Chevron vs. human rights — big consequences for the man who fought big oil
He is a human rights lawyer who helped indigenous peoples in Ecuador fight back — and win — against one big oil company’s deliberate and disastrous harm to them and the rainforest ecosystems that sustain them. Now he’s paying the price.
“I’m just a foil for Chevron, because they try to distract attention from their terrible, wrongful acts,” says Steven Donziger, on house arrest, during his Earth Day Week broadcast.
We Don’t Have Time followed up with him afterward to hear more about how Chevron has tried to evade its legal loss — and mute Steven as a part of that.
For 25 years, Steven Donziger has stood on the front line with a team of international attorneys in the biggest environmental legal case in history against oil-related destruction.
The grounds for the case reach back to the 1960s when the American oil company Texaco — now Chevron — initiated a major drilling operation in Ecuador’s Amazon region that included approximately 400 well sites and 20 production stations. The oil production facilities were located in delicate rainforest areas where indigenous communities had lived for millenia. Those peoples not forced from their homeland by the discovery and extraction of oil have been destined to decades of torment, destruction, and disease at the hands of Chevron.
The legal claims were designed to address three fundamental problems created by Chevron in the 1,500-square-mile expanse where the drilling took place.
First, Texaco gouged approximately 1,000 waste pits into the jungle floor around the well sites. Each pit was used to dispose of drilling waste that abounds with toxic and carcinogenic materials such as benzene and chromium 6. These pits were purposefully built to pollute — with pipes running from the pits to streams and rivers that indigenous groups relied on for drinking water, bathing, and the fish that made up the primary portion of their diet. To this day, all of these pits continue to poison soils, groundwater, streams, and rivers.
Second, Texaco designed the production stations to deliberately discharge massive amounts of toxic “wastewater” into the surrounding waterways. This wastewater, separated from the marketable crude oil, is clear but scalding hot and exceptionally toxic. Poured into the river systems at a volume of about four million gallons per day at the height of the operation, it became a pervasive, invisible contaminant that made the drinking water in some areas toxic enough to kill.
The third major problem addressed by the case was damage caused by the flaring of natural gas at the well sites. The gas, which contained cancer-causing dioxins, poisoned the air with soot to such a degree it created a “black rain” phenomenon during the frequent rainstorms in the region.
All of these problems compounded over decades to result in a dramatic increase in cancer deaths, as documented by several peer-reviewed health evaluations. They also destroyed ecosystems the indigenous peoples directly depend on for life and that are crucial to the health of the planet.
Texaco left the region in 1992 when its contract expired. It turned over the well sites and production stations to Ecuador’s state oil company, Petroecuador, leaving behind more than two decades of massive, accumulated toxicity in a system designed to pollute — and that was never cleaned up, so it still pollutes today.
A long and arduous process
In 1993, Steven and other lawyers were invited to tour the affected region. In November of that year they initiated a class-action case in federal court in New York, where Texaco was headquartered and where the decisions to pollute in Ecuador had been made by the company executives. Donziger and his colleagues hoped for a fair court process with a jury of impartial fact-finders, a bedrock principle of U.S. civil law.
Meanwhile, Texaco fought to have the case moved to Ecuador, where they knew the case could disappear if the attorneys didn’t pursue it there, and where there was hope for engineering a dismissal by Ecuador’s pro-oil government.
In 2001, after eight years of litigation, Chevron — who had, by then, taken over — agreed to accept jurisdiction in Ecuador as a condition of dismissal from U.S. courts. The U.S. attorneys did not give up the fight, however, teaming up instead with Ecuadorian lawyers to re-file the case in Ecuador’s courts.
The first hearing took place in 2003 — the opening chapter of a trial that took another eight years in total and entailed, among many other things, multiple inspections of contaminated well sites by teams appointed by the opposing parties. The inspections generated 105 technical evidentiary reports and 64,000 chemical sampling results that documented the massive magnitude of the pollution.
Asked about the length of the trial, Steven explains: “The trial was unnecessarily long because Chevron kept trying to add more inspections and delay it as much as they could and clog up the court with frivolous motions. They calculated it would be cheaper to pay lawyers to obstruct the process than to deal with the likely outcome, which was that they were going to lose, because the evidence against them was overwhelming. In the meantime, while Chevron played this cynical game, the people who brought the case were slowly dying off. Many people testified at trial and later passed from cancer before the verdict was delivered.”
The court’s ruling finally came in February 2011 — a historic judgement against Chevron, ordering the company to pay $18 billion USD in damages to the indigenous groups and local communities. The finding of liability was later upheld in three separate appeals made by Chevron, although the damages were ultimately reduced to $9.5 billion.
As of today, Chevron has paid nothing.
In an October 2007 news release, Chevron predicted “a lifetime of appellate and collateral litigation” if the case was not dismissed by the Ecuadorian court. And that lifetime of litigation has come true for the indigenous peoples and those acting on their behalf — a prophecy fulfilled by Chevron itself.
A target and a scapegoat
Pointing fingers away from themselves, Chevron — and their lead law firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher — has targeted Steven in particular as the frontline attorney who had dared to challenge the monolith for revering profits over human life.
Internal company emails show a defense strategy based largely on a campaign to demonize Steven, involving dozens of law firms and public relations agencies hired to train their firepower on one human rights lawyer who lives in a modest apartment in New York with his wife and son.
In 2011 Chevron filed a retaliatory civil lawsuit against Steven and his colleagues, claiming that the original case had been a racketeering conspiracy. Steven was sued for $60 billion USD — the largest potential personal liability in U.S. history.
The case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York — the very court from which Chevron had the original case removed. The law used to sue Steven — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO — was designed by the U.S. Congress decades ago to target the mafia, but since then it has been co-opted by corporations to try to criminalize environmental activism.
In that court, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former tobacco industry lawyer, accepted testimony from an admittedly corrupt witness who had been paid $2 million under contract with Chevron. He claimed that Steven had bribed the judge in Ecuador to win the original case.
No corroborating evidence was presented, and this same witness later admitted under oath that he had a history of accepting bribes and that he had lied about several key points. That, however, did not deter Judge Kaplan from crediting the testimony to find the Ecuador judgement had been obtained by fraud. In the meantime, 29 appellate judges in Ecuador and Canada have ruled the judgement was valid.
Since Chevron refused to comply with the court order in Ecuador, Steven’s clients there filed actions to have the judgement enforced against Chevron’s assets in other countries. While Steven was in Canada to pursue enforcement action there, Judge Kaplan filed criminal contempt charges against Steven after he appealed an unprecedented order to turn over his confidential communications, computer, and cell phone for review by Chevron.
The U.S. attorney’s office normally would prosecute such a case, but they rejected the charges. Judge Kaplan then found an extraordinary backroads route to drive the charges forward anyway. He appointed a private corporate law firm in New York — Seward & Kissel LLP — to prosecute Steven in the name of the U.S. government.
Despite Chevron being one of the firm’s clients — a glaring conflict of interest — they have, as of now, been allowed to continue targeting Steven.
When Steven appeared in the federal court last year to contest the criminal charges, he found that Judge Kaplan had bypassed local rules requiring random case assignment and had appointed a close colleague to preside over the case. In that hearing, Judge Loretta Preska claimed that Steven was a flight risk and ordered him detained in his apartment while he awaits trial — the first time in U.S. history a lawyer has been detained pre-trial on contempt charges.
Steven is now ten months into his sentence — with no certain end in sight — bound to his home by an electronic anklet, with all movements monitored on a 24/7 basis.
His criminal trial is scheduled for June 15, but with COVID-19 and other variables, that date can easily be postponed. In the meantime, he is aiming to get the case fully dismissed.
What’s really happening
“I think I am illustrative of a very dangerous trend in terms of the climate movement,” explains Steven.
He says Chevron has used 60 law firms and more than 2,000 lawyers against him.
“They’ve probably had two or three billion dollars in legal fees — not just to win this case but to destroy the idea of this case.”
He believes the ruling in Ecuador was and is an extreme threat to the oil industry’s business model, which depends on externalizing many of its production costs — oil pollution — onto vulnerable communities, which in effect subsidizes the company’s profits.
“If these companies are able to externalize and not actually pay for their pollution…there’s going to be an excess of drilling,” says Steven in his Earth Day Week broadcast. “If they had to actually pay for this they wouldn’t drill in these ecosystems.”
He sees the industry’s accountability for climate change through a similar lens:
“Oil companies are accelerating climate change, and they do that by leaving behind pollution and having the public pick up the tab for clean-up. It’s wrong legally. It’s wrong morally. It harms and often kills people.
It’s very important these types of large-scale legal cases addressing major pollution problems exist and that judgements are complied with. And it is critical that the lawyers fighting them receive protection, or the cases will never be brought.”
Written by Lisa M. Bailey
What we can do
From within his home detention, Steven and his many allies are rallying support. He has lawyers, environmental groups, celebrities and, most recently, 29 Nobel laureates on his side.
“What I need now,” he says, “is citizen support.”
There are three main avenues of action to provide this:
- At makechevroncleanup.com, you can take action on Steven’s behalf — which means also on behalf of the affected communities in Ecuador and the Amazon region itself. Perhaps most crucial within the next week or two is a call to action on that home page to contact the U.S. Department of Justice — a simple form to fill out, calling for Steven’s release.
- At donzigerdefense.com you can contribute to Steven’s defense fund to help him pay his lawyers so he can be free and protected from Chevron’s attacks — and continue doing the necessary legal work to help indigenous peoples protect themselves and our planet.
- Please share this story for the release of Steven Donziger untill a fair trial can be guaranteed, using the hashtags #FreeDonziger and #MakeChevronCleanUp
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