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

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Chevron hit hard today by movie review in Washington Post

Interesting review of the movie "Crude" in today's Washington Post – the article really breaks down the way Chevron has handled the lawsuit to date. Take a look below or at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/22/AR2009102201443_pf.html

Not simply an underdog's tale

By John Anderson
Friday, October 23, 2009

Had Michael Moore wanted to make a serious movie about capitalism, he would have made "Crude." Joe Berlinger's scorched-earth documentary and David-and-Goliath drama offers more than a few eco-outraged observations on the not-so-free enterprise system: As the film very eloquently implies, when the greater good is defined as profits, and a lack of culpability is proportionate to your number of shareholders, well . . . a lot of petroleum-soaked chickens will be coming home to roost.

For three years, Berlinger followed the now-17-year-old lawsuit against Chevron filed by 30,000 indigenous Ecuadorans, and the results are an eco-war strategy as might have been devised by Sun Tzu. Witnesses are prepped, strategies are rehearsed, judges are buttonholed and celebrities are stroked -- and this is the strategy of the "good guys," as they probably would be defined by Berlinger. While both sides in the case certainly are given their voice, it's unlikely that the director -- who enjoys a lucrative commercial career in New York -- would have been inspired to leave hearth and home by his deep sense of injustice over the sufferings of Chevron.

And yet, "Crude" is that rare thing in fiction or nonfiction cinema, a movie that relies on its audience to draw the right conclusions. Chevron makes a decent case for itself: It wasn't even in the Amazon from 1972 to 1990, when an alleged 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater were dumped there, sickening the inhabitants (notably the plaintiff Cofán tribe). But Texaco was, and Chevron took it over in 2001. And while much blame is assigned by all parties to the government-owned PetroEcuador, which has run the country's oil production since the early '90s, all the experts brought in to make assessments conclude that the damage is deep and old.

Chevron's motives are clear -- although the pending judgment against it is "only" $27 billion, it hardly pays to set a precedent and settle. When Pablo Fajardo, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, and his associate Luis Yanza receive the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2008, a Chevron spokesman is heard calling them liars. Lawyers for the Ecuadorans admit that a Chevron defeat could mean big fees. When we see Chevron's agents -- such as counsel Ricardo Reis Veiga, who has since been indicted for fraud -- they admit nothing.

Berlinger ("Brother's Keeper," "Paradise Lost") lets it play out artfully. The fact that Chevron's representatives come across as soulless shills is hardly his fault; he lets them present their case without comment. It's hardly his responsibility to make someone such as corporation scientist Sara McMillan appear less reptilian when she contends that there's been no damage to the jungle, no oil-related illness, no correlation between pollution and death. From what the viewer can tell, Chevron is a little like the guy who performed a little surgery and stole your kidneys: What kidneys? Prove you ever had kidneys! If the movie is any indication, Chevron would have the public believe there was no Amazon at all -- something people might be willing to believe, were Berlinger not sticking "Crude" in their faces.

Anderson is a freelance reviewer.

*** ½ Unrated. At Landmark's E Street Cinema. Contains disturbing content. 105 minutes.

Whew. 3.5 stars (out of 4) for a film that Chevron and its shills keep trying to attack as just an anti-Chevron film. Maybe they try and go after the film because the company's arguments ring hollow - so rather than deal with the reality on the ground, the company encourages sympathetic bloggers like Carter Wood to attack the film. And therein lies Chevron's entire strategy (and the root of the company's problems): treat the situation in Ecuador as an image problem to be managed, rather than a humanitarian and economic crisis to be solved.

Hopefully the film will start to wake the company up to the reality: they made a mess in Ecudor, and they now need to clean it up.

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Chevron: Don’t believe your eyes…believe our lies!

Chevron's bloggers, who continue to deny the truth about the company's involvement in oil contamination in Ecuador, are upset with a New York Times photo of a waste pit in Ecuador that ran last Saturday.

Chevron apologists such as Carter Wood – who blogs for the National Associat

ion of Manufacturers, which counts Chevron as a major donor – have said the photo is of a waste pit by Ecuador's state-owned oil company, Petroecuador, because the oil is fresh and Chevron left the country in 1992. But in his hurry to carry Chevron's water, Carter again misses the boat with his analysis.

Evidence at the trial demonstrates that Chevron's predecessor company, Texaco, constructed 916 unlined waste pits in Ecuador's Amazon in the 1970s and 1980s. All were gouged out of the jungle floor without lining, in violation of U.S. and industry standards dating to the 1920s. Almost all of the pits had pipes that ran the toxic contents into nearby streams relied on by the local population for drinking water; in most cases, the toxic contents have migrated through the bottom of the pits to contaminate groundwater used for wells by local residents. If you want to see for yourself, check out the 60 Minutes report on the case.

This is clear evidence of the reckless indifference to human life that characterized Texaco's operations and Chevron's defense. Texaco had so little regard for the locals that Chevron had to admit that Texaco never even kept a list of the existence or locations of the pits, each of one of which is a hazardous waste site. The use of these reckless operational practices might explain why several independent health evaluations show skyrocketing rates of cancer in the region, and why the court Special Master found 1,401 excess cancer deaths. If this had happened in the U.S. it would probably be considered negligent homicide – and those that designed and built this system would probably be in jail.

Not that Wood cares. According to him – in a line he lifted directly from Chevron's talking points - if the oil in the pit is liquid then it must have been put there recently, which means the NYT photo could not be of contamination in a pit that Chevron left Ecuador in 1992. That's simply not true, according to evidence at trial. Dozens of Texaco waste pits in Ecuador's Amazon that were never touched by Petroecuador look exactly like the one in the NYT photo – even pits closed down by Texaco in the 1970s and 1980s. Check out this picture (taken in 2005), which is of Texaco site "Lago Agrio 5" which was closed in 1972 – and which hasn't been touched by anyone since it was closed by the company that year. Oil in old pits does not weather in Ecuador because it rains constantly in the Amazon, keeping the sludge in the old waste pits in the exact form one sees in the NYT photo. Even if the pit is now owned by Petroecuador, it does not absolve Chevron of its responsibility for building it, operating it, and abandoning it – and for the continued damage caused by using the same methods by the subsequent operator.

Chevron and bloggers like Carter Wood have consistently lied and misled the public, shareholders, and the media about Chevron's role in Ecuador. Chevron has tried every trick in the book – from creating its own news reports designed to look like CNN reports (including hiring disgraced former CNN correspondent Gene Randall to give the recordings an "authentic" appearance), to its latest Nixon-style dirty tricks operation to undermine the Ecuador trial where Chevron faces a substantial liability. Now, Carter Wood, on behalf of his organization's client Chevron, is asking people to not believe what is evident in a photo.

As Chevron's game of smoke and mirrors unravels, look for more misleading postings by Carter Wood and Chevron's cohort of bloggers. After all, Wood readily admits that he took an all-expense paid trip to Ecuador - paid for by Chevron of course - to get educated (read indoctrinated) on the issue. What he doesn't admit is that he failed to speak to any of the people who are trying to hold Chevron responsible for ruining their land and their lives. As a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, Wood should know better than to write about an issue without talking to both sides or disclosing that he is paid to support one party to a dispute.

So please Carter, stop trying to fool people with misleading arguments about oil liquidity and photos - people are not that stupid in the reality-based world.

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