16 days of deposition from Donziger himself along with his entire computer hard drive. "They have every scrap of paper that he's ever written," Herz said.

The fraud case is Chevron Corp v. Steven Donziger et al, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 11-0691. The related case over the Amazon Watch subpoena was in the Northern District of California, No. 13-mc-80038-CRB.

(Reporting by Braden Reddall in San Francisco. Editing by Andre Grenon)

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Telling The Truth About Chevron in Ecuador

It's no conspiracy, says Paul Paz y Miño of Amazon Watch in his blog about the subpoena Chevron served on Amazon Watch, one of the most effective environmental advocacy organizations in the country.

It's truth telling, and, last time we checked, that wasn't against the law.


Chevron, though, could care less, writes Paz y Miño.


"Not only is this invasive subpoena request a flagrant attack on our first-amendment rights, it is also an attempt at miring our organization in a protected and tangential lawsuit, designed to burden our resources and distract us from our goal: justice in the Amazon."


Amazon Watch, dedicated to helping communities in the Amazon region protect their lands, has been an outspoken defender of the Ecuadorians who recently won a $19 billion judgment against Chevron for massive contamination in the rainforest. Because Chevron has refused to pay the judgment, the Ecuadorians have filed lawsuits in Canada, Brazil and Argentina to freeze and seize Chevron's assets there. See here. (Chevron has few assets in Ecuador.)


In turn, Chevron has filed lawsuits in the United States to stop enforcement of the judgment. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court put a stop to that, but another lawsuit seeks to show that the Ecuadorians, their lawyers and supporters "conspired" through a "racketeering" campaign to force Chevron to pay a settlement.


In that effort, Chevron has intimidated and harassed hundreds of people, including its own shareholders, who favor Chevron being held accountable for its misconduct in Ecuador.
Subpoenaed for documents or depositions include environmentalist advocates, like the people who work for Amazon Watch, law students who spent a summer in Ecuador working on the case, others who had little to do with the litigation and even shareholders, an action that drew criticism recently from a New York Times business columnist.


Paz y Miño, though, hits the nail on the head when he calls Chevron's "conspiracy" theories nothing more than what other environmental groups did when Exxon spilled oil in Alaska and BP on the U.S. Gulf Coast; what consumer groups and advocates for homeowners did when banks ripped off home buyers with predatory loans and then ripped them off again with illegal foreclosures; what gun control advocates are doing now to stop the killing of innocent people:  they are exercising their First Amendment rights, telling the truth about how Chevron's intentional contamination destroyed what was once a pristine rainforest.


"What we are witnessing now is the last chapter of a 50-year campaign of human rights abuses by Chevron. And if they are successful in their desperate subpoena of hundreds of thousands of Amazon Watch documents, what they will find, ironically, is not that AW has been part of any alleged conspiracy, but rather nothing more than the spirit, the resolve, the compassion, and the intellect that we have brought to telling the truth about what Chevron did in Ecuador, and that in turn has helped bring the company to its knees."


Click here for the entire blog.


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Which Is It? Chevron Tells Shareholders Ecuador Case Under Control But Swears To U.S. Courts It's A "Nightmare"

In his recent blog, Shareholder Shocker: Chevron's Assets Frozen in Argentina, Amazon Watch's Kevin Koenig explores the lack of shareholder disclosure and the outright lies Chevron is telling its investors about its Ecuadorian legal battles, including a recent ruling in Argentina to freeze up to $19 billion of Chevron's assets in the South American country as payment for the historic judgment out of Ecuador.

Here's what Chevron lawyer Randy Mastro told a U.S. court not that long ago about the Ecuadorians' efforts to collect on their $19 billion judgment for massive oil contamination: 

"So we are definitely right now in a position of that nightmare is here, irreparable harm is imminent…[We] are facing the ultimate Sword of Damocles, and it is over our heads…The Sword of Damocles is not over our heads, it's touching our foreheads.”

Touching our foreheads?  

Here's what Chevron wrote in its public filing to shareholders: 

“Management does not believe an estimate of a reasonably possible loss (or a range of loss) can be made in this case...the highly uncertain legal environment surrounding the case provides no basis for management to estimate a reasonably possible loss (or a range of loss).”

Which is it, Chevron? 

Read more of Koenig's blog here.

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Chevron's Cold Calculus: Cash Money

Amazon Watch's Eye on the Amazon blog hits the mark on why Chevron finds itself in trouble, facing serious investigations in its backyard, in Richmond, California, Ecuador, Brazil and in other countries across the world: Cash Money.

Entitled Law and Order: Chevron's Criminal Intent, the blog doesn't pull any punches about Chevron's misconduct in Ecuador:

"It was a cold calculus based on one thing. Cash money. To save a couple bucks, Chevron designed an oil extraction on the cheap, using outdated technology that it knew would harm people and the planet. It wasn't a "mistake". It was premeditated, criminal intent. This was executives and engineers sitting around conferences tables, diagraming dangerous deeds on chalkboards, mapping out their crimes against humanity and ecosystems. [I can't confirm whether evil laughter took place, or whether these meetings were followed by long, extravagant Mad Men style lunches with stiff drinks, big steaks, and inappropriate flirting with secretaries. But it was the 1960s.]"

Read it all here.

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Canadians Warned About Chevron's Machinations, Says Environmental Group

The internationally-respected Canadian and Brazilian courts can "put an end to Chevron's rope-a-dope strategy" to evade accountability for the widespread human suffering it caused in the Ecuadorian rainforest by illegally discharging billions of gallons of toxic waste, a worldwide environmental group said today in a blog on its website.

A group of Ecuadorian indigenous and farmer communities recently won an $18 billion judgment in Ecuador against Chevron, but the oil giant has refused to pay. The Ecuadorians are now seeking to enforce the judgment by seizing Chevron's assets in Canada and Brazil, as Chevron sold all of its assets in Ecuador.

Below is the blog, written by Paul Paz of Amazon Watch, a well-known environmental group working to protect the Amazon.  

Canadians: Don't Say You Weren't Warned

Engaged for years in a campaign of subterfuge to evade its legal obligations related to a massive environmental contamination in Ecuador. In Canada, where the Ecuadorians have come to force Chevron to comply with the rule of law, people should be aware of this company's long track record of abusing indigenous communities in Ecuador by poisoning their streams and rivers with toxic waste. Internationally respected Canadian courts have a chance to put an end to Chevron's rope-a-dope strategy to delay, deny, and distract attention from this gross and even criminal misconduct.

Chevron predictably refuses to pay an $18 billion judgment against it in Ecuador, where it was found by a court after an eight-year trial to have recklessly operated six large oil fields in the rainforest from 1964 to 1992. To understand how easily it would be Chevron to pay this judgment, the company's gross annual profit since the trial started in 2003 is over $150 billion. That's over eight times the damages imposed by the court.

The judgment number is modest compared to the magnitude of the damage. By way of comparison, the smaller BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico produced a total liability of $40 billion, or more than twice as much as Chevron's liability in Ecuador.

The Ecuador court found that Chevron–out of pure greed–dumped more than 16 billion gallons of toxic "water of formation" into Amazon waterways, and the trial record is replete with evidence of how the company engaged in a fraudulent "remediation" to try to cover up the contamination; doctored soil and water samples to hide the extent of the contamination from the court; never spent a penny on environmental monitoring or safety; used sub-standard practices that produced an outbreak of cancer that has killed numerous people; and then tried to bribe both the judge and high-level officials in Ecuador's government to quash the legal case. This is the same company that has already paid a $30 million fine in the U.S. for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in Iraq.

Independent journalists have long confirmed the company's hand in creating this unprecedented catastrophe. See these recent news reports from the Australia program Sunday Night; the American show 60 Minutes and this extraordinary video from the plaintiffs summarizing the evidence and Chevron's corrupt attempts to derail the trial. A story in Vanity Fair on the courageous Ecuadorian lawyer Pablo Fajardo, who was raised in abject poverty and who has been targeted with death threats for trying to hold Chevron accountable, can be downloaded here.

The Ecuadorian communities originally filed the case in the U.S. in 1993; Chevron delayed the matter for nine years before convincing a U.S. judge to shift the venue to Ecuador. At the time, Chevron lawyers filed 14 sworn affidavits praising Ecuador's courts as fair and transparent. These affidavits can be read here.

Looking back, it is clear that Chevron thought it likely the plaintiffs would melt back into the jungle if the case was thrown out of U.S. courts. Instead, the affected communities re-filed their claims under Ecuadorian law in the local court where Chevron had begged for the trial to be held. When the evidence began to point to its guilt, Chevron started to attack as unfit the courts it had previously praised. It also engaged in political engineering, mounting a six-year lobbying effort that is still ongoing to convince the United States to cut trade preferences for Ecuador just for allowing the lawsuit to be brought in the place where Chevron wanted the trial to be held.

When asked by 60 Minutes to explain the hypocrisy of wanting the case in Ecuador and then trying to get out of the case once it got to Ecuador, Chevron lawyer Sylvia Garrigo said, "We don't want to be sued anywhere, period." Garrigo also compared the awful waste pits in Ecuador to the oil in the makeup on her face.

There is no better snapshot than Garrigo of Chevron's deeply held belief that it is entitled to impunity for its human rights abuses in Ecuador–abuses that have killed or threaten to kill thousands of people with cancer and other diseases, according to independent peer-reviewed health evaluations in the region. See here and here.

Chevron might think it can get away with ignoring court orders in Ecuador, but it will not easily obtain impunity in Canada's courts. Chevron's interest in various oil field and refining operations in Canada are reportedly worth billions of dollars. They could easily be sold with the proceeds redirected for clean-up in Ecuador. That would be poetic justice indeed for a company that admitted contaminating drinking water with benzene-laden "water of formation", and then denied it was legally responsible.

As terrible as the BP spill was, it was still an accident. Chevron's contamination of Ecuador's rainforest was the product of a planned design to inflate profits by externalizing production costs. The company even built pipes that continue to drain the toxic waste from its pits into nearby streams, as documented in the trial and in the 60 Minutes segment.

According to American law professor Judith Kimerling, who chronicled these facts in her 1991 book Amazon Crude, Chevron engineers told the indigenous people of the region that oil had vitamins and other positive medicinal effects. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the noted environmental lawyer, penned a powerful firsthand essay after visiting the region in 1991. See here. Kennedy said he witnessed "antiquated equipment, rusting pipelines, and uncounted toxic waste sites"; the jungle, he said, "was broken by landscapes reminiscent of war."

Chevron is notorious in communities around the world for trying to win through intimidation, political lobbying, and corruption what it can't win legitimately in court. In Ecuador, the trial judge found that Chevron tried to grind the case to a halt as part of its defense strategy. The company once filed 18 motions in 30 minutes and then tried to recuse the judge when he did not rule on them fast enough. Chevron employee Diego Borja, under the direction of company lawyers, tried to bribe a sitting judge in a sting operation; Chevron threatened other Ecuadorian judges as well as lawyers for the plaintiffs with sham criminal prosecutions; and finally, offered $1 billion to Ecuador's government (half of which was to go to an environmental project) to induce it to illegally quash the case. Chevron lawyer Doak Bishop famously announced that the Ecuadorian plaintiffs "are irrelevant". This sworn affidavit from Ecuadorian lawyer Juan Pablo Saenz provides some of the gruesome details about Chevron's ongoing efforts to corrupt Ecuador's judicial system.

Chevron's new public relations narrative claims that the evidence in Ecuador is in its favor. What the evidence actually shows is that Chevron, via its own audits and technical reports, proved the claims of the plaintiffs and then lied about it to shareholders and the financial markets to artificially boost its stock price. That helps explain why a U.S. Congresswoman and three institutional investors recently asked U.S. regulatory authorities to investigate the company for violating securities laws. See here and here.

Another prominent U.S. elected official who visited the region in 2008, Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, described seeing a "terrible environmental and humanitarian crisis" that made him "ashamed" as an American. See here for a letter he wrote to President Obama about Chevron's activities in Ecuador.

Which brings us back the falsehoods Chevron will try to market in Canada. First, the few minutes of outtakes from the movie Crude that Chevron posted on its website are spliced and diced in its editing room to present a completely distorted view of the case. Joe Berlinger, the film's director, told Fortune that he is "dismayed at the level of mischaracterizations" in Chevron's presentation of his outtakes.

American lawyer Steven Donziger, who Chevron has spied on and harassed for years as he too tried to hold company officials accountable, emphasizes throughout the full 600 hours of outtakes the strength of the evidence against Chevron and his own frustration that Chevron that was corrupting the court and improperly delaying the trial. Chevron won't show you these outtakes, which faithfully reflect the conclusion among the legal team that the scientific evidence against Chevron is overwhelming.

Chevron's take on the science is equally unavailing. To the extent you can judge somebody by the company they keep, consider this: one of Chevron's scientific consultants in the Ecuador case is Dr. Douglas Southgate, who works with an institute funded by the oil and gas industry to cast doubt on global warming. See here. Another, Ralph Marquez, is the former lead lobbyist for the chemical industry in Texas. See here. Michael Kelsh–the author of a grossly flawed cancer study funded by Chevron–was hired by a company owned by a former Chevron Board member. See here. (One can better understand how Chevron uses junk science by reading the classic book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscure the Truth On Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.)

The evidence relied on by the Ecuador court clearly shows that all of the toxic substances Chevron and the plaintiffs found at hundreds of contaminated well sites in Ecuador are dangerous to human health and can kill people at high exposures, according to the Agency for Toxic Disease Registry, the leading authority on toxicity in the U.S. government. Yet Chevron continues to deny any harm has occurred.

Chevron's paid "expert reports" claiming there is no risk to human health are pre-cooked by company lawyers. For example, the Chevron-funded Kelsh study severely undercounts the incidence of cancer in Ecuador's Amazon by relying on official mortality data when most rainforest residents die quietly in the forest and therefore never enter the national cancer database. In its first iteration, Kelsh never disclosed in the study that he received funding from Chevron. Chevron can also cite the existence of some "clean" water and soil samples from the trial, but it lifted these samples up-gradient from the waste pits as part of its fraudulent sampling and analysis plan, exposed here in a report by Dr. Ann Maest.

Incidentally, Dr. Maest–one of the most respected experts in the world on how contaminants travel in groundwater–testified under oath recently that there is massive contamination of water in Chevron's concession area. See here and here. In a blatant act of deceit, in a recent blog Chevron leaves the false impression that Dr. Maest agrees with the company that there is no water contamination. See here.

Chevron's assertion that the plaintiffs wrote the judgment is a both a fabrication and a final act of desperation. It plays into the company's fundamentally racist notion that an Ecuadorian judge is simply not capable of writing a considered, intelligent 188-page decision that picks apart and destroys its arguments, as was done in this case.

Of course, these arguments already were litigated and resolved in the trial that Chevron wanted. But to Chevron, any court or judge who disagrees with it is just part of an ever-widening conspiracy. As of now, the members of this "conspiracy" include numerous judges in Ecuador, dozens of respected media outlets that Chevron claims have been "hoodwinked" by the plaintiffs, prominent U.S. law firms such as Patton Boggs, and the highly respected Canadian lawyer Alan Lenczner, who represents the Ecuadorians in their legal action. You might as well throw in Sergio Bermudes, probably the most respected litigator in Brazil, who just joined the case to help the plaintiffs.

Chevron's goal in Canada will be to reopen the litigation so it can kick the can down the road several more years, calculating it is cheaper to pay the hourly rates for an army lawyers than it would be to clean one of the largest oil disasters on the planet.

Canada's courts will have a great opportunity to finally block Chevron's rope-a-dope, cynical, and manipulative legal strategy.

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Ecuadorians File Suit In Canada Against Chevron To Collect Money Awarded By Court In Historic Lawsuit

Ecuadorian plaintiffs started the process of enforcing the $18 billion court judgement by filing a lawsuit in the Superior Court of Justice in Ontario to take over various assets that Chevron and its subsidiaries hold in Canada. Press release with more details below.

Ecuadorians Hit Chevron With $18 Billion Enforcement Action In Canada 

Toronto, Ontario – Villagers from Ecuador's rainforest today filed a lawsuit in Canada as the first step in forcing the company to comply with an $18 billion court judgment rendered in Ecuador and imposed to permit the clean-up of what experts believe is the largest oil disaster on the planet.

The lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of Justice in Ontario, (see here) targets Chevron and various subsidiaries that together hold significant assets in the country – including Canada's largest offshore drilling project and new investments in oil sands in the province of Alberta, said Alan Lenczner, the noted Canadian litigator representing the Amazon communities. Canada also has a law that allows interest to run on a foreign judgment during the enforcement process, potentially adding a significant amount to the judgment against the oil giant.

The Ecuadorians, who consist of the inhabitants of five indigenous groups and approximately 70 farmer communities, are being forced to file enforcement actions because Chevron refuses to pay the judgment imposed by an Ecuador trial court in February 2011, which was later affirmed by Ecuador's court of appeals in January. The oil giant has virtually no assets in Ecuador.

Pablo Fajardo, the lead lawyer for the Ecuadorians and the recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize and a CNN "Hero" Award, said his clients were intent on collecting the entire judgment.

"The time for delay is over," he said. "For decades Chevron refused to address the contamination that has devastated our ancestral lands. While Chevron might think it can ignore court orders in Ecuador, it will be impossible to ignore a court order in Canada where a court may seize the company's assets if necessary to secure payment.

"We plan to exercise our legal right to collect every penny of the legitimate judgment from Ecuador, even if we have to drag Chevron kicking and screaming into courts around the world," said Fajardo, who grew up in poverty working in Ecuador's oil fields and who put himself through law school specifically to hold Chevron accountable for the environmental disaster. See this article in Vanity Fair about Fajardo.

The judgment in Ecuador resulted from an eight-year trial that produced more than 64,000 soil and water samples that pointed to extensive contamination at more than 350 Chevron well sites and oil production stations in a large swath of Ecuador's northern Amazon region, known as the Oriente. This area was considered one of the most bio-diverse areas on earth before Chevron – to lower production costs – deliberately discharged billions of gallons of toxic waste into the environment, decimating local tribesmen and plummeting the region into a tailspin of despair from which it has yet to recover, according to evidence before the court.

(A video that explains Chevron's substandard operational practices in Ecuador and efforts to corrupt the trial process can be seen here.)

The result of the dumping, according to evidence presented at trial, is a public health crisis and the poisoning of a large swath of pristine rainforest that indigenous communities had relied on for millennia for their sustenance. Five indigenous groups – the Cofan, Secoya, Siona, Quichua, and Huaroni – are struggling to survive. Part of the judgment will be used to restore the forest so that the indigenous communities can return to their hunting and gathering traditions, said Fajardo.

Lenczner, the Canadian litigator who is representing the Ecuadorians, is considered by Chambers Global to be one of the top lawyers in Canada, having appeared in courts in all ten provinces and argued numerous cases before the country's Supreme Court. He is the founding partner of Lenczner & Slaght, a boutique litigation firm with approximately 50 lawyers that recently was named one of the top ten litigation firms in the country by Canadian Lawyer magazine.

"I am honored to have been asked by the indigenous people of Ecuador to correct a historic injustice visited upon them by Chevron," said Lenczner, who visited Ecuador and reviewed the extensive trial and appellate records of the case, which exceed 250,000 pages.

"Chevron fought for nine years to move the trial from the United States to Ecuador, and then had a full opportunity for eight years to defend itself in Ecuador," Lenczner added. “This is a legitimate judgment and I believe Canadian courts will recognize it and enforce it as such."

Fajardo said that the Ecuadorians have a list of countries that are possible targets for enforcement actions and that additional actions are likely to be filed to ensure the full amount of the judgment can be satisfied. A significant portion of Chevron's assets are located around the world in over 70 wholly-owned subsidiaries and 75% of the company's annual profits are derived outside of the U.S., according to an analysis by the plaintiffs.

Almost all countries have specific laws governing the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. Most of the laws favor enforcement, subject to specific exceptions such as lack of jurisdiction or fraud. Chevron has stated it will try to block enforcement by alleging fraud, but the Ecuadorian trial and appellate courts directly addressed the allegations and rejected them. See the lower court judgment and the appellate court judgment.

Representatives of the affected population, who meet every two months in the rainforest in a body called the Assembly of the Affected Ones (Asamblea de Afectados), were thrilled that the first enforcement action was filed. The local population has suffered from high rates of cancer, spontaneous miscarriages, and oil-related diseases. See here, here, and here.

"This is a historic day for us," said Luis Yanza, the coordinator of the Assembly. "We might be impoverished materially but we are rich in spirit. The time has now come to use the force of law to make Chevron clean up its pollution. No company, even one as rich and powerful as Chevron, is above the law."

In Canada, Chevron's biggest assets are a 20% interest in the Athabasca Oil Sands Project, which yields a capacity of 255,000 barrels per day and supplies 10% of Canada's oil needs; the Hibernia project, which is Canada's largest offshore drilling project; and the Ells River concession, which covers 75,000 acres and contains up to an estimated 7.5 billion barrels of oil.

Chevron also is the largest gasoline convenience store marketer in British Columbia through a network of 162 service stations, 134 Town Pantry convenience stores, and 21 White Spot Triple O quick-serve restaurants. Chevron also owns the Burnaby refinery, which processes over 50,000 barrels of oil per day.

Total daily production for Chevron in Canada in 2011 averaged 29,000 barrels of crude oil, 4 million cubic feet of natural gas, and 40,000 barrels of synthetic oil from oil sands, according to public disclosures of the company. Canada is one of the top ten markets in the world for Chevron's capital spending in 2012, according to the company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The filing of the enforcement action comes on the heels of a major challenge by Chevron shareholders over the Ecuador matter.

Today Chevron CEO John Watson suffered a stunning reprimand during a tense annual meeting when investors holding over 38% of the company's shares (representing $73 billion worth of stock) voted for a resolution that directly challenged his authority because of the Ecuador case. Last week, 40 institutional shareholders representing $570 billion under management – including the New York state pension fund – urged the company to settle the Ecuador litigation.

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