Chevron Lobbying Over Ecuador Lawsuit Criticized by Sierra Club, Catholic Bishops

Chevron's long-running lobbying campaign to cancel Ecuador's trade preferences over a potential $27.3 billion environmental lawsuit brought against the company by more than 30,000 Ecuadorian indigenous people has attracted the criticism of several influential and wide-ranging groups. Recently the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and the Sierra Club – America's largest and oldest environmental group, with more than 1.3 million members and supporters – wrote letters to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, urging him to ignore Chevron's "improper" lobbying. Archbishop Howard Hubbard, the chair of the USCCB's Council on International Justice and Peace, expressed concerns over attempts to "misuse" trade policy to "punish the very people trade preferences are intended to help when people try to defend the environment and human rights," while Executive Director Michael Brune of the Sierra Club wrote that trade "preferences were not intended to be, and should not be, used as a means of pressuring any government to foreclose the constitutional rights of its citizens who seek to use the legal system to protect and restore the natural world."

This isn't the first time Chevron's improper lobbying has drawn condemnation. In 2009 26 U.S. Congressmen sent a letter to the Obama administration, calling on the administration "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." Earlier, then-Senator Barack Obama and Senator Patrick Leahy had similarly urged the USTR to ignore Chevron's improper actions.

Take a look at the letters themselves: you can read the USCCB letter here and the Sierra Club letter here. The letter from the 26 Congressmen is available here and the Obama letter here.

You can read a press release from the Amazon Defense Coalition about the criticisms below:

Chevron Draws Fire from U.S. Council of Bishops, Sierra Club over Improper Ecuador Lobbying

Oil Giant's Campaign to Cancel Ecuador's Trade Preferences Derailed for Fifth Straight Year

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chevron's lobbying campaign to cancel Ecuador's trade preferences over a $27 billion environmental lawsuit brought by indigenous groups appears headed for failure yet again.

Last week, the office of the United States Trade Representative submitted a report to Congress that flatly ignored Chevron's attempt to have Ecuador's trade preferences canceled. It was the fifth consecutive year the oil giant had engaged the USTR on the issue and failed to achieve its objective. Each time, Chevron used heavyweights such as former Clinton Administration officials Mickey Kantor and Mac McLarty and Republican super-lobbyist Wayne Berman to carry its message.

Chevron's lobbying of the USTR, called an "attack on the rule of law" by the indigenous leaders, recently was criticized either implicitly or expressly by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Sierra Club, and numerous Congressmen. All wrote letters to USTR Ambassador Ron Kirk urging that his office reject Chevron's proposal, which would have cost Ecuador 350,000 jobs had it been accepted.

Chevron's lobbying also had been criticized by the Los Angeles Times, which editorialized that "halting the [Ecuador] trade agreement at Chevron's behest would harm broader U.S. interests."

The lawsuit, which is being tried in Ecuador at Chevron's request, accuses the oil giant of deliberately discharging more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into Amazon forests and waterways when it operated a large oil concession from 1964 to 1990. Six indigenous groups have had their traditional lifestyles decimated and more than 1,400 people have died of cancer due to Chevron's sub-standard practices, according to the lawsuit.

The amount of oil discharged by Chevron in Ecuador is far greater in quantity that the amount spilled in the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the plaintiffs. The damages claim against Chevron in Ecuador is $27.3 billion.

The letter from the Conference of Catholic Bishops, sent June 23 to Kirk, urged the Obama Administration "to resist direct or indirect interference in any legal processes Ecuador or its citizens may have initiated to assert their right to defend their environment and the health of their people."

Most Reverend Howard Hubbard, writing for the Bishops, also expressed concern over efforts to "misuse" trade policy to "punish the very people trade preferences are intended to help when people try to defend the environment and human rights."

In its letter, the Sierra Club wrote in reference to Chevron that trade "preferences were not intended to be, and should not be, used as a means of pressuring any government to foreclose the constitutional rights of its citizens who seek to use the legal system to protect and restore the natural world."

"This is especially true when our government is being asked to do so by, and for the economic benefit of, a powerful corporation that does not contest the central fact of pollution on a vast scale at issue in the case, only its own liability," said the letter, signed by Executive Director Michael Brune.

With 1.3 million members and supporters, the Sierra Club is the oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization in the United States. Both the Sierra Club and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops are considered highly influential in Washington lobbying circles.

For years, the USTR – under both the Bush and Obama Administrations -- has snubbed Chevron over its Ecuador lobbying. Last year, 26 members of Congress, including several powerful senior members, urged the USTR to reject Chevron's effort to use trade agreements "as leverage to interfere in private claims progressing through Ecuador's legal process."

In 2006, then-Senator Obama and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) also wrote a letter to the USTR urging it to reject Chevron's lobbying and to steer clear of the private legal dispute in Ecuador.

The lawsuit, originally filed by 30,000 Ecuadorians in New York in 1993, was transferred to Ecuador after Chevron filed 14 sworn affidavits to the U.S. court praising the fairness of that country's court system. Shortly after the trial in Ecuador began in 2003 and the evidence pointed to Chevron's culpability, the company started to attack the courts it had previously praised and initiated the lobbying campaign over trade preferences.

The USTR report is only a recommendation to the Congress, which must decide by the end of the year whether Ecuador's trade preferences will be extended. Like the USTR, for several years running Congress has rejected Chevron's request over Ecuador's trade preferences.

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Mickey Kantor Has an Ethics Problem

Mickey Kantor, normally an impressive individual, has a major ethics problem.

Kantor, as Peter Stone reports in The National Journal is taking money from Chevron to defend an American oil company responsible for what is probably the worst human rights problem in the world related to environmental degradation –the deliberate dumping of 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon by Texaco (now Chevron) from 1964 to 1992 in Ecuador, all to keep production costs to the bare minimum. This dumping – and the separate abandonment of 916 unlined waste pits that for decades have been leaching toxins into soils and groundwater – has over the last four decades caused cancer rates to skyrocket, decimated indigenous cultures, and despoiled an area of the rainforest the size of Rhode Island. The entire catastrophe is at least 30 times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill, and thousands of people in this part of Ecuador are living in and around the contamination with no access to clean water or adequate health care. Chevron would never have done this type of thing in the U.S. where it would be called to account; it was done in an isolated part of the rainforest because the company calculated it could get away with it. To understand the issue, take a look at this short memorandum and this Q&A. And to understand how Chevron has treated this crisis, take a look at this document about Chevron's Top 10 Lies about Ecuador.

So Kantor is now trying to rescue Chevron from what is fast becoming a public relations and financial crisis of epic proportions. (Chevron, perhaps not coincidentally, has other human rights problems – it employs one of the six "torture lawyers" subject to possible investigation and prosecution. His name is William Haynes, the former general counsel for the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld.) Kantor is taking Chevron's money to help lobby the executive branch agency he used to head, the office of the United States Trade Representative. His objective is to persuade the USTR to "punish" Ecuador for letting indigenous tribes and farmer communities in the Amazon bring a lawsuit over this mess in Ecuador's courts. With this single representation, Kantor is violating both the spirit of the new ethics rules put forth by the Obama Administration and providing cover for a company involved in what the lawsuit claims is a massive human rights violation affecting tens of thousands of people. There is no evidence that Kantor or any of Chevron's other A-list lobbyists have even visited the affected region, read the studies about increased cancer rates, or talked to any of the thousands of victims. Yet they ply their trade with no moral sensibility about the consequences of their actions.

Chevron should be paying Kantor at least ten times his normal rate to take this on. The company spent $6.8 million on lobbying in the first quarter of this year (about $27 million on an annualized basis), not including the 20 or so people on the company's permanent government relations staff in Washington. Some significant portion of this spending relates to the Ecuador lawsuit, where the company faces a possible judgment of $27 billion for clean-up. Separately, two Chevron lawyers and seven former government officials are under indictment for lying about the results of an earlier clean-up that was appears to have been a fraud.

In a nutshell, Kantor has been hired by Chevron to undermine the legal rights of thousands of people to sue the company and hold it accountable. Rather than letting the trial finish, he is trying to shut the trial down. His job is to pressure Ecuador's President to violate his country's Constitution, interfere with his country's independent judiciary, and extinguish the legal claims held by thousands of his own citizens who are trying against all odds to address a life-threatening situation. What audacity these indigenous groups have. Last year, a Chevron lobbyist was quoted anonymously in a Newsweek story written by Michael Isikoff as saying, in reference to the Ecuador case: "We can't little countries screw around with big companies like this – companies that have made big investments around the world."

This quote reflects Chevron's attitude about the rule of law. The "little" people should not be allowed to sue big American companies. But big American companies should be allowed to sue, harass, and violate the rights of the "little" people if it's necessary to protect their bottom line.

Kantor wants Ecuador's government to behave like a "Banana Republic" and corrupt the legal process of its own country. This is a shameless attack on the rule of law. It is also dishonest. In 2002 Chevron consented to jurisdiction in Ecuador before a U.S. federal judge as a condition of the case being transferred out of U.S. federal court where it had originally been filed. At the time, Chevron submitted 14 expert affidavits praising the courts there as fair and adequate.

Kantor wants the USTR to decide the issue based on what is good for Chevron. In that vein, he claims in The National Journal story that the potential $27 billion in damages has "no logic", as if he is in a position to know. There is a 4,000-page report explaining those damages, based on 200,000 pages of trial evidence and more than 62,000 chemical sampling results that show contamination at 100% of Texaco's former production sites in Ecuador. I doubt Kantor has even seen the front page of this report, much less the executive summary or annexes. (This report has been reviewed by 25 respected scientists in the U.S., Ecuador, and Spain who have found its conclusions reasonable and the damages figure roughly in keeping with the cost of clean-up of other large environmental disasters.)

Kantor should recuse himself from the issue by virtue of his former work as the USTR ambassador, if nothing else. I also assume he has made enough money in his years as a lobbyist that he doesn't have to serve as a hired gun for Chevron defending a massive human rights violation that besmirches the image of the U.S. in Ecuador and the rest of Latin America.

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