Ecuador
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MILITARY // MADURO RAID?
see chevron boutrous dunn gibson
see donziger
chevron greenwash singer PR
bak
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RWW
03/25/2026
by
- Martha McHardy @ The Daily Beast: Humiliation in Trump’s Backyard Could Signal Worst GOP Midterms in 100 Years
If the enormous 21-point swing against Trump in his own hometown was replicated across the country, this would be the Republicans’ worst midterms in 100 years.
- Tracy Simmons @ Religion News Service: For Doug Wilson's neighbors, CNN documentary a reminder Moscow is Christian nationalism's ground zero
‘I’m hopeful that this exposure will help people recognize the signs of Christian nationalism in their own spaces,’ one Moscow resident said.
- Luis Ferré-Sadurní José María León Cabrera, Annie Correal **and Eric Schmitt @ The New York Times: The U.S. Said It Helped Bomb a Drug Camp. It Was a Dairy Farm.
The Times visited a village where the United States and Ecuador said they destroyed an armed group’s training camp. Residents said it was actually a dairy farm.
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Chevron owns this city's news site. Many stories aren't told
March 28, 2024
Heard on All Things Considered
Miranda Green
Chevron operates a major refinery in Richmond, Calif., a community with high childhood asthma rates. It also owns the city's dominant news site, putting its own spin on events, and runs similar websites in Texas and Ecuador.
Tracy J. Lee for NPR
NPR's David Folkenflik reported this story with Miranda Green ofFloodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.
RICHMOND, Calif. — Open flames shot upward from four smokestacks at the Chevron refinery on the western edge of Richmond, Calif. Soon, black smoke blanketed the sky.
News spread quickly that day last November, but by word of mouth, says Denny Khamphanthong, a 29-year-old Richmond resident. "We don't know the full story, but we know that you shouldn't breathe in the air or be outside for that matter," Khamphanthong says now. "It would be nice to have an actual news outlet that would actually go out there and figure it out themselves."
The city's primary local news source, The Richmond Standard, didn't cover the flare. Nor had it reported on a 2021 Chevron refinery pipeline rupture that dumped nearly 800 gallons of diesel fuel into San Francisco Bay.
Chevron is the city's largest employer, largest taxpayer and largest polluter. Yet when it comes to writing about Chevron, The Richmond Standard consistently toes the company line.
And there's a reason for that: Chevron owns The Richmond Standard.
"If you look at Chevron's website and you look at The Richmond Standard, a lot of the information is copy and paste," says Katt Ramos, a local climate activist. "They present a very skewed viewpoint that is bought and paid for by Chevron."
The site's very name evokes the history of Chevron, created when John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil was broken up by federal trust-busters more than a century ago. The Richmond Standard prides itself on being the "number one source for local, community-driven news" about the city.
The city of Richmond exists in the shadow of the nearby Chevron refinery, which has been connected to poor air quality and health issues in the nearby community.
Brian L. Frank for NPR
Around town, in coffee shops, an architect's office, at a Mexican restaurant, even at a waterside National Park Service site, the Standard is recognized as the main source of news about the city. It carries stories about charity drives and street closings. New bars and art exhibits. Youth soccer events and local concerts and safety initiatives.
Decades ago, the city relied on the Richmond Independentand the San Francisco Chronicle to report on the community. And then a pattern familiar across the U.S. unfolded. The Chronicle pulled back. The Independent got folded into a newspaper in nearby Berkeley, which itself shut down in 1984. Papers in other East Bay cities shriveled up. Now the city's news landscape is dominated by its major corporate force.
Markets where news outlets shut down are often called news deserts. The Standard has created something of a news mirage: Stories are told — but with an agenda. Facts displeasing to Chevron are omitted; hard truths softened. The company is seeking to get its point of view across and to convey that it can be trusted.
On a recent February night, a city council meeting focused repeatedly on developments involving Chevron. Not a single journalist attended in person — other than those for NPR and Floodlight.
The same San Francisco public relations firm that operates the Standard for Chevron runs a similar site about developments in the Permian Basin in West Texas and New Mexico, where Chevron has major business interests. It also runs one of the company's sites in Ecuador, where the energy giant has fought back decades of litigation.
The Richmond Standard is a local news site funded by Chevron, which runs the large refinery in town.
Brian L. Frank for NPR
Chevron's bid to control the public discourse comes as efforts to combat climate change threaten the fossil fuel industry, especially in California. State regulators would effectively ban the sales of gas-powered cars by 2035. They released the world's first plan to achieve net-zero carbon pollution. Other states and countries have adopted similar goals.
In February, Chevron revealed that it was taking a loss of about $1.8 billion on assets mainly in California, because of a tougher regulatory climate in the state. Chevron's corporate headquarters is in San Ramon, about a 35-mile drive southeast of Richmond, though the company has moved the bulk of its workforce to Texas.
"The company saw a need to offer the community more news coverage of Richmond, which had been largely ignored by traditional media with the exception of crime stories," said Braden Reddall, a manager of external affairs at Chevron. "Most people in Richmond will tell you there is a lot more to the community than what is known and reported by traditional media outlets. It's a proud community, filled with interesting people who are doing interesting things."
Other outlets more than adequately cover Chevron, added Reddall, who earlier covered the company for the international news service Reuters.
Former schoolteacher Patricia Dornan says she reads The Richmond Standard but skips the stories about Chevron. "I don't read any of the articles about how wonderful their company is," she says.
Brian L. Frank for NPR
Lifelong Richmond resident Patricia Dornan says she cherry-picks which stories she reads in the Standard.
"If you understand that it's going to have a Chevron-Standard Oil point of view, it's fine because most of the stuff that they're putting out has nothing to do with them," says Dornan, a retired middle school teacher. "And so long as it doesn't have to do with Chevron, it's fine. I don't read any of the articles about how wonderful their company is."
Dornan volunteers at the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park. She tells visitors about the marvels of American manufacturing in a time of war and about the women welders of Richmond who were able to turn out warships in 51 days rather than two years.
Her grandmother moved to town in 1905 — just three years after the refinery first opened — and her family has been there ever since. One of the streets in town is named after her father. She says Richmond can't function without Chevron, but a true local news outlet would help hold it accountable to the community.
When she wants to know what Chevron is up to, Dornan says, "I usually ask my friends who are retirees from the refinery — what's going on?"
"Richmond deserves more news coverage"
When the Standard launched in 2014, it proclaimed: "Richmond deserves more news coverage."
"For the first time in more than 30 years, Richmond will have a community-driven daily news source dedicated to shining a light on the positive things that are going on in the community," the site announced.
Chevron presents the Standard as an investment in the Richmond community. The public relations firm operating the Standard wrote, "This site would tell the stories other outlets had lost the resources to tell."
But not all of the stories.
In the Southeast, power company money flows to news sites that attack their critics
She was an ABC News producer. She also was a corporate operative
A recent review found The Richmond Standard had published 434 stories that touch on its owner, Chevron, since the site's inception. Eight articles refer to flaring incidents. None cite oil spills. The majority of the stories that mention Chevron focus on profiles, awards ceremonies, community projects and celebrations it throws on such occasions as Black History and Hispanic Heritage months.
When Bay Area air pollution regulators secured landmark concessions from Chevron in February to settle a lawsuit, they called it a "decisive victory." The San Jose Mercury News headline cited "$20 million in fines for hundreds of air-quality violations."
The Richmond Standard was more reserved: "Chevron agreement with Air District called win for environment and energy."
The article did not clearly lay out the core of the litigation. The words "fine" and "penalty" did not appear. Careful readers might have been able to piece together what transpired: The news outlet described an agreement involving $20 million that "solidifies the future of energy production at the Richmond Refinery."
"There are a whole host of news outlets around the Bay Area that cover the refinery," said Reddall, the Chevron spokesperson. "The Standard seeks to fill in the gaps. From where I'm sitting, I don't think that it's a refinery that's not written about."
Richmond is a working-class city of 115,000 — nearly half of whom are Latino. Most of the people who work at the Chevron refinery live outside the city.
Brian L. Frank for NPR
A news mirage
Boundaries blur between city and corporation in this largely working-class city of 115,000 people, almost half of whom are Latino. The tech boom of nearby Silicon Valley and the opulence of neighboring Marin County feel like universes away.
The public high school's mascot is the Oilers. Streets are named Ammonia and Petrolite and Xylene. Chevron's network of pipes, low-lying cooling ponds and even sulfuric stench have become defining parts of the town's character. A nature park where tufted egrets and hummingbirds frolic abuts the nearly 3,000-acre refinery itself — an expansive preserve of smokestacks, pipelines and tanks.
Chevron, which recorded $21.3 billion in profits last year, has played an outsized role in Richmond for decades. It supplies the city with jobs — yet most Chevron employees live elsewhere. It pays roughly $50 million a year to Richmond — more than a sixth of the town's annual revenue.
The company's relationship with Richmond turned sour rather abruptly in 2012. An explosion at the refinery engulfed 19 employees in a cloud of light gas oil that had been partially vaporized, according to a federal investigation. The air pollution from the resulting industrial fire could be seen from miles away. In the ensuing days, 15,000 Bay Area residents went to medical centers for respiratory complications.
The Richmond High School mascot is the Oilers.
Brian L. Frank for NPR
State and local prosecutors charged Chevron with criminal negligence and other crimes;the company settled by pleading no contest to six charges, paying out roughly $10 million to affected local residents, agencies and hospitals. Chevron also paid $5 million directly to the city of Richmond to settle a separate civil lawsuit.
By the time of the incident, political sentiment in Richmond started to swing away from the company. As the months passed, progressives were threatening to take control of the city government. They promoted a future without the refinery — just as Chevron was seeking approval from city officials for a sweeping project to overhaul and modernize it.
As the 2014 election cycle dawned, Chevron took action to make sure its voice was heard. It promised a huge investment in scholarships and public health programs.
Chevron also spent $3 million to help propel pro-industry candidates. They all lost. "The election became a referendum on Chevron," said Tom Butt, at the time a city council member who won election as mayor.
Chevron also launched The Richmond Standard that year.
From the outset, the company disclosed its involvement. In small letters at the top of its homepage, the site reads "Funded by Chevron."
Tom Butt was elected mayor of Richmond in 2014. He says that election was a referendum on Chevron.
Brian L. Frank for NPR
In the aftermath of the election, the Standard published a 428-word statement from Chevron in its entirety that defended the company's actions and criticized the city's new leaders. "The question for Richmond is: Will local leaders recognize that business is integral to the city's success?" the Chevron statement read. "Or, will city leaders continue to oppose efforts to create growth, preferring instead to watch the business climate — and the prosperity that business helps generate — decline?"
"We should be outraged"
Katt Ramos, who helps lead Communities for a Better Environment's Richmond chapter, stages tours to demonstrate what she says is Chevron's destructive legacy. It also illustrates what happens when independent local news disappears.
She stops by Peres K-8 School in the Iron Triangle, a nickname derived from the three train tracks that intersect here. Older kids play soccer on a field with a coach while younger ones cavort on a playground. Beyond the school fence, the Chevron plant stands less than a mile away. A sign next to the school's entrance warns of a shallow hazardous liquid pipeline from another petroleum company, Phillips 66, a warning to not dig there.
"Nothing that is normalized about childhood is normalized in Richmond," Ramos says. Adults have to tell kids they can't play outdoors due to a high number of bad air days, she says.
"Nothing that is normalized about childhood is normalized in Richmond," says Katt Ramos, a local climate activist. She says the city's air pollution problems and residents' health issues are rarely covered in the news.
Brian L. Frank for NPR
Perhaps the best way of gauging the seriousness of such concerns is to look at child admissions to emergency rooms for asthma, says Anne Kelsey Lamb, who oversees asthma research for the Oakland-based Public Health Institute. Children in the ZIP code of the Iron Triangle — which includes the refinery as well as the neighborhoods surrounding the Peres school — are admitted for emergency care for asthma at triple the rate for California at large. (The institute provided an analysis of the most recent available state statistics at the request of NPR and Floodlight.)
Parceling out responsibility for air pollution is complicated, given Richmond's many highways and railroads, along with the refinery. The regional board that regulates air quality found that Chevron accounts for 63% of all particle pollution in Richmond and two neighboring towns.
These issues rarely get covered, Ramos says. She starts to weep gently when talking about the city's future.
"I think at best we should be outraged, you know?" she says. "Everyone should be concerned about the conditions that our community has to face."
The PR firm running the Standard
While Chevron owns the Standard, San Francisco-based Singer Associates runs it from across the bay. The consulting firm is known for handling PR crises. Founder Sam Singer is no stranger to Richmond; he grew up in Berkeley and briefly worked at the Richmond Independent and a sister paper before moving on.
Singer Associates has written that the news outlet came about after Chevron developed a "fractured relationship with many stakeholders including city government leaders." The site was part of an effort "to provide the company with greater freedom to operate by increasing awareness for the positive role it plays in Richmond," according to Singer's application for an industry award, as cited in a U.S. House Natural Resources Committee staff report.
A man fishes for leopard sharks in the waterways along Point Richmond that are a thoroughfare for petroleum and have been the site of several oil and chemical spills.
Brian L. Frank for NPR
Most Standard articles are written by Singer Associates employee Mike Aldax, a former reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and the Bay City News Service. (Aldax did not return messages seeking comment.) The site also hired two journalists who live in Richmond to write for the site.
"Our team has worked hard to build relationships with the community, which is why people trust us, and turn to us, to cover community stories," Singer wrote in an email for this story.
The pace of reporting ebbs and flows. Some featured videos on the Standard's homepage are several years old. The metabolism of fresh posts stepped up in early March, shortly after NPR and Floodlight first sent a series of queries about the Standard to Chevron and Singer for this story.
Chevron newsrooms begin in South America
In launching the Standard, Chevron followed a path the fossil fuel giant had first forged thousands of miles to the south.
Since 2009, Singer has run The Amazon Post in Ecuador at Chevron's direction. The English-language site emerged as Chevron confronted lengthy multibillion-dollar litigation seeking to hold it liable for the pollution from oil drilling there. (Chevron had acquired Texaco in 2001, which was responsible for the oil extraction.) Chevron's legal battle spread to other nations, including the U.S. and Brazil. The American attorney who led the suits against Chevron for Ecuadorian farmers and Indigenous peoples was a frequent target of the site. He was ultimately disbarred in New York for his actions in the case.
Flames flicker through the thick green trees of the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest — where gas flares, oil wells and refineries darken the landscape and poison the environment — shown in Shushufindi, Ecuador, in 2023. The legacy there of Texaco, which Chevron acquired, has inspired lengthy legal battles in several countries.
Pedro Pardo/AFP via Getty Images
A subsequent Spanish-language site called Juicio Crudo (an allusion to crude oil) focusessquarely on a damning legal judgment against Chevron that a U.S. court later found to be fraudulent. It reprints text directly from Chevron's Spanish-language press releases.
By contrast, El Oriente, a Spanish-language digital outlet launched in 2019, presents itself as a news site aimed at audiences who reside in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Until recently, it noted at the bottom of its page that it is "sponsored by Chevron." Days after NPR and Floodlight started posing questions about Chevron's sites, the affiliation was moved to the top, just beneath the site's name.
The sites link to one another. Chevron says those sites are managed separately, not by Singer.
In at least one instance, the controversies surrounding Chevron in Ecuador inspired fodder for the Standard back in Richmond.
In 2014, Richmond's then-mayor, Gayle McLaughlin, traveled to see Ecuador's environmental degradation at a time when her party was seeking to force Chevron to pay more to the city.
Shortly after she returned home, the Standard's Aldax reported: "The mayor's six-day trip to Ecuador was in support [of] the South American nation in its ongoing battle against Chevron, which it falsely blames for polluting the rain forest."
Aldax wrote that McLaughlin was late in filing $4,499 in expenses for the trip, which had been paid for by the Ecuadorian government. The article embedded a
produced by The Amazon Post.
Gayle McLaughlin, then Richmond's mayor, speaks onstage during a 2014 event in Los Angeles.
Mike Windle/Getty Images
It was a rare instance of the Standard producing anything other than benign community news. She had to pay a $200 fine.
Today, McLaughlin calls her misstep minor. She tells NPR and Floodlight she believes the story was intended as a warning to Chevron's critics that it could embarrass them or just ignore them altogether.
Politicians say this Florida news site lets them buy coverage. Is your state next?
"The Richmond Standard will never, ever print anything that is critical of Chevron," McLaughlin says, "and it will never print anything that upholds the community's victories against Chevron. And we need to spread the word about those victories."
Expanding to Texas
Chevron launched its latest newsroom, called Permian Proud, in the Permian Basin in August 2022.
The site posts stories about West Texas and New Mexico. They are home to the nation's highest-producing oil fields, where Chevron has substantial drilling interests — and where local news has been hard hit. Permian Proud explained its mission this way: "We aim to complement the important work of existing local media by providing hyper-local news you won't find anywhere else."
Unlike California, Texas is a deeply red state with a broader base of support for the oil and gas industry. Even so, Chevron's future there is similarly deeply reliant on the goodwill of residents and regulators.
"Over the past year and a half, Permian Proud has put a spotlight on national spelling bee contestants, the local arts community, nonprofit organizations, community events, high school sports, industry accomplishments, and much more," Chevron spokesperson Catie Matthews wrote in a statement for this story. "Additionally, the platform has amplified coverage of local stories by other news outlets, and provided a digital arm to some of our rural communities and smaller nonprofit organizations who would otherwise not have one."
Permian Proud also promotes Chevron's perspective.
Many of the articles on the site are rewritten press releases. For example, Permian Proud's article "Chevron's Permian Basin operations to tap into more recycled water," is almost identical to Chevron's press release. The original text read, "By using recycled water in our fracking operations, we help preserve fresh water and groundwater in drought-prone areas." Permian Proud swapped "Chevron helps" for "we help."
Among the few listed bylines: Mike Aldax of Singer and The Richmond Standard.
Ramos says locals share news about Chevron by word of mouth because The Richmond Standard is "giving us the opposite of the truth."
Brian L. Frank for NPR
Relying on word of mouth
In the absence of independent local news sources, Richmond residents say they rely on each other for accurate information.
A husband-and-wife team started a small news site last year. A former mayor shares his thoughts about local politics in a newsletter. When school is in session, journalism students at the nearby University of California, Berkeley cover Richmond as part of their studies. A nonprofit group has held listening sessions about plans to extend a hyperlocal site to the area. And sometimes — when the news is big enough — San Francisco TV stations cross the bay to cover it.
But mostly, there's word of mouth. Activist Katt Ramos points to the February 2021 pipeline rupture. As Chevron publicly conceded, a resident spotted the tainted water long before Chevron or any news outlet alerted the community.
"A lot of our news is really from me, gathered by our local kind of independent folks that go around covering things for us," Ramos said. "Because we have to deal with publications like The Richmond Standard that are giving us the opposite of the truth."
*Felicia Alvarez, Maria Fernanda Bernal and Richard Tzul of the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism contributed to this report.
===
bb 6 24
As if dealing with COVID-19, conflicts, and climate change wasn't enough, emerging nations are now suffocating under a colossal $29 trillion in public debt.
According to a new UN report, the debt crisis is so bad that "15 countries are spending more on interest payments than they do on education" and "46 spend more on debt payments than they do on health care."
As the NY Times' Patricia Cohen reports, "Unmanageable debts have been a recurring feature of the modern global economy, but the current wave may well be the worst so far. Overall, government debt worldwide is four times what it was in 2000."
Who is cashing in on poor countries debts? According to the Times: old school development banks and major Western banks, shady private lenders, official creditors like China, "as well as a variety of sometimes secret loan agreements governed by different national regulations."
These lenders rake in extra money with usurious surcharges, too:
Martin Guzmán, a former finance minister of Argentina who also experienced the devastating impact of his native country's debt crisis, was at the Vatican meeting last week. In his view, I.M.F. help is sometimes counterproductive, offering bailout loans, now with high interest rates, that end up increasing a country's already burdensome debt
He has also railed against the extra fees, or surcharges, that the fund imposes on struggling high-risk debtors, siphoning precious funds that could be used to provide health care and rebuild an economy.
The five largest borrowers — Ukraine, Egypt, Argentina, Ecuador and Pakistan — paid $2 billion alone in surcharges last year, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. On average, surcharges ended up raising the cost of borrowing for all affected countries by nearly 50 percent.
Until the global financial system is fundamentally reformed, this cycle of debt and misery for emerging nations will keep spinning.
Previously:
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Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has ruled that Indigenous communities should have much more control over whether to allow extractive projects on their lands. In a decision handed down Friday, judges ruled that Indigenous groups can halt proposed mining and oil drilling projects if they’re found to require “excessive sacrifices to the collective rights of communities and nature.”It’s a blow to President Guillermo Lasso, who has promised to double Ecuador’s oil production, and a major victory for the A’i Cofán communityand other Indigenous groups who’ve suffered the effects of environmental destruction for decades.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-ecuadors-democracy-is-being-suffocated/
A recent poll showed that if Andrés Arauz Galarza were allowed to run in Ecuador's presidential election of 2021, he would win in the first round with 45.9 percent of the vote. The pollsters found that Arauz—who was the minister of knowledge and human talent from 2015 to 2017—wins across "all the social strata and regions of the country, with a slight weakness among the richest voters in the country."
Andrés Arauz entered policymaking and government when Rafael Correa was the president of the country, from 2007 to 2017. A stint at the Central Bank led to a career in the planning department (SENPLADES), before Arauz became a minister in the last two turbulent years of Correa's government. There was not a whiff of corruption or incompetence around Arauz in his decade of service; when Correa left office, Arauz went to Mexico to pursue a PhD at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Far behind Arauz in the polls is Guillermo Lasso Mendoza, the candidate of the right. Lasso, who is a wealthy banker, had run against the current President Lenín Moreno in 2017 but lost. He is the consensus candidate of the right wing, which cannot seem to advance his standing in the polls. He sits frozen at 32 percent.
Those polled said that Arauz was by far the most attractive candidate. But, if the ruling bloc in Ecuador has its way, Arauz will not be sworn in as the next president of the country next year. They will use every means to suffocate democracy in their country.
Correa and Moreno
The government of Rafael Correa, who is now living in Belgium, attempted to move a broadly left agenda while in office from 2007 to 2017. The Citizens' Revolution that Correa led passed a progressive constitution in 2008, which put the principle of good living (buen vivir in Spanish and sumak kawsay in Quechua) at its heart. Government investment to strengthen social and economic rights came alongside a crackdown on corporate (including multinational) corruption. Oil revenue was not parked in foreign banks, but used to invest in education, health care, roads, and other basic infrastructure. From Ecuador's population of 17 million, nearly 2 million people were lifted out of poverty in the Correa years.
Correa's government was anathema to the multinational firms—such as the U.S.-based oil company Chevron—and to the Ecuadorian oligarchy. Chevron's dangerous case for compensation against Ecuador, brought before Correa took office, was nonetheless fiercely resisted by Correa's government; the Dirty Hand (Mano Negra) campaign put enormous international pressure against Chevron. Chevron worked closely with the U.S. embassy in Quito and the U.S. government to undermine Correa and his campaign against the oil giant. Not only did they want him out, but they wanted the political tradition of the left—called Correistas by shorthand—out as well. Moreno, who was once close to Correa, switched sides and became the main instrument for the fragmentation of the Ecuadorian left.
In the election of 2017, Moreno defeated Guillermo Lasso, who is running again in 2021. But, within a short time, Moreno sharply moved rightward. He worked closely with Lasso in the National Assembly to undermine each advance made by the government of Correa. They defunded education and health care, withdrew labor rights and rights to housing, wanted to sell off Ecuador's refinery, and deregulated parts of the financial system. A consequence of these policies has been Ecuador's appalling response, including accusations of deliberate undercounting, to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Attack on the Correistas
Moreno and his right-wing allies needed to inoculate themselves from any criticism. They went on a frontal attack against the Correistas.
The first battleground was to fragment the Correista political organization and to deny the Correistas a political platform. A February 2018 referendum was barreled through the country that allowed the government to destroy the democratic structures of the Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE), the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, the Judiciary Council, the attorney general, the comptroller general, and others. With the assistance of the CNE, Moreno divided and took control of Correa's party, the Alianza Pais.
When the Correistas tried to regroup and form a party, the institutions of the state blocked them. They said that the proposed names were misleading or that the signatures collected were invalid. By 2019, the Correistas used the Fuerza Compromiso Social platform to run for local elections in 2019. This platform was then banned in 2020.
In Brazil, the oligarchy prevented former president Lula from contesting the 2018 election; that process resulted in a new concept, lawfare—using the law as a political instrument. The same sort of lawfare was used in Ecuador to ensnare Correa and to prevent him from running for office. Correa was accused of bribery—with the bizarre notion of "psychic influence" (influjo psíquico) at the root of the case. The eight-year sentence inflicted upon him prevented him from running for office in Ecuador; that he was in Belgium meant that he could not, however, be arrested and imprisoned.
Election of 2021
The Correistas, using their platform of Union for Hope (Unión por la Esperanza), made an alliance with the Movimiento Centro Democrático to be able to run a candidate for the presidential election of 2021. Arauz won the primaries and was nominated as the presidential candidate. The party decided to have two vice-presidential candidates—both Correa and Carlos Rabascall.
The CNE's president Diana Atamaint indicated that the CNE would disqualify Correa from the ballot, and even suggested that Arauz's candidacy is illegal as a consequence of having Correa as his running mate. Matters are at a stalemate, as lawyers scurry about trying to find a solution to this crisis. The CNE has until October 7 to fix the matter. The first round for the election is on February 7, 2021.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.
Pilar Troya is a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. She is an Ecuadorian anthropologist interested in the feminist movement and social public policies, especially concerning gender equality. She served as a member of the board of Ecuador's former Women's National Council (CONAMU), an adviser to the Ministry of National Planning, and an adviser and deputy minister in the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, and Technology.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-ecuadors-democracy-is-being-suffocated/
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820 desmog
https://www.desmog.co.uk/2020/08/12/campaigners-demand-court-shuts-down-ecuador-s-oil-pipelines-after-spill
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420
https://theconversation.com/deaths-and-desperation-mount-in-ecuador-epicenter-of-coronavirus-pandemic-in-latin-america-137015
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Correa
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https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/steven-donziger-chevron/
no lnx
More than a quarter-century ago, Steven Donziger, a young American human rights lawyer, joined the legal effort to force Texaco to clean up the Ecuadoran headwaters of the Amazon rain forest. Between 1972 and 1992, the company dumped toxic waste and spilled billions of gallons of oil-exposed water across 1,700 square miles, an area larger than Rhode Island. In response, a coalition of rural Ecuadorans in the Lago Agrio region sued the US oil giant, and Donziger signed on to help and soon became the lead attorney on the case.
In 2013, after a legal campaign that stretched across two continents, the 30,000 indigenous people and small farmers whom Donziger represented in a class-action lawsuit won a $9.5 billion judgment in Ecuadoran courts against Chevron, which acquired Texaco in 2001. It was one of the largest financial judgments ever against an oil company. It looked like a historic warning to polluters across the Global South. Paul Paz y Miño, the associate director of the environmental group Amazon Watch, described it as “the most important corporate accountability case in history.”
Fast-forward to today, and Donziger is under house arrest in New York City, forced to wear an ankle monitor. The lawyer, now 59, is fighting contempt charges.Meanwhile, his clients in Ecuador have received nothing from Chevron. Without that funding, they have no way to cleanse the poisoned soil or treat what they say is an elevated number of cancer cases.
The mainstream press has largely ignored the legal attacks against Donziger, but Chevron’s counteroffensive could endanger human rights and environmental work around the world. Donziger’s fate, Paz y Miño said, will set a precedent: “Whether it’s Chevron or BP or Shell or any other oil company, if you cannot hold them to account and the lawyer advocating for that case is personally attacked, who else is going to fight those kinds of cases?”
Chevron’s legal onslaught succeeded largely because of a single federal judge in New York named Lewis A. Kaplan. In 2014, Kaplan found Donziger and his Ecuadoran allies guilty of bribery and fraud, which makes it extremely difficult for the plaintiffs to collect their damages in the United States. Then Kaplan asked federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to bring criminal contempt charges against Donziger for refusing to turn over his electronic devices, which contain communications with his clients.When the prosecutors declined, Kaplan appointed private attorneys to prosecute Donziger—a nearly unprecedented step by a federal judge.
Judge Lewis Kaplan took the nearly unprecedented step of appointing private attorneys to prosecute Donziger. (Courtesy of Richard Baker / University of Rochester)
Kaplan’s hostility toward Donziger has been on ample display in his 21st-floor wood-paneled courtroom in downtown New York for nearly a decade. At times, he has said the pollution case in Ecuador was “not a bona fide litigation” and dismissed the Lago Agrio residents as “so-called plaintiffs.”
Martin Garbus, the legendary human rights lawyer who is part of Donziger’s legal team, is 86 years old and has appeared at hundreds of trials, including in the Deep South during the segregation era. He told me that Kaplan’s treatment of Donziger is the worst he has ever witnessed. “In the courtroom, Kaplan displayed a rage, a fury, that he channeled against Steve,” Garbus said. “He tried to humiliate him. You wouldn’t have to be an expert on the law to recognize it. It was brutal. I’ve never seen a guy eviscerated the way Kaplan tried to eviscerate Steve.”
For his part, Donziger said he hopes the Ecuadorans and their lawyers will hold Chevron accountable. He is a tall man—6 feet, 4 inches—and has been pacing restlessly around his Upper West Side apartment, reading law briefs or talking with his contacts in Ecuador by phone. These days, the coronavirus has driven almost everyone into their homes, but Donziger has already spent months “detained in a small apartment not because we did anything wrong,” he said, “but because we were successful and did a lot of things right. Facing the loss of one’s liberty not because one committed a crime but because of something dark and unaccountable in the system is terrifying. It calls into question most everything I believe about our country and my role in it.”
In an open letter to his supporters last August, Donziger wrote, “I never knew when I started working on this case in 1993 that I would face jail for standing up for the rights of my clients, who have been victimized by what is probably the world’s worst oil pollution…. Quite simply, Judge Kaplan and Chevron are working in lockstep to try and destroy me and my clients.”
Alberto Guerra, a former Ecuadoran judge who admitted to lying about his interactions with Donziger, became the target of outrage after he testified in support of Chevron.
The saga began in the 1980s, when Ecuadorans in the rain forest started to protest Texaco’s contamination. The company left Ecuador in 1992, after having dumped crude oil, drilling muds, and an oily, watery mixture known as formation water into unlined waste pits—a procedure that has been outlawed in Texas since 1969. Texaco also released billions of gallons of oil-laced water into the rain forest’s streams and lakes, even though the standard procedure in the United States has long been to inject the potentially toxic compounds safely deep underground.
Five peer-reviewed scientific studies have shown an increased incidence of cancer and other health risks in the area. (Chevron funded its own peer-reviewed study, which claimed to find no such cancer risk.)
About 20 grassroots organizations formed the Amazon Defense Coalition in the mid-1990s, and Donziger, a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, started representing the group in 1993.The Ecuadorans originally sued Texaco in the United States, but after years of delay, a federal judge in New York sent the case to Ecuador in 2001. More than a decade later, Chevron lost. Three levels of Ecuadoran courts up to the Supreme Court ratified the verdict and awarded the plaintiffs $9.5 billion. (Though even if Chevron honored the decision, none of the rain forest residents would receive a check. Instead, the Amazon Defense Coalition would use the money to scour the soil of toxins and build treatment centers for cancer patients.)
RELATED ARTICLE
The Nation
ECUADOR’S BATTLE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AGAINST CHEVRON
James North
Chevron defended itself at every stage of the proceedings in Ecuador, and for years it never challenged the legitimacy of the process. But in 2010 it changed strategies. Chevron launched a countersuit in a New York federal court, alleging that Donziger and his allies had committed bribery and fraud in Ecuador to win the case. The company invoked the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, originally designed to prosecute the Mafia, and in 2011, Kaplan presided over a new trial. Donziger and the Ecuadoran codefendants expected that such serious charges would be tried before a jury, but at the last minute, Chevron dropped its demand for monetary damages.Under RICO law, this meant Donziger and the others lost their right to appear before a jury and Kaplan alone would decide the facts of the case. Charles Nesson, a Harvard law professor, wrote recently in the Harvard Law Record that “Chevron amended its demands to cheat Donziger out of a jury.”
From the beginning of the RICO trial, Kaplan made his pro-business outlook clear. He lauded Chevron as “a company of considerable importance to our economy that employs thousands all over the world, that supplies a group of commodities—gasoline, heating oil, other fuels, and lubricants—on which every one of us depends every single day. I don’t think there is anybody in this courtroom who wants to pull his car into a gas station to fill up and finds that there isn’t any gas there.”
During the case, Chevron claimed that Donziger and his clients had bribed the original trial judge in Ecuador. Chevron’s star witness was Alberto Guerra, a former judge who lost his position on the Ecuadoran bench because of corruption accusations and later, in testimony before an international trade tribunal, admitted to lying about his interactions with Donziger. The oil giant acknowledged paying Guerra and moving him and his family to a secret location in the United States. In all, Donziger estimated that Chevron has spent $2 million on the ex-judge.
Catastrophe: Cofan women stand near a pool of oil. Texaco spilled billions of gallons of contaminated water in Ecuador’s Amazon region. (Dolores Ochoa / AP)
Chevron’s lawyers rehearsed Guerra’s testimony with him 53 times and then put him on the stand in front of Kaplan. In his testimony, the disgraced ex-judge asserted that Donziger and an Ecuadoran lawyer, Pablo Fajardo, had offered him a $500,000 bribe and that Donziger and Fajardo had ghostwritten the final judgment against Chevron. Nicolás Zambrano, the judge who had rendered the decision in Ecuador, denied Guerra’s testimony, but Kaplan accepted Guerra’s account, dismissed Zambrano, and found Donziger and his Ecuadoran colleagues guilty in 2014.
Chevron’s legal offensive is an example of a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or SLAPP, suit. Over the past few decades, corporations have brought an increasing number of SLAPP suits against environmental and human rights groups. The idea is to spend so much money that your underfunded opponents are forced to give up.The oil giant presumably also has a related aim: to prevent the plaintiffs from ever collecting their cleanup money. Kaplan’s verdict in the RICO case means Chevron can refuse to pay them in the United States. Chevron has long since sold its remaining holdings in Ecuador, so now Donziger and the Amazon Defense Front have to chase the corporation to other countries where it still does business. Chevron’s lawyers are already trying to use the New York RICO judgment to discredit legal efforts against the company in Canada and elsewhere.
Kaplan’s persecution of Donziger did not stop after the RICO verdict. Donziger faces criminal contempt charges because he has so far refused to turn over his personal computer and cell phone to Chevron, as Kaplan ordered him to do last March. Donziger said in a press release that he is defending his clients, because his electronic communications would give Chevron’s lawyers “backdoor access to spy on everything we are planning, thinking, and doing.” He said he wants to wait until the US Court of Appeals hears his defense, after which he will promptly hand over his computer and phone if the higher court confirms Kaplan’s directive.
Sean Comey, Chevron’s senior adviser on corporate issues, litigation, and financial communications, declined to comment for this article. As a result, I was unable to ask him a series of questions, including: Is your company still paying Guerra for his cooperation? How much is it continuing to spend on the legal case? Why do attorneys representing Chevron appear at every hearing against Donziger, even ones that don’t involve the oil company? And what is Chevron’s role, if any, in the multiple legal attacks against Donziger?
Show of hands: Protesters in New York City, some with symbolically oil-stained hands, demonstrate against Chevron in 2013. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
Meanwhile, residents in the Amazon rain forest live and work on poisoned land. Donziger cautions that their plight must remain the center of the case. He works closely with Luis Yanza, the elected leader of the Amazon Defense Coalition and a lifelong defender of the environment; in 2008, Yanza won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, an award for frontline activists. Donziger and Yanza have talked and e-mailed regularly for more than 25 years, and Donziger, who is fluent in Spanish, estimated that he has visited Ecuador 250 times to consult with his clients.
Yanza told me that cancer continues to afflict people in the rain forest. “I visited several of our communities just last weekend, and each one had two or three cases of cancer, including a girl,” he said. And there is no adequate treatment facility in the Lago Agrio area, he added. “The closest cancer treatment center is in Quito, which is seven to 12 hours by bus, depending on where you live.”
Luis Yanza, the elected leader of the Amazon Defense Coalition, speaks at a protest against Chevron in 2008. (AP Photo / Paul Sakuma)
He is indignant about the attacks on Donziger. “Steven is totally the opposite of how Chevron portrays him,” Yanza said. “He’s dedicated his life—a great part of his life—to defending people in our poor communities.” Yanza also dismissed the insinuations of critics that Donziger is manipulating the unsophisticated rain forest inhabitants. “This is the mentality of imperialism, saying that we don’t have the capacity to think and to act, to make decisions about our own lives. Steven and others in the United States do provide technical and legal help, but the fundamental decisions are made by us here.”
Donziger’s critics say that he is mainly after his percentage of the judgment, that he’s an ambulance-chasing attorney who found his way to the rain forest. But if that were true, wouldn’t Donziger have given up by now? Surely he would have cut his losses, dusted off his Harvard Law diploma, and found another potential money-making scheme. Instead, he has remained under house arrest for nearly eight months.
Donziger is also fighting to get his law license reinstated. (It was suspended in 2018 without a hearing, based on Kaplan’s findings in the contempt case.) In September and October, he appeared several times at a New York Bar Association hearing in lower Manhattan, before a polite referee named John Horan. The cramped, low-ceilinged hearing room was filled with human rights lawyers and environmentalists who support Donziger—as well as a few conservatively dressed attorneys representing Chevron. A parade of witnesses testified to Donziger’s honesty and integrity, including Rex Weyler, a founder of Greenpeace; Roger Waters of the rock band Pink Floyd; and Simon Taylor, one of the directors of Global Witness, the influential international anti-corruption organization. On February 24, Horan found in Donziger’s favor and recommended that his law license be restored. Horan, a former prosecutor, sharply criticized Chevron’s vendetta, writing, “The extent of [Donziger’s] pursuit by Chevron is so extravagant, and at this point so unnecessary and punitive, [that] while not a factor in my recommendation, [it] is nonetheless background to it.” Horan’s decision must now be reviewed by a New York state court.
Steven Donziger addresses a press conference in Ecuador in 2014. Today he’s under house arrest. (Rodrigo Buendia / AFP via Getty Images)
On November 25, Donziger appeared before Senior US District Judge Loretta Preska, who will preside over his criminal contempt trial, to ask that his confinement be ended and replaced by an $800,000 bail bond, guaranteed by a number of his supporters. His attorney, Andrew Frisch, reminded the court that Donziger has a family and is not likely to abandon it to flee the United States. What’s more, Frisch pointed out, doing so would mean abandoning his clients in Ecuador. “For 25 years,” he noted, “Mr. Donziger has had his skin, his heart, and his soul in this cause, which is bigger than him.”
In the end, Preska turned down the request. “Mr. Donziger has ties to Ecuador, we know, indeed, to high-ranking government officials,” she said. “We know he has traveled to Ecuador on numerous, numerous occasions…. I find that he remains a flight risk, and accordingly, the request to eliminate monitoring and home confinement is denied.”
Donziger’s trial isn’t scheduled to begin until June 15. He is again challenging his home detention, but he could remain confined to his apartment until then. If this effort fails, he will have spent more than 300 days under house arrest.
Donziger described what it’s like to live under these circumstances. “Sleep is difficult because my ankle bracelet actually blinks and talks,” he said. “A voice reminds me to recharge the battery, which allows the state to monitor my every movement.” The bracelet is “like a giant black claw that clings to your lower leg. It’s designed to be a constant reminder of your banishment, to disorient you psychologically. Of course,” he added, “Chevron and Judge Kaplan want me to be consumed with my survival—rather than helping the indigenous people of Ecuador collect their judgment.”
James North has reported from Africa, Latin America, and Asia for four decades. He lives in New York City.
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no lnx
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/ecuadors-battle-environmental-justice-against-chevron/
The Nation
ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISMFOSSIL FUELSFEATUREJUNE 22-29, 2015 ISSUE
Ecuador’s Battle for Environmental Justice Against Chevron
For more than two decades, impoverished indigenous people have been seeking restitution from the oil giant for polluting their region.
By James North JUNE 2,2015
Quito—Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s popular president, does not mince words when he talks about the Chevron Corporation. In an interview with The Nation here recently, Correa accused the oil giant—the third-largest company in the United States, as measured by gross revenue—of “deliberately polluting” the Amazon rain forest in eastern Ecuador, of “shamelessly lying” to evade its legal responsibility to clean up, and of waging a ferocious international campaign “to destroy the reputation of our justice system and government.” In a wide-ranging, hourlong interview in the centuries-old presidential palace, Correa was intense and passionate as he spoke about how Texaco—which was taken over by Chevron in 2001—had dumped toxic waste into nearly 1,000 pits and spilled billions of gallons of oil-exposed water into a 1,700-square-mile area between 1972 and 1992. Correa said that Texaco could have chosen not to pollute. “Back then, better techniques [of waste disposal] already existed,” he said. “The techniques they used here were against the law in their own country. They weren’t interested in the human beings who lived in the Amazon region. To me, it is a question of racism.”
For more on Rafael Correa, see James North at TheNation.com.
Correa’s outspoken comments are just one of the latest developments in a massive international legal case that has pitted 30,000 poor Ecuadorans who live in the rain forest against a corporation that reported $19.2 billion in profits last year—more than half of Ecuador’s entire government budget. The battle has already lasted 22 years, spanned several countries on three continents, and shows no signs of ending anytime soon.
The American public is largely uninformed about this epic struggle, even though it’s as important as the dispute over the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The mainstream US media, when it hasn’t ignored the case, has often taken Chevron’s side, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) endorsing the company’s view that an alliance of Ecuadoran extortionists and crooked US lawyers is using the corrupt Ecuadoran court system to shake down an innocent corporation.
On closer inspection, the truth is totally different. If the plaintiffs finally win in the end, the rain-forest inhabitants will not just have their habitat start to be cleansed of the oil muck that oozes into their water supply, or enjoy improved health facilities to treat what they argue are elevated levels of cancer and other diseases. They will also have proved the success of an innovative legal strategy that recruits financial help in the rich developed world to provide at least a fighting chance against a corporate colossus like Chevron, which has already spent, by some estimates, $2 billion in its massive legal and propaganda campaign. But if Chevron prevails, it will be one more depressing proof that multinational corporations can defy national and international law and pollute with impunity.
Here, as briefly as possible, is what has happened so far:Texaco left Ecuador in 1992, having disposed of its wastes by methods that in some cases would have been illegal, and in others unethical, in the United States. The company dumped a combination of drilling muds, “formation water,” and actual crude oil into unlined waste pits—a procedure that Texas outlawed back in 1969. It released billions of gallons of oil-laced “produced” waters straight into the streams and lakes, even though standard procedure in the United States was to “reinject” the potentially toxic compounds safely deep underground. In 1995, Texaco agreed to “remediate” part of the mess, which it later said cost $40 million. In 1998, Ecuador’s government certified that the purported cleanup had been successfully completed, thus relinquishing its right to bring further legal action.
But popular movements in the rain forest that had already started organizing against Texaco’s pollution were outraged, charging that their government had sold them out. They brought their own lawsuit against Texaco in a New York federal court in 1993. Eventually, the plaintiffs would represent some 30,000 people, known as the afectados (affected ones) in Spanish.
In 2001, Chevron took over Texaco.The oil giant’s lawyers were already fighting to dismiss the case in the United States and move it to Ecuador. That same year, federal judge Jed Rakoff finally agreed, ruling that the case “had everything to do with Ecuador and nothing to do with the United States.” So, in 2003, the legal battle reopened in the eastern oil-frontier town of Lago Agrio. The Ecuadorans would soon be led by Pablo Fajardo, a young lawyer who had grown up in the region and lived through the contamination firsthand.
In 2007, Chevron, probably sensing that the case was going against it, sold all of its assets in Ecuador—which now meant that even if the plaintiffs won a judgment, they would struggle to collect; they would be forced to bring lengthy and costly legal action in other countries where the company still had operations. Finally, in 2011, the local court found in favor of the rain-forest residents. The original judgment was for $19 billion. Chevron appealed to higher courts, and the case ended up in Ecuador’s National Court of Justice, which in 2013 reduced the judgment to $9.5 billion. The amount may sound large, until you consider that another major oil corporation, BP, has already spent $27 billion to clean up its 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and could face an additional US fine of nearly $14 billion.
By then, Chevron’s intransigence was drawing some unwanted attention in the financial world. A respected oil analyst, Fadel Gheit of Oppenheimer & Co., said in 2013 that the litigation was damaging the corporation’s stock price and encouraged it to settle. New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who is responsible for some $540 million of Chevron stock in a state pension fund, had also pointedly suggested in 2011 that Chevron come to an agreement.
Instead, Chevron launched a publicity counterattack. The oil giant’s home page includes a prominent banner linking to its views on the case.It ran large ads in print, on television, and online—not to encourage readers to buy its products, but to boast in general terms about its purported social and environmental conscience.
Other tactics in Chevron’s onslaught were vicious, and historically unprecedented in their scope and intensity. In 2011, the corporation came back to a federal district courtroom in New York, this time before Judge Lewis Kaplan, and counter-charged a group of Ecuador’s lawyers and plaintiffs under the notorious RICO Actwith “racketeering” and “fraud.” The corporation’s main target was Steven Donziger, an American attorney who had been part of the Ecuadoran legal team almost from the start.
Here is where the Chevron/Ecuador legal saga becomes truly bizarre. After a three-year trial without a jury, a US judge, in a US courtroom, somehow found the predominantly Ecuadoran defendants guilty of fraud in the Ecuadoran courts, and then issued a legal injunction that would almost certainly prevent them from collecting on the judgment they’d won in Ecuador anywhere else in the world. Judge Kaplan did concede that “there is pollution” in Ecuador’s rain forest, and that “On that assumption, Texaco and perhaps even Chevron—although it never drilled for oil in Ecuador—might bear some responsibility.” But he insisted that his chief concern was the fraud that he decided had taken place in an Ecuadoran courtroom more than 3,000 miles away.
It’s little wonder that legal scholars have been scratching their heads over Kaplan’s verdict. The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which had already reversed one of Kaplan’s earlier rulings in the Ecuador case, heard arguments from Donziger and his codefendants on April 20 of this year. Meanwhile, the Ecuadoran legal team remains undeterred: The plaintiffs are already taking action to collect their judgment in other countries. Canada, where Chevron has an estimated $15 billion in assets, is their first target, and a leading Canadian trial attorney is already fighting their case there.
Chevron’s ferocious counteroffensive didn’t stop in Judge Kaplan’s courtroom. Even though Ecuador’s government is not a party to the lawsuit, President Correa denounced, in our interview, what he called Chevron’s “multimillion-dollar publicity campaign” against his country and its judicial system. He also criticized Chevron for bringing a case against his government at the Permanent Court of International Arbitration in The Hague,where the corporation alleged that its rights under the Bilateral Investment Treaty between the United States and Ecuador had been violated. Chevron’s demands are brazen: It’s asking the Hague tribunal to either order the government of Ecuador to quash the lawsuit brought on behalf of the 30,000 rain-forest residents, or to financially compensate the company for any verdict against it.
Correa has visited the polluted Amazon region several times and criticized what he’s witnessed there. Chevron’s supporters contend that his comments reveal bias—and imply an interference in the judicial process. Correa was indignant at this assertion. “It is a monstrous lie,” he said. “Of course I spoke out about our citizens in the affected zone; they have all our sympathy. But it is an independent judicial system. When President Obama said that BP had to take responsibility for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, that did not mean he was interfering in court cases.” Correa concluded, with feeling: “If they can show that the president interfered in this case, I will resign the same day.”
Chevron doesn’t deny that there is substantial pollution in eastern Ecuador. But it blames Petroecuador, the state-owned oil company, which took over some operations after Texaco left in 1992. President Correa counters Chevron’s assertion by arguing that some of the most polluted waste pits are right alongside wells that have not pumped any oil since Texaco departed. “Just ask the people in the community: Who contaminated? I invite the readers of your magazine—the entire world—to come to Ecuador and put your hands in those waste pits. Your hands will come out black with oil.”
* * *
I had, in fact, already visited the polluted rainforest zone three years earlier. My guide back then was Donald Moncayo, a serious, even somber man, now in his 40s, who belongs to the Amazon Defense Coalition, a popular organization that represents the 30,000 rain-forest afectados. Over the years, he had led several hundred of what he calls “toxi-tours,” but he hasn’t gotten tired, or lost his indignation at Texaco for poisoning his home area. He seemed to know many of the waste pits by name; he said there were 953.
Our two-day tour started in Lago Agrio, the raw, ramshackle oil town 120 miles east of Quito that Texaco founded after it struck oil in the 1960s. Lago Agrio is a shabby place, with no sign that the oil boom had much local benefit. The courtroom in which Chevron first lost the historic decision is on the third floor of an unprepossessing building trimmed in yellow paint.
Here are the tools of Moncayo’s trade as a toxi-tour guide: a machete to cut through the forest underbrush; a spade for digging up the shallower waste pits; a coring device for taking soil samples at other dumps, where the waste is more deeply covered up; and rubber gloves for when he does unearth the oozing poison.
We set off into the rain forest. Oil pipelines of various sizes run alongside the roads; in one spot, you can count dozens of them, like strands of spaghetti. Moncayo uses the tour to rebut, point by point, Chevron’s main claims, such as blaming Petroecuador for the pollution. He started at Aguarico 2, a well that has been closed for years and that Petroecuador never operated. The oily residue is still floating on the surface. Then he marched down a steep slope to a stream, where you could see and smell the oil as well.
Chevron says that during the mid-1990s, Texaco “remediated”—cleaned up—some of the waste pits where it did acknowledge responsibility for the pollution. Moncayo went to Pozo Lago 2, which is near the modest wood-frame house where he lives with his wife and baby daughter. He pulled out his core sampler and set to work. After only a meter and a half, he struck some viscosity; before two meters, he hit heavy oil soak. “Texaco said they cleaned up here,” he said. “All they really did was dump some soil over the mess.” Less than 50 yards away, people were washing in a stream. (An irony is that the word in Spanish for the waste pits—piscinas—actually means “swimming pools.”)
Chevron’s supporters insinuate that the local people are the pawns of ambulance-chasing lawyers in the United States. Halfway through the tour, we crossed La Victoria River; people were doing their laundry as children splashed in the water. Moncayo explained that the fight against Texaco started there, back in 1986—not in the offices of US attorneys. He said that local people carried out a paro—a work stoppage and road blockade—to protest the pollution, then formed the grassroots organizations that launched the long campaign for environmental justice.
During the two days of the toxi-tour, Moncayo regularly asked by name about cancer sufferers all over the area. The 30,000 afectados cite five peer-reviewed scientific studies that show an increased incidence of cancer and other health risks in the area; one article in the International Journal of Epidemiology reported on the “statistically significant higher rates of cancer found in people living in oil-producing areas compared to people living in similar regions of the Ecuadorian Amazon unaffected by oil operations.” (Chevron funded its own peer-reviewed study, which claimed to find no such increased cancer risk.) As Moncayo pointed out, “Our local hospital is not capable of diagnosing cancer properly, much less treating it. So we really don’t know how many cases there have been.” Some cancer patients have to travel all the way to Quito, or even farther, for treatment.
Moncayo emphasized that the legal case is not about winning cash payments. “None of us is going to get a check,” he said. “The damages will be used for environmental repair, not individual indemnifications. We have discussed this all in our Assembly of Affected People. The money will be used to genuinely clean up the piscinas and to set up a proper hospital to treat our cancer patients.”
The final stop on the toxi-tour was the Sacha 41 oil well, which Moncayo said had been truly fixed. You see a deep excavation, from which tons of earth had evidently been removed and scoured, rather than waste covered up by spreading a few feet of soil over it. “Only 28 of the 953 pits have been remediated like this,” Moncayo told me. “This is what must happen all over our region.”
* * *
Burt Neuborne, 74, is a nationally respected human-rights attorney who is also a professor at the New York University Law School. He’s appealing on behalf of Hugo Gerardo Camacho Naranjo and Javier Piaguaje Payaguaje, two of the Ecuadoran defendants who got snared in Chevron’s “racketeering” case against Steven Donziger in Judge Kaplan’s New York courtroom. Neuborne declines to comment publicly while the Chevron/Ecuador case is pending before the federal appeals court in Lower Manhattan, where he appeared on April 20 on behalf of his clients. But his vigorous, closely reasoned, and biting arguments are publicly available in the two appellate briefs he has filed. He apparently finds it hard to hide his astonishment at Judge Kaplan’s verdict.
Neuborne notes that Kaplan’s decision included a sweeping indictment of Ecuador’s entire judicial system, but he reminds the appeals court that it was actually Chevron that argued hard and successfully back in the early 2000s to transfer the case to Ecuador. Neuborne writes that “scarcely a decade ago,” Chevron fought “to send the case to Ecuador by swearing that its courts were fully capable of resolving this dispute justly.” He argues that Chevron should not be permitted to get away with shopping around for a more sympathetic venue. In passing, he also notes that Chevron has not produced “an iota of evidence” suggesting that President Correa has interfered in the case.
Neuborne reserves some of his most compelling language for Chevron’s star witness, a disgraced former judge in Ecuador named Alberto Guerra, who testified in Kaplan’s New York courtroom that Donziger and Fajardo had agreed to pay a $500,000 bribe to let them ghost-write the Ecuadoran trial judge’s final opinion. Judge Kaplan accepted Guerra’s testimony as convincing.
Neuborne is scathing in response. He notes that Chevron admitted in court that it had given Guerra cash and benefits that added up to $2 million, including relocating his family to the United States. Neuborne’s appeal argues: “The uncorroborated word of Alberto Guerra, a conceded liar and cheat who was paid at least $2 million by Chevron for his intensely rehearsed testimony (Guerra met with Chevron’s lawyers at least 53 times to prepare his testimony), cannot possibly be deemed clear and convincing evidence of judicial bribery…. If such thin, uncorroborated testimony by a conceded liar and crook justifies a finding of judicial bribery, no verdict (or judge) is safe from corrupt collateral attack.”
Neuborne observes that Judge Kaplan was forced to acknowledge that pollution had taken place in the Ecuadoran rain forest, even though he ignored the extent of the environmental poisoning. His brief asserts that “the District Court’s preoccupation with Mr. Donziger’s alleged wrongdoing in the Ecuadorian trial court cannot erase the independent legal rights of thousands of innocent inhabitants of the environmentally ravaged areas….”
* * *
To hear Chevron’s side of the story, I offered to visit the oil giant’s world headquarters, a leafy 92-acre campus in the San Francisco Bay Area.The corporation declined my request, but Morgan Crinklaw, whose job title is “manager, issues management communications,” did answer my questions by e-mail. In response to Correa’s claim that Chevron is waging a “multimillion-dollar publicity campaign” against Ecuador and its judicial system, Crinklaw said: “If President Correa has evidence to support his claims, he has yet to present it….” And in response to the claim that Texaco “deliberately polluted” the rain forest, Crinklaw answered: “President Correa’s rhetoric is nothing more than an effort to evade his government’s own responsibility for addressing the environmental, social and economic needs of the people of the Amazon.” I asked him how much Chevron had paid ex-judge Guerra; if the company was still paying him; and whether he could put me in touch with Guerra. Crinklaw’s complete response: “In his sworn declaration to the U.S. court, Judge Guerra testified under oath that he was not being compensated for his testimony.” Crinklaw didn’t answer my query as to why Chevron had sold all its assets in Ecuador.
Steven Donziger, the American lawyer who is the main target of Chevron’s counterattack, lives on New York’s Upper West Side. In person, he is tall and intense, but also friendly and open. He said that his ongoing status as a defendant in the racketeering case meant that he would prefer to speak on the record by e-mail.
Donziger commenced by pointing out: “Since the legal case began 22 years ago, we estimate that Chevron has spent at least $2 billion to pay at least 60 law firms, 2,000 lawyers, 200 private investigators, dozens of lobbyists and at least eight different public-relations firms. Most of that amount has been spent in the past four years as part of an unprecedented retaliation campaign designed by Chevron management to cover up the company’s misconduct from its own shareholders, and to silence anybody who helped to hold the company accountable for its wrongdoing and fraud in Ecuador.”
(I asked Chevron spokesman Crinklaw, “How much does Chevron estimate that it has spent so far on this legal case? How many attorneys has Chevron used?” His answer: “We have not disclosed the resources that we have dedicated to defending ourselves in this case. The amount of resources we have expended is commensurate with the level of fraud perpetrated against the company.”)
Donziger contrasts Chevron’s bitter resistance with the actions of BP after its 2010 disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. “It is instructive to compare Chevron’s model of perpetual litigation in the Ecuador matter with BP’s response,” he wrote. “In the immediate aftermath of that spill, BP created a $20 billion fund to compensate its victims without so much as a trial.”
The central mystery in this epic battle, noted by many who have followed the case over more than two decades, is simply this: Why didn’t Chevron cut its losses and settle long ago, avoiding the expenses and the damaging publicity of the endless intercontinental litigation? Donziger argues that the case is about more than just Ecuador’s contaminated rain forest. He believes that a victory for the rain-forest plaintiffs would set an important precedent: It would prove the success of a business model that can inspire other communities around the world to confront Chevron and other multinational corporations with some chance of success.
Donziger uses the expression “monetize hope” to describe this new business model. He explains that the affected Ecuadoran communities could never have financed legal action on their own—“not even the filing fee for the original lawsuit.” So he and others found investors around the world: American law firms, hedge funds, and other backers. “When there is a recovery on the judgment,” he explained, “many of these individuals and entities will receive their investment back plus a modest percentage of the overall recovery. This is just like thousands of other contingency-fee cases filed every year in the United States and around the world.
“What is unusual about this one,” he continued, “is that it involves indigenous groups in Ecuador. These folks usually don’t figure out how to access funds and lawyers to carry on year after year and ultimately win against a big oil company and its army of sophisticated lawyers, lobbyists, political consultants, and public-relations propagandists.”
Donziger emphasized that the fight against Chevron concerns more than just money: “Chevron is trying to kill off the idea that impoverished indigenous groups and lawyers can pool their talents and resources like we have to take on Big Oil and be successful.”
* * *
On April 20, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals in Lower Manhattan heard oral arguments in Chevron Corporation v. Steven Donziger, et al. Chevron was represented by a phalanx of corporate lawyers headed by Theodore Olson, solicitor general of the United States in the George W. Bush administration. Olson continued the attack against Rafael Correa and Ecuador’s entire legal system, asserting that “the president of Ecuador has laid his hands on this case.” As Donziger looked on in the visitors’ gallery, attorneys for him and the Ecuadoran rain-forest plaintiffs vigorously countered these arguments; Neuborne charged that the decision in Judge Kaplan’s lower court “stands on sand.”
Later, Donziger met the press outside the courtroom. “I’m as strong as I’ve ever been,” he said. “I represent the people of Ecuador, who will continue to fight to get this valid judgment enforced, to force Chevron to comply with the law. This case is not about Steven Donziger; it’s about the people of Ecuador. The people of Ecuador will continue to fight with all the tools at their disposal. This battle will continue.”
James North has reported from Africa, Latin America, and Asia for four decades. He lives in New York City.
==
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/16448/chevrons-slapp-suit-against-ecuadorians-corporate-intimidation/
no lnx many
Chevron’s SLAPP suit against Ecuadorians: corporate intimidation
by Rex Weyler
CO-FOUNDER
11 May 2018 |
These days, when powerful corporations get caught breaking the law, polluting the Earth, violating human rights, or all of those crimes simultaneously, they don’t pay the fine and make amends, like normal citizens. They attack.
Corporate lawyers spend millions to assault victims with SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). The most recent SLAPP strategy in the US, popularized by attack-dog New York law firm Gibson Dunn, employs US “racketeering” (RICO) laws against environmental groups, victims of pollution, and their lawyers.
The purpose of a SLAPP lawsuit is not necessarily to win in court, but rather to intimidate, harass, demonize, and bankrupt the weaker opponent. “The powerful use their abundance of resources to enact revenge,” explains the American Civil Liberties Union. Many jurisdictions now ban SLAPP suits, but corporations still shop around for lax jurisdictions and sympathetic judges.
In 2013, for example, when Greenpeace Canada exposed Resolute Forest Products’ destructive logging in Québec, Resolute filed a retaliatory $7-million lawsuit against Greenpeace Canada and two staff members in Ontario, which did not yet have anti-SLAPP laws. Later, Resolute used US courts to attack Greenpeace USA and Greenpeace International under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, created in 1970 to prosecute organized crime syndicates. “This lawsuit,” said Greenpeace US director Annie Leonard, “is an attempt to silence, vilify, and criminalize activism.” As with most of these intimidation lawsuits, the RICO case in the US was thrown out of court, but Resolute promptly filed an amended suit.
In perhaps the most vindictive SLAPP in history, Chevron — one of the world’s largest corporations, with over $260-billion in assets — found a sympathetic New York judge to accept a RICO lawsuit against the victims of its vast oil pollution in Ecuador’s Amazon basin.
Legal thuggery
Chevron’s Amazon troubles began in 2000 when it purchased Texaco, inheriting liability for the company’s oil field pollution in Ecuador, known as the Amazon Chernobyl. Texaco/Chevron had dumped some 16 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into rivers and abandoned over 900 carcinogenic waste pits. The Indigenous rainforest inhabitants claim they were left with destroyed land, polluted water, and an epidemic of cancer and birth defects.
Abandoned toxic oil dump, Ecuador. Courtesy of Amazon Watch Abandoned toxic oil dump, Ecuador. Courtesy of Amazon Watch]
In 1993, the victims sued for damages in the US. Chevron fought for nine years to shift the case to Ecuador, where they may have expected to influence the courts. Chevron fully accepted jurisdiction in Ecuador, where the case began in 2003. Six years later, in light of overwhelming scientific evidence, Chevron realized that they would likely lose. In 2009 the oil company hired the notorious “rescue squad” law firm of Gibson Dunn, found a corporate-friendly Judge, Lewis A. Kaplan in New York, and began a series of SLAPP attacks on the victims, on their lawyers, and on the Ecuadorian judicial system. Over the next five years, Kaplan allowed virtually any Chevron motion, denied defendant motions, mocked the victims and their lawyers, and allowed a RICO racketeering case against two Ecuadoreans — Secoya Indigenous leader Javier Piaguaje and farmer Hugo Camacho — and their American lawyer, Steven Donziger.
Meanwhile, in Ecuador, the Indigenous and peasant villagers won a $9.5 billion compensation judgment, confirmed by appellate courts and by Ecuador’s Supreme Court (Court of Cessation). In response, Chevron sold its assets in Ecuador, fled the country, refused to pay, and threatened the victims with a “lifetime of litigation.”
The company has since retained over 60 law firms, 2,000 lawyers, paralegals, six public relations firms, squads of private investigators, and at least one bribed witness, who later admitted to lying. Lawyers for the victims estimate Chevron has spent over $2 billion to avoid payment of the court judgement, the largest collection of SLAPP suits in history.
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher (Gibson Dunn) promotes itself as a corporate “rescue squad” specializing in “shielding clients” from “billions in liability”. They boast of getting George W. Bush installed as US president by stopping a Florida vote recount, and shielding Lehman Brothers from liabilities in the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.
Randy Mastro co-chairs the firm’s litigation department; infamous for a string of court censures for fabricating evidence, lying and other criminal misconduct. In 2015, the High Court of England sanctioned Gibson Dunn for fabricating evidence to frame the political rival of the firm’s client, the President of Djibouti, Africa.
In 2005, a federal court in California sanctioned Gibson Dunn for tampering with a witness, “obstruction, gamesmanship and flagrant disregard” of Court orders. In 2007, the Montana Supreme Court assessed a $9.9 million fine against Gibson Dunn for “blatantly and maliciously trying to intimidate” its adversary, using the judicial system for “legal thuggery”. The following year, a New York federal judge sanctioned the firm for “unacceptable shenanigans”, including hiding documents and outright lies. A California federal judge concluded that the firm’s misconduct is “a product of a culture which permeates” Gibson Dunn.
As Chevron faced losing the pollution case in Ecuador, CEO John Watson and General Counsel R. Hewitt Pate turned to Gibson Dunn’s “rescue squad” for help.The lawyers, led by Mastro, soon revealed their abusive tactics. An Oregon federal judge sanctioned the Gibson Dunn lawyers for using the discovery process — intended to provide information to opposing counsel — to harass a small legal non-profit assisting the Ecuadorian victims. In Ecuador, appellate judges rebuked Chevron’s new lawyers for threatening trial Judge Nicolas Zambrano with criminal charges and prison unless he dismissed the case.
However, the Ecuadorian decision stood, Chevron owed its victims $9.5 billion, and Randy Mastro went to work harassing the victims, their lawyers, and the Ecuadorian justice system before a gleefully encouraging Judge Kaplan in New York.
Judge as prosecutor
Chevron and Gibson Dunn knew precisely who Judge Kaplan was, when they launched their series of SLAPP suits through his court.
In 2004, Kaplan allowed the NY Police Department to arrest any “recognizable group” of 50 or more cyclists riding together, as a way of stopping bicycle protests, specifically by the environmental group Critical Mass. Although the First Amendment of the US Constitution protects “freedom of assembly”, Kaplan argued that “traffic flow” held precedent over the right of citizens to assemble in peaceful protest. When Lehman Brothers employees sued Lehmans for failing to protect their pension plan, violating the Employee Retirement Security Act, Kaplan simply dismissed the case.
At The Robing Room, a judicial review forum, one commenter warned, “if you are representing big business interests, Judge Kaplan will find a way to rule in your favor. If you going up against big business interests, you are out of luck.” Others describe Kaplan as “working for business interests” and “part of the old-boy network.”
“We knew that Gibson Dunn and Chevron had selected Judge Kaplan as an ally,” said Steven Donziger, lawyer for the original Ecuadorian plaintiffs, Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía (FDA).“A normal judge’s responsibility is to insure impartiality, decorum, and legal integrity. In the RICO SLAPP suit, Kaplan served more as a member of the prosecution team. He mocked defendants, laughed at defense motions, praised Chevron, granted their every wish, and insulted the entire Ecuadorian justice system.”
Marathon of preliminaries
The highly unusual three year discovery and deposition process, prior to the actual trial, revealed a succession of nightmarish legal irregularities:
No media confidentiality: The SLAPP began in April 2010, when Kaplan forced filmmaker, Joseph Berlinger to turn over 600 hours of outtakes from his acclaimed 2009 documentary, Crude: The Real Price of Oil. Kaplan ridiculed the journalist’s request to protect confidential sources. “If this is your best argument,” jeered Kaplan, “you’re in a lot of trouble.” A media coalition — including The New York Times, NBC, and HBO — filed a First Amendment objection with the court, and Robert Redford, writing in the Huffington Post, called the decision a “shocking” betrayal of US First Amendment rights.
Insulting a foreign Court: Kaplan and Chevron lawyer Mastro used the Berlinger hearings to insult the courts in Ecuador, where Chevron had insisted the trial be held. Mastro called the Ecuador courts “a sham” that would cause “any American to shudder at … what passes for a judicial system.” Kaplan openly laughed when asked to delay until an Ecuadorian court could provide input. “If this were the High Court in London,” Kaplan taunted, “you can be sure I’d wait.” Despite Mastro and Kaplan’s disdain here, the Ecuadorian justice system appears as impartial and honourable as any such system in any modern nation.
Insulting the defendants: Throughout the proceedings and in written memoranda, Kaplan referred to the 30,000 class-action victims in Ecuador as “so-called plaintiffs”, suggesting that their “standing in this matter is debatable to say the least.” He referred to their case in Ecuador as “the game” and “not a bona fide litigation.” When Donziger’s attorney made a routine request for time to review thousands of documents, Kaplan scoffed, “Don’t tell me about how long Mr. Donziger needs. I know the game here.”
No attorney-client confidentiality: Kaplan invoked a minor technicality to claim that Donziger, the victims’ US lawyer, had “waived” all attorney-client privilege, and insisted he turn over to Chevron lawyers 17-years of confidential communications with his clients, including, emails, notes, and his entire hard drive. Defense attorneys called this “the most sweeping forced production of privileged documents in history.”
Monster deposition:Federal rules typically limit individual depositions to one day, possibly two days in extraordinary cases. Once Chevron had all of Donziger’s confidential client files, they forced him, with Kaplan’s approval, to endure an unorthodox 18 days of discovery deposition, during which 20 or more Chevron/Gibson Dunn lawyers pelted him with petty and personal questions. According to Donziger’s RICO case rebuttal, Chevron’s lead PR consultant, revealed in 2009: “Our L-T [long-term] strategy is to demonize Donziger.”
Special Master: Judge Kaplan appointed his former law partner, Max Gitter, as “Special Master” or private judge to rule over the protracted deposition, paid entirely by Chevron. According to the Amazon Defense Coalition, Kaplan approved secret payments to Gitter, totaling “likely well over $1 million.” Like Kaplan, Gitter approved Chevron requests and dismissed defense requests. He revealed his conspiratorial relationship with Mastro and Chevron when he made a ruling based on the contents of a future Chevron document that had not yet been filed with the court. Upon realizing his error, he muttered, “Mr. Mastro, am I correct about that?” Mastro responded, “absolutely correct.”
Judge proposes Chevron strategy:During the discovery hearings, Judge Kaplan exclaimed: “Do the phrases Hobbs Act, extortion, RICO, have any bearing here?” signaling to Chevron lawyers that they should file a racketeering complaint. Shortly thereafter, on February 1, 2011, Chevron filed their RICO complaint against Donziger, Piaguaje, and Camacho, claiming that the 10-year case before three levels of Ecuadorian courts amounted to criminal extortion. Chevron asked for billions of dollars in damages, from Donziger, a sole practitioner, and two impoverished villagers, which required a jury trial. Kaplan accepted the claim and assigned the case to himself.
International powers:After the RICO filing, Judge Kaplan presumed to issue a universal injunction, allegedly prohibiting any court in any nation from enforcing the environmental judgment against Chevron, two days before the Ecuadorian court announced that judgment. In September, 2011, the US Court of Appeals vacated the injunction, chastizing Kaplan for inflicting damage on international comity, the principle among modern nations to show respect for each other’s legal systems.
Implacable hostility: By this time, Donziger and the Ecuadorian victims were almost broke, which Donziger claims, “was the whole point of Mastro’s and Chevron’s strategy.” Nevertheless, renowned defense attorney, John Keker, a former US marine, highly respected for legal integrity, offered to help the beleaguered defendants. “This case has degenerated into a Dickensian farce,” Keker said. “Encouraged by this Court’s implacable hostility toward Donziger, Chevron will file any motion, however meritless, in the hope that the Court will use it to hurt Donziger.”
Fishing expeditions:Chevron served Donziger, Piaguaje, and Camacho, with hundreds of new document requests and over a thousand “requests for admission,” disputed claims that Chevron could argue were “admitted” if the defendants could not respond. The impoverished Ecuadorian peasants kept almost no documents and rarely engaged in written communication. The requests imposed a massive new expense for the defendants.Kaplan also allowed Chevron to serve subpoenas on Amazon Watch, Google, Microsoft, and others, seeking email accounts to track the activities of some 100 lawyers, students, journalists, and academics that supported the Ecuadorian’s cause. “These were fishing expeditions,” Donziger explained, “that violated everyone’s right to privacy.”
Scorched Earth:By May 2013, before the actual trial had even begun, the defendants were thoroughly destitute, and their defense attorneys — Keker and Craig Smyser, who had been deferring payment — could no longer continue. Both attorneys expressed outrage at Kaplan’s refusal to grant common sense measures to streamline the burdensome process. “Through scorched-earth litigation, executed by its army of hundreds of lawyers,” said Keker, “Chevron is using its limitless resources to crush defendants and win this case through might rather than merit.”Smyser, called the lawsuit a “legal blitzkrieg” that Kaplan not only tolerated but “encouraged”.
After four years of gruelling discovery depositions and document demands by Chevron — the exhausted defendants’ best hope for justice rested on the trial jury. A jury would remove some decision-making power from Kaplan, and would hear overwhelming evidence of Chevron pollution and legal misdeeds. However, Kaplan had new surprises in store.
[pix Ecuadorians and P. Bellegarde, court, 2018 © Johanna LunaHugo Camacho, Amazon Defense Coalition (second from left) was one of the villagers named in the US RICO case. Here, he joins Domingo Paes, Achuar; Canadian Assembly of First Nations Grand Chief Perry Bellegarde, Janeth Cuji, Kichwa; and Rafael Pandam, President of the Indigenous Amazonian Parliament of Ecuador, in a Canadian court]
The RICO Trial
No jury:On the eve of the trial, Chevron decided, with Kaplan’s approval, to drop their financial damages claim, which meant that Kaplan could drop the jury and decide the outcome himself. “Chevron,” said Donziger, “apparently panicked at the notion of trying to sell their fraud and extortion claims to anyone other than Kaplan.” The defense demanded a jury trial, based on their right to a jury in a RICO case, a long-standing legal principle in cases that carry criminal implications. Kaplan refused. He would decide himself about the defendants’ guilt or innocence.
No pollution talk: Even though Kaplan had presumed the authority to “set aside” an Ecuadorian environmental judgment with a 10-year, 220,000-page evidentiary record of Chevron’s environmental crimes, and to characterize that entire proceeding as an act of “extortion,” the corporate-friendly judge barred the defense from even mentioning anything “related to the existence of pollution in Ecuador.” The pollution, he said, was “not relevant.”
No dirty-tricks talk:Furthermore, Kaplan ruled that the defense could not mention evidence of Chevron’s campaign or Gibson Dunn’s campaign of “dirty tricks” operations, past courtroom crimes, lies, and fabricated evidence. Chevron, of course, was allowed to discuss any alleged history of the defendants, dredged up from four years of ruthless depositions, spies, and private investigators.
Tsunami of paper: On the first day of trial, Chevron placed over 2,500 exhibits into evidence en masse, nearly 10,000 separate assertions, to which the impoverished defense was given less than a week to respond. If they failed, Kaplan could deem the defendants’ objection “waived.”
Anonymous witnesses: Kaplan accepted testimony from Chevron witnesses whose identity they kept hidden from the defense, preventing the normal investigation necessary for effective cross-examination. The defense expressed outrage at this violation of “basic legal principles,” which they said would “be right at home in the Spanish Inquisition.”
Editing the evidence: At this point, the defense caught Randy Mastro presenting edited video, in which he had cut out critical contextual words from Mr. Donziger’s comments. According to trial transcripts, when the defense brought this to the judge’s attention, Kaplan adjourned, did some research, and responded: “About 15 words were edited out … I assume there was no attempt to mislead.”
Chevron’s claim that the entire Ecuadorian judicial process — ten years of court trials and appellate reviews in three levels of courts — had been “fraudulent” rested, however, almost entirely upon one, single witness.
[ pix Steven Donziger at oil well © Lisa GibbonsSteven Donziger, lawyer for the Ecuador plaintiffs for 25 years, at oil site in Ecuador’s Amazon]
The Witness
In American Lawyer magazine, in 2009, David Hechler, describes Gibson Dunn’s “game plan,” to shield clients from liability in foreign pollution cases: “find witnesses” who will accuse the foreign court of “fraud.” In a separate American Lawyer story, Gibson, Dunn lawyer Robert Cooper, explains, “We prepared the witnesses to tell our story.”
In Ecuador, on behalf of Chevron, Gibson Dunn found one such witness, Alberto Guerra, a former Ecuadorian judge who had been removed for misconduct, including accepting bribes. According to Amazon Watch, Chevron lawyer Andres Rivero and Chevron private investigator Yohi Ackerman paid Guerra $48,000 in cash, and agreed to pay him $12,000 a month for at least three years. Chevron lawyers allegedly negotiated and smoothed Guerra’s immigration into the US, paid for his family to move, hired lawyers to get them green cards, and bought them a car, auto insurance, and health insurance.
Justice Now protest, Ecuador. Photo courtesy of amazonwatch.orgJustice Now protest, Ecuador. Photo courtesy of amazonwatch.org]
According to a letter from the defense to the US Department of Justice, Chevron has paid Guerra at least $2 million in cash and benefits, in exchange for false testimony. According to an affidavit by legal ethicist Erwin Chemerinsky — Founding Dean of the University of California at Irvine School of Law and a prominent US legal scholar — these payments to Guerra violated fundamental ethical rules of law.
In New York, over 53 days by Guerra’s admission, Gibson Dunn’s Randy Mastro helped him prepare his testimony about “fraud” in Ecuador. On the stand before judge Kaplan, Guerra claimed that Ecuadorian lawyers promised presiding judge Nicolas Zambrano $500,000 to allow them to write the final judgment, which Guerra claimed they gave to Zambrano on a flash drive. Guerra also claimed that he possessed a draft copy of the fraudulent judgment and that he met with the plaintiffs’ American lawyer Steven Donziger to discuss the alleged “bribe”.
Quickly, however, Guerra’s story fell apart.Immigration records showed that Donziger was not even in Ecuador when Guerra claims the meeting took place. No evidence of a flash drive was ever produced, and Guerra’s computers did not turn up the draft judgment, or even a single email from the plaintiffs’ attorneys.When this came to light, Guerra changed his story, claiming that after “strengthening my memory”he now recalled working on this draft, not at home, but rather had taken an eight-hour bus ride into the jungle, where he claimed he edited the judgment on a laptop handed to him by one of the Ecuadorians’ lawyers.
However, this story crumbled as well when forensic analysis showed that the trial judge had never downloaded the judgement from a flash drive and, rather, had opened and saved his own written judgement document more than 400 times over three months on his own office computer.
Furthermore, after the RICO trial, in a separate arbitration under the US-Ecuador Bilateral Investment Treaty, Guerra admitted under oath that he had lied to Chevron’s lawyers about his involvement in the alleged attempt to influence the Ecuadorian judgement. “I did exaggerate about [some things], yes,” said Guerra under questioning. When a lawyer asked him, “And among the ways you tried to leverage your position was to falsely tell the Chevron representatives that the Plaintiffs had offered you $300,000?” Guerra answered, “Yes, sir. I lied there.”
Nevertheless, Kaplan accepted Guerra’s testimony and rejected defense efforts— Motion to strike testimony and Motion for terminating sanctions — to strike Guerra’s testimony, which the defense claims was fabricated during the 53-day session with Chevron lawyers.
The final twist appeared as Judge Kaplan crafted a judgment. By dropping the money claim, Chevron had avoided a jury but also undermined its own case. A plaintiff must seek either money for damages or an injunction, a court-ordered condition placed on the defendant. The Court of Appeals had already reversed Kaplan’s earlier injunction and could do so again. Without a money claim or injunction, Chevron lacked standing.
Perhaps to avoid this problem, Kaplan based his guilty verdict on a “non-statutory claim for equitable relief” from an allegedly fraudulent judgment. According to Donziger’s rebuttal, the decision lacked “due process,” since the claim had never been presented by Chevron or argued in court, and “relied on vague 18th and 19th century treatises” that “had been effectively repealed and replaced by the statutory framework for enforcement of foreign judgments … during the twentieth century.” Typically, a judge can’t invent a new claim for the plaintiff after a trial has ended.
The Republic of Ecuador filed an Amicus Brief, stating that “Judge Lewis Kaplan reached far beyond the issues presented to unfairly—and unnecessarily—impugn the integrity of the Republic of Ecuador.” They stated that Kaplan’s “unfounded commentary”, against a “sovereign democracy”, was based on “unreliable evidence”. The Ecuadorian court charged that Kaplan relied almost exclusively on one Vladimiro Álvarez Grau, an avowed political opponent of the Ecuadorian government. “Chevron sought out a favorable forum,” the Ecuadorian court wrote. “The District Court [Kaplan], fulfilling Chevron’s wishes, chose to make far-reaching judgments based primarily on the opinions of a single partisan.”
Finally, the Ecuadorian court confirmed that Chevron Corporation remained responsible for the impact of its pollution. “In 2005,” the court wrote, “ChevronTexaco dropped the name ‘Texaco’ and reverted to its original name, Chevron Corporation. There is no indication in the record before us that shortening its name had any effect on ChevronTexaco’s legal obligations. Chevron Corporation therefore remains accountable.”
Furthermore, in a separate discovery hearing, the US Third Circuit court cautioned: “The circumstances supporting [Chevron’s] claim of fraud largely are allegations and allegations are not factual findings.”
This historic SLAPP lawsuit, possibly the most expensive in history, appears to have failed, even after Kaplan’s decision. Foreign courts have ignored Kaplan’s injunction, and Donziger and his clients are making progress in Canadian courts, where the victims are attempting to collect the Ecuadorian judgment by seizing Chevron Canada’s assets, and where they have won three consecutive unanimous appellate court decisions. Donziger and the Ecuadorian villagers have said they would welcome Chevron to claim in Canada that the Ecuadorian judgment was fraudulent. “If they had to bring Guerra to Canada before a neutral judge,” says Donziger, “we believe the company’s entire RICO narrative will collapse.”
SLAPP suits represent a threat to public protest and free speech. They have no place in a democracy.
References and Links
Ecuador Supreme Court (Court of Cessation): court ruling in Ecuadorean class action vs. Chevron Corporation.
ACLU, Slapped: A Tool for Activists: ACLU
Chevron assets: Fortune magazine.
Chevron: 60 law firms and 2000 lawyers: Amazon Watch, CSR.
Chevron threatens plaintiffs with a “Lifetime of litigation.”: (1) “Chevron Accused of $2 Million Witness Bribery Plot in Ecuador Pollution Case, Alternet, January 31, 2018; and (2) Writ of Mandamus, Feb. 6, 2011: pdf
Gibson Dunn, “rescue squad,” “shielding clients”: Gibson Dunn promotions
Gibson Dunn censure by High Court of England: “Chevron Law Firm Gibson Dunn Blasted by High Court of England For Falsifying Evidence: Chevron Pit, March 25, 2015.” Montana Supreme Court assessed a $9.9 million fine against Gibson Dunn: Montana Supreme Court document, 05-378, 2007, MT 62.
Ecuador, appellate judges rebuke Chevron’s lawyers for threatening trial Judge Nicolas Zambrano.
Gibson Dunn in Ecuador: under scrutiny for trying to mislead Congress
California, 2005, censure of Gibson Dunn
Gibson Dunn sanctioned by a federal judge for harassing a witness in a discovery action in Oregon.
Comments about Judge Lewis A. Kaplan on legal review site: The Robing Room
Robert Redford objects to Kaplan denial of media confidentiality: Huffington Post
New York Times, NBC, and HBO file a First Amendment objection with the court. NPR
Kaplan and Mastro insult the courts in Ecuador: “Writ of Mandamus, US Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, Hugo Gerardo Camacho Naranjo and Javier Piaguaje Payaguaje, petitioners, filed by Attorneys: James E. Tyrrell Jr. NY, Julio C. Gomez, NY, and Carlos A. Zelaya, II, Feb. 6, 2011: pdf
Allegations of bias by Kaplan: Writ of Mandamus, Feb. 6, 2011: pdf; and “Chevron’s RICO Fraud” pdf
“Our L-T [long-term] strategy is to demonize Donziger.” — Chevron’s lead PR consultant, 2009: (1) “Chevron’s RICO Fraud” pdf and (2) “Chevron Accused of $2 Million Witness Bribery Plot in Ecuador Pollution Case, Alternet, January 31, 2018
Chevron’s RICO Fraud: An Abuse of Indigenous Peoples, the Environment, and U.S. Courts in the Chevron v. Donziger Case; S. Donziger and the Ecuadorian Legal Team: pdf.
Defendant’s right to a jury in a RICO case: CSR, 6 February, 2014.
Defense calls anonymous witnesses a violation of “basic legal principles … right at home in the Spanish Inquisition.”: US District Court, Southern District of New York, Case 1:11-cv-00691-LAK-JCF Document 1154 Filed 05/14/13, “Opposition to Chevron’s Motion for an order to Further protecting the Confidential declaration of Doe3.”
Gibson Dunn “game plan”: (1) “District Court Denies Enforcement of $97 Million Nicaraguan Judgment,” Gibson Dunn; and (2) “The Kill Step,” David Hechler, Sept. 20, 2009, The American Lawyer
Randy Mastro and Gibson Dunn lawyers preparing Guerra over 53 days: Huffington Post, Paul Paz y Miño, May 30, 2017.
Guerra bribed by Chevron: (1) “Chevron Accused of $2 Million Witness Bribery Plot in Ecuador Pollution Case, Alternet, January 31, 2018; (2) “Chevron’s RICO Fraud,” legal rebuttal: pdf. Guerra bribed by Chevron: Huffington Post, Dec. 6, 2017; (3) “Chevron Executives Misused Millions of Shareholder Dollars To Bribe a Witness,” Amazon Watch, May 30, 2017.
Alberto Guerra admits lying in RICO testimony: (1) US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Chevron Corporation vs. Steven Donziger, Hugo Gerardo Camacho Naranjo, et. al.; No. 14-826-cv(L), November 5, 2015. (2) “Chevron’s Star Witness Admits to Lying in the Amazon Pollution Case, Vice News, Eva Hershaw, October 26, 2015 (with Testimony from arbitration under the US-Ecuador Bilateral Investment Treaty); (3) U.S. Courts Endorsed Chevron’s Fabricated Evidence: Ecuadorian Villagers and Counsel Slam Chevron’s Star Witness for Lying and Offer Rebuttals to 12 False Findings by Second Circuit Court of Appeals”: CSR wire, May 16, 2017; and (4) Chevron’s RICO Fraud: pdf.
“Judge Kaplan Drastically Overreached With “Unlawful” Injunction To Protect Chevron, International Law Experts Say,” Rainforest Action Network.
Defense documents requesting to strike Guerra’s false testimony, citing evidence that Guerra lied, and admitted to lying: (1) Motion to strike testimony of Alberto Guerra Bastides, pdf and (2) Motion for terminating sanctions, pdf.
“Rainforest Groups Blast U.S. Judge Kaplan for Ruling Designed to Help Chevron Evade $9.5b Pollution Liability,” CSR wire, March 9, 2018.
Republic of Ecuador’s Amicus Brief denouncing the Kaplan judgement based on false testimony from a bribed witness, and denouncing Kaplan’s insults toward Ecuadorian courts.
US Third Circuit court, Chevron’s claim of fraud are allegations, not facts: Writ of Mandamus, US Court of Appeals, Case: 11-2259, 06/02/2011.
Kaplan’s judgement based on 18th and 19th century treatises: Judgement transcript: District Court, Southern District of New York: Case 1:11-cv-00691-LAK-JCF, Document 1874, Filed 03/04/14, Page 330 of 497.
Chevron lacked standing: (Article III , U.S. Constitution; the US Supreme Court has held that federal courts may hear “cases and controversies” but many not simply issue advisory opinions if there is no claim for “relief.”
“In Canada, Chevron Faces New Risks From $12b Ecuador Pollution Judgment As Shareholders Step up Pressure,” Amazon Defense Coalition, FDA, March 23, 2018
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https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44821726 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quijos_Canton
...Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the region had been widely farmed by Quijos peoples. Maize was cultivated and there was very little tree pollen to be found - the valley had been cleared for agriculture.Once the Spanish arrived, things changed abruptly. A spike in charcoal in the soil sample coincided with historical records of an uprising against Spanish rule in the mid-16th century.Afterwards, a sharp increase in grass pollen gave way to evidence of the forest slowly returning. Nature was reclaiming the valley, and the people who had inhabited it for at least 1,000 years were gone.By the time the 19th century tourists wrote their accounts, the cloud forest had been repopulated by many of the same species that had occupied the area around 40,000 years earlier, before the first humans arrived in South America.The nearby town of Baeza, previously home to about 11,000 inhabitants, was reduced to just a few families."So you went from something that was quite a large population centre to almost completely empty... there was certainly a massive depopulation of the indigenous peoples there," says Dr Loughlin."I still believe it's severely underestimated the impact that European colonisation had on the indigenous population," he added....EB colonial periodDuring much of the colonial period, what is now Ecuador was under the direct jurisdiction of the law court (audiencia) of Quito and ultimately under the rule of the Spanish crown. Spanish culture was spread primarily by religious orders and male Spanish colonists.In the Sierra, the Spaniards established a colony of large estates worked by Indian peons. Settlements included semiautonomous Indian villages and Spanish and mestizo administrative and religious centres such as Quito, Ambato, and Cuenca. The making of rough textiles in primitive sweatshops was the only industry. The development of Roman Catholic religious establishments provided for the flowering of Baroque architecture, sculpture in wood and stone, painting, music, and other arts and crafts.In the tropical Costa, much of the population died as a result of introduced diseases, and the area remained unhealthy until the advent of modern medicine. As a result, the coast was somewhat neglected during the colonial period, although there was some shipbuilding and exporting of cacao (as cocoa beans) from the port of Guayaquil. The small coastal population of slaves, free blacks, and mixed ethnicities, with plenty of vacant land and less coercion of labour, developed a culture very different from that of the Sierra.In the Oriente, the region on the eastern slopes between the Andes and the headwaters of the Amazon, large populations of Shuar and other indigenous people successfully repelled European invaders; however, Jesuits and other missionaries were able to spread both Christianity and the Quichua language. The Spaniards used Quichua as a language of evangelization—at one period missionaries were required to know the language—and continued to spread it orally by means of Quichua speakers who travelled with them in further conquests.The country’s fourth major subdivision, the Galapagos Islands, were little more than pirate nests during the colonial period. They were to achieve world fame in the 19th century, because it was there that Charles Darwin made a major portion of the observations that led to his theories on evolution and his On the Origin of Species.The people of Quito, the Ecuadoran capital, claim that it was the scene of the first Ecuadoran patriot uprising against Spanish rule (1809). Invading from Colombia in 1822, the armies of Simón Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre came to the aid of Ecuadoran rebels, and on May 24 Sucre won the decisive Battle of Pichincha on a mountain slope near Quito, thus assuring Ecuadoran independence.Early national history, 1830–c. 1925Ecuador’s early history as a country was a tormented one. For some eight years it formed, together with what are now the countries of Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela, the confederation of Gran Colombia. But on May 13, 1830, after a period of protracted regional rivalries, Ecuador seceded and became a separate independent republic....Problems of the early 20th centuryThe liberals remained in office, but the real power continued to rest in the hands of the wealthy merchants and bankers of Guayaquil. During World War I and the short boom that followed it, this clique further extended its influence and diversified its capital with a view to controlling the agriculture of the coastal plain. Cacao was the dominant export crop, as in the colonial period, but sugar and rice became increasingly important. A depression followed in the early 1920s. The price of food increased, and exports in general declined. The sucre—the national unit of currency—fell rapidly in value. At the same time, the country’s cacao plantations became infected with a fungus that causes a malformation known as witches’-broom, and production sagged. These crises brought urban discontent, the formation of trade unions in Guayaquil, riots, and massacres by the army. Hundreds died during riots and shootings in November 1922. In 1925 the army entered this turbulent situation, claiming that it wished to restore national unity and blaming many of the country’s problems on the merchant bankers of Guayaquil. Unfortunately, the 1925 revolution brought little change to Ecuador’s social and economic structures. Subscribe Today!Modern historyThe period between 1925 and 1948 was one of greater turbulence than Ecuador had ever known. Increasing involvement in the world market and in international politics meant that the country could no longer escape entanglements and the consequences of world ideological conflicts. Yet during this crucial period, Ecuador’s internal disunity prevented the modernization of its social structure, land tenure system, education, and communications. Thus, the country was badly equipped to face the demands of the age. Economic development and loss of territory in the 1940sEcuador was still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression when it became involved in World War II. It sided with the Allies and allowed the United States to build military bases on its territory, but it played little direct part in the war. Under Pres. Carlos Arroyo del Río, Ecuador drew some benefit from the higher prices for raw materials caused by the war, and the early years of the war were relatively prosperous and tranquil. World War II had a serious secondary effect on the country, however. The large Amazonian territories claimed by Ecuador had never been effectively controlled by the government; much of the area was occupied by indigenous groups. Dating back to the 16th century, Peruvians had increasingly settled along the Amazon and its tributaries. In July 1941, after long diplomatic bickering and a series of border incidents, the Peruvian army invaded, seized much of the disputed Amazonian area, and devastated El Oro provincia (province). The Ecuadoran forces, poorly trained and equipped, were easily defeated, and the disgrace caused the overthrow of Arroyo del Río. The United States and the other major powers were too preoccupied with World War II to allow such small conflicts to destroy Allied unity or to disrupt the production of vital raw materials. A peace conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1942 forced Ecuador to relinquish its claims to much of the Amazonian region. Subsequently, Ecuador repeatedly attempted to reopen the question, claiming that the Protocol of Rio did not establish precise borders and that the new borders were therefore invalid. This constant irredentism was used repeatedly by demagogues and ultranationalists, who distracted attention and effort from urgent internal problems. Domination of Velasco Ibarra after World War IIPolitics and government after World War II presented contradictions. Ecuador enjoyed a long period of constitutional government and relatively free elections following the presidency of the PLR leader Galo Plaza (1948–52). There were also two long interludes of military government (1963–66; 1972–79), but the period was dominated by one of Latin America’s great caudillos, José María Velasco Ibarra. Velasco Ibarra, who died in 1979, was president of Ecuador five times but completed only one of these terms. He seemed able to win any election, such was his popularity with the masses, but his terms of office were marked by sudden reversals in policy, contradictory economic programs, personal outbursts, temporary suspensions of civil liberties, and military interventions. Some critics claimed that Velasco Ibarra drew support from communist groups; others said he was the puppet of powerful business groups in Guayaquil. But neither these nor other groups were able to control the erratic Velasco Ibarra for long. His political presence may have inhibited the development of coherent political parties and programs for changing the country’s antiquated social and economic structure, but his personal appeal cut across parties and ideologies. The traditional parties—the PLR and the PC—were thrown into disarray by his incursions, and the growth of newer parties, such as the Ecuadoran Socialists and the Social Christians, was retarded. Opponents alleged that Velasco Ibarra made economic progress impossible because constructive measures undertaken by previous governments were halted or reversed by the Velasco Ibarra interludes.Ecuador from the late 20th centuryAfter Velasco Ibarra’s last fall from power, in 1972, military officers ruled for some seven years before handing over the government to a constitutionally elected (July 16, 1979) civilian president. The civilian and military governments of the 1970s had not developed a firm policy for dealing with the oil boom that occurred in that decade. The boom increased the size and wealth of the middle class, led to the building of roads, quays, pipelines, and other infrastructure, and caused severe inflation. No basic structural reforms took place, however, and the poor suffered the effects of inflation but reaped few of the benefits of the oil boom. Velasco Ibarra’s death and the withdrawal of the military officers from government allowed the country to return to an elected civilian government and a new constitution in 1979. Jaime Roldós Aguilera, a young social democrat, was elected president on a reformist platform. He promised greater social equality and a more equitable distribution of oil industry profits, but he was unable to manage the legislature and was soon at odds with his own party, the Concentration of Popular Forces. His popularity increased after a border skirmish with Peru in early 1981, but he was killed in an airplane crash later that year. His successor was Osvaldo Hurtado Larrea of the small Christian Democratic party. The economy, depressed by the drop in world oil prices, spiraled downward with accompanying high inflation and a depreciating currency. León Febres Cordero, a congressman from Guayaquil, was elected president in 1984. His free-market economics and pro-U.S. foreign policy drew Ecuador into closer alliance with the U.S. administration of Pres. Ronald Reagan, but Febres Cordero was never popular in Ecuador. Oil prices continued to fall, and his troubles with the National Congress and the military led to calls for his resignation and, on one occasion, to his being kidnapped by air force personnel for half a day, until he agreed to release one of their leaders. In March 1987 he suspended interest payments on Ecuador’s $8.3 billion foreign debt after an earthquake destroyed part of a major oil pipeline. Left-wing opponent Rodrigo Borja Cevallos was elected to the presidency in 1988, but he seemed to have few solutions to the steadily worsening economic crisis. His term was marked by a major national uprising in 1990, with Indian groups demonstrating in favour of such issues as land reform; the uprising and subsequent protests pushed the Ecuadoran government to recognize the land rights of these indigenous groups and address their other concerns. In 1992 Sixto Durán Ballén was elected president. He brought the government budget into balance, reduced trade barriers, brought Ecuador into the World Trade Organization, and encouraged foreign investment. The benefits of his accomplishments, however, were somewhat offset by conflict: in early 1995, the long-simmering boundary dispute with Peru erupted in a border war, leading to a standoff that persisted until a peace accord was signed on October 26, 1998. The country was left with a crippling war debt. From the mid-1990s to the early 21st century, Ecuador experienced several years of political upheaval, during which time many individuals served as president. Populist leader Abdalá Bucaram Ortíz was elected president in 1996; however, he became increasingly unpopular because of his erratic and controversial behaviour, and in early 1997 Congress removed him from office and replaced him with Fabián Alarcón Rivera. In elections held in 1998, Quito mayor Jamil Mahuad Witt was elected president. Early in his term, Mahuad was confronted with a serious economic crisis that peaked in 1999. His unpopular austerity measures, implemented to address the crisis, and high rates of inflation resulted in public demonstrations against his leadership. In 2000 Mahuad made perhaps his most unpopular decision—to adopt the U.S. dollar as Ecuador’s currency. This proposal proved to be his undoing, and shortly thereafter he was removed from the presidency in a coup engineered by indigenous leaders and some members of the military, including Col. Lucio Gutiérrez Borbua. The coup leaders eventually agreed to let Vice Pres. Gustavo Noboa Bejerano ascend to the presidency, which effectively ended the coup. Noboa followed through with Mahuad’s decision to convert Ecuador’s currency to the dollar, despite the plan’s unpopularity. However, this conversion, as well as a rise in oil prices, helped stabilize the economy in 2001. The beginning of the 21st century found Ecuador struggling with many of the same issues as in previous decades: political upheaval, social unrest due to dissatisfaction with indigenous rights and economic policies, and poor economic performance. Former coup leader Gutiérrez stood in the 2002 presidential elections and won, taking office in 2003. He made some attempts at economic reform, but he did not have the cooperation of the National Congress and was initially limited in his success. Gutiérrez was removed from office in April 2005 and replaced with Vice Pres. Alfredo Palacio. Rafael Correa was elected president in November 2006 as an independent leftist, with oil policy, poverty, debt, and relations with the United States as the main campaign issues. Correa, an ally of populist Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez and other left-leaning leaders, strengthened state control over the country’s extensive oil resources, increased spending on social programs, and diminished ties to U.S. development organizations. In early 2008 he broke off diplomatic relations with Colombia after that country’s forces raided a guerrilla camp inside Ecuador. Correa also received support from the majority of voters for his plan to devise a new constitution to fight long-standing corruption in Ecuador’s National Congress. Gregory W. KnappMurdo J. MacLeodA draft constitution was approved by a special Constituent Assembly in July 2008, and more than 60 percent of Ecuadoran voters backed the new constitution in a referendum held in September. When the constitution entered into force in October 2008, the Constituent Assembly assumed the duties of the legislative branch, pending the election of the new National Assembly outlined in the constitution. The new constitution was the 20th since the country gained independence in 1830, and it reflected many of Correa’s leftist ideals, including a ban on foreign military bases, the allowance of same-sex marriage, free education through the college level, social security benefits for unpaid domestic workers, and greater national control over the oil and mining industries. Moreover, it gave broad powers to the president and, most notably, allowed the president to serve up to two consecutive four-year terms. Critics of the new constitution accused Correa of giving the government too much control and aligning himself too much with Chávez. Correa won another four-year term, receiving more than 50 percent of the vote in the April 2009 presidential elections (it was ruled that his tenure in office prior to the promulgation of the new constitution did not count as a term under that document). In July the newly elected National Assembly convened for its first session. Correa’s hold on power was threatened on September 30, 2010, when factions of the military and the national police—responding to the president’s austerity measures in general and to cuts in benefits for public servants in particular—staged protests that escalated into a virtual coup attempt. Correa was addressing protesting police when he was injured by tear gas and taken to a hospital that was quickly besieged by police. He was rescued by the military (whose leadership remained loyal) and returned to the presidential palace as order was restored. By May 2011 Correa was firmly back in control, his presidential powers having been extended by approval of a 10-issue referendum that included authorization for him to appoint a commission to overhaul the judicial system and to direct the National Assembly to form a commission (reporting to him) that would regulate media content. In August 2012 Ecuador granted political asylum to Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, who had been living under Ecuador’s protection in its embassy in London since June, having exhausted appeals under the British legal system to avoid extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges. Correa secured another term as president in February 2013, when he was reelected in a landslide, capturing nearly 58 percent of the popular vote, a margin of more than 30 percent over the next closest competitor in a field of eight major candidates. In 2014 a new crescendo was reached in a long ongoing legal battle that had led an Ecuadoran judge in 2011 to order the Chevron Corporation to pay $18.2 billion for environmental damage done to the Amazonian Lake Agrio region where oil producer Texaco (taken over by Chevron in 2001) had been active. The Ecuadoran Supreme Court upheld this judgment in 2012 (though it reduced the compensation for the Amazonian residents to $9.5 billion); however, Chevron won several subsequent legal victories in its bid to avoid paying compensation, most notably the March 2014 decision by a U.S. court that found that the Amazonian plaintiffs’ legal team (led by an American lawyer) had used “fraudulent evidence” and paid bribes to obtain its favourable rulings in the Ecuadoran courts.The balance in the battle shifted again in Ecuador’s favour in September 2015 when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Ecuador could use the Canadian legal system to pursue redress from Chevron. In the first half of 2015, Ecuadorans repeatedly took to the streets en masse to protest Correa’s government’s proposal to impose an inheritance tax of 77.5 percent and a real-estate capital gains tax of 75 percent. Protests were also more broadly aimed at what many Ecuadorans saw as the dictatorial style of Correa, whose popularity waned as his government’s largesse was reined in as a result of dramatically declining oil revenues. Correa withdrew the tax proposals in advance of Pope Francis I’s visit to Ecuador in early July. In December 2015, however, the National Assembly, controlled by Correa’s party, adopted 15 amendments to the constitution, including the removal of term limits for public office as of 2021, paving the way for Correa to seek reelection indefinitely. The changes to the constitution, which prompted a new round of street protests, also included the classification of communications as a “public service,” allowing the government to further extend the control of the media that it had begun to exert in the previous few years. A magnitude-7.8 earthquake that shook the Pacific coast of Ecuador on April 16, 2016, caused widespread destruction and hundreds of deaths in the northwestern part of the country. The quake was centred about 17 miles (27 km) south-southeast of Muisne and roughly 100 miles (160 km) west of Quito. It was the worst such event in decades—recalling the powerful earthquake that hit the coast of Ecuador and Colombia in 1979 and sparked a tsunami that took more than 600 lives and the 1987 earthquake in which more than 1,000 individuals died. After growing at an average rate of about 4 percent per year between 2006 and 2014, GDP in Ecuador bottomed out in 2015 as the toll taken by falling world oil prices fully hit home. In 2016 the Ecuadoran GDP contracted by some 1.7 percent. In the process, government revenue shrunk from about $25 billion to about $11 billion. With his ability to finance popular social programs critically impaired and his popularity further eroded by scandal (including billions of dollars in bribes allegedly paid to Ecuadoran government officials by the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht), Correa opted not to run for reelection in 2017. He threw his support to Lenín Moreno, who had served as his vice president from 2007 to 2013. Moreno was the winner of the first round of voting in February 2017 but was unable to preclude a runoff by failing to capture the majority of the total vote and falling just short of obtaining 40 percent of the vote plus a 10 percent or greater victory margin that would also have eliminated the need for a second round of voting. For the first time in recent Ecuadoran history, authorities were not able to declare a winner on election night. As the count continued two days after voting (owing ostensibly to delays in the arrival of the vote from rural districts and abroad), supporters of second-place finisher Guillermo Lasso, suspecting fraud, took to the streets to demand confirmation of a second round of balloting. When that confirmation came, Lasso—who had promised corporate tax cuts, job creation through foreign investment, and the end to Ecuadoran protection for Assange—appeared to be well positioned to benefit from the support of other runner-up candidates heading into the April runoff election. Lasso and his supporters again cried fraud when Moreno was declared the winner in the runoff election held on April 2. Moreno captured just over 51 percent of the vote to almost 49 percent for Lasso. However, a prominent exit poll had indicated that Lasso would be the winner, and he had already claimed victory when the National Electoral Council announced Moreno (projected as the victor in a different exit poll) as the winner. Lasso demanded a recount, and his supporters angrily took to the streets again to protest the results. Nonetheless, Moreno took office and surprised many observers when he began reversing some of Correa’s policies rather than preserving the status quo in anticipation of Correa seeking to return to office in 2021. Moreover, Moreno pushed for a referendum that would limit Ecuadoran presidents to two terms. An outraged Correa campaigned against the referendum, but on February 4, 2018, voters approved it by roughly a two-to-one margin, thus preventing Correa from ever running for the presidency again. In April 2019 Ecuador revoked the asylum it had granted Assange. It allowed British police to enter the Ecuadoran embassy in London after securing a written agreement from the British government that Assange “would not be extradited to a country where he could face torture or the death penalty.” President Moreno indicated that the decision to allow Assange’s arrest came in response to “his repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols." In March 2019 the International Monetary Fund finalized a $4.2 billion loan for Ecuador that would support the Moreno government’s economic policies over the next three years. That agreement was predicated on the contingency that Ecuador adopt austerity measures to bring stability to the country’s finances. When Moreno made a dramatic step in that direction in early October by eliminating a fuel subsidy that had been in place for some 40 years, protests erupted throughout the country and quickly turned violent, especially in Quito. Indigenous groups and transportation workers played a major role in the protests, which escalated into running battles with security forces, persisted over a number of days, and forced Moreno to temporarily transfer the government to the coastal city of Guayaquil.= https://www.ecowatch.com/ecuador-residents-palm-oil-2644430752.html1/20 Communities in Ecuador Fight Back Against Palm Oil