Chevron Knows No Bounds In Ecuador Case, New York Times Article Shows

In a blog on The Huffington Post, the former U.S. spokesperson for the Ecuadorians who won a $19 billion judgment against Chevron for oil contamination argues a recent  New York Times article clearly shows that Chevron knows no bounds in its legal attacks to avoid being held accountable for the destruction it caused in the Ecuadorian rainforest.

Read the blog, written by Karen Hinton, here.

The New York Times article, written by energy reporter Cliff Krauss, is a balanced look at the 20-year-old lawsuit, but neglects to point out some key facts about the case:

1 -- Most importantly, it incorrectly states that the Ecuadorians filed their lawsuit against Texaco, now owned by Chevron, after Texaco entered into a remediation agreement with the Government of Ecuador. They filed their lawsuit in 1993 in a U.S. court. Not long after, Texaco appealed, lobbied, and probably bribed Ecuador's government to get the lawsuit dismissed. It would not and that led to the 1995 remediation agreement, which the U.S. court ignored. Equally important is the fact that the agreement carved out the Ecuadorians' lawsuit, stating that the third-party complaints were not covered by the agreement.

2 -- Chevron has never denied that it has spied and possibly continues to spy on one of the Ecuadorians' attorneys, Steven Donziger, a human rights lawyer whose reputation Chevron is clearly trying to destroy, if not his entire ability to make a living to support his family.

3 -- Chevron charges that the Ecuadorians' lawyers "ghostwrote" an Ecuador court report and two judgments, but have any reporters taken a close look at U.S. Judge Lewis Kaplan's recent rulings on Chevron's fraud countersuit? Kaplan's rulings are only slight re-writes of legal briefs filed by Chevron lawyers. U.S. judges often take arguments written in briefs, submitted by one side or the other, and use them in their briefs. In Ecuador, it's no different.

4 -- Krauss quotes Chevron saying that Donziger's "confidents" have turned against him, but everyone involved in the case knows that the individuals in question have been threatened and pressured by Chevron. For more than four years, Chevron pressured clients of Stratus Consulting, the environmental engineering firm for the Ecuadorians, to dump the firm. On the verge of bankruptcy resulting from the Chevron litigation against it, Stratus succumbed to the pressure with an affidavit disavowing the process for writing one of the court reports on contamination at the Chevron oil sites. Chevron dropped its lawsuit against Stratus; however, Stratus continues to stand by its findings of contamination. See here and here.

5 -- Another of Stratus' environmentalists is quoted from a video, saying that the contamination had not spread beyond the oil sites. Had Chevron allowed the reporter to see the entire video, he would have seen that she was concerned about the number of tests taken so far and was arguing for more testing to determine the impact of the contamination beyond the pits. Donziger was arguing that the Ecuadorians only had so much money to spend on tests; that contamination was evident at the oil sites, and that was enough to prove Chevron's guilt. Regardless, there is contamination at the well sites; people live near them; they should be cleaned.

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SEC Tries To Silence Chevron Shareholders

Not surprisingly, the Securities and Exchange Commission has rubber stamped Chevron's request to remove a shareholder resolution from consideration at its annual shareholders meeting that would have stripped John Watson of his Chairman's title and responsibilities. Watson currently is the CEO and Chairman.

The SEC decision makes it look like the corporate tool it is, and Chevron, well, the corporate thug readers of The Chevron Pit have come to know.

A growing number of shareholders are concerned about the way Chevron is handling the $19 billion Ecuador judgment for massive oil contamination facing the company and have proposed a resolution to hold top executives more accountable by splitting the role of Chair and CEO, as many other companies have done.  Last year, a similar resolution won the support of 38 percent of Chevron shareholders.

Today, though, the SEC big footed Chevron's request, depriving shareholders an opportunity to vote on the resolution again. The move is in keeping with SEC's weak oversight of corporate America in general and an attempt to silence shareholders.

It will, however, take more than the SEC to silence these shareholders, some of whom have been subpoenaed by Chevron in its desperate legal attacks in the U.S. to stop enforcement of the judgment.

Two other resolutions will be voted on by shareholders:  one to appoint an environmental expert to the board and the other to explain why Chevron has subpoenaed several shareholder groups, including Trillium Asset Management, along with several dozen environmentalists, law students and summer interns.

See this New York Times article by Gretchen Morgenson and a San Francisco Chronicle article by David Baker.

Expect to see shareholders out in full force at the May 29th meeting without the resolution, but resolute to hold Chevron accountable for its environmental crimes.

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What Happens When Big Oil Freaks Out

Chevron Spending $400 Million A Year On Ecuador Case, Subsidized By U.S Government?

Since 2011, when an Ecuadorian court found Chevron guilty of widespread contamination of the Amazon rain forest and ordered the oil giant to pay $19 billion in damages, Chevron has been spending around $400 million annually on 2,000 legal experts from 60 law firms to evade paying the judgment, according to a recent court filing.

But, for all the money and all the lawyers, Chevron is facing enforcement actions in four countries -- Ecuador, Canada, Argentina, and Brazil – where the Ecuadorians could seize their billions from Chevron’s assets. And, Chevron continues to lose in U.S. courts on the merits. See here.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports today that Chevron has received $2.6 billion in federal tax-free bonds to expand a refinery in Mississippi. The New York Times said Chevron has received more than any U.S.-based corporation and described it as "sweetheart rates for corporations."

What this means is the U.S. federal government is subsidizing Chevron's legal bills as a result of its misconduct in Ecuador, not to mention litigation and accusations Chevron has been defending in Brazil, California, Angola, Nigeria and other places across the globe. See here. 

In a desperate attempt to stop enforcement of the $19 billion judgment, Chevron has accused the Ecuadorian villagers and their lawyers for “fraud” and sued them in about 20 different U.S. court jurisdictions, filing hundreds of legal motions and millions of pages of discovery documents and taking over 40 depositions from experts and consultants -- all designed to distract from the 16 billion gallons of toxic production water it dumped into the Ecuadorian rainforest and the 900 unlined pits Chevron built to store permanently pure crude oil. 

For more details, read this press release.

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U.S. Investigations Into Wastewater Raise Similar Concerns As In Ecuador

U.S. investigations into hydrofracking — a drilling method to tap natural gas resources — revealed the same findings of an Ecuadorian judge who recently awarded $8.6 billion in damages to a group of indigenous tribes suing Chevron for oil contamination in the Amazon rainforest. The judge found that wastewater generated by Chevron’s oil exploration had contaminated drinking water and soil — the same concern raised by hydrofracking investigations in Pennsylvania, New York, Louisiana and Texas. New York Times’ reporter Ian Urbina wrote this disturbing article about the safety impacts on drinking water. Not surprisingly, industry officials denied harm, just as Chevron has done in Ecuador.

Urbina wrote:

“With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground.... More than 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater was produced by Pennsylvania wells over the past three years, far more than has been previously disclosed. Most of this water — enough to cover Manhattan in three inches — was sent to treatment plants not equipped to remove many of the toxic materials in drilling waste.”

In Ecuador, Chevron never treated the wastewater at all. The oil giant produced 16 to 18 billion gallons of untreated wastewater and intentionally dumped it into the rainforest during the company’s operations in Ecuador from 1964 to 1992. Tests taken in 1994 found dangerous levels of benzene in Chevron’s wastewater, but no tests on radioactive elements have been conducted. View this video of a former oil operations assistant for Texaco (purchased by Chevron in 2001) who talks about how the company intentionally dumped untreated wastewater directly into the rainforest.



Urbina wrote:

The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.... The Times also found never-reported studies by the E.P.A. and a confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways.

Chevron has argued that harmful chemicals in the wastewater have been diluted by the rainforest’s waterways.

Urbina wrote:

A confidential industry study from 1990, conducted for the American Petroleum Institute, concluded that “using conservative assumptions,” radium in drilling wastewater dumped off the Louisiana coast posed “potentially significant risks” of cancer for people who eat fish from those waters regularly.... In Texas, which now has about 93,000 natural-gas wells, up from around 58,000 a dozen years ago, a hospital system in six counties with some of the heaviest drilling said in 2010 that it found a 25 percent asthma rate for young children, more than three times the state rate of about 7 percent.

Health studies have shown higher rates of cancer, respiratory illnesses, spontaneous abortions and other diseases in the former Chevron concession area, in comparison to other areas of Ecuador. Not surprisingly, Chevron denies any negative health impacts.

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Chevron’s Deepwater Drilling: Blind Faith or Dump Luck?

Chevron has its own ticking time bomb in the Gulf of Mexico. The following article, from John Collins Rudolph, appeared on the New York Times' "Green Blog" today:

On a Wing and a Prayer: Chevron's Deep Well

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/on-a-wing-and-a-prayer-chevrons-deep-well/

One of the deepest offshore oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico lies beneath 7,000 feet of water and under more than 20,000 feet of rock and sand. Estimated to hold as much as 100 million barrels of crude, the field was discovered by Chevron in 2001, and production began in 2008. It is less than 20 miles west of the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

The name of the field, and the rig anchored above it, is Blind Faith.

It's a curious choice for a high-tech drilling operation pushing the boundaries of modern engineering, perhaps a bit like NASA naming a new shuttle "Dumb Luck." But there's an explanation: Blind Faith is in fact the name of a short-lived 1960s psychedelic rock supergroup, fronted by the guitar god Eric Clapton.

The investigative reporter and former 60 Minutes correspondent Peter W. Klein uncovered this factoid during a visit to the Blind Faith rig last summer while filming a story for ABC News on deepwater drilling. The segment features video of submersible robots thousands of feet down on the seafloor manipulating drilling equipment.

"When I asked the manager of Chevron's gulf rigs what he would do if there was a leak at his wellhead more than a mile down, he assured me they had robot-controlled devices that could handle any contingency," Mr. Klein wrote in a recent essay on the National Public Radio Web site.

In Congressional testimony this week, Chevron's chairman and chief executive, John S. Watson, testified that his wells and rigs – presumably including Blind Faith – were far safer than the BP well that continues to gush after 50-plus days of desperate attempts to cap it.

"We have multiple systems to prevent a tragedy like the Deepwater Horizon," Mr. Watson said. "Our drilling policies and procedures are rigorous. We require continuous training. We certify our drilling personnel to ensure they are qualified to manage unusual circumstances. And we verify that contractors have the skills to execute well control."

Mr. Watson joined three other oil company executives in rhetorically throwing BP under the bus during Wednesday's hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The leaders of Shell, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips also claimed that their deepwater operations were safe, and that it was negligence by BP – not the inherent risks of drilling in ultra-deep waters, or lax regulation of the industry – that led to the uncontrolled blowout.

Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the Democratic chairman of the committee, was having none of it.

"BP failed miserably when confronted with a real leak," Mr. Waxman said, "and Exxon Mobil and the other companies would do no better."

As for Blind Faith – well, it is perhaps BP, not Chevron, who could find some solace in one of the band's hits: "Had to Cry Today," by Steve Winwood.

"The feeling's the same as being outside of the law," the song laments. "Had to cry today."

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Bob Herbert of NYT on Chevron: Rain Forest Jekyll and Hyde

Bob Herbert's column today detailing the extent of the disaster caused by Chevron in Ecuador is not the first time his attention has turned to the tragedy in the region. The below article appeared in the New York Times on October 20, 2005.

You can find the original at: http://select.nytimes.com/2005/10/20/opinion/20herbert.html

October 20, 2005

Op-Ed Columnist

Rain Forest Jekyll and Hyde?

By BOB HERBERT

Please welcome the latest entry to the Chutzpah Hall of Fame: the mighty Chevron Corporation.

On Oct. 28, during a gala ceremony at its headquarters in San Ramon, Calif., the company, which until May was known as ChevronTexaco, will honor the latest recipients of the annual Chevron Conservation Awards. The awards are meant to recognize the achievements of men and women who have "helped to protect wildlife, restore wilderness, create natural preserves and parks, and institute educational programs to heighten environmental awareness."

Meanwhile, Chevron's lawyers are in Ecuador defending the company against charges that it contributed to one of the worst environmental disasters on the planet. The company is accused of dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste, over a period of 20 years, into the soil and water of a previously pristine section of the Amazon rain forest.

According to a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of some 30,000 impoverished residents of the rain forest, this massive, long-term pollution has ruined portions of the jungle, contaminated drinking water, sickened livestock, driven off wildlife and threatened the very survival of the indigenous tribes, which have been plagued with serious illnesses, including a variety of cancers.

Chevron, which likes to promote itself as a champion of the environment, contends that no such catastrophe occurred. A spokesman told me yesterday that the billions of gallons of waste that was dumped "wasn't necessarily toxic."

"We've done inspections," the spokesman said. "We've done a deep scientific analysis, and that analysis has shown no harmful impacts from the operations. There just aren't any."

You would have a very difficult time selling that story to the people in the rain forest who have been drinking and bathing in water fouled with the byproducts of oil-drilling processes. Parents have watched their children play and their livestock feed in areas contaminated with oily substances. Pits that perpetually ooze gunk and oil are ubiquitous.

Two years ago, a reporter from The Times interviewed a man named René Arévalo who lived near a separation plant that was once operated by a Texaco subsidiary. The house in which Mr. Arévalo and his five children lived had been built on a mound of dirt that covered a pit where wastewater had been dumped.

The family got its water from a well. "If you dig here just a meter deep," said Mr. Arévalo, "you hit oil. The water is contaminated, very contaminated. But we drink it. What else can we do?"

Texaco merged with Chevron in 2001. From the early 1970's to 1992, the Texaco subsidiary was part of a consortium that ran the oil-drilling operations in an area of virgin rain forest known simply as the Oriente - the East. Texaco discovered oil there in the late 60's.

According to nearly all accounts, neither Texaco nor its primary partner in the consortium, Ecuador's state oil company - Petroecuador - paid much attention to the effects of the venture on the surrounding environment and its people. Tremendous amounts of waste generated from the drilling, extraction, processing and transportation operations - billions upon billions of gallons - were dumped into unlined pits in the ground or poured into freshwater streams.

"The systematic way that they disposed of toxic waste in Ecuador was to dump it into open-air pits that they dug out of the jungle soil, or directly into rivers, streams and swamps in one of the most delicate ecosystems on the planet," said Steven Donziger, who is part of a team of American and Ecuadorean lawyers handling the lawsuit.

Crude oil was also spilled in the jungle, millions of gallons of it.

Disasters of this kind, involving poor people in remote areas of foreign countries, tend to stay low on the level of awareness of the American news media. The suffering tends to go unnoticed by the outside world.

The families in the vicinity of the Ecuadorean oil-drilling operations have had to drink from contaminated rivers and streams because they had such limited access to running water. And any pollution-related illnesses they may contract pose an even greater danger than normal because of their abject poverty and the absence of adequate health care.

Officials at Chevron do not see any of this as their problem. They will tell you that they've cleaned up any mess they might have made, and then some. And they will deny to their dying breath that they have harmed anyone.

After all, they're champions of the environment.

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Bob Herbert of NYT: Chevron Has Its Own BP Disaster In Ecuador

The following article appeared in today's New York Times:

Disaster in the Amazon

By BOB HERBERT

BP’s calamitous behavior in the Gulf of Mexico is the big oil story of the moment. But for many years, indigenous people from a formerly pristine region of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador have been trying to get relief from an American company, Texaco (which later merged with Chevron), for what has been described as the largest oil-related environmental catastrophe ever.

“As horrible as the gulf spill has been, what happened in the Amazon was worse,” said Jonathan Abady, a New York lawyer who is part of the legal team that is suing Chevron on behalf of the rainforest inhabitants.

It has been a long and ugly legal fight and the outcome is uncertain. But what has happened in the rainforest is heartbreaking, although it has not gotten nearly the coverage that the BP spill has.

What’s not in dispute is that Texaco operated more than 300 oil wells for the better part of three decades in a vast swath of Ecuador’s northern Amazon region, just south of the border with Colombia. Much of that area has been horribly polluted. The lives and culture of the local inhabitants, who fished in the intricate waterways and cultivated the land as their ancestors had done for generations, have been upended in ways that have led to widespread misery.

Texaco came barreling into this delicate ancient landscape in the early 1960s with all the subtlety and grace of an invading army. And when it left in 1992, it left behind, according to the lawsuit, widespread toxic contamination that devastated the livelihoods and traditions of the local people, and took a severe toll on their physical well-being.

A brief filed by the plaintiffs said: “It deliberately dumped many billions of gallons of waste byproduct from oil drilling directly into the rivers and streams of the rainforest covering an area the size of Rhode Island. It gouged more than 900 unlined waste pits out of the jungle floor — pits which to this day leach toxic waste into soils and groundwater. It burned hundreds of millions of cubic feet of gas and waste oil into the atmosphere, poisoning the air and creating ‘black rain’ which inundated the area during tropical thunderstorms.”

The quest for oil is, by its nature, colossally destructive. And the giant oil companies, when left to their own devices, will treat even the most magnificent of nature’s wonders like a sewer. But the riches to be made are so vastly corrupting that governments refuse to impose the kinds of rigid oversight and safeguards that would mitigate the damage to the environment and its human and animal inhabitants.

Pick your venue. The families whose lives and culture are dependent upon the intricate web of waterways along the Gulf Coast of the United States are in a fix similar to that of the indigenous people zapped by nonstop oil spills and the oil-related pollution in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Each group is fearful about its future. Both have been treated contemptuously.

The oil companies don’t care. Shell can’t wait to begin drilling in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska, an area that would pose monumental problems for anyone trying to deal with a catastrophic spill. The companies pretend that the spills won’t happen. They always say that their drilling operations are safe. They said that before drilling off Santa Barbara, and in the rainforest in Ecuador, and in the Gulf of Mexico, and everywhere else they drill.

Their assurances mean nothing.

President Obama has suspended Shell’s Arctic drilling permits and has temporarily halted the so-called Arctic oil rush. What we’ve learned from the BP debacle in the gulf, and from the rainforest, and so many other places, is just how reckless and inept the oil companies can be when it comes to safeguarding life, limb and the environment.

They’re dangerous. They need the most stringent kind of oversight, and swift and severe sanctions for serious wrongdoing. At the same time, we need to be searching with a much, much greater sense of urgency for viable energy alternatives. Treating the Amazon and the gulf and the Arctic as if they were nothing more than toxic waste sites is an affront to the planet and all life-forms that inhabit it.

Chevron doesn’t believe it should be called to account for any of the sins Texaco may have committed in the Amazon. A spokesman told me that the allegations of environmental damage were wildly overstated and that even if Texaco had caused some pollution, it had cleaned it up and reached an agreement with the Ecuadorian government that precluded further liability.

The indigenous residents may be suffering (they’re in much worse shape than the people on the gulf coast) but the Chevron-Texaco crowd feels real good about itself. The big money was made, and the trash was left behind.

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NY Times: Media Companies Join Filmmaker in Opposing Chevron

This article appeared on the New York Times "ArtsBeat" blog yesterday:

Media Companies File Brief on Behalf of Filmmaker in Chevron Case

By DAVE ITZKOFF

A group of 13 media companies has filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Joe Berlinger, the documentary filmmaker who is appealing a federal district court’s ruling that the oil company Chevron can subpoena the outtakes from his film “Crude.”

The brief, filed Tuesday in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, by the lawyer Floyd Abrams, and which was joined by others, including NBC Universal, the Directors Guild of America, HBO and The New York Times Company, says the work of these companies “will be seriously jeopardized” by the district court’s decision and its effect on journalist’s privilege.

Last month, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District court in Manhattan ruled that Mr. Berlinger would have to turn over more than 600 hours of footage from “Crude,” his documentary about the Ecuadorians who sued Texaco (now owned by Chevron), accusing it of contaminating their water. Chevron said Mr. Berlinger’s footage could be helpful to the company as it seeks to have the suit dismissed and pursues an international treaty arbitration related to the litigation.

The brief says the district court’s ruling “was fundamentally flawed” in its interpretation of the 1999 case Gonzales v. NBC, in which the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that even confidential materials can be released if they are likely to be relevant to a significant issue in the case and are not reasonably obtainable elsewhere.

The brief said:

a party seeking to compel production of such materials must make a somewhat less demanding showing than for confidential information — but a showing that is, nonetheless, still significantly more substantial than the burden on a litigant seeking ordinary garden-variety discovery.

Judge Kaplan’s ruling, the brief said, “effectively shifted the burden of alleged unfairness onto the filmmakers, rendering this circuit’s requirement of a relevance showing meaningless,” and “made it far too easy for Chevron to obtain far too much, precisely what Gonzales forbids.”

On May 21 Judge Denny Chin of the appellate court ordered a hearing on June 8 to consider a subpoena and stayed the subpoena until that hearing.

The friend-of-the-court brief can be found here. The 13 companies that joined it are ABC, The Associated Press, CBS Broadcasting, the Daily News, the Directors Guild of America, Dow Jones & Company, Gannett Company, Hearst Corporation, Home Box Office, the International Documentary Association, NBC Universal, The New York Times Company and The Washington Post.

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Chevron Tries to Silence Critics of Its Ecuador Environmental Disaster

Chevron is exhibiting some awfully thin skin lately over its Ecuador environmental disaster.

A clear pattern is emerging where the company, its lawyers, and its public relations firms try to intimidate critics of its Ecuador problem into silence. Award-winning filmmaker Joe Berlinger, who recent made a movie documenting the company's abuses in Ecuador, is the latest victim. That has gotten Chevron on the bad side of prominent journalists and filmmakers such as Bill Moyers, Trudie Styler and Michael Moore.

Chevron has admitted to dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste into Ecuador's Amazon to cut costs, decimating indigenous groups and creating an outbreak of cancer that affects thousands of people. For years, the company has engaged in abusive litigation to evade accountability for a clean-up.

Unlike the BP disaster in the Gulf, Chevron (via its predecessor company Texaco) discharged this waste on purpose. And unlike BP, Chevron's executives have buried their heads in the sand and refused to accept responsibility for the clean-up.

The increased pressure on Chevron – 60 Minutes did a highly unflattering segment on the company recently – seems be taking a toll.

Take look at Chevron's attacks on Free Speech just in the past year:

• Filing frivolous lawsuits to "punish" critics: Chevron, via its new law firm Gibson Dunn, initiated a "malicious prosecution" lawsuit in a California federal court to punish a 75-year-old lawyer, Cristobal Bonifaz. Bonifaz had brought a separate lawsuit against Chevron on behalf of a handful of individuals for health claims related to the company's Ecuador disaster in San Francisco federal court. A federal judge turned the tables on Chevron, finding the Chevron action violated a California law that bars nuisance lawsuits designed to suppress Free Speech. The judge dismissed virtually all of Chevron's claims against Bonifaz. The California law (called Anti-SLAPP) used by the court against Chevron was created to prevent legal attacks brought to censor, intimidate and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of defending a frivolous lawsuit. The decision was a tremendous setback for Gibson Dunn, which has a reputation for being paid millions to protect companies like Chevron from being held accountable for their human rights abuses.

• Attempting to intimidate journalists and gain access to their files: Chevron recently launched an unprecedented legal attack on award-winning documentarian Joe Berlinger to force him to allow the company to rummage through 600 hours of video footage Berlinger shot for the documentary, CRUDE. The movie – which has won 22 awards from film festivals -- chronicles the struggle of the 30,000 residents of the Ecuadorian rainforest to hold Chevron accountable for systematically polluting their lands. Chevron's lawsuit prompted a group of filmmakers that includes 20 Academy Award winners and many more nominees to write an open letter in support of Berlinger stating that Chevron's effort "will have a crippling effect on the work of investigative journalists everywhere." Filmmaker Michael Moore has stated, "The chilling effect of this is, someone like me, if something like this is upheld, the next whistleblower at the next corporation is going to think twice about showing me some documents if that information has to be turned over to the corporation that they're working for."

• Barring critics from public events: At the Chevron-sponsored Houston Marathon, a team of runners was barred from participating in the event, and threatened with arrest, for attempting to distribute materials critical of Chevron's human rights record in Ecuador. The race manager told the runners that "higher ups at Chevron were freaking out." At the time, runner Maria Ramos stated: "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."
• Attempting to pressure news outlets to silence critics: Chevron has used pressure tactics to force major media outlets to prevent advertisements critical of the company from being published. Chevron responded to an ad campaign from the Rainforest Action Network by directing its lawyers and public relations firms to leverage the company's influence and demand that the New York Times and Washington Post pull the ads. Despite Chevron's complaints, the New York Times ran the advertisements. However, the Washington Post initially succumbed to Chevron's pressure and pulled the ads temporarily. Of course, the fact Chevron was contemporaneously paying for the publication of advertisements attacking its critics was of no small irony.

• Taking out advertisements attacking critics: Chevron has taken out multiple paid advertisements in Ecuador, in the United States, and across the internet accusing the Amazon community leaders suing Chevron of being liars, frauds, and con men. Chevron has also taken out ads attacking the independent court-appointed expert in Ecuador, the judge, and other participants in the lawsuit. The use of paid public advertisements to attack and intimidate court officials is unethical and would result in sanctions against the company's lawyers if it were done in the United States.

Chevron's "scorched earth" approach to its critics is pathetic, to say the least. But that's what happens when some of Big Oil's corporate leaders don't want to be reminded that they are responsible for the discharge of more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon Rainforest.

But the facts are the facts. While we can understand Chevron's desire to forget about the mess it made in Ecuador, and to wish that its critics would go away, it's time for the company to stop trying to silence the opposition.

For more information, visit www.chevrontoxico.com.

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