Chevron's Human Rights Hitmen | Amazon Watch
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Chevron’s Human Rights Hitmen

March 8, 2011 | Mitch Anderson | Eye on the Amazon

A gallery of Chevron rogues

After more than seventeen years of intense legal battle, last month, Chevron, the second largest oil company in the United States, was found guilty in Ecuadorian courts for massive environmental contamination of the Amazon and was ordered to pay upwards of $9 billion in damages. This morning I was on KQED’s Forum radio program discussing this topic. On the program with me was a spokesperson from Chevron, Kent Robertson, and a business reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, David Baker.

What first struck me, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, is how Chevron’s spokesperson Kent Robertson is able to consistently, and in a very disciplined way, lie through his teeth. Not an admirable job, but given that Chevron has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the years on high-powered law firms and public relations outfits, it’s no wonder that the company has developed a sophisticated (but disingenuous) narrative in order to distract the media, financial analysts and shareholders from the central issue: Chevron has been proven guilty of massive environmental crimes in the Amazon, thousands of indigenous peoples and farmers continue to suffer a widespread public health crisis, and Chevron is facing a very real multi-billion liability, with serious financial, operational and reputational consequences to the company.

Instead of resolving this issue by respecting the Ecuadorian court’s ruling, Chevron has chosen instead to mire itself in a kind of legal Vietnam – a protracted, expensive, and in the end, futile legal battle, which serves only the interests of Chevron’s high-powered law firms (Gibson Dunn, Jones Day, etc), who have droves of lawyers billing thousands of dollars an hour. Is Chevron senior management being taken for a ride by outside law firms, who have no interest in a productive resolution to this case, or the interests of Chevron shareholders, or most importantly, the thousands of Ecuadorians, who continue to suffer from a poisoned environment?

Chevron claims that the entire lawsuit against them is part of a vast international conspiracy to extort and defraud the company for billions of dollars. Indeed, that was the central focus of Kent Robertson’s talking points today on the show. It’s very easy for Chevron to merely assert that there has been a fraud, and in doing so, push the media narrative of the case away from the pollution in Ecuador. What is perplexing is how Chevron was able to convince US District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan to issue a temporary injunction against enforcement of the multi-billion dollar verdict in Ecuador. It is no secret that Judge Kaplan has a profound distaste for Steven Donziger, an attorney for the plaintiffs based in New York; nor is it a secret that in Judge Kaplan, Chevron has found a very sympathetic ally in their attempts to avoid being held liable for the massive verdict in Ecuador.

What is extraordinarily troubling though is that Chevron has convinced Judge Kaplan that the admittedly egregious public relations gaffes that attorney Steve Donziger has made over the last years, somehow provide a legal basis to suspend the ability of 30,000 indigenous people and farmers from enforcing the judgment in courts around the world. Two issues here. First, it’s troubling (and should raise eyebrows) that a US Judge would have the temerity to summarily dismiss the integrity and validity of the judicial process in a foreign country, without even pretending to have any expert knowledge of the workings of the Ecuadorian judiciary; and secondly, that in his ruling, he would substantially rely on the company’s argument that enforcement of a verdict would pose business problems for Chevron.

In his ruling, Kaplan writes:

“There is a significant risk that assets would be seized or attached, thus disrupting Chevron’s supply chain, causing it to miss critical deliveries to business partners, damaging ‘Chevron’s business reputation as a reliable supplier and harm the valuable customer goodwill Chevron has developed over the past 130 years,’ and causing injury to Chevron’s ‘business reputation and business relationships.'”

Immediately after Judge Kaplan’s controversial ruling, the Ecuadorian plaintiffs responded:

“This decision is a slap in the face to the democratic nation of Ecuador and the thousands of Ecuadorian citizens who have courageously fought for 18 years to hold Chevron accountable for committing the world’s worst environmental disaster. The trampling of due process in the court’s refusal to consider key evidence or hold a hearing to determine the facts is an inappropriate exercise of judicial power that will harm the United States’ relationship with Latin America and other parts of the world. It disregards the scholarly and comprehensive 188-page opinion of Ecuadorian Judge Nicolas Zambrano, a well-respected member of Ecuador’s judiciary. It also ignores key evidence that Chevron has committed a series of frauds in Ecuador to cover up its unlawful misconduct.

“We want to emphasize that after appeals in Ecuador the Ecuadorian plaintiffs retain their full right to lawfully enforce the judgment of their own country’s courts in any of the dozens of nations around the world where Chevron has assets. In the meantime, we will appeal the decision on multiple grounds.”

And as long as Chevron is accusing the Ecuadorian plaintiffs of extortion for spending nearly 18 years trying to hold the company accountable for poisoning their rainforest environment, we must look at Chevron’s actions during that time (and of course Texaco before that). In a press release sent out only hours before Judge Kaplan’s ruling, representatives of the Ecuadorian plaintiffs highlight a legal filing in the case before Judge Kaplan, which details the long history of Chevron’s attempts to corrupt the judicial process in Ecaudor.

  • An internal company fax indicated Chevron officials in the 1990s ghostwrote a letter from the Ecuadorian ambassador to the U.S. Department of State, prevailing upon the agency to intervene and try to have the case dismissed when it was pending in federal court in New York City.
  • Chevron lawyer Ricardo Reis Veiga, one of two Chevron officials criminally indicted in Ecuador for falsifying the results of a purported remediation, admitted in a 2006 deposition that he had met with Ecuador’s attorney general in 2003 in an extrajudicial effort to have the executive branch of the Ecuadorian government order the lawsuit dismissed.
  • A 1972 Chevron memo revealed that a company executive ordered the destruction of all documents relating to oil spills and demanded that company employees no longer keep records of such spills.
  • Between 2003 and 2010, Chevron delayed the trial via subterfuge – including canceling a critical site inspection by fabricating a security threat, inundating the court with frivolous motions, refusing to pay court experts, and blocking the gathering of scientific evidence.
  • In 2009, Chevron used an Ecuadorian employee and a convicted American drug trafficker to mount an unlawful sting operation against the presiding judge as part of a scheme to entrap him in a bribery scandal. Although the scheme was quickly discredited, the scandal delayed the trial by two years and served as a tool for Chevron to try to intimidate the court.
  • Diego Borja, a member of Chevron’s trial team in Ecuador, has been quoted saying he “cooked” evidence for Chevron and that he replaced contaminated samples with clean ones before submitting them to laboratories for testing. Borja also said “crime pays” and that he had evidence that showed Chevron’s guilt that he would disclose unless the company compensated him.
  • In February 2010, Chevron offered $20,000 to a U.S. journalist to spy on the plaintiffs under the false pretenses that she was writing a story.
  • Throughout the trial Chevron has taken out paid advertisements in Ecuadorian media and in various online media outlets accusing judges and court-appointed experts of bias in an effort to intimidate the court.

For more on this sordid history, and the players behind it, see Rainforest Action Network’s latest online report called Chevron’s Human Rights Hitmen.

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