The internationally-respected Canadian and
Brazilian courts can "put an end to Chevron's rope-a-dope strategy"
to evade accountability for the widespread human suffering it caused in the Ecuadorian
rainforest by illegally discharging billions of gallons of toxic waste, a
worldwide environmental group said today in a blog
on its website.
A group of Ecuadorian indigenous and farmer
communities recently won an $18 billion judgment in Ecuador against Chevron,
but the oil giant has refused to pay. The Ecuadorians are now seeking to
enforce the judgment by seizing Chevron's assets in Canada and Brazil, as
Chevron sold all of its assets in Ecuador.
Below is the blog, written by Paul Paz of
Amazon Watch, a well-known environmental group working to protect the Amazon.
Engaged for years in a campaign of subterfuge
to evade its legal obligations related to a massive environmental contamination
in Ecuador. In Canada, where the Ecuadorians have come to force Chevron to
comply with the rule of law, people should be aware of this company's long
track record of abusing indigenous communities in Ecuador by poisoning their
streams and rivers with toxic waste. Internationally respected Canadian courts
have a chance to put an end to Chevron's rope-a-dope strategy to delay, deny,
and distract attention from this gross and even criminal misconduct.
Chevron predictably refuses to pay an $18
billion judgment against it in Ecuador, where it was found by a court after an
eight-year trial to have recklessly operated six large oil fields in the
rainforest from 1964 to 1992. To understand how easily it would be Chevron to
pay this judgment, the company's gross annual profit since the trial started in
2003 is over $150 billion. That's over eight times the damages imposed by the
court.
The judgment number is modest compared to the
magnitude of the damage. By way of comparison, the smaller BP spill in the Gulf
of Mexico produced a total liability of $40 billion, or more than twice as much
as Chevron's liability in Ecuador.
The Ecuador court found that Chevron–out of
pure greed–dumped more than 16 billion gallons of toxic "water of
formation" into Amazon waterways, and the trial record is replete with
evidence of how the company engaged in a fraudulent "remediation" to
try to cover up the contamination; doctored soil and water samples to hide the
extent of the contamination from the court; never spent a penny on
environmental monitoring or safety; used sub-standard practices that produced
an outbreak of cancer that has killed numerous people; and then tried to bribe
both the judge and high-level officials in Ecuador's government to quash the
legal case. This is the same company that has already paid a $30 million fine
in the U.S. for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in Iraq.
Independent journalists have long confirmed the
company's hand in creating this unprecedented catastrophe. See these recent
news reports from the Australia program Sunday Night;
the American show 60 Minutes and
this extraordinary video from
the plaintiffs summarizing the evidence and Chevron's corrupt attempts to
derail the trial. A story in Vanity Fair on
the courageous Ecuadorian lawyer Pablo Fajardo, who was raised in abject
poverty and who has been targeted with death threats for trying to hold Chevron
accountable, can be downloaded here.
The Ecuadorian communities originally filed the
case in the U.S. in 1993; Chevron delayed the matter for nine years before
convincing a U.S. judge to shift the venue to Ecuador. At the time, Chevron
lawyers filed 14 sworn affidavits praising Ecuador's courts as fair and
transparent. These affidavits can be read here.
Looking back, it is clear that Chevron thought
it likely the plaintiffs would melt back into the jungle if the case was thrown
out of U.S. courts. Instead, the affected communities re-filed their claims
under Ecuadorian law in the local court where Chevron had begged for the trial
to be held. When the evidence began to point to its guilt, Chevron started to
attack as unfit the courts it had previously praised. It also engaged in
political engineering, mounting a six-year lobbying effort that is still
ongoing to convince the United States to cut trade preferences for Ecuador just
for allowing the lawsuit to be brought in the place where Chevron wanted the
trial to be held.
When asked by 60 Minutes to
explain the hypocrisy of wanting the case in Ecuador and then trying to get out
of the case once it got to Ecuador, Chevron lawyer Sylvia Garrigo said,
"We don't want to be sued anywhere, period." Garrigo also compared
the awful waste pits in Ecuador to the oil in the makeup on her face.
There is no better snapshot than Garrigo of
Chevron's deeply held belief that it is entitled to impunity for its human
rights abuses in Ecuador–abuses that have killed or threaten to kill thousands
of people with cancer and other diseases, according to independent
peer-reviewed health evaluations in the region. See here and here.
Chevron might think it can get away with
ignoring court orders in Ecuador, but it will not easily obtain impunity in
Canada's courts. Chevron's interest in various oil field and refining
operations in Canada are reportedly worth billions of dollars. They could
easily be sold with the proceeds redirected for clean-up in Ecuador. That would
be poetic justice indeed for a company that admitted contaminating drinking
water with benzene-laden "water of formation", and then denied it was
legally responsible.
As terrible as the BP spill was, it was still
an accident. Chevron's contamination of Ecuador's rainforest was the product of
a planned design to inflate profits by externalizing production costs. The
company even built pipes that continue to drain the toxic waste from its pits
into nearby streams, as documented in the trial and in the 60 Minutes segment.
According to American law professor Judith Kimerling,
who chronicled these facts in her 1991 book Amazon Crude, Chevron engineers told
the indigenous people of the region that oil had vitamins and other positive
medicinal effects. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the noted environmental lawyer,
penned a powerful firsthand essay after visiting the region in 1991. See here.
Kennedy said he witnessed "antiquated equipment, rusting pipelines, and
uncounted toxic waste sites"; the jungle, he said, "was broken by
landscapes reminiscent of war."
Chevron is notorious in communities around the
world for trying to win through intimidation, political lobbying, and
corruption what it can't win legitimately in court. In Ecuador, the trial judge
found that Chevron tried to grind the case to a halt as part of its defense
strategy. The company once filed 18 motions in 30 minutes and then tried to recuse
the judge when he did not rule on them fast enough. Chevron employee Diego
Borja, under the direction of company lawyers, tried to bribe a sitting judge
in a sting operation; Chevron threatened other Ecuadorian judges as well as
lawyers for the plaintiffs with sham criminal prosecutions; and finally,
offered $1 billion to Ecuador's government (half of which was to go to an
environmental project) to induce it to illegally quash the case. Chevron lawyer
Doak Bishop famously announced that the Ecuadorian plaintiffs "are
irrelevant". This sworn affidavit from
Ecuadorian lawyer Juan Pablo Saenz provides some of the gruesome details about
Chevron's ongoing efforts to corrupt Ecuador's judicial system.
Chevron's new public relations narrative claims
that the evidence in Ecuador is in its favor. What the evidence actually shows
is that Chevron, via its own audits and technical reports, proved the claims of
the plaintiffs and then lied about it to shareholders and the financial markets
to artificially boost its stock price. That helps explain why a U.S.
Congresswoman and three institutional investors recently asked U.S. regulatory
authorities to investigate the company for violating securities laws. See here and here.
Another prominent U.S. elected official who
visited the region in 2008, Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, described
seeing a "terrible environmental and humanitarian crisis" that made
him "ashamed" as an American. See here for
a letter he wrote to President Obama about Chevron's activities in Ecuador.
Which brings us back the falsehoods Chevron
will try to market in Canada. First, the few minutes of outtakes from the movie
Crude that Chevron posted on its website are spliced and diced in its editing
room to present a completely distorted view of the case. Joe Berlinger, the
film's director, told Fortune that he is "dismayed at the level of
mischaracterizations" in Chevron's presentation of his outtakes.
American lawyer Steven Donziger, who Chevron
has spied on and harassed
for years as he too tried to hold company officials
accountable, emphasizes throughout the full 600 hours of outtakes the strength
of the evidence against Chevron and his own frustration that Chevron that was
corrupting the court and improperly delaying the trial. Chevron won't show you
these outtakes, which faithfully reflect the conclusion among the legal team
that the scientific evidence against Chevron is overwhelming.
Chevron's take on the science is equally
unavailing. To the extent you can judge somebody by the company they keep,
consider this: one of Chevron's scientific consultants in the Ecuador case is
Dr. Douglas Southgate, who works with an institute funded by the oil and gas
industry to cast doubt on global warming. See here.
Another, Ralph Marquez, is the former lead lobbyist for the chemical industry
in Texas. See here.
Michael Kelsh–the author of a grossly flawed cancer study funded by Chevron–was
hired by a company owned by a former Chevron Board member. See here.
(One can better understand how Chevron uses junk science by reading the classic
book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscure the Truth
On Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.)
The evidence relied on by the Ecuador court
clearly shows that all of the toxic substances Chevron and the plaintiffs found
at hundreds of contaminated well sites in Ecuador are dangerous to human health
and can kill people at high exposures, according to the Agency for Toxic
Disease Registry, the leading authority on toxicity in the U.S. government. Yet
Chevron continues to deny any harm has occurred.
Chevron's paid "expert reports"
claiming there is no risk to human health are pre-cooked by company lawyers.
For example, the Chevron-funded Kelsh study severely undercounts the incidence
of cancer in Ecuador's Amazon by relying on official mortality data when most
rainforest residents die quietly in the forest and therefore never enter the
national cancer database. In its first iteration, Kelsh never disclosed in the
study that he received funding from Chevron. Chevron can also cite the
existence of some "clean" water and soil samples from the trial, but
it lifted these samples up-gradient from the waste pits as part of its
fraudulent sampling and analysis plan, exposed here in
a report by Dr. Ann Maest.
Incidentally, Dr. Maest–one of the most
respected experts in the world on how contaminants travel in
groundwater–testified under oath recently that there is massive contamination
of water in Chevron's concession area. See here and here.
In a blatant act of deceit, in a recent blog Chevron leaves the false
impression that Dr. Maest agrees with the company that there is no water
contamination. See here.
Chevron's assertion that the plaintiffs wrote
the judgment is a both a fabrication and a final act of desperation. It plays
into the company's fundamentally racist notion that an Ecuadorian judge is
simply not capable of writing a considered, intelligent 188-page decision that
picks apart and destroys its arguments, as was done in this case.
Of course, these arguments already were
litigated and resolved in the trial that Chevron wanted. But to Chevron, any
court or judge who disagrees with it is just part of an ever-widening
conspiracy. As of now, the members of this "conspiracy" include numerous
judges in Ecuador, dozens of respected media outlets that Chevron claims have
been "hoodwinked" by the plaintiffs, prominent U.S. law firms such as
Patton Boggs, and the highly respected Canadian lawyer Alan Lenczner, who
represents the Ecuadorians in their legal action. You might as well throw in Sergio
Bermudes, probably the most respected litigator in Brazil, who just joined the
case to help the plaintiffs.
Chevron's goal in Canada will be to reopen the
litigation so it can kick the can down the road several more years, calculating
it is cheaper to pay the hourly rates for an army lawyers than it would be to
clean one of the largest oil disasters on the planet.
Canada's courts will have a great opportunity
to finally block Chevron's rope-a-dope, cynical, and manipulative legal
strategy.
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