Chevron: Don’t believe your eyes…believe our lies!

(Cross post from The Chevron Pit blog)

Chevron's bloggers, who continue to deny the truth about the company's involvement in oil contamination in Ecuador, are upset with a New York Times photo of a waste pit in Ecuador that ran last Saturday.

Chevron apologists such as Carter Wood – who blogs for the National Association of Manufacturers, which counts Chevron as a major donor – have said the photo is of a waste pit by Ecuador's state-owned oil company, Petroecuador, because the oil is fresh and Chevron left the country in 1992. But in his hurry to carry Chevron's water, Carter again misses the boat with his analysis.

Evidence at the trial demonstrates that Chevron's predecessor company, Texaco, constructed 916 unlined waste pits in Ecuador's Amazon in the 1970s and 1980s. All were gouged out of the jungle floor without lining, in violation of U.S. and industry standards dating to the 1920s. Almost all of the pits had pipes that ran the toxic contents into nearby streams relied on by the local population for drinking water; in most cases, the toxic contents have migrated through the bottom of the pits to contaminate groundwater used for wells by local residents. If you want to see for yourself, check out the 60 Minutes report on the case.

This is clear evidence of the reckless indifference to human life that characterized Texaco's operations and Chevron's defense. Texaco had so little regard for the locals that Chevron had to admit that Texaco never even kept a list of the existence or locations of the pits, each of one of which is a hazardous waste site. The use of these reckless operational practices might explain why several independent health evaluations show skyrocketing rates of cancer in the region, and why the court Special Master found 1,401 excess cancer deaths. If this had happened in the U.S. it would probably be considered negligent homicide – and those that designed and built this system would probably be in jail.

Not that Wood cares. According to him – in a line he lifted directly from Chevron's talking points - if the oil in the pit is liquid then it must have been put there recently, which means the NYT photo could not be of contamination in a pit that Chevron left Ecuador in 1992. That's simply not true, according to evidence at trial. Dozens of Texaco waste pits in Ecuador's Amazon that were never touched by Petroecuador look exactly like the one in the NYT photo – even pits closed down by Texaco in the 1970s and 1980s. Check out this picture (taken in 2005), which is of Texaco site "Lago Agrio 5" which was closed in 1972 – and which hasn't been touched by anyone since it was closed by the company that year. Oil in old pits does not weather in Ecuador because it rains constantly in the Amazon, keeping the sludge in the old waste pits in the exact form one sees in the NYT photo. Even if the pit is now owned by Petroecuador, it does not absolve Chevron of its responsibility for building it, operating it, and abandoning it – and for the continued damage caused by using the same methods by the subsequent operator.

Chevron and bloggers like Carter Wood have consistently lied and misled the public, shareholders, and the media about Chevron's role in Ecuador. Chevron has tried every trick in the book – from creating its own news reports designed to look like CNN reports (including hiring disgraced former CNN correspondent Gene Randall to give the recordings an "authentic" appearance), to its latest Nixon-style dirty tricks operation to undermine the Ecuador trial where Chevron faces a substantial liability. Now, Carter Wood, on behalf of his organization's client Chevron, is asking people to not believe what is evident in a photo.

As Chevron's game of smoke and mirrors unravels, look for more misleading postings by Carter Wood and Chevron's cohort of bloggers. After all, Wood readily admits that he took an all-expense paid trip to Ecuador - paid for by Chevron of course - to get educated (read indoctrinated) on the issue. What he doesn't admit is that he failed to speak to any of the people who are trying to hold Chevron responsible for ruining their land and their lives. As a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, Wood should know better than to write about an issue without talking to both sides or disclosing that he is paid to support one party to a dispute.

So please Carter, stop trying to fool people with misleading arguments about oil liquidity and photos - people are not that stupid in the reality-based world.

Chevron: The Toxic Tour

Chevron: The Toxic Tour

(written by Michaela D Amico)

Manuel Ignacio Salinas was so proud to repeat his name when I asked him a third time.

“Manuel…Ignacio…Salinas.”

Standing just over five feet tall, the aging Señor Salinas had graying hair, a discolored left eye, and rashes visible where his tattered light-blue button-down shirt failed to cover his dark Ecuadorian skin.

We passed his ramshackle wooden home, which was held ten feet off the ground by white concrete stilts. In the backyard, a group of children were hanging clothes on a line and chasing a small, fluffy white dog. They smiled and waved before quickly returning to their tasks. It was obvious they knew what we were there to see.

I was visiting Señor Salinas with one other volunteer as part of a Toxic Tour of the polluted area in the Amazon jungle. As we entered his backyard, I began to smell the unbearable scent of crude oil. Lying before us was what looked like an abandoned sewage waste site—a 50 yard-long section of marshy land with weeds jutting out.

There were no rats or flies like I expected, perhaps because even these creatures could not stand to live near such a massive pool of stagnant oil. The area was encircled with yellow tape that read “peligro”—danger—but the side closest to Manuel Salinas’s home was left open. We walked to the edge of the area, and Señor Salinas began to talk to us.

“I bought this land 25 years ago, without knowing what was beneath the surface,” he said. “I started to clear away the trees and brush to grow coffee and fruit trees, because this was how I had planned to make a living. But then I discovered what I thought was a huge swamp and could only plant a few trees around it.

“We were unable to farm the land. We were unable to get clean water. We slid into poverty. But we had no choice but to continue drinking from the contaminated well. For a while, we had nothing, ni agua,” he said. Not even water.

As I listened, his adorable white dog scurried around our feet. Suddenly, it sprinted a little too far and hopped directly into the pool of contaminated oil-water. We screamed for it to come back, and when it finally pulled itself out of the sludge, its coat was completely black. Señor Salinas also called for the dog, but it was obvious he was not nearly as shocked as us. After all, he had lived near the backyard waste-sight for over 20 years and had seen many animals perish in it.

“I wanted to move, but who would buy this land?” he continued. “I just don’t want my family to be sick.”

Despite being threatened with “a lifetime of litigation” by Chevron attorneys, Señor Salinas is one of the 30,000 residents of the Ecuadorian Amazon who are plaintiffs in a $27.3 billion class-action lawsuit against Chevron, to remediate what has become known as the Amazon Chernobyl–the worst oil-related disaster on the planet.

Texaco, now Chevron, admitted to dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic chemicals into hundreds of waste pits throughout the jungle between 1964 and 1990. As a result, oil-polluted water and soil are spread over more than 1,500 square miles in the pristine Amazon wilderness. Environmental and medical experts believe the mess left by Texaco’s negligence has caused extremely high levels of cancer, miscarriages, birth defects and other health problems in the region.

Judging by his discolored eye and skin rashes and Señor Salinas’ tales of frequent hospital visits, it was apparent that Señor Salinas himself had been affected.

“Even the President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, came to visit,” Señor Salinas said. As he spoke, the sadness in his eyes was impossible to ignore. “The president put his hand on my shoulder and he asked, ‘What can I do?’ The truth was, at this point, not much.”

His family is forced to travel seven hours by bus to Quito, the capitol, to seek medical treatment for the illnesses caused by the polluted water that they unknowingly drank and bathed in for years. I could not imagine staying near this pool for an hour, never mind a lifetime, as Señor Salinas’s children have. After just a few minutes of standing around the waste site, my nose and whole body felt infiltrated with the gross waste, and I even began to feel light-headed. Wiping my face and blowing my nose later in the car, I was appalled to find the tissue black with what appeared to be nasty petroleum particles that must have been densely polluting the air around Señor Salinas’ home.

A few days later, I traveled to Cuyabeno National Park in the heart of Ecuador’s rainforest. As we traveled slowly down a bumpy dirt path toward the river, large, untouched forests lined one side of the road. On the other, massive oil extraction stations were visibly still in operation. We passed by huge, black tanks surrounded by a maze of black and yellow tubes, fenced-off silver machinery covered in skull and crossbones signs, old unused oil barrels thrown carelessly in all directions and several shiny oil-pits with outlandishly tall and sweltering gas flares in the background that stood higher than the hundreds of tall green trees directly next to them.

We finally arrived at the Cuyabeno River, and I stepped into a canoe that would take us to our destination: a rainforest eco-lodge. Two hours later, we arrived at the lodge, surrounded by a lush canopy. Stepping off the boat onto the small wooden dock, I walked towards what looked like a pseudo-summer camp in the middle of the jungle – complete with fishing boats, small stilted straw huts, bunk-beds, hammocks, and a communal outdoor dining area.

The sound of birds singing intermingled with the pounding rain. I took a deep breath and savored the fresh jungle air. This was how the rainforest was supposed to be. As I plopped into a hammock beneath the canopy, my mind drifted back to all the things I had just seen: the incriminating pools of pollution, the countless rusting oil barrels, the massive oil stations, and the flaming gas burners with birds circling in their emissions.

Eventually, I think I could forget these images. But the one thing I will always remember is the face of Manuel Ignacio Salinas.

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Michaela Joyce D’Amico is a passionate international human rights and environmental justice activist, listener/talker, peace-maker, artist and athlete. Also a student on the side, she will graduate from Northeastern University in Boston, MA in 2010 with a degree in International Affairs, minor in Sociology, Spanish and Social Entrepreneurship. She has worked with Global Exchange in San Francisco, EF Educational Tours in Boston and most recently, Amazon Watch in Quito Ecuador. She is now back in Ecuador to continue her work with the landmark environment lawsuit against Chevron's abuse to the people and land of the Amazon rain forest. Learn more about this at her blog and the Chevron Toxico website.

Chevron's Desperate Wanderlust

Chevron Files International Arbitration Claim Against Ecuador: Forum Shopping at the Hague?

(International Business Law Advisor)

By: Santiago Cueto

First, the United States. Then Ecuador. Now Holland. Chevron's wanderlust knows no bounds, as it just filed a parallel international arbitration proceeding in The Hague.

As reported in this article in the Wall Street Journal and in this article in the New York Times, Chevron filed an international arbitration claim before the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague under the Rules of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). The claim is based on Ecuador's alleged violation of investment agreements, international law, and its treaty with the United States--the Encouragement and Protection of Investments Treaty.

Chevron’s claims relate to the Amazon oil lawsuit I wrote about in an earlier post. In the arbitration filed in the Hague , Chevron alleges that Ecuador’s judicial process is broken and that the South American nation cannot fairly adjudicate the long-running oil pollution litigation. Through the filing, Chevron seeks to enforce prior settlement and release agreements that the government of Ecuador entered into with Texaco Petroleum when the consortium was terminated, and to hold Ecuador accountable for its obligations under Ecuadorian law and existing international treaties.

The Ecuadorian government says that it will "vigorously" defend itself against the claim.

Chevron's new general counsel, Hewitt Pate, released a statement that accompanied the announcement of the new claim.

"Because Ecuador's judicial system is incapable of functioning independently of political influence, Chevron has no choice but to seek relief under the treaty between the United States and Ecuador."

Forum Shopping is an Unfair Venue Shell Game

Chevron's latest move is the litigation equivalent of three card monty and is yet another tactic to divert attention away from the trial taking place in Ecuador. Chevron first fought successfully to force plaintiffs to try their lawsuit in Ecuador rather than U.S. courts. Then it sought (unsuccessfully) to win indemnification in U.S. courts from a possible judgment in Ecuador. And now it's filed for arbitration in Holland. Chevron's blatant forum shopping is an abuse of the judicial process and designed to avoid a judgment.

The Hague is arguably the most hallowed institution for the resolution of high-profile international disputes. Chevron's latest tactic all but mocks the institution's primary mission to administer justice. The Hague must not be utilized to frustrate legitimate legal proceedings taking place elsewhere.

Forum shopping drains resources by imposing substantial additional costs on defendants, who must transport lawyers, documents, and numerous witnesses to the site of the trial – an expense that is multiplied when the trial is located far from the defendant’s place of business, such as in Holland.

Steven Donziger, a U.S. legal adviser to the plaintiffs, said the latest move by Chevron followed a series of setbacks in courts for the company in both countries.

Filing an international arbitration campaign at this point in time smacks of desperation and is a clear example of forum shopping," Donziger said in emailed statement.

As reported in this article in the Oil & Gas Journal, Steven called the company’s move “one of Chevron’s last cards to avoid paying for a half-century of environmental contamination in Ecuador’s Amazon.”

The country's solicitor general, Diego García, said "Chevron has signaled for years its intention to file the instant arbitration, although only after an adverse judgment had issued and the appellate process completed.

"The environmental case should be resolved by the courts," Garcia added, "not in an arbitration in which the private parties are not even represented."

You can read the entire article HERE

Chevron Casts Stones...

With self-righteous drama Chevron continues to attack Ecuador's legal system as "corrupt" and a place where it cannot obtain a fair trial. Yet to avoid a trial in the United States, where the case originally was filed in 1993, Chevron submitted fourteen sworn affidavits to a U.S. federal judge praising the fairness of Ecuador's courts and stipulated it would be bound by the jurisdiction of the Ecuadorian court as a condition of the case being transferred there.

The depth (or lack thereof) of Chevron's pious stance is seen for what it is in this 1972 Texaco memo entitled "Reporting of Environmental Incidents" from Texaco’s Chairman of the Board, R.C. Shields. The memo provides new instructions to the corporation’s Acting Manager in Ecuador, M. E. Crawford, as to what constitutes Texaco’s definition of a major oil spill. It is one which "attracts the attention of the press and/or regulatory authorities" - not one in which rainforest residents´ water supplies are rendered undrinkable or their health seriously affected. A clear indication of a cover-up of known wrongs is the note at the end of the memo requiring that all previous reports of oil spills be destroyed.

Finally, in an indication of how Chevron's word is far from being as good as its bond, the oil company's spokesperson, Kent Robertson, has announced that Chevron has no intention of abiding by its promise to a U.S. federal court that it would be bound by the jurisdiction of the Ecuadorian court.

So much for Chevron's superior corporate greenwashing virtue.

Chevron's Desperate Delaying Tactics

For years, Chevron has repeatedly tried to distort Ecuadorian law, present misleading evidence, create fake laboratory test results, politicize the trial by lobbying Ecuadorian and U.S. government officials to extinguish the claims of the plaintiffs, and employ extrajudicial pressure to intimidate the judge and court personnel – all with the goal of preventing a final judgment from being reached.

These tactics help explain why the trial process has lasted 16 years and why Chevron’s lawyers have promised the plaintiffs a “lifetime of litigation” if they persist in their claims. Despite this bad faith, Ecuador’s court system likely has afforded Chevron more due process rights than any defendant in the history of civil jurisprudence. The company alone has presented more than 50,000 chemical sampling results and produced almost 200,000 pages of evidence in a trial that has lasted six years in its Ecuador phase. It has been free to inspect any site it wants, turn over any scientific evidence it can generate, present any witness from whom it wants testimony, and present any documentary evidence it can find.

It is the scientific data itself that is proving the case against Chevron, not any bias on the part of the judge or court.

More Smoke from Chevron Bloggers

Bloggers paid by Chevron are thrilled that Ecuador's Prosecutor General Washington Pesantez recently commented that:

“Although I don’t have the exact figures, 10% would go to the plaintiffs if Chevron is found guilty; 90% would be delivered to the State for remediation or bio-remediation activities that would serve to correct biologic and chemical mechanisms, as from what we have found out in a parallel criminal process, there are still environmental problems.”

They're falling over each other to blog that this "proves" the state of Ecuador is involved in prosecuting the case against poor old innocent Chevron.

The assumption that the Ecuadorian government is a party to the lawsuit, since even if it isn't named it will receive the proceeds from it, is incorrect. The Pesantez statement must be understood within the context of Ecuador's law.

What the prosecutor general was alluding to was that, under Ecuadorian law, 10% of the award would go to the Amazon Defense Coalition and 90% would be administered directly for remediation costs under a public trust mandated by government legislation.

The government would not be entitled to any of the actual award.

Kent Robertson's Crude Spin

Chevron spokesperson Kent Robertson recently criticized the documentary Crude as being "long on emotion and short on facts."

Crude director Joe Berlinger responded:

"I find Kent Robertson's comments about Crude to be extremely troubling, given the fact that he has yet to see the film. I have made multiple offers to screen the film for Mr. Robertson and his colleagues at Chevron, and my offers have been declined. Just last week, he told me that the company sees 'no meaningful value' in having a private screening, but they would 'simply wait until the film hits [their] local theatres.' Since Crude opened in New York on the same day the California-based Mr. Robertson made his comments to Reuters, I would be surprised if he has seen it, which makes me wonder why he is attacking the film.

"The comment that Crude is 'short on facts' is outlandish. The film goes to great lengths to give as much attention to the positions of each of the opposing parties in this landmark case as is possible in a feature length documentary. Stephen Holden of the New York Times -- among other prominent critics -- specifically cited this quality, saying, 'rarely have such conflicts been examined with the depth and power of Crude.' Perhaps the 'facts' that Mr. Robertson is referring to are not the talking points that his company has been working so hard to inject into the news cycle in the days leading up to Crude's release.

"While Crude attempts to present both sides of the legal case, it concerns me that Mr. Robertson continues to criticize the film's presentation of the story by obfuscating the accusations against his company. Mr. Robertson told Reuters, 'If you're seeing fresh oil today ... how can that be the responsibility of a company that stopped operating in 1990?' The systems and infrastructure that the plaintiffs say dumped billions of gallons of oil and toxic waste products into the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador were designed, built and operated for decades solely by Texaco (which merged with Chevron in 2001), according to the suit. Although the operation was later taken over by PetroEcuador, it is the theory of the plaintiffs' case that Chevron is responsible not only for the past pollution, but the current pollution as well, because they turned over a faulty system to the current operator. To ignore this would be to miss a key point in the story examined in Crude. While Mr. Robertson is not an attorney, he is surely aware of this major detail in the case against the company, which has now been going on for sixteen years."