Environmentalists Urge Avatar Director to Support Ecuadorians' Cause

Environmentalists across the globe are calling on Avatar director James Cameron to take up the cause of the Ecuadorians seeking justice in the largest environmental contamination case ever in the Amazon rainforest. Who knows if Cameron will agree to their requests, but it’s clear from the response that what happens in Ecuador is on the minds of Americans who care about how Chevron and other multinational companies treat indigenous people everywhere.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rtarbotton/detail?entry_id=57723

Read More

Texaco Throws Dirt On Oil Pit, After Couple Pleaded With Company To Clean It; Both Died Of Cancer After Living Near Pit For 22 Years

The Chevron Pit is featuring a series of personal stories about how the oil contamination left behind by Texaco has impacted the people living near the oil company’s former oil sites. Chevron purchased Texaco in 2001.

This story is about Rosana Sisalima, who passed away in 2006 from uterine cancer; her husband died of stomach cancer. Senora Sisalima gave an interview to Lou Dematteis and Kayana Szymczak for their book Crude Reflections before she died. Other stories can be found in their book and can be obtained here:

http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100896180

Uterine cancer victim Rosana Sisalima with her granddaughter at their home in San Carlos on November 24, 2004. Rosana succumbed to cancer in 2006.

Rosana Sisalima

San Carlos

Our house is located between a [Texaco] toxic waste pit and an oil spill. There are three [Texaco] oil wells nearby. A big oil spill had just occurred when we moved here. The oil company burned the oil and there was smoke everywhere. The former owner of this farm died of stomach cancer three years after he sold it to us.

I’ve lived here for 22 years. I came with my husband and 10 children from Loja. We bought this farm which is surrounded by two [Texaco] open waste pits. So many animals fell in; chickens, dogs, watusas, rabbits. We pulled them out and cleaned them, but they were covered with sludge, and died anyway.

We pleaded with the oil company to clean the pits, and they finally showed up, only to cover the pits with dirt. But in heavy rainstorms, the pits overflow and waste runs into the streams, contaminating them.

We bathed in the river and got our drinking water there too.

We pushed the crude aside and dipped in our buckets, and we ate fish from that river. We never realized the river was contaminated.

I was diagnosed with uterine cancer in 1988. I went to Solca [the cancer hospital] and stayed there two months while they burned off the cancer until the doctor told me I was better.

My husband died of stomach cancer. He grew coffee, and worked almost until the day he died. One day he stopped eating. We went to the doctors and they operated but he had a malignant tumor and the cancer had already spread throughout his body. He was 64, so young.

I had a hysterectomy, then in 2004 gallbladder surgery. I had stomach aches, vomiting and diarrhea for over a year. I’ve been seriously ill. (Crying)

My children have helped me with medical costs. We sold our cattle, and we had to sell half of our farm, but I still don’t know how we’ll pay the rest.

Read More

Chevron Tells The Truth For A Change

Chevron does a good job dressing up its misinformation campaign about what happened in Ecuador when Texaco operated a faulty and substandard operation system to explore for oil and dumped over 18 billion gallons of toxic sludge into the rainforest from 1964 to 1990. It has three-inch binders full of background materials, colorful charts and snazzy Power Point presentations, but every now and then the truth reveals itself when Chevron least expects it. Watch Chevron’s Managing Counsel for Latin America, Ricardo Reis Veiga, present his eight-step plan for cleaning the gigantic, unlined oil pits that Texaco dug to store oil and formation water left over after drilling stopped. Texaco, which Chevron bought in 2001, said it cleaned a small number of pits, but tests taken during the Ecuadoran trial about the contamination found that those same pits have illegal levels of contamination as high or higher than pits never cleaned by Texaco.

Check out this blog: http://livinnthebigtime.blogspot.com/2010/02/chevrons-8-steps-ricardo-reis-veiga.html

Read More

Chevron General Counsel Hewitt Pate Stumbles as Ecuador Problem Balloons Out of Control

Hewitt Pate

As we blogged earlier, Chevron's continuing desperation to do anything it can to derail the potential $27.3 billion liability it faces for destroying part of Ecuador's rainforest has backfired yet again –this week the company again was caught misrepresenting key facts about the court-appointed expert who conducted a damages assessment not to the company's liking. On Tuesday, Chevron announced it had "newly discovered" evidence that the expert who conducted the damages assessment, Dr. Richard Cabrera, owns a remediation company in Ecuador that stands to benefit from a clean-up should the plaintiffs win the case.

Like so many other breathless announcements by Chevron, the company's newest "discovery" ("new" despite the fact that Chevron has filed 28 prior motions to attack Cabrera, none of which has been successful) has turned out to be worth less than the paper that its press releases were printed on.

It turns out that far from a conflict of interest, Dr. Cabrera explicitly disclosed to the court that he was involved in remediation in Ecuador – a qualification that was properly cited by the court as one of the reasons why he was accepted as the independent expert in the first place. Obviously, Dr. Cabrera would never be able to benefit from a clean-up related to a case he worked on given basic conflict of interest rules in Ecuador. But since Chevron cannot attack the technically sound evidence in the Cabrera report, which calls the company out for creating pollution that led to more than 1,400 excess cancer deaths, it tried to fabricate a distracting sideshow. For more details about Chevron's misrepresentations regarding Cabrera, see this response: http://chevrontoxico.com/assets/docs/2010-02-09-cabrera-response.pdf

The factual deficiencies of Chevron's allegations didn't stop the company from its ill-advised decision to "man up" and deploy Chevron Vice-President and General Counsel Hewitt Pate as its lead spokesman on the issue. Pate was featured prominently in Chevron's press materials and was put squarely in the middle of what should have been a low-level food fight between the long-warring parties. The fact that Pate, who is the general counsel of America's third largest company, is expending his political capital to bolster unsubstantiated allegations demonstrates how frantic the company has become about Ecuador. It also raises serious questions about the judgment of Chevron's legal department, where it seems to be a job requirement to prove your "machismo" through frontline interviews. Any other company would use a consultant or public relations firm to execute this type of messy media hit job.

So what's behind this? The answer is politics. Making up a press "event" out of facts that you misrepresent is a classic maneuver popularized by the Karl Rove School of politics. It turns out that Pate and his colleagues running the Chevron legal department all played central roles in the last Bush Administration. This is not a coincidence, as all of these individuals looked like they picked up a trick or two from Rove during their years of government service.

Chevron has a major distinction among the world's super-major oil companies: while most hire their general counsels from within their own legal department after years of service, or from prestigious outside law firms populated by lawyers experienced in the ways of the energy industry, Chevron stands alone in hiring political lawyers out of Republican Administrations. The last two general counsels for the company (Charles James and Pate) have been hand-plucked from the Bush administration's Justice Department, where they worked closely with former Attorney General John Ashcroft. James, who worked closely with Pate in Washington and hired him for Chevron, has a reputation from Washington to San Francisco as being a hard-right political ideologue.

James made the decision to hire as Chevron's deputy general counsel Jim Haynes, one of the Bush Administration "torture lawyers" under potential indictment in Spain and now unable to travel abroad for fear of arrest. While Chevron keeps Haynes swept under the rug for public image purposes, speculation on the street is that he is running the day to day in Chevron's in-house legal department. He clearly learned a lot about Chevron's conception of human rights by providing the legal justification for torture to a Rumsfeld-led Pentagon, where he served as General Counsel before being blocked by the Senate for a federal judgeship because of his infamous memo justifying waterboarding.

With these personnel moves, Chevron has elected to build a general counsel's office that is filled with right-wing lawyers who have relatively little experience in complex litigation matters. It turns out that since Chevron's legal team is led by political ideologues, the company is trying to find a political solution to a legal problem. It hires outside law firms who, to obtain Chevron's lucrative business, fall all over themselves to enable this distorted and ineffective conception of politics-as-litigation. That's why Chevron keeps stubbing its toes over Ecuador. That's why it has lost five straight times before U.S. federal courts, including before the U.S. Supreme Court, in its increasingly futile effort to get any judge anywhere to grant the company some sort of relief. That's also why Chevron's latest gambit to take the entire Ecuador matter to an international arbitration panel, without the presence of the Amazon communities, now risks getting torpedoed in U.S. federal court. The ham-fisted approach championed by James and now Pate is one reason why the Ecuador liability has ballooned out of control for Chevron and threatens about 20% of the company's market value.

Chevron must realize that the old days of using political influence to quash legal cases in far-flung countries is winding down. In Ecuador, those days are clearly over. In the United States, the method doesn't work. The fact Chevron uses its new general counsel's limited credibility to distort basic facts shows how "quaint" Chevron is compared to its industry peers, most of whom (perhaps not coincidentally) reported far better financial results last quarter. "Quaint" is how former Bush Administration lawyers such as Chevron's Haynes and Alberto Gonzales – folks who never served in the armed forces themselves -- used to describe the Geneva Conventions when justifying those "harsh interrogation tactics" that the world considered torture. Most Americans would consider such talk profoundly unpatriotic, but in Chevron's legal department that's probably what passes for typical chatter around the water cooler. That, and the excitement generated by the Sarah Palin sighting at the latest Tea Party convention.

Since lost lives don't seem to have much impact on the thinking at Chevron, how many billions of dollars will have to be garnished before Chevron's Board wakes up to this internal hazard?

Read More

Chevron Caught Misrepresenting Facts about Expert Report in Ecuador Trial

In its latest attempt to evade a $27 billion liability in Ecuador, Chevron is misrepresenting key facts about a court-appointed expert who conducted a damages assessment not to the company’s liking, representatives of the plaintiffs announced today.

“Chevron is again trying to strong-arm the court by misrepresenting facts,” said Steven R. Donziger, an American legal advisor to the plaintiffs. “This is part of an underhanded attempt to derail a trial Chevron is losing based on the voluminous scientific evidence.”

On Tuesday, Chevron in a press release announced it had “newly discovered” evidence that the court-appointed Special Master who conducted a damages assessment, Richard Cabrera, owns a remediation company in Ecuador that stands to benefit from a clean-up should the plaintiffs win the case. The filing is the 29th official motion Chevron has made to the court to disqualify Cabrera but the court has never accepted Chevron’s arguments, said Donziger.

For more details about Chevron’s misrepresentations, see this response: http://chevrontoxico.com/assets/docs/2010-02-09-cabrera-response.pdf

Chevron is accused in the underlying lawsuit of deliberately dumping more than 18 billion gallons of waste into Ecuador’s Amazon when it operated oil fields in that country from 1964 to 1990, causing a spike in cancer rates and decimating indigenous groups. The communities claim the pollution left is still leaching into soils and groundwater and has poisoned an area the size of Rhode Island.

Cabrera, working with a team of 14 scientists, found damages could be as high as $27.3 billion. A court will make a final determination on liability and damages later this year.

According to Pablo Fajardo, the lead Ecuadorian lawyer in the case, in its latest court filing Chevron fails to note that:

• Cabrera disclosed to the court that he owned a clean-up company before his appointment as Special Master. This fact was properly cited by the court as one of the reasons he was qualified to do the damages assessment.
  
• Chevron thought so highly of Cabrera’s qualifications that it accepted him as a court-appointed expert in an earlier part of the case and paid his fees as required by court rules.
  
• The fact Cabrera’s company is qualified to bid on clean-up contracts offered by Ecuador’s state-owned oil company is irrelevant. That company, Petroecuador, is not a party to the case against Chevron and would have no role in any eventual cleanup.
  
• Cabrera by virtue of his role in the case would be barred from having a role in a future clean-up.
  
• Chevron misrepresents Cabrera’s role. Contrary to Chevron’s assertions, Cabrera did not rule on the critical question of liability and did not “exculpate” Petroecuador. Liability can only be determined by the court.

The case was transferred in 2002 to Ecuador from U.S. federal court (where it was originally filed in 1993) at Chevron’s request. Once the trial began in Ecuador in 2003 and the evidence pointed to Chevron’s culpability, the company began to try to delay the proceedings and discredit the court and Cabrera.

In the 1990s, in its effort to move the case to Ecuador, Chevron filed 14 sworn affidavits in U.S. federal court praising the fairness and competency of Ecuador’s courts. Once it was clear the company could lose the trial in Ecuador, Chevron filed multiple legal actions in the U.S. to shift the potential liability to Ecuador’s government, said Donziger.

Not one of the U.S.-based legal actions -- including one that was denied by the U.S. Supreme Court -- have succeeded. Chevron’s latest move is to seek a closed-door international arbitration under a trade pact between the U.S. and Ecuador, but the Amazon communities and Ecuador’s government have filed separate motions in U.S. federal court to block that proceeding, said Donziger.

“Chevron loses credibility in front of the court and the world each time it files a frivolous motion based on unsubstantiated facts,” said Donziger. “Each of these motions is part of an evidentiary record that we will use to prove that Chevron completely abused the court process in Ecuador to evade a judgment, in violation of the law.”

“We believe all of these Chevron attacks will backfire against the company in a later enforcement action to collect on any judgment,” said Donziger. “Judges are not as naïve as Chevron seems to think they are.”

Read More

Chevron’s New CEO Ducks Spotlight Over Ecuador Issue

Pressures Washington Post & New York Times To Pull Ad, Violating Free Speech Rights in Move To Squash Criticism of Company

San Francisco, CA – Chevron’s new CEO John Watson is violating the free speech rights of environmental groups with aggressive pressure tactics, involving the New York Times and the Washington Post, to quash an ad campaign sponsored by the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), critical of the company’s handling of a potential $27.3 billion liability for environmental damage in Ecuador, representatives of the Amazon Defense Coalition, which is suing the company for the environmental damage, said today.

The ad campaign, which featured a photo of Watson and was published in print in the New York Times and on the Washington Post website, read: “Oil men have polluted the Ecuadorean rainforest for decades. This man can do something about it now.” The ads were run as part of the launching of a new RAN campaign with the tagline “Energy Shouldn’t Cost Lives.”

Chevron responded to the ad campaign by directing the company’s lawyers and a paid advertising agency, which oversees the company’s own multi-million dollar ad campaign, to leverage the company’s influence and demand that the media outlets pull the ads. In their complaint to the Washington Post, Chevron alleged that the RAN campaign’s tagline, “Energy Shouldn’t Cost Lives,” was unsubstantiated, and thus should prevent the ad from being run.

“I hope Chevron would agree that energy shouldn’t cost lives. Me thinks Chevron doth protest too much. An arm-chair analysis of Chevron’s arm-twisting is nothing more than a projection of the guilt they harbor about the mess that Texaco left behind in Ecuador,” said Karen Hinton, a spokesperson for the Amazon Defense Coalition.

“If they have problems with the ad content, then Chevron officials should take out their own ad or agree to debate the plaintiffs or the environmental group. Otherwise they come across as schoolyard bullies.”

Despite Chevron’s complaints, the New York Times ran the advertisements. However, the Washington Post pulled the ad pending resolution of Chevron’s complaint. Last night, the Washington Post agreed to run the ad following questioning by RAN, the Amazon Defense Coalition and other news reporters. Separately, Chevron contacted Getty Images, from which RAN had purchased the rights to the photo of the CEO, to demand that Getty rescind RAN’s license to use the photo. Getty agreed to Chevron’s demand.

”Chevron is now pulling out all the stops to attempt to silence any criticism of the company, no matter how legitimate or well-founded,” said Hinton. “Even this ad campaign, which simply states that Watson has the power to do something about the pollution in Ecuador, has led to Watson mobilizing the company’s extensive resources.”

The response to the ad campaign is just the latest in a series of aggressive tactics employed by the oil giant in an apparent attempt to stifle criticism which have attracted headlines.

• Chevron recently pressured the managers of the Houston Marathon Expo Center to throw out a RAN-sponsored booth and its runners. The booth contained information about Ecuador and the contamination. Chevron was a sponsor of the Houston Marathon. RAN agreed to leave the center, but a manager had them escorted out by Houston police anyway because, as he said, “Chevron’s higher-ups are freaking out.” See this article for more information: http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2010/01/chevron_marathon_rainforest_ac.php

• Last year, Chevron tried to force the Sierra Club in San Francisco to block any questions about Ecuador from people attending a public forum featuring Sierra Club President Carl Pope and then Chevron CEO David O’Reilly. Wall Street Journal Editor, Alan Murray, who was moderating the forum discussion, did not know about this agreement. Once informed about it, Murray refused to agree to Chevron’s terms.

• Chevron also paid for a fake “news” video, produced by former CNN anchor Gene Randall to counter a critical 60 Minutes piece. The video is widely advertised through Google ads, even though the New York Times and the Columbia Journalism Review wrote news articles critical of Randall and Chevron for trying to trick viewers into thinking the video was real news coverage.

In the underlying environmental case in Ecuador, Chevron is charged with deliberately dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste when it operated several large oil fields in Ecuador's Amazon from 1964 to 1990, decimating indigenous groups and causing a spike in cancer rates and other oil-related diseases. A court-appointed Special Master in Ecuador, where the trial is being held at Chevron’s request, found 1,401 excess cancer deaths due to the contamination and pegged damages at $27.3 billion.

A final judgment is expected this year.

Read More

Cancer Leads To Woman’s Death After Living Near Chevron Oil Site For 30 Years

Modesta Briones

The Chevron Pit is featuring the first of many personal stories about how the oil contamination left behind by Texaco has impacted the people living near the oil company’s former oil sites. Chevron purchased Texaco in 2001.

Our first story is about Modesta Briones, who passed away not long after she and her husband, Segundo Salinas, gave an interview to authors Lou Dematteis and Kayana Szymczak for their book Crude Reflections. Other stories can be found in this book and can be obtained here:

http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100896180

Modesta Briones and her husband Segundo Salinas
Texaco Parahuaco Oil Well #2/ Parahuaco

Modesta Briones: It started with a little sore on my toe, which grew a bit larger. The water near my house, where I washed clothes, was full of crude and the sore grew bigger, as if the flesh were rotting. It didn’t hurt, but I couldn’t stand its stink. I had a fever and chills.

Segundo Salinas: In Quito they said it was a cancerous tumor, and they had to amputate her leg, or the cancer would spread throughout her body and she could die.

Modesta Briones: When the doctor told me he was cutting off my leg, I was so sick that I thought I was going to die.

He amputated, and the doctor said I should return for a checkup, but I haven’t gone back because I don’t have the money.

I’m having a hard time getting used to living without my foot. I can’t walk with crutches. My husband, daughter and son help me, but it’s a hardship for them. Now, I no longer leave the house. Since the operation, I’ve only left my house once, to request an I.D. card. After losing my leg, I regret moving to the Amazon, but what can one do?

Segundo Salinas: We’ve lived here some 30 years. We moved here looking for a better future because there was unoccupied land for sale at a good price.

Texaco had already drilled five oil wells. In those days, the oil companies didn’t respect any laws. Nor did they respect us. They would say, “This is government land and we’ve made a deal with the government. And it doesn’t include you, so leave.” They would arrive, decide they wanted to drill somewhere, and then drill. They brought in machines and crushed our crops.

There are three toxic waste pits near my house, so many animals died. When my horses and chickens fell in, I pulled them out, but they stopped eating and died.

Some of the oil wells here have flares that burn off gas. The smoke rises, and when the rains come, black rain with a rusty smell falls back to earth, contaminating the land and the water.

Read More

Chevron’s Lobbying Effort Blasted in Politico

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29560.html

Chevron's lobby campaign backfires

By: Kenneth P. Vogel November 16, 2009 04:58 AM EST

Facing the possibility of a $27 billion pollution judgment against it in an Ecuadorean court, Chevron launched an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign to try to prevent the judgment as well as reverse a deeply damaging story line. Chevron's tactics — ranging from quietly trying to wield U.S. trade policy to compel Ecuador's government to squelch the case, to producing a pseudo-news report casting the company as the victim of a corrupt Ecuadorean political system — were designed to win powerful allies in Congress and the Obama administration as well as to shape public opinion and calm shareholders. But many of the company's moves have backfired, drawing fire from environmentalists, media ethicists, state pension funds, New York's attorney general, members of Congress and even Barack Obama when he was a senator. "Their lobbying and PR efforts are really clumsy and very heavy handed, and I think that that's why they're experiencing a degree of backlash," said Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), who is circulating the first of what she promises will be three letters to colleagues blasting what she calls the company's "misguided approach" to dealing with the case. The case stems from a class action suit brought by well-connected U.S. trial lawyers on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadoreans alleging that from 1964 to 1990, Texaco — which was purchased by Chevron in 2001 — dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into Ecuador's Amazon rain forest, leaving behind an unprecedented environmental and public health disaster including a wave of cancers, birth defects and miscarriages. Chevron has been pushing the U.S. government to revise Ecuador's trade preferences since soon after the lawsuit was filed in Ecuador in 2003 (it originally had been in U.S. federal court in 1993). But with a years-long trial in a tiny courtroom in the Ecuadorean rain forest expected to culminate in a ruling early next year, Chevron has turned up the heat, arguing that it can't get a fair trial in Ecuador, an assertion that Sanchez and other Chevron critics point out seems to conflict with the company's previous efforts to move the trial from U.S. courts to Ecuador. In part, Chevron wants the office of U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, as well as Congress, to revoke the preferential treatment Ecuador gets for its oil exports under the 1991 Andean Trade Preferences Act, unless the country enforces an agreement it entered into with Texaco in the mid-1990s, under which the company paid for a three-year, $40 million cleanup and was relieved of liability. The plaintiffs contend that Chevron botched the cleanup, but if the court were to recognize the agreement, it could essentially end the suit. "When a government is in violation of its contractual obligations to a company, there are only a few avenues a company has to seek resolution," Chevron spokesman Kent Robertson said in explaining his firm's lobbying over the trade preferences. "If we were able to call a timeout and make the lawsuit disappear, then this entire issue disappears," he added. Chevron says its lobbying campaign — which has included more than $1.6 million in fees this year to a bipartisan roster of Washington heavyweights including Democrats Mickey Kantor, a former U.S. trade representative; Mack McLarty, a former White House chief of staff; and former Sen. John Breaux (D-La.); as well as big-time GOP bundler Wayne Berman — is not at all unusual. Advocates for the plaintiffs, whose suit is financed by a Philadelphia law firm, have rallied their own impressive response in Washington. Led by Steven Donziger, a New York-based lawyer who was a Harvard Law School classmate of Obama, it includes Democratic fundraiser and lobbyist Ben Barnes; Tom Downey, a former Democratic congressman who is married to Obama climate czar Carol Browner and who recently registered to lobby Congress for Donziger; and public relations consultant Karen Hinton. The team has helped persuade a number of influential members of Congress to sign on to letters urging Kirk to reject Chevron's efforts.

In 2006, after multiple visits from Donziger, then-Sen. Obama joined with Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) in signing a letter to then-U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman, asking him "not to interfere in the Chevron case" and asserting that the Ecuadoreans "deserve their day in court." Robertson rejected the suggestion that the company's lobbying had backfired, pointing to a report Obama transmitted to Congress this summer that allowed the preferences to continue but referenced Chevron's concerns about the trial, including the company's allegations of interference by Ecuadorean officials up to and including President Rafael Correa. In an interview, Sanchez, who will testify Tuesday at a hearing her House Ways and Means subcommittee is scheduled to hold on free trade agreements, said Chevron is "trying to leverage our trade policy in order to get a lawsuit dismissed that is currently pending before the Ecuadorean court. It is a way of trying to undermine the rule of law, and I just find that completely abhorrent. It's shocking." This summer, Chevron thought it had made major progress toward proving its point that it could not receive a fair trial in Ecuador, when it revealed that it had obtained videos — purportedly taped secretly by a pair of whistleblowers using recorders implanted in watches and pens — that the company said exposed a bribery scheme in the case involving Ecuadorean officials and possibly the judge in the case. The company turned the recordings over to authorities in the U.S. and Ecuador and circulated excerpts of the recordings on Capitol Hill. The judge recused himself. But late last month, Hinton — who is paid by the Philadelphia law firm financing the suit to advocate on behalf of a nonprofit called the Amazon Defense Coalition — released a report revealing that the American who helped make the recordings was a convicted drug trafficker, while his Ecuadorean partner was a Chevron contractor. Robertson called the report "character assignation" and said it "doesn't change what was caught on film. We have a judge who is corrupt. … We're not measuring the release of the videos as success or failure." He did count as a success, though, the fact that Chevron shareholders in May, after a letter-writing campaign by the company, voted down a resolution citing the lawsuit and calling on the company to examine whether it complies with host country laws and environmental regulations. Nonetheless, state pension funds that hold a combined $1 billion in Chevron shares have expressed concern about how the company plans to handle a potentially huge adverse judgment in the case. And in a May letter demanding more information from Chevron, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said he had recently "received complaints regarding Chevron's disclosures of the potential litigation risks and Chevron's characterization of available legal defenses." Chevron also got dinged for a curious PR effort back in April, when — after catching wind that CBS's "60 Minutes" was preparing a damaging report about its handling of the Ecuador case — it released a video it paid for featuring former CNN reporter Gene Randall delivering what looked like a news report giving Chevron's side of the story.

Posted on YouTube and the company's website and bearing the logo "Gene Randall reporting," the report was produced with help from the conservative Beltway consulting firm CRC Public Relations. It cast Ecuador's politicians as out to get Chevron and blamed the pollution on Ecuador's state-owned oil company, which took over Texaco's operations. Columbia Journalism Review assailed the report as "deceptive" and posited that it "might be unprecedented for how it blurred the line between public relations and journalism." Chevron's Robertson said Hinton and the lawyers in the case are "trying to take Chevron's reputation hostage and to ransom it back to us" for a settlement. "So getting our side of the story out there is important." Robertson also said Hinton and her allies are in a bit of a "glass houses situation" when it comes to alleging sneaky techniques. He pointed out that Hinton's group paid a private investigator to expose the background of the video maker, that a group linked to Hinton's issued press releases insinuating that the murder of a brother of one of the plaintiff's lawyers may be linked to the case (though the lawyer initially told the police otherwise) and that Hinton's own husband, Howard Glaser, a financial services industry analyst, late last month posted an item bashing Chevron on The Huffington Post — to which he is a contributor — without noting their marriage. Hinton asserted her side's tactics have been above board, adding that, though "no one knows who murdered [the lawyer's] brother," the killing came at a time when the lawyer "and other members of the plaintiffs' legal team had received a number of anonymous death threats connected to the work on the case." Meanwhile, even the addendum Hinton's husband posted at the request of Chevron noting his wife's relationship to the case somehow seemed to ricochet against Chevron. "My spouse works with the indigenous people of Ecuador who are the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Chevron for the massive pollution the company left behind in the rain forest," he wrote. "While Chevron conducts a multimillion-dollar media spin campaign to paint themselves as the environmental 'good guys,' said spouse working out of her house with her two cats and cell phone appears to have gotten under Chevron's corporate skin."

Read More

Chevron Using “Every Trick In The Book” To Evade Justice in Ecuador

Chevron's attempt to continually play its games to evade any semblance of justice in Ecuador is blasted in this post ("Ecuador Class Action Plaintiffs Strike Back at Chevron's Cynical Game of Musical Jurisdictions") from the International Business Law Advisor. Read on for Santiago Cueto's take on Chevron's activities:

The seventeen-year war between Ecuador's 30,000 class plaintiffs against oil giant Chevron continues its global odyssey, as the oil giant pulls out every trick in the book to avoid an impending $27 Billion judgment against it in Ecuador for contaminating an immense portion of rainforest and devastating the local population.

Chevron first fought successfully to force plaintiffs to try their lawsuit in Ecuador rather than U.S. courts. Then it sought (unsuccessfully) to win indemnification in U.S. courts from a possible judgment in Ecuador. And now it's filed for arbitration seven thousand miles across the Atlantic in Holland.

Chevron's latest tactical attempt to escape justice in Ecuador is consistent with its October 2007 press release, in which it promised the plaintiffs "a lifetime" of appellate and collateral litigation if they persisted in pursuing their claims.

Unfortunately for Chevron, it grossly underestimated the resolve of the class plaintiffs. As reported in The Wall Street Journal article, Chevron Plaintiffs Ask U.S. Court for Action, the People of Ecuador just filed a Petition to Stay Arbitration in United States District Court (S.D.N.Y) to enjoin Chevron from proceeding on the baseless international arbitration claim it recently filed in Holland. In December the Government of Ecuador filed its own Petition to Stay Arbitration.

As a litigator, I'm mindful that an attorney's obligation to zealously advocate his clients' interest may involve forum shopping as part of the procedural calculus, however, the obligation must be tempered with a keen understanding of what becomes abusive litigation.

Chevron's global quest for a favorable forum is a text book example of abusive litigation. To litigate a lawsuit across three continents is a cynical game of musical jurisdictions and takes corporate arrogance and the civil justice system to a new low. Isn't it time for Chevron to take a seat when the music stops in Ecuador?

What do you think?

This is the third in a series of posts discussing this extremely important case. Be sure to read Chevron Files International Arbitration Claim Against Ecuador: Forum Shopping in the Hague? and Chevron's Missteps: How Not to Handle Foreign Litigation.

Read More

Chevron Kicks Out “Runners for Human Rights” in Houston

Apparently Chevron is so hysterical about its impending legal disaster in Ecuador it has taken to infringing on free speech here in the United States. Take a look at this post from Han over at ChevroninEcuador.com:

Chevron pulls strings, kicks 'Runners for Human Rights' out of pre-Chevron Houston Marathan expo

Our friends at Rainforest Action Network (RAN) have recently joined the effort to demand justice for the people of the Ecuadorian Amazon suffering from Chevron's massive contamination of their rainforest communities. In true RAN style, their first big public initiative is smart and engaging– a handful of RAN activists are "running for human rights" in the Chevron Houston Marathon, taking place this Sunday. As part of the Chevron-sponsored (and thoroughly branded) marathon, the organizers present a big public Expo, at which the RAN runners paid for a table to distribute info about why they're running.

But at 10am this morning, before the Expo even opened, the RAN team – registered and credentialed – was threatened with arrest and kicked out of the Expo building by police. According to the RAN team, Chevron Marathon Managing Director Steven Karpas told them that "higher ups at Chevron are freaking out." And apparently, the Chevron big-wigs' "freak-out" was enough to deny the RAN team of their right to free speech and get them ejected from a building owned and operated by the city of Houston.

This is another pathetic example of Chevron throwing its weight around and resorting to dirty tactics in attempt to hide the truth from the public. Let's hope that Chevron won't be able to stop the registered runners from taking part in the marathon. And regardless, we know they'll do a great job raising awareness in Houston, with plans to unveil banners along the race route, and host a screening of the explosive documentary CRUDE in Houston. Read the full RAN press release after the jump.

RAN's press release:


For Immediate Release January 15, 2010

Contact: Brianna Cayo Cotter, Rainforest Action Network, (415) 305-1943 (in Houston)

Houston Chevron Marathon Marred by Denial of Runners' Free Speech


Runners for human rights barred from Chevron Houston Marathon Expo, threatened with arrest

Houston, TX – A team that is running for human rights in Ecuador at this Sunday's Chevron Houston Marathon was just kicked out of the marathon's Expo by Chevron Marathon Managing Director Steven Karpas. The runners had paid for a table to distribute "I'm Running for Human Rights" stickers and information about Chevron's refusal to clean up over 18 billion tons of toxic oil sludge they are responsible for in the Ecuadorean rainforest.

At approximately 10 a.m. this morning, Managing Director Steven Karpas told the Rainforest Action Network team, "higher ups at Chevron are freaking out" and threatened to arrest the peaceful runners. Police then ejected the runners from the city-owned and operated building for exercising their right to free speech.

"We are outraged that Chevron would deny marathon participants the right to run for what they believe, in our case, human rights in Ecuador," said Rainforest Action Network runner Maria Ramos. "It is sad that the Chevron Houston Marathon - which raises awareness and money for many important causes - would deny the rights of participants to appease a corporate sponsor that is clearly ashamed of its human rights record."

When asked for a reason for their ejection, Steven Karpas told the runners they were being removed for "protest activities." The Rainforest Action Network team's objective at the Expo was not to protest, disrupt the Expo or dampen other runners experience at this important race. The runners merely wanted to sit at their table and invite other runners to run with them for human rights.

While in Houston, Rainforest Action Network advocates will run in the race, unveil "Energy Shouldn't Cost Lives" banners along the race route, distribute "I'm Running for Human Rights" stickers to other runners, and host a free screening of Crude – the critically acclaimed documentary about the crisis in Ecuador – for Chevron employees and the Houston community.

Chevron is currently facing a $27.3 billion pollution judgment against the company in an Ecuadorean court over Chevron's toxic legacy in the Amazon rainforest. Just yesterday, representatives of Amazonian indigenous groups in Ecuador went to U.S. federal court in New York today to enjoin Chevron from initiating a closed-door international arbitration against Ecuador's government designed to eliminate the company's potential $27 billion liability for contaminating a huge swath of rainforest and devastating the local population.

– Han

Born and raised in Baltimore, Han Shan is a human rights and environmental justice campaigner living in New York City. He is currently serving as an organizer with the Clean Up Ecuador campaign for Amazon Watch.

Read More

Clean Up Ecuador: Letter to New Chevron CEO, John Watson

(Cross-posted from Amazon Watch's "Clean Up Ecuador" campaign website, www.chevrontoxico.com)

ChevronToxico | Letter from Atossa Soltani to New Chevron CEO, John Watson

On January 1st, John Watson will become the new Chairman and CEO of Chevron Corporation. Within the first few months of his tenure, a judgment is expected on a monumental environmental lawsuit for cleanup of oil contamination affecting tens of thousands of people living in an Amazon rainforest region of Ecuador called the Oriente.

Following is an open letter to Mr. Watson from Atossa Soltani, the founder and Executive Director of Amazon Watch, an organization that works to protect the rainforest and advance the rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin. The letter references a confidential corporate memo that provides shocking insight into the reckless practices employed by Texaco (now Chevron) in Ecuador.

Click here to add your name to a petition to Mr. Watson supporting clean-up in Ecuador.

December 17, 2009

Mr. John S. Watson
Incoming Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Chevron Corporation

Dear Mr. Watson:

I write to you on behalf of Amazon Watch to express our hope that as Chief Executive of Chevron Corporation you will have the fortitude and vision to genuinely address the most painful and immediate challenge facing your company - the Ecuador disaster.

Our hope is that you will not miss this critical opportunity to resolve the human and environmental tragedy in Ecuador and transform Chevron into the responsible 21st century energy company professed in 'The Chevron Way' and in your 'Human Energy' advertising campaigns.

Your company is currently facing a $27.3 billion financial liability in Ecuador. We ask that you reflect on Chevron's handling of the Ecuador situation over the course of the last decade. You should remember Chevron's Annual General Shareholder Meeting in April 2001 - on the eve of the Texaco acquisition - when I delivered to your company a binder, titled "El Dorado," with more than 500 pages of comprehensive evidence documenting Texaco's massive environmental contamination in the Ecuadorian Amazon. At that meeting, I warned Chevron that by acquiring Texaco the company would not only take on the moral responsibility of rectifying the tragedy in the Amazon, but also assume a very costly financial liability.

Despite increasing shareholder and analyst concern, the growing public demand that Chevron take responsibility for its actions in Ecuador, and the resulting multi-billion liability they have spawned, Amazon Watch has witnessed your company pursue an expensive, ethically questionable, and counterproductive policy with regard to the Ecuador case.

Mr. Watson, as you surely know, the situation on the ground is dire. Thousands of acres of once pristine rainforest have been devastated by oil pollution. More than 30,000 indigenous peoples and campesinos have been left without clean water to drink. Children play beside toxic waste pits. Young women have been ravaged by stomach and uterine cancer due to poisoned water. As you are well aware, Texaco has admitted to having deliberately released 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into the waterways of the Ecuadorian Amazon, and to having left hundreds of abandoned unlined pits filled with crude oil and poison sludge over the course of more than two decades of oil operations. And now, as a direct result, a devastating public health crisis has consumed the region.

We are keenly attuned to Chevron's public relations strategy with respect to this matter. The basic approach is to consistently blame the contamination of the Amazon on Petroecuador, Ecuador's National Oil Company. Petroecuador's poor record of environmental stewardship - largely because it has used an oil production system built by Texaco and designed to pollute - does not diminish Texaco's responsibility for catastrophic contamination from 1964 to 1990. Texaco's deliberate dumping dwarfs any subsequent pollution. Rather than continuing to shift the blame to Petruecuador, it is time for Chevron to assume the responsibility for Texaco's legacy in Ecuador.

To remind you of Texaco's unethical practices in the 1970's, we have attached here a confidential memorandum from the Chairman of the Texaco Board of Directors to the Acting Manager of Texaco in Ecuador in 1972. The memo instructs the staff only to report "major events as per Oil Spill Response Plan" if they attract "the attention of press and/or regulatory authorities" and goes on to instruct: "no reports are to be kept on a routine basis and all previous reports to be removed...and destroyed." We trust that as the incoming CEO of Chevron, you do not condone this kind of denial, neglect and obfuscation made plain in the 1972 Texaco memo. We are interested in hearing your position on the matter.

Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, it is our understanding that you have never been to Ecuador, Mr. Watson. It is of great concern to us, and should be to you, that the information and advice provided to Chevron senior management since the Texaco acquisition has lacked integrity and independence. We do not believe that a well-informed and responsible senior management team could reasonably pursue the current "blind fight" legal and public relations strategy if it indeed possessed accurate information. Consequently, and with the best intentions, we would like to invite you to visit the affected region of Ecuador in the sincere hope that seeing the abandoned toxic waste pits and poisoned waters and hearing the innumerable stories of human suffering will move you to do the right thing.

Until Chevron takes meaningful steps to resolve this case, it will continue to play out in the courts of Ecuador, as well as in the global court of public opinion. You have a choice between allowing the ongoing suffering and environmental devastation in Ecuador to tarnish your company's reputation, or providing a bold example of 'The Chevron Way,' which states "We respect the law, support universal human rights, protect the environment, and benefit the communities where we work."

Rather than continue to battle the communities that have already paid a heavy price to enrich Chevron, we believe you have an opportunity to help bring an end to their decades of needless suffering.

We don't make these suggestions lightly or symbolically; we appeal to you to resolve this human and environmental tragedy, and lead Chevron into a new era of meaningful corporate social responsibility.

We look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Atossa Soltani

Executive Director
Amazon Watch

Read More

Chevron's Blogger Propagandists: Accuse First, Ask (No) Questions Later

(Originally posted by Amazon Watch over at www.chevroninecuador.com)

Chevron's Blogger Propagandists: Accuse First, Ask (No) Questions Later

We've written before about the motley crew of bloggers who fervently defend Chevron in its ongoing effort to run from a multibillion dollar liability for environmental disaster in Ecuador. Chevron is certainly not an easy company to stick up for, given its long and sordid history in Ecuador. Chevron's predecessor, Texaco, showed up in the pristine Amazon rainforest in 1964 and left a huge swath of it devastated and polluted by 1990. Chevron acquired Texaco, and its liability in Ecuador, in 2001 and is now the third largest U.S. corporation, with a 2008 profit of $24 billion. And yet this behemoth of an oil company loves to, ludicrously, play the victim card, and when it does, these are the bloggers who fall in line with PR-brushes in tow.

Chevron's blogger allies went into overdrive mode in September, trumpeting Chevron's claims when the oil major announced it had uncovered a $3 million bribery scandal that would implicate the Ecuadorian judge in corruption and, they claimed, prove government interference in the lawsuit. When the news hit, the pro-Chevron bloggers ran wild, crying foul, and trumpeting the Chevron line that a fair trial in Ecuador was impossible.

The only problem was, the smoking gun backfired. Instead of revealing a scandal, the videos themselves–and Chevron's role in presenting them to the media–became the scandal. As my colleague Han Shan documents in his thorough deconstruction of the company's allegations on Huffington Post, the whole "scandal" was nothing but a bizarre set up. By the end of October, it was clear that there was no actual bribe and no actual government officials were involved. Instead the videos merely document what appears to have been a plan to entrap judge Juan Nuñez and get him removed from the case. The man who presents himself as a businessman isn't, though he is a convicted drug-trafficker. The man he purports to bribe in the video is a phony government official (actually a car salesman). And the contracts they discuss were never signed and were proposed for a business that doesn't exist. Nice try, Chevron, but...

Since the bribery scandal imploded, there's been a curious silence from Chevron's merry band of bloggers. This isn't surprising. They're following a well-known propaganda strategy: make dramatic accusations with little supporting evidence, spread those accusations far and wide, then offer no retraction or apology when your claims are later proven to have been wildly off base...

More after the jump

Read More

Twenty-Six Members of Congress Ask USTR to Reject Chevron Interference in Landmark Ecuador Legal Case

House Members Express "Concern" About Oil Giant's Effort to Use Trade Policy to Deny Due Process in Environmental Lawsuit

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chevron has been dealt a major setback in the Congress as more than two dozen representatives, led by Rep. Linda Sanchez and including powerful senior members, have signed a letter urging that the United States Trade Representative reject efforts by the oil giant to cancel Ecuador's trade preferences. Chevron has pressured the USTR and Congress for years to revoke or curtail Ecuador's preferences in retaliation for a lawsuit brought by 30,000 Ecuadorian citizens alleging that Chevron dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into the rainforest over a period of more than 20 years.

Separately, a one-year extension of the trade preferences for Ecuador were approved in the House on Dec. 14 on a voice vote – the fourth consecutive year Chevron's lobbying effort against Ecuador appears to have failed. The Senate is expected to formally approve the measure by the end of the year.

The letter to the USTR, sent December 15, expresses concern about Chevron's efforts to influence a private litigation which originally was filed in 1993 in U.S. federal court by several Ecuadorian indigenous tribes and farmer communities, but was sent to Ecuador at Chevron's request in 2002.

"We urge you to reject Chevron's request and reaffirm that U.S. trade agreements will not be used as leverage to interfere in private claims progressing through Ecuador's legal process," the representatives wrote in the letter.

Among the 26 Members taking this strong stand with Rep. Sanchez were: the Chief Democratic Deputy Whip and Vice-Chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee's Trade Subcommittee, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL); the Chairman of the Human Rights Subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. William Delahunt (D-MA); eight Members of the Ways & Means Committee, including the chairman of its Oversight Subcommittee, Rep. John Lewis (D-GA); and eight members of the Appropriations Committee, three of whom also oversee State Department matters and Foreign Operations. Judiciary and Rules Committee Members also were among those lending their support.

Other members signing the letter were Reps.: Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), James McGovern (D-MA), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Danny Davis (D-IL), Sam Farr (D-CA), Steve Israel (D-NY), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), Brian Higgins (D-NY), Phil Hare (D-IL), Hank Johnson (D-GA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Betty McCollum (D-MN), Michael Michaud (D-ME), Jim McDermott (D-WA), James Moran (D-VA), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), Mike Quigley (D-IL), John Olver (D-MA), Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), Betty Sutton (D-OH), and Fortney "Pete" Stark (D-CA).

Chevron is charged in the lawsuit with dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into Amazon waterways and abandoning more than 900 unlined waste pits when it operated a large oil concession in Ecuador's Amazon from 1964 to 1990. A team of independent, court-appointed experts has estimated that at least 1,401 individuals have died from cancer related to exposure to the contamination and determined that damages could reach as high as $27.3 billion, according to a 4,000-page report turned over to the court last year.

The members of Congress write: "We do not prejudge the outcome of the case, nor do we take a position on the litigation. We do believe, however, that tens of thousands of indigenous residents of Ecuador who have brought this case deserve their day in court. We further believe that the USTR should not interfere in an ongoing judicial matter, particularly when this case involves environmental, health, and human rights issues that have a regional, and even global, importance."

Even though Chevron filed 14 expert affidavits in U.S. federal court praising Ecuador's court system to get the case transferred, once the evidence in the Ecuador trial pointed to the company's culpability it began a lobbying campaign in Washington to have Ecuador's preferences canceled. Chevron's lobbyists have made misleading assertions to the Congress that the company was granted a release from claims after a limited environmental clean-up in the mid-1990s, even though the release does not apply to the private claims in the lawsuit and the clean-up itself was fraudulent, according to the plaintiffs.

The ultimate goal of Chevron's Washington lobbying campaign was to pressure Ecuador's President, Rafael Correa, to interfere in his country's judiciary and quash the case as a way to maintain more than 300,000 jobs in Ecuador that are dependent on the preferences, according to Steven Donziger, an American legal advisor to the plaintiffs in the legal case.

"Chevron was trying to pressure Ecuador's President to violate his own Constitution and interfere in a private litigation to benefit the company in its battle with indigenous groups decimated by Chevron's pollution," said Donziger.

Chevron's lobbying campaign has sparked strong reactions across Capitol Hill and in the media.

On November 17, in testimony before the trade subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Sanchez called Chevron's lobbying "extortion" and said, "Apparently, if it can't get the outcome it wants from the Ecuadorian court system, Chevron will use the US government to deny trade benefits until Ecuador cries uncle."

A recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times editorial blasted Chevron, noting that "If ... Chevron has its way, Congress will instead punish Ecuador because its government refuses to halt a private lawsuit against the oil giant.... to force a favorable outcome in a private claim would justly generate international outrage."

In 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama and Sen. Patrick Leahy wrote a similar letter to the USTR asking it to reject Chevron's petition, which it did.

Experts believe the Ecuador contamination – which covers an area the size of Rhode Island -- is the worst oil-related disaster on earth and would take at least two decades to properly clean. A final judgment in the case is expected next year.

Read More

Wood’s Private Life Questioned, But His Public Choices Raise Real Questions

For the first time in Tiger Woods' career his private life is being closely scrutinized and his unwillingness to discuss what happened in his home criticized. Much ink has been used to debate what impact this scandal is having on his corporate partners, specifically Chevron, who entered into a five-year contract with the Tiger Woods' Foundation last year and had expected him to attend its golf tournament this week.

But, greater attention should be paid to Tiger's willingness enter into a relationship with Chevron itself, and the impact its had with the oil giant has had on the countries and people suffering from Chevron's abuse of the environment and human life across the globe.

This moment of media chaos may be the perfect time for Woods to reassess his relationship with this particular multinational for about 18 billion good reasons. That's the number of gallons of toxic waste that Texaco, now Chevron, intentionally dumped into the Ecuadorian rainforest from 1964 to 1990, contaminating the food and water supplies of the indigenous groups and farmer communities living there. Texaco built over 900 gigantic, unlined oil pits to store toxic waste permanently. The pits continue to seep into the groundwater and leech into the rivers and streams used by the 200,000 people living in the region.

This humanitarian crisis created by Woods' partner decimated the pristine rainforest in the Ecuadorian Amazon, one of the most bio diverse regions on earth and continues to contaminate to this day.

Kerry Kennedy, human rights activist and daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, recently visited the area and called it "Chevron's Chernobyl." [See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kerry-kennedy/chevron-and-cultural-geno_b_346257.html]

Experts estimate over 1,000 people have died from cancer, and thousands more suffer from respiratory illnesses, skin disease and other medical problems. Women living near the oil sites are 2.5 times as likely to have spontaneous abortions than women in other parts of Ecuador and incidents of childhood leukemia are three times higher than the national average. Children are born with deformities and, upon bathing in the contaminated water, develop painful skin rashes over their entire bodies.

Yet Chevron refuses to take responsibility for the deliberate contamination of the region designed to maximize profit at the time of its operation.

Chevron has a long history of human rights abuse across the globe and has shown no remorse for the Toxic legacy it inherited in Ecuador. EarthRights International has called on Woods to no longer partner with Chevron as a result of the company's criminal environmental practices and human rights abuses abroad. [See http://www.metro.us/us/article/2009/12/02/05/3635-82/index.xml]

Looks like Tiger's relationship with Chevron may actually be the most harmful one for the mega-athlete's reputation. At a time when Tiger might need to do a bit of rehab on his public image, he should be cutting ties with an oil-giant that is embroiled in a rising tide of human rights problems around the globe. If Chevron insists on continuing to do business in a way that violates the environmental integrity of the communities in which it operates around the world, than Tiger should insist that his foundation disassociate itself with the oil company in every way.

Read More

Chevron’s Lobbying Effort Blasted in Politico Monday

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29560.html

Chevron's lobby campaign backfires
By: Kenneth P. Vogel
November 16, 2009 04:58 AM EST

Facing the possibility of a $27 billion pollution judgment against it in an Ecuadorean court, Chevron launched an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign to try to prevent the judgment as well as reverse a deeply damaging story line.

Chevron's tactics — ranging from quietly trying to wield U.S. trade policy to compel Ecuador's government to squelch the case, to producing a pseudo-news report casting the company as the victim of a corrupt Ecuadorean political system — were designed to win powerful allies in Congress and the Obama administration as well as to shape public opinion and calm shareholders.

But many of the company's moves have backfired, drawing fire from environmentalists, media ethicists, state pension funds, New York's attorney general, members of Congress and even Barack Obama when he was a senator.

"Their lobbying and PR efforts are really clumsy and very heavy handed, and I think that that's why they're experiencing a degree of backlash," said Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), who is circulating the first of what she promises will be three letters to colleagues blasting what she calls the company's "misguided approach" to dealing with the case.

The case stems from a class action suit brought by well-connected U.S. trial lawyers on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadoreans alleging that from 1964 to 1990, Texaco — which was purchased by Chevron in 2001 — dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into Ecuador's Amazon rain forest, leaving behind an unprecedented environmental and public health disaster including a wave of cancers, birth defects and miscarriages.

Chevron has been pushing the U.S. government to revise Ecuador's trade preferences since soon after the lawsuit was filed in Ecuador in 2003 (it originally had been in U.S. federal court in 1993). But with a years-long trial in a tiny courtroom in the Ecuadorean rain forest expected to culminate in a ruling early next year, Chevron has turned up the heat, arguing that it can't get a fair trial in Ecuador, an assertion that Sanchez and other Chevron critics point out seems to conflict with the company's previous efforts to move the trial from U.S. courts to Ecuador.

In part, Chevron wants the office of U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, as well as Congress, to revoke the preferential treatment Ecuador gets for its oil exports under the 1991 Andean Trade Preferences Act, unless the country enforces an agreement it entered into with Texaco in the mid-1990s, under which the company paid for a three-year, $40 million cleanup and was relieved of liability. The plaintiffs contend that Chevron botched the cleanup, but if the court were to recognize the agreement, it could essentially end the suit.

"When a government is in violation of its contractual obligations to a company, there are only a few avenues a company has to seek resolution," Chevron spokesman Kent Robertson said in explaining his firm's lobbying over the trade preferences. "If we were able to call a timeout and make the lawsuit disappear, then this entire issue disappears," he added.

Chevron says its lobbying campaign — which has included more than $1.6 million in fees this year to a bipartisan roster of Washington heavyweights including Democrats Mickey Kantor, a former U.S. trade representative; Mack McLarty, a former White House chief of staff; and former Sen. John Breaux (D-La.); as well as big-time GOP bundler Wayne Berman — is not at all unusual.

Advocates for the plaintiffs, whose suit is financed by a Philadelphia law firm, have rallied their own impressive response in Washington. Led by Steven Donziger, a New York-based lawyer who was a Harvard Law School classmate of Obama, it includes Democratic fundraiser and lobbyist Ben Barnes; Tom Downey, a former Democratic congressman who is married to Obama climate czar Carol Browner and who recently registered to lobby Congress for Donziger; and public relations consultant Karen Hinton. The team has helped persuade a number of influential members of Congress to sign on to letters urging Kirk to reject Chevron's efforts.

In 2006, after multiple visits from Donziger, then-Sen. Obama joined with Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) in signing a letter to then-U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman, asking him "not to interfere in the Chevron case" and asserting that the Ecuadoreans "deserve their day in court."

Robertson rejected the suggestion that the company's lobbying had backfired, pointing to a report Obama transmitted to Congress this summer that allowed the preferences to continue but referenced Chevron's concerns about the trial, including the company's allegations of interference by Ecuadorean officials up to and including President Rafael Correa.

In an interview, Sanchez, who will testify Tuesday at a hearing her House Ways and Means subcommittee is scheduled to hold on free trade agreements, said Chevron is "trying to leverage our trade policy in order to get a lawsuit dismissed that is currently pending before the Ecuadorean court. It is a way of trying to undermine the rule of law, and I just find that completely abhorrent. It's shocking."

This summer, Chevron thought it had made major progress toward proving its point that it could not receive a fair trial in Ecuador, when it revealed that it had obtained videos — purportedly taped secretly by a pair of whistleblowers using recorders implanted in watches and pens — that the company said exposed a bribery scheme in the case involving Ecuadorean officials and possibly the judge in the case. The company turned the recordings over to authorities in the U.S. and Ecuador and circulated excerpts of the recordings on Capitol Hill. The judge recused himself.

But late last month, Hinton — who is paid by the Philadelphia law firm financing the suit to advocate on behalf of a nonprofit called the Amazon Defense Coalition — released a report revealing that the American who helped make the recordings was a convicted drug trafficker, while his Ecuadorean partner was a Chevron contractor.

Robertson called the report "character assignation" and said it "doesn't change what was caught on film. We have a judge who is corrupt. … We're not measuring the release of the videos as success or failure."

He did count as a success, though, the fact that Chevron shareholders in May, after a letter-writing campaign by the company, voted down a resolution citing the lawsuit and calling on the company to examine whether it complies with host country laws and environmental regulations.

Nonetheless, state pension funds that hold a combined $1 billion in Chevron shares have expressed concern about how the company plans to handle a potentially huge adverse judgment in the case. And in a May letter demanding more information from Chevron, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said he had recently "received complaints regarding Chevron's disclosures of the potential litigation risks and Chevron's characterization of available legal defenses."

Chevron also got dinged for a curious PR effort back in April, when — after catching wind that CBS's "60 Minutes" was preparing a damaging report about its handling of the Ecuador case — it released a video it paid for featuring former CNN reporter Gene Randall delivering what looked like a news report giving Chevron's side of the story.

Posted on YouTube and the company's website and bearing the logo "Gene Randall reporting," the report was produced with help from the conservative Beltway consulting firm CRC Public Relations. It cast Ecuador's politicians as out to get Chevron and blamed the pollution on Ecuador's state-owned oil company, which took over Texaco's operations.

Columbia Journalism Review assailed the report as "deceptive" and posited that it "might be unprecedented for how it blurred the line between public relations and journalism."

Chevron's Robertson said Hinton and the lawyers in the case are "trying to take Chevron's reputation hostage and to ransom it back to us" for a settlement. "So getting our side of the story out there is important."

Robertson also said Hinton and her allies are in a bit of a "glass houses situation" when it comes to alleging sneaky techniques. He pointed out that Hinton's group paid a private investigator to expose the background of the video maker, that a group linked to Hinton's issued press releases insinuating that the murder of a brother of one of the plaintiff's lawyers may be linked to the case (though the lawyer initially told the police otherwise) and that Hinton's own husband, Howard Glaser, a financial services industry analyst, late last month posted an item bashing Chevron on The Huffington Post — to which he is a contributor — without noting their marriage.

Hinton asserted her side's tactics have been above board, adding that, though "no one knows who murdered [the lawyer's] brother," the killing came at a time when the lawyer "and other members of the plaintiffs' legal team had received a number of anonymous death threats connected to the work on the case."

Meanwhile, even the addendum Hinton's husband posted at the request of Chevron noting his wife's relationship to the case somehow seemed to ricochet against Chevron.

"My spouse works with the indigenous people of Ecuador who are the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Chevron for the massive pollution the company left behind in the rain forest," he wrote. "While Chevron conducts a multimillion-dollar media spin campaign to paint themselves as the environmental 'good guys,' said spouse working out of her house with her two cats and cell phone appears to have gotten under Chevron's corporate skin."

Read More