A rumble in the jungle that has the capacity to change the
way multi-national corporations do business with South American countries,
basically getting their way through a series of high-placed bribes to ravage
the earth, including the rainforest, in order to extract precious resources by
the cheapest means possible, even if that means leaving behind some of the
world’s largest toxic waste materials, as is alleged in a now 17-year old
pending lawsuit (filed in 1993) by the inhabitants of an Ecuadorian rainforest where
their water supply has been systematically poisoned by the Texaco (now Chevron since
a 2001 merger) oil industries, which turned the rivers into a permanent waste
facility for what is alleged to be 18 billion tons of toxic waste, or pay heavy
court damages to clean up the mess, including damages to the 30,000 indigenous
people still living in the region who are constantly exposed to not only
extremely high levels of cancer, but also a poisonous water supply that is so
toxic it can lead to instant death within 24 hours. According to many outside visitors, that
water even smells like gasoline. Chevron’s
scientists, like the tobacco industry before them, alleges there is nothing
wrong with their product, that the same illnesses could have resulted from poor
sanitary conditions, as there are no sewage treatment plants in the vicinity,
so they bathe and wash clothes in the same water where they dispose of human
waste. The remarkable success of this
film is contrasting the well-dressed Chevron lawyers who haven’t a problem in
the world sitting in their sleek air-conditioned offices with the people
actually living in the tropical vicinity who have livestock that died, family
members that died, wild game that has vanished, so they have no means to
support themselves, as everything has already or is continuing to die off,
where many people continue to be sick.
Perhaps the most devastating evidence was the skin lesions that almost
completely consume a 20-day old baby who is brought in to seek medical
treatment. Those with cancer need to
come up with $500 per weekly treatment session if they wish to obtain medical
services, which are only accessible after riding a bus 18 hours just to get
there. Who, living in the jungle, has
that kind of ready cash available, when many don’t earn that weekly amount over
the entire year?
A first-time, young Ecuadorian lawyer, Pablo Fajardo, a man
who previously worked for the oil industries when Texaco started their
operations in the region and saw first hand just exactly how they disposed of
toxic waste, a lawyer who still resides there in his unassuming 2-room house, a
man with no other legal experience whatsoever, is handling the case against a
stream of Chevron lawyers. Fajardo is
assisted by a New York lawyer named Steve Donziger, a media expert who
represents a U.S. law firm that’s actually financing the law suit, and
nonprofit groups like Amazon Watch, but Fajardo has the testimony of those
still living in the vicinity, where the affected area is a targeted
1700-square-miles, about the size of Rhode Island, as this is their ancestral
tribal home, people with nowhere else to go, as this is the only world they’ve
ever known. Chevron, on the other hand,
got in and got out, as in 1992, after 30 years of drilling, they transferred
oil rights to an Ecuadorian company called Petro-Ecuador who has an even worse
environmental record than the U.S. corporation, so one of Chevron’s arguments
is to lay the blame on the Ecuadorians.
Fajardo, however, having grown up in the region, knows what areas Texaco
dumped toxic materials, areas that Petro-Ecuador has never worked, and can
identify thousands of dump sites left behind, despite methods used to cover the
top ground with dirt, all of which remain hazardous underneath. Some people inadvertently built their houses
right on top of what were waste dumps, as what they saw was an area of cleared
ground, perfect to build a home. But
animals all around them that use the nearby river or creek for drinking water
mysteriously die, so how is anyone to know where it’s safe, especially when the
company claims there’s no scientific trace of any problem?
Early on, Chevron moved the court jurisdiction from the
United States to Ecuador, a country where they had 8 different Presidents over
a 10 year period, thinking they’d have a better chance bribing or influencing
the locals, so the mounds of legal evidence that have accumulated for nearly 20
years fills a storage room. But lately
they’ve been having second thoughts, arguing they cannot receive a fair trial
in Ecuador now that they’ve elected a left-leaning President, Rafael Correa
(still the incumbent since 2006), who actually sides with the victims in this
case, so the company is now calling him a socialist and urging the United
States government to cut all diplomatic ties.
It was somewhat confounding to see press conferences set up in the
middle of a jungle, where native people are displaying demonstration-style photos
of their sick or dead children while both Fajardo and a local Chevron attorney
accompany a judge to various inspection sites where water and mud samples are
taken, usually accompanied by several dozen locals witnessing the proceedings,
so as the lawyers are making their legal arguments to the judge and the
cameras, they are also playing to the people who happen to live there, with
both sides continually trying to persuade them.
This kind of Greek chorus was fascinating, as they are usually a
speechless and unseen human life force with little power or influence, yet in
this film they’re hearing the arguments of what could turn out to be one of the
cases of the century.
One of the saddest parts of the story, especially seeing how
raw and primitive the conditions are living in a tropical jungle, is generating
publicity to famous American celebrities who can raise money in behalf of their
cause. This part of the story is really
pretty sickening, but absolutely essential, as Chevron’s legal strategy has
been to prolong and postpone the process until they force the other side to go
bankrupt. So fundraising is essential,
like a political campaign, which is simply not a natural part of any native
person’s life and must seem just as strange and foreign as the oil industry
itself, who brought strange explosions and excavation into what was otherwise a
pristine jungle where they had been perfectly suited for centuries to live off
the land. When Trudie Styler, the wife
of Sting and co-founder of the Rainforest Foundation shows up in the jungle,
having read a 2007
story for Vanity Fair, a cover story article on the history of the case,
and she professes solidarity with the indigenous people, needing a translator,
of course, to express her sentiments, one gets a sense of theater and
manipulation, which only escalates when Fajardo is flown into New York City for
a Sting rock concert promoting their own environmental organizations, all set
to a Police performance where we hear the constant refrain repeating over and
over again, “Sending out at an S.O.S.”
All in all, the comprehensive picture shown here is meticulously
detailed, where we hear the mouthpieces on both sides, but the ravaged earth
and native people, powerfully silent throughout, are easily the most eloquent
spokespersons as we are able to see how their lives have been uprooted from
anything resembling normalcy to a point where their survival as a species, both
the rainforest and its inhabitants, are both in jeopardy.
Postscript
On February 14, 2011, an Ecuadorian judge awarded an $8
billion penalty against Chevron, the largest environmental penalty ever awarded,
along with an additional $8 billion if Chevron did not promptly issue an
apology for despoiling areas around drilling sites once operated by Texaco,
which since has been bought by Chevron.
The oil company refused, quickly filing an appeal, claiming that “by
imposing this award, the court, in effect, penalized Chevron billions of
dollars for exercising its fundamental right to defend itself,” calling the
ruling “illegitimate and unenforceable,” also filing suit against the
plaintiffs for racketeering, which targets not only lawyers, but indigenous
persons named within the lawsuit. The award was reduced to $9.5 billion on
November 12, 2013 by the Ecuadorean National Court of Justice, the nation’s
highest tribunal, which amounts to almost half of Chevron’s 2013 profit.
On March 4, 2014, Chevron Corporation won a U.S. judge’s
ruling that a multibillion-dollar pollution judgment issued in Ecuador was
procured by fraud, as U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in New York said he
found “clear and convincing evidence” that a 2011 judgment on behalf of rain
forest dwellers in the country’s Lago Agrio area was secured by bribing a judge
with a promise of $500,000 from the proceeds and ghostwriting the ruling, and that
attorney Steven Donziger’s legal team used bribery, fraud and extortion in pursuit
of an $18 billion judgment against the oil company issued in 2011. The villagers had said Texaco, later acquired
by Chevron, contaminated an oil field in northeastern Ecuador between 1964 and
1992. Ecuador’s high court cut the
judgment to $9.5 billion last year. At a
six-week trial last year, Chevron accused Donziger of fraud and racketeering
and said Texaco cleaned up the site, known as Lago Agrio, before handing it
over to a state-controlled entity. The
judge said Texaco, and by extension Chevron, “might bear some responsibility”
for pollution at the site but that it was irrelevant to the question of whether
fraud had occurred. “Justice is not served
by inflicting injustice,” Kaplan wrote. “The
ends do not justify the means. There is
no ‘Robin Hood’ defense to illegal and wrongful conduct.”
Chevron Corporation is now seeking $32.3 million in legal
fees from Steven Donziger and others who this month who were found by a judge
to have used fraud to obtain a multibillion-dollar pollution judgment against
Chevron in Ecuador, claiming it spent more than $10 million gathering evidence
to build the racketeering case against Donziger. A lawyer for Donziger, Deepak Gupta, said
Chevron’s “eye-popping” fee request was a “transparent attempt” to intimidate
anyone who might be thinking of suing the company for wrongdoing. In a recent court filing, Chevron said the
$32.3 million in fees included 36,837 hours billed by its lawyers at Gibson,
Dunn & Crutcher. Randy Mastro, the
lead lawyer for Chevron, most recently billed at a rate of $1,140 an hour, the
filings show. Mastro was hired in
January by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to conduct an internal inquiry
into the scandal involving lane closings at George Washington Bridge. Gupta, Donziger’s lawyer, said Donziger could
not pay the fees. “Steven is a solo
environmental lawyer who works from the kitchen table of his apartment,” Gupta
said. “Chevron knows he can’t actually pay those fees -- and that’s the point.”
The Ecuadoreans have sued Chevron in Brazil, Argentina, and
Canada, where the company has assets that can be seized. The Court of Appeal for Ontario ruled in
December 2013 that the 47 villagers have the right to pursue Chevron’s Canada
assets. The other cases are pending.
