Will the Lawsuit Over Oil Contamination in Ecuador Ever End?

Protesters hold photos of Ecuadorians outside of Chevron's headquarters in California. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/rainforestactionnetwork/5448819841/sizes/m/in/photostream/">Rainforest Action Network</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In the past few weeks, there have been several developments in the ongoing lawsuit that Ecuadorian communities have filed against Chevron for polluting the Amazon. On Jan. 4, an appeals panel in the country sided with the communities and upheld the $18 billion judgment previously leveled against the oil giant. But the case is probably still far from over, as the plaintiffs will now need to find a way to actually enforce that decision.

This case started back in 2003, though the legal challenges date back to 1992. That’s when the plaintiffs in the case—a group of indigenous Ecuadorians—first brought forward their complaint that the oil company Texaco had dumped 16 billion gallons of heavily polluted waste water into the Amazon over the previous three decades. Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001, which is why the company is now the subject of the complaint, and claims that its subsidiary “fully remediated its share of environmental impacts” before 1992.

The case has dragged on for years now, with all kinds of drama. That’s included alleging that the plaintiff’s aren’t real, and then accusing the same not-real plaintiffs of racketeering in a US court under anti-organized-crime laws. The plaintiffs have dug up evidence of espionage and “dirty tricks” on Chevron’s part. Last February, a court in Lago Agrio, Ecuador ordered Chevron to pay $18 billion in damages. And on Jan. 3, an appellate court upheld that ruling. There will still be a drawn-out legal battle over the money, however, as Chevron no longer has assets in Ecuador. The plaintiffs will have to take their case to another country where Chevron does have assets and get a court there to enforce the ruling.

Meanwhile, both sides are still raising complaints about malfeasance. Among the documents turned over by Chevron in one of the many cases, the plaintiffs’ lawyers unearthed one (Exhibit F) that they believe shows that Chevron was gaming the soil testing that the company used in court to show that it had already cleaned up site. An internal document outlining Chevron’s testing protocol notes that sampling points should be selected “to emphasize clean points around pits when possible.” Another part of the document explicitly directs that soil samples from the perimeter of oil production stations that have already “shown to be clean” in a pre-inspection visit to the site. This document differs from what the one the company used in court to detail their testing procedures (Exhibit H). The plaintiffs publicly called on some of the experts involved in the sampling to recant.

In response to that most recent allegation, Chevron’s lawyers accused the plaintiffs of “intimidating and threatening” their witnesses and called the claim “false and misleading” in a letter to the plaintiffs’ legal team.

What’s clear is that this case probably isn’t going to wrap up anytime soon, despite the most recent ruling. Chevron maintains that the “politicization and corruption of Ecuador’s judiciary” should render the decision null. (Even though it was Chevron that sought to move the case there in the first place.) Instead, the company wants the courts to go after the plaintiffs. “Chevron does not believe that the Ecuador ruling is enforceable in any court that observes the rule of law,” said Justin Higgs, a Chevron spokesman. “The company will continue to seek to hold accountable the perpetrators of this fraud.”

But the plaintiffs say Chevron is just trying to deflect blame. “They’re trying to paint the Ecuadorians and anyone associated with Ecuadorians as corrupt,” said Karen Hinton, the spokeswoman for the plaintiffs. “In their minds that was the only way they’d get out of this.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate