The Next Time Chevron Tells You Texaco Cleaned Its Share Of The Pits, Ask Them About Atacapi 5.

The next time Chevron tells you Texaco cleaned its share of the pits, ask them about Atacapi 5.

Chevron’s main defense in a $27 billion lawsuit for oil contamination is the 1995 remediation agreement with the government of Ecuador that released Texaco from government claims in exchange for cleaning up oil pits built by Texaco to store the toxic sludge left over from drilling.

What Chevron doesn’t tell you is that Texaco failed to live up to its side of the agreement. The pits Texaco “cleaned” tested as high or even higher for contamination than the pits Texaco did not clean. At many pits, Texaco only poured dirt into the pits, without cleaning them out and lining the pits first.

Here’s a photo of dirt laden with oil, dug only three inches deep from the pit at the well site, Atacapi 5. Contamination tests taken by the court-appointed expert at this site found a total petroleum hydrocarbon level of 21,976 parts per million — 21 times over the legal limit of 1,000 TPH.




The chart below lists other so-called “cleaned” pits that Texaco said it remediated, but clearly did not based on the illegal levels of TPH.

	SITE	CHEVRON’S CLAIM	TPH	NUMBER OF TIMES OVER LEGAL LIMIT
1	Sacha 18	Complete Remediation	35,380	35.3
2	Sacha 65	Complete Remediation	32,444	32.4
3	Shushufindi 27	Complete Remediation	26,413	26.4
4	Atacapi 5	Complete Remediation	21,976	21.9
5	Sacha 21	Complete Remediation	17,000	17
6	Shushufindi 21	Complete Remediation	16,033	16
7	Shushufindi 67	Complete Remediation	13,587	13.5
8	Shushufindi 45A	Complete Remediation	13,290	13.2
9	Shushufindi 48	Complete Remediation	13,000	13
10	Shushufindi 7	Complete Remediation	12,715	12.7
11	Shushufindi 25	Complete Remediation	10,956	10.9
12	Shushufindi 27	Complete Remediation	10,452	10.4
13	Ron 1	Complete Remediation	9,632	9.6
14	Lago Agrio 5	Complete Remediation	8,830	8.8
15	Sacha 94	Complete Remediation	8,700	8.7
16	Aguarico 8	Complete Remediation	8,183	8.1
17	Sacha 57	Complete Remediation	8,100	8.1
18	Sacha 65	Complete Remediation	7,519	7.5
19	Sacha 53	Complete Remediation	7,430	7.4
20	Shushufindi 13	Complete Remediation	7,415	7.4
21	Sacha 51	Complete Remediation	7,200	7.2
22	Shushufindi 45A	Complete Remediation	5,721	5.7
23	Sacha 94	Complete Remediation	5,600	5.6
24	Shushufindi 25	Complete Remediation	5,574	5.5
25	Guanta 4	Complete Remediation	5,510	5.5
26	Shushufindi 7	Complete Remediation	5,334	5.3
27	Shushufindi 48	Complete Remediation	5,000	5
28	Shushufindi 18	Complete Remediation	4,881	4.8
29	Lago Agrio 2	Complete Remediation	4,777	4.7
30	Auca 19	Complete Remediation	4,014	4
31	Yuca 28	Complete Remediation	3,876	3.8
32	Shushufindi 46	Complete Remediation	3,697	3.6
33	Sacha 56	Complete Remediation	3,600	3.6
34	Sacha 6	Complete Remediation	3,300	3.3
35	Shushufindi 21	Complete Remediation	3,133	3.1
36	Sacha 51	Complete Remediation	3,100	3.1
37	Shushufindi 48	Complete Remediation	3,000	3
38	Sacha 10	Complete Remediation	2,802	2.8
39	Shushufindi 48	Complete Remediation	2,700	2.7
40	Sacha 57	Complete Remediation	2,400	2.4
41	Shushufindi 24	Complete Remediation	2,180	2.1
42	Parahuacu 3	Complete Remediation	2,065.12	2.065
43	Shushufindi 24	Complete Remediation	2,000	2
44	Shushufindi 8	Complete Remediation	1,600	1.6
45	Lago Agrio 6	Complete Remediation	1,300	1.3

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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.

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Father of Six Moved To Find A Good Job With Texaco, Died of Cancer After Living Near Oil Well

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

This story is about Luz Maria Martin and her deceased husband Angel Toala, who died of stomach cancer. Senora Martin gave an interview to authors Lou Dematteis and Kayana Szymczak for their book Crude Reflections. Other stories and a copy of the book can be obtained here:

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

Angel Toala

Luz Maria Martin, widow of Angel Toala, who died of stomach cancer

Texaco Shushufindi Oil Field/ Shushufindi

My husband, Angel Toala, and I came here to the Amazon 23 years ago from the mountains of San Domingo. We came because he was told you could earn good money with the [oil] companies here. We have six children.

Angel worked on the pipeline for Texaco for five years, and that’s how we’ve been able to buy this farm. Mostly we grew coffee, plantains, yucca, some cacao.

There’s [Texaco] pumping station near our house and a [Texaco] oil well 200 yards from our house, and downstream is a lake where the crude oil they dumped gathers. We never let the animals drink the water. A lot of times we found dead fish in it. Our coffee plants there turned yellow and died.

We got our drinking water from the rain, and, when it didn’t rain, from the stream. It had a funny taste and sometimes you could see oil floating on top. We bathed there and washed our clothes there. We knew the water was bad for our health, but what could we do? There wasn’t water anywhere else.

I don’t think the oil company (Texaco) worried if they contaminated the water. We farmers didn't realize the water was contaminated, and certainly it was not in oil company’s interest to tell us that.

About three years ago, my husband started having stomach pains, slight pains when he ate. He couldn’t eat as much as he used to. (Crying) Certain foods made him feel bad, and he couldn’t eat meat, or fish. About a year ago he started losing weight.

(Crying) Then his back began hurting, and his muscles. He felt tired. At the end, he couldn’t take the sun. He was so tired; he didn’t have any energy.

In Quito he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. We took him to the Eugenio Espejo Hospital but the doctors said that it was too late; nothing could be done.

(Crying) The last three months before he died, he couldn’t do anything. He just lay in the hammock.

Angel Toala

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California Legislators Plan To Travel To Ecuador To See Chevron’s Contamination

After meeting with members of the California State Legislature, tribal leader Emergildo Criollo and officials with the Rainforest Action Network and Amazon Watch report that several state legislators said they would travel to see the oil contamination in Ecuador’s rainforest, left by Texaco which Chevron purchased in 2001. One of the state legislators, State Senator Loni Hancock, represents the district where Chevron is headquartered. Below is RAN’s blog about the meeting.

CA Lawmakers want to help make Chevron clean up Ecuador

posted by Brianna in RAN General on March 4th, 2010


Last night, Emergildo Criollo, the Indigenous leader from Ecuador, met with California legislators and asked for their support in the 16+ year campaign to demand Chevron remediate massive oil contamination affecting over 30,000 people. Along with supporters from Amazon Watch and Rainforest Action Network, Emergildo spoke with lawmakers about the impact of California’s largest company in Ecuador, and what they can do to support his community’s call for environmental cleanup and action to prevent such tragedies in the future.

Senator Fran Pavley and Assemblymember Jared Huffman hosted the reception in Sacramento entitled, “From Ecuador to California: California’s largest corporation, one of the world’s worst oil related disasters, and what California’s legislators can do.”



Despite the pouring rain, the reception was packed with Senators, Assemblymembers, and their staff. Lawmakers in attendance included Senator Fran Pavley, Senator Loni Hancock, Assemblyman Manny Perez, Assemblyman Paul Fong, Assemblyman Ira Ruskin, and Assemblyman Jared Huffman. These key leaders from both the Environmental and Latino Caucuses not only listened to Emergildo’s story, but spoke of their desire to support the people of Ecuador who are suffering and dying because of Chevron’s operations.

Assemblymember Jared Huffmand spoke of the need “to remedy a very serious environmental and human tragedy.”

At the reception, Emergildo shared his story. He told the lawmakers about how he was only 6 years old when Chevron (then Texaco) began oil drilling in his community. He spoke of how his family was forced to relocate because of the contamination. About he had to part centimeters of oil off of the river to drink the water. About how he has lost two sons and nursed a wife through uterine cancer because of the contamination. His family drank, bathed, and fished in water that was poisoned by oil dumping.

After telling his story, Emergilod asked all of the Assemblymembers and Senators for their help and invited them to visit his home and see for themselves the devastation Chevron’s behavior has caused.

Senator Loni Hancock, from the Contra Costa district where Chevron is headquartered, said she “would like to come and visit. This is an international issue and an issue here as well.”

Assemblymember Manny Perez had a heartfelt exchange with Emergildo in Spanish and lawmaker after lawmaker stood up and said they wanted to learn more and to see what action they could take.

We are excited about the possibilities moving forward and look forward to working closely with California’s legislators to make sure California’s largest corporation is held responsible for cleaning up one of the largest environmental disasters of all time.

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Chevron Snubs Ecuadorian Tribal Leader

Once again, Chevron snubs the Ecuadorians and the Americans trying to convince the oil company to clean up the toxic sludge left behind in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador by Texaco, which Chevron purchased in 2001. It looks like CEO John Watson is no more receptive to protecting the rainforest than David O’Reilly, the former Chevron leader who along with former General Counsel Charles James orchestrated a seven-year legal strategy to deny the Ecuadorians justice and their right to clean water and a healthy food supply in the jungle. Both O’Reilly and James no longer work for the company.

Read more here about Tribal Leader Emergildo Criollo’s effort to deliver a letter to Watson with the signatures of over 350,000 people calling on Chevron to clean up the oil contamination.

http://www.chevroninecuador.com/2010/03/emergildo-criollo-delivers-letter-and.html

http://changechevron.org/blog/emergildo-criollo-delivers-petition-to-chevron-headquarters/

Emergildo Criollo outside Chevron CEO John Watson’s house

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Chevron’s Fugitives from Justice and the Bogus TCLP Test

Not only has Chevron readily admitted in trial that it deliberately discharged billions of gallons of toxic "water of formation" into Ecuador's Amazon rainforest, but it also has figured out a clever way for its employees to evade justice. What began as a corporate strategy of cover-up has trickled down to Chevron's lawyers who do the company's dirty work in Ecuador.

Rodrigo Perez Pallares is a perfect illustration of the extent of Chevron's corruption in Ecuador. This disgraced Ecuadorian lawyer had worked as Chevron's official corporate agent in Ecuador for more than three decades while it mercilessly dumped toxins into the Amazon. Pallares was paid handsomely for defending a system of oil production that imposed horrific costs on the local indigenous population. After Chevron was sued in U.S. federal court by those groups for clean-up in 1993, Pallares helped to mastermind Chevron's sham "remediation" in the mid-1990s that the company has continually (and unsuccessfully) used to try to escape liability in various courts.

Pallares now appears to be a fugitive from justice, having fled to Miami after being indicted on fraud charges in Ecuador related to a cover-up of the contamination. Chevron should fess up as to whether it is paying for his relocation costs and living expenses. The U.S. government also might note that Chevron might be harboring a fugitive from what could be the world's worst environmental crime.

Chevron used the Pallares "clean-up" to argue that the then-pending environmental against (Aguinda v. ChevronTexaco) should be dismissed from U.S. federal court. The argument didn't work, but Pallares and his sidekick Ricardo Reis Veiga built a career out of it anyway. The pair orchestrated the use of an improper laboratory test, called the TCLP test, which made it impossible to measure anything more than trace amounts of toxins at the highly contaminated "cleaned" sites. The TCLP test runs water over contaminated soil, and then measures the toxins in the water instead of the soil. Only problem? Oil and water don't mix – so it's physically impossible for anything more than trace contaminants to show up in the TCLP test results, even if the soil sample tested was full of pure crude oil. Pallares and Reis Veiga used these test results to "prove" that the sites were remediated to they could procure a "release" under false pretenses.

Pallares and Reis Veiga probably never expected that their fraudulent handiwork would come under independent scrutiny during the Aguinda trial in Ecuador. But hundreds of scientific sampling results from the trial definitively prove that Chevron's representations to Ecuador's government about the "remediation" – used to induce the release -- were lies. Chevron's "remediation" amounted to bulldozing dirt over the waste pits without cleaning them out. Other waste pits the company had agreed to clean were never touched; Chevron's engineers claimed they were being used for "fishing" by the locals.

Chevron's fraud is as plain as day. Compare what Chevron reported to Ecuador's government in 1998 (at the end of its "remediation") to the actual trial results from the same sites:

Chevron's Fraud During The Ecuador Remediation

(Measured in TPHs)

Site of Judicial Inspection: Lago Agrio Trial	Chevron's Reported Result to Obtain Release From Ecuador (1998)	Actual Result At Same Site During Trial (2006)
Sacha 18	No Detect	35,380 ppm
Sacha 65	No Detect	32,444 ppm
SSF 27	No Detect	26,413 ppm
Atacapi 5	No Detect	21,976 ppm
Sacha 21	No Detect	17,000 ppm
SSF 21	No Detect	16,033 ppm

This chart is telling. The maximum tolerance for TPH (which measures hydrocarbon contamination) in many U.S. states is 100 parts per million (ppm). In Ecuador, the maximum tolerance for "sensitive ecosystems" like the Amazon is 1,000 ppm. In Ecuador, pits Chevron claimed it cleaned (such as pits at Well Sites Sacha 18 and Sacha 65) are obviously more than three hundred times higher than what would be a maximum tolerance in many U.S. states and dozens of times higher than the more lax Ecuadorian norm. And these are the cleaned sites.

Note in the second column of the chart that Chevron reports its results as "no detect" rather than giving the actual result. First, the clean-up standard of 5,000 ppm that Chevron maliciously negotiated with Ecuador's government is more than 50 times more lax than a typical U.S. norm. Sort of shows you how much Chevron values an Ecuadorian life. Given that the company knew it couldn't meet even this ridiculously lax standard with its clean-up, it used the bogus TCLP test which made it physically impossible to violate the 5,000 ppm standard. All this so the company could induce a release under false pretenses.

Even if the cleanup Chevron conducted hadn't been fraudulent, the cleanup would not absolve Chevron of responsibility. The release expressly excludes the private claims that are being pressed in the Aguinda lawsuit. Chevron only touched 16% of the 916 toxic waste pits the court-appointed Special Master found in his review of the evidence at trial; only a fraction of those were actually covered with the dirt. Instead of preparing some sort of estimate of how much the company should pay to clean up the mess it made, Chevron claims that the court-appointed Special Master's damages assessment to properly remediate the remaining pits is too high. Chevron prefers the Special Master lower the number to comport with the cost of running dirt over the oil sludge in the pits consistent with Chevron's shoddy method of clean-up in Ecuador.

This scam is why Pallares has been living in Miami for more than a year and might end up never returning to his country. Reis Veiga, who works in Miami as one of Chevron's top executives for Latin America, refuses to return to Ecuador to confront the charges against him.
Chevron is still using both men to play instrumental roles in advising the company in the Aguinda trial where their previous fraudulent conduct is at issue.

If this sounds familiar, that's because it is. Last year, Chevron paid to move one of its Ecuadorian contractors, Diego Borja, out of Ecuador after he was implicated in a sting operation against the judge overseeing the trial. Our sources in Chevron indicate that Borja now lives in a luxury mansion in a gated community near Chevron's headquarters. Borja now has an American lawyer paid for by Chevron to ensure he can never be questioned by investigators. There is some question as to whether Chevron implicated itself in obstruction of justice by moving Borja out of a country where he is now the subject of an official investigation.

Chevron has shown it will do anything to evade accountability for the humanitarian crisis it created in Ecuador. Now its employees seem to be rewarded for ducking out of countries where they face investigations or indictments. Just like the toxic dumping, Chevron operates on the principle that violating the law can pay handsome dividends.

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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

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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.

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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

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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?

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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