Part one of a three-part series
In the modern mainstream media world in which Big Oil is always the offender, the story line was perfect. Impoverished and dying, native people from Ecuador sued Chevron to force the company to clean up the environmental catastrophe its oil operations had left in the Amazonian jungle. The $113 billion in damages would pay for compensation, health care and clean water.
U.S. environmental activists decried Chevron for committing an "Amazon Chernobyl," disrupted stockholder meetings, appealed to Congress and blogged furiously. Celebrities like actress Daryl Hannah and Sting joined the cause, gaining the attention of sympathetic media. A noted filmmaker produced a documentary, "Crude," raising awareness and winning film festival awards.
It's a good story line, but the truth is much simpler. The litigation against Chevron was always just about the money -- big money for U.S. trial lawyers, their Ecuadorean underlings and the anti-American regime of Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa.
"I sit back and dream. I cannot believe what we have accomplished," New York trial lawyer Steven Donziger wrote in a diary entry. "Important people interested in us. A new paradigm of not only a case, but how to do a case. Chevron wanting to settle. Billions of dollars on the table. A movie, a possible book."
Donziger's dollar-filled reveries appear among the hundreds of thousands of pages Chevron has submitted as evidence in court proceedings around the United States. The company's aggressive legal defense argues that what the plaintiffs portray as pursuit for corporate accountability and justice is nothing more than a litigation shakedown backed by a public relations and political campaign.
Campaign? Chevron calls it a conspiracy, filing a RICO suit on Feb. 1 against Donziger and other major actors in the litigation. In a civil suit in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, Chevron charges that the conspirators sought to extort the company by a plan developed in the United States: "The enterprise's ultimate aim is to create enough pressure on Chevron in the United States to extort it into paying to stop the campaign against it."
Chevron is under attack for work that began after the Ecuadorean government opened up its Amazon territory bordering Colombia to oil development and settlement in the 1960s. A subsidiary of Texaco -- acquired by Chevron in 2001 -- worked in a consortium with the government-run oil company, Petroecuador, beginning to produce oil in 1973.
Texaco ended its operating role in Ecuador in 1990 and left the country in 1992 when the consortium contract expired. After fulfilling an agreement with the government to clean up the oil sites, Texaco was released from all legal and environmental claims in 1998.
Deep-pocketed U.S. oil companies make for inviting targets. In 1993 and 1994, U.S. trial lawyers filed federal lawsuits in New York, claiming to represent 30,000 Amazonians harmed by the oil operations. Those suits were eventually dismissed as being in the wrong jurisdiction.
So in May 2003, using the names of 48 Ecuadoreans as plaintiffs -- of which 20 were forged, Chevron asserts -- Donziger and his team of Ecuadorean lawyers and activists filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of Nueva Loja, Ecuador, Maria Aguinda et al. v. Chevron-Texaco.
Their initial claims of $6 billion of damages rose to $27 billion and now to a preposterous $113 billion. To make their case, the plaintiffs have concocted fraudulent "scientific reports," applied rough political pressure to the Ecuadorean courts, orchestrated a widespread PR campaign and tirelessly attacked Chevron as a greedy exploiter of Third World people.
Greed does indeed lie at the heart of the litigation -- the greed of trial lawyers who have corrupted the legal process in the pursuit of billions of dollars of other people's money.
Editor's note: Chevron issued this statement Monday following an Ecuadorean judge's ruling that the firm must pay a fine estimated at $8 billion: "The Ecuadorian court's judgment is illegitimate and unenforceable. It is the product of fraud and is contrary to the legitimate scientific evidence. Chevron will appeal this decision in Ecuador and intends to see that justice prevails."
Carter Wood, a former newspaper journalist, has blogged about the Chevron/Ecuador litigation on Shopfloor.org, the blog of the National Association of Manufacturers, for which he is a spokesman. However, this three-part series, which is based in part on material gathered in Ecuador on a trip funded by Chevron, reflects only Wood's views, not NAM's.
Tomorrow: Claims based not on science but on fraud.
Carter Wood, a former newspaper journalist, has blogged about the Chevron/Ecuador litigation on Shopfloor.org, the blog of the National Association of Manufacturers, his employer. However, this three-part series, which is based in part on material gathered in Ecuador on a trip funded by Chevron, reflects only Wood's views, not NAM's.
