Chevron’s New Outrage: Oil Giant Trying to Suck Millions In “Blood Money” from the Indigenous People It Poisoned

In Ecuador, Chevron dumped billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste. After ignoring multiple court rulings, it now wants to collect money from its victims.

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Steven Donziger || In this festive season, I want to focus again on one of the major predators destroying our planet: Chevron. Is there an oil company in the world that engages in more outright criminality across more countries than this one?

Of course, I have a special distaste for Chevron. Many of you know that I’ve been battling the company as a lawyer for more than three decades. Most of that time I was on the legal team that in 2013 won the landmark $10 billion pollution case against Chevron in Ecuador — a damages award the company refuses to pay in open violation of various court orders. For many years, I’ve also been defending myself against a vicious company retaliation campaign targeting me and my family. This ultimately led to me spending almost three years in home detention and prison (from 2019 to 2022) on a baseless contempt of court case in New York. The contempt case had been flatly rejected by the federal prosecutor’s office, but a judge authorized Chevron to step in to the shoes of the government to prosecute me anyway. I remain the only person in US history ever to be subject to a private criminal prosecution by a corporation. The case also cost me my law license, which was taken without a hearing in a brazen violation of due process. (I recently began a process to get it reinstated which you can read about here.)

(Yes, most observers believe the private prosecution of me was illegal. It’s been condemned by five US federal judges as unconstitutional — here is the decision by two Supreme Court justices to that effect. Five respected international jurists from the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of the United Nations separately determined my detention violated international law — read that decision here. Through various Chevron-orchestrated machinations too tricked-up to write about in detail here, the prosecution and detention happened anyway.)

Here’s the latest Chevron Amazon outrage: after spending more than a half-century decimating Indigenous and farmer communities in Ecuador by dumping billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste into the rainforest, Chevron just sent Ecuador’s government a bill for $220 million to cover its legal fees defending our $10 billion pollution case. The decision in our case required the company to finance the remediation of its toxic cesspool covering an area roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island; the company still has refused to pay the damages award to the communities. (For details of Chevron’s latest maneuver to suck $220 million out of Ecuador, see this report from Inside Climate News.)

The recent Chevron invoice was the product of a secret and (in the opinion of many experts) illegitimate private investor-state arbitration process that is attempting to end-run Ecuador’s court system and nullify the pollution judgement that our team of lawyers won after years of arduous litigation. To be clear, the environmental case against Chevron has been affirmed unanimously by Ecuador’s highest court in the very country where Chevron insisted the trial be held and where it had accepted jurisdiction. It’s also been affirmed unanimously by Canada’s Supreme Court for enforcement purposes.

For those unfamiliar with the process, investor-state arbitration is a private dispute resolution process created by corporations to try to “protect” their foreign investments by creating an end-run around the national court systems of sovereign nations. It allows corporations (the investor) to sue a host country government in a private process when they feel their investment has been negatively affected by some public court or legislative decision. The process is held in secret where local citizens cannot have access. The process is not part of any public court system. Technically, nothing that happens through this process can overrule or upend a public court decision; it is more of an intimidation play to wield by corporations to try to get foreign countries to abide by their wishes and to screw over locals who on rare occasions muster the resources to win a case or two in their own court systems (like the communities did against Chevron). The provision for this dispute resolution process was included in the US-Ecuador bilateral investment treaty, which was signed in 1997.

The Ecuador case is a vivid example of the utter bankruptcy of this process. (I and my colleagues Laura Garr and Aaron Page explain the details in a 2010 article from a law journal published here.) To be clear, the private corporation dispute resolution mechanism is not a judicial process. In my opinion, it’s a racket to protect corporations from liability when they harm people, as Chevron did on a massive scale in Ecuador. Worse, the process is designed to be dressed up in the esoterica of legal vernacular to make it look legitimate even though it is fundamentally anti-democratic. It was this process led recently led Ecuador’s current President, the Trump-aligned billionaire Daniel Noboa, to “agree” to send Chevron the $220 million even though Chevron actually owed the people of Ecuador at least fifty times as much for the environmental damage it caused.

This is Chevron’s new outrage in the Amazon. Rather than pay the court-ordered damages, Chevron and its shameless CEO Michael Wirth are now asking their victims in Ecuador to bail them out.

More broadly, Chevron has a big and growing global human rights problem. Aside from Ecuador, the company is a major partner with the Netanyahu government. Chevron generates massive revenue from gas fields it owns off the coast of Gaza (that should be the property of the Palestinian people) that help Israel finance its war crimes. Chevron’s reckless operational behavior and its policies of aggressive tax avoidance and attacks on advocates literally take place in dozens of countries, including Australia, Canada, and the United States. The academic Nan Greer documented the alarming degree of Chevron’s global misconduct in her 2021 report, Chevron’s Global Destruction: Ecocide, Genocide, and Corruption. (Read the report here.)

There are two more notable facts to this story. First, Chevron’s latest plan could well backfire. Lawyers for the Amazon communities — that is, my colleagues in Ecuador who unlike me still have their law licenses — just asked an Ecuador court to embargo the $220 million and divert it to pay for the clean-up of the contamination that Chevron caused. If the $220 million in Ecuador becomes a Chevron asset, then that asset under law must be used to satisfy the company’s legal debt to the Amazon communities. Chevron had stripped its assets from the country in anticipation of our judgment. Well, they now might have an asset that the communities can seize. I also found out that Chevron is so shameless it tried to pressure Ecuador’s government to reimburse it for the tens of millions of dollars of legal fees the company spent to sue me personally in New York and have me locked up. Turns out that part of Chevron’s claim was rejected by the corporate arbitrators.

Happy holidays. Very grateful to each of you for the support. I’ll report back soon on how this story evolves.

— Steven