Hello, Hi, Karen, It's me Amy.
How are you since I've helped you?
I know, I know, well, I feel like it. I mean it.
It's maybe been like a couple of weeks, but it feels like two years.
Yeah, long, because we used to talk about.
You might have heard me mention my co reporter on this season, Karen Savage in the credits of every episode, and you've heard her voice a couple of times too, But she's been a really big part of this season behind the scenes and especially on our website, where Karen has been writing stories that go along with each episode. She's also the person I've called all season long to help make sense of this story or to help remember where this or that document is or who said what
and when. So I wanted to bring her in for this last episode, where we're going to try to make sense of this story as a whole and what it means in the con text of climate Today, we're going to update you on what's happening for the Ecuadorians and dig into why we decided to tackle this story in the first place, plus what we learned from it and what it has to do with climate change.
That's all coming.
Up right after this quick break. Like most people, Pod Save America co host Tommy Vitor thought foreign policy was boring and complicated until he got the education of a lifetime working for President Obama's National Security Council. It was a crash course that taught him two things. Anyone can understand these issues, and we all have an obligation to try. That's why he started Podsave the World, a weekly podcast from Crooked Media that breaks down international news and foreign
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your podcasts. My sort of general sense of this story is just that the Ecuadorians have kind of been fucked over by everyone, and I just keep coming back to this thing that Joe Berlinger said, which is, if this contamination had happened somewhere in the world where you know, wealthy, white people live, it would have just been cleaned up first and then litigated later.
If this incident had happened anywhere where white people live, it would have been cleaned up, you know, and then they would have figured out the culpability later, right, right.
And like I just yet, I do feel like it's become all about legal procedure and not a wrong.
Was done and should be addressed the.
End, right right, because at this point it doesn't seem like that's even being addressed or even thought of in any of these, like all of these cor proceedings. And you know it would be I definitely couldn't do it myself. But like, how many of these court filings even mentioned the Equadorians or the mess that they're still dealing with, right, I mean there are literally hundreds of thousands, if not more, legal filings, and how many of them actually even mentioned the Equadorians.
That's true, Yeah, that's true.
That and it does it just like I think there's been this very asserted and successful strategy to make it all about the lawyers and not the people. Pablo Fajardo actually said when we talked to him too, that like this is about the people, not the lawyers.
Can in whoish you in noise om pros Asum Processa Pueblos.
And I understand his frustration and like the Ecuadorians frustration, But then I also grapple with like, well, how do you cover it without mentioning that stuff?
Yeah, I mean I think that's actually the biggest challenge to me. And well, no, it's not the biggest challenge because understanding all the legal stuff.
Has been the biggest challenge.
But one of the biggest challenges has been doing this story without having gone there. I keep saying that, but you know, I have never written before about any kind of toxic contamination or allegations of contamination without going there and seeing it, do you.
Know what I mean?
Or experience like climate change, We all experience it, even though we're not like right there at the refinery sense line, but you know, having not talked to these people and their homes, you know, or sat down and had coffee or whatever, you know, Yeah, all of those things that you can just kind of get to know folks and get to know how their lives have been affected.
Yeah, I think is huge. Yeah.
Yeah, So yeah, we did not get to go to Ecuador for this season, which was not the plan. We kept thinking we'd be able to go in a couple months, but obviously that never happened. The other thing that did not go as planned this season was the schedule. We were going to launch in June, and then it was July for sure. We ended up finally launching at the end of September because there was just so much reporting to do and documents to read and people to track
down and just thinking too. This story is a really weird one because on the one hand, it's so simple. Toxic waste was dumped in the Amazon rainforest. Whoever's responsible for that should clean it up. But the legal system can make that whoever's responsible part really tricky. And then you had this whole complicated thing happening where a US judge was evaluating the decision of an Ecuadorian judge. And
then there's the whole Petro Ecuador thing. How responsible are they or the Equadorian government which let these oil guys in in the first place. And that's why we couldn't just talk about this case with Chevron. We had to start by talking about colonialism.
And it's totally as we've talked about before, like a story about colonialization, right you know.
There's yes, the Equadorian government was complicit in that initially, right, But even in that situation, you know what choices did they have really between playing ball with oil companies in order to develop their economy in this world that was dictating like.
You either do this or you starve.
Right, right, because that at the very heart of this is the inequity that was set up so long ago, right, that like leaves people fighting over crumbs, and sometimes.
We're really bad crumbs. Yeah, you know in this.
Case, yeah, I mean, And honestly, what all of these court cases are doing is just muddying everything up, right. It kind of seems like everyone involved is just throwing stuff out there to get themselves unstuck. But over on the other side, the Ecuadorians are still there, still suffering, still living in a contaminating environment.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Ecuadorians are absolutely not sitting around and waiting for someone to save them. They're doing everything they possibly can to try to improve their situation on the ground. Judith Kimmerling, the lawyer who went down to Ecuador in the nineteen eighties and wrote about it, really kind of kicking off a lot of the legal action that happened in the later decades said this.
For example, this lawsuit was a relatively small group of people trying to accomplish something for a huge area, in many, many people. And in that area, you know, what's overlooked is that there are a lot of people who haven't been engaged in the lawsuit, but they've been engaged in their own processes, in their own dynamics, in their own efforts to survive the impacts caused by Texaco and you know, secure a future for themselves and their children. And the
by raity are one of them. And so to present their story in that way as okay, So in the tort law, in human rights law, we call them victims, but really their survivors. They have their own aspirations, they have their own processes, they have their own efforts, their own struggle.
You know.
In Spanish se Luca.
There's an extremely cool project using mushrooms to absorb the petroleum and toxic waste in the oil pits. For example, it's called Sukumbio's Alliance of Bioremediation and Sustainability ABSs. Fung Guy it turns out, are probably our best weapon when it comes to remediating all sorts of toxic waste sites. There are mushrooms that gobble up everything from the hydrocarbons and petroleum to heavy metal and even plastic. So there's the Mushroom Project in Ecuador. There's a mutual aid group
that looks after the area's many cancer patients. This is a community that looks after its own and knows how to survive. The core system is not their only tool, but there are more cases too. Pablo Ardo, the lead attorney against Chevron in Ecuador, has also sued Petro Ecuador to encourage it to clean up its share of the pollution in the Amazon. Fajardo's organization you adapt UDAPT is also encouraging the government to appeal the arbitration decision that
came down in favor of Chevron. You might remember us talking about that this season that an arbitral tribunal in the Netherlands ruled that the Ecuadorian government owed Chevron millions of dollars for allowing this case to proceed in its courts. Documentary filmmaker Lindsay Afrias, who we also talked to during the season, talked about what the Ecuadorians are continuing to do, and why their work on the ground always seems to be ignored in press reports about this case.
And that's the thing it's really passating to, however, the way in which fingers get pointed, where Chevron will be like, oh, no, it's Petro Ecuador, and petrorectord Or will say no, it's Chevron, And there is a world in which we can see them all responsible but in different ways. And ironically, you know, the people who are who are taking the most responsibility or the people who are actually least responsible for having
caused this situation. And so I was able to spend significant time with you know, the plaintiffs who have turned into I would call like emergency responders, where they've created their own health committees, their own environmental cleanup committees.
And they're doing unbelievable work.
That gets no attention. And I often find it difficult to even think outside of the law and imagine, you know, with them, what is possible to do in the face
of corporate and state impunity. And you know, while it is a worthy endeavor to continue fighting through the legal system, how can we still direct resources to the people who are most affected, who are building responses and they have really brilliant ideas, and they have very brilliant structures already in place in which they're working, and they could be even more effective if you know, everybody else somehow paid them some respect.
This is a really key point and reminds me a lot of how we think and talk about climate change, as though climate action can only happen through these very specific systems that are mostly controlled by powerful interests. A couple people have told me that while they find the story of this Chevron Ecuador case interesting, they're not really sure what it has to do with climate change. Sure, Chevron is an oil company, but this story isn't really
about climate change, right. Here's how I think it connects. This is a story about power and accountability, which is really at the root of every climate story. I always say climate change is a power problem, and I don't mean energy sources. You don't get a problem like catastrophic climate change where a small handful of people have shifted the world away from acting on the problem just to
benefit themselves without some sort of major power imbalances. A lot of people who think we need to act on climate also think that oil companies can and should be part of that action. That it will negotiate and act in good faith on climate. When I look at this case,
I don't see how that could possibly hold true. I kind of started this season thinking this, and it definitely turned out this way that it is such a good example of the lengths that oil companies will go to even when they lose a battle or lose a case, to not be held accountable.
Yes.
Yeah, to me, I just feel like this is I don't know, this is like the thing I will probably point to you whenever people say things about negotiating with oil companies over climate policy.
Just right right, I look at the you know, the inequality of the court system, yes, you know what I mean, the things that different folks told us about the Rico trial, and you know, the hundreds of lawyers that Chevron was able to work with, and the much less number of lawyers that you know, Stephen Donziger and the plaintiffs and that Ecuadorians were able to hire. And honestly, if you look at that in terms of everyday people, they were very lucky to have even been able to mount the defense.
That they did.
Right right.
I thought that was such a good point that Julio Gomez made about how like the only one that can really go up against Chevron is like another oil company. Julio Gomez was the attorney for the Equadorian plaintiffs in the Rico trial. We heard from him a few times this season, but here's what he had to say about inequality in the justice system.
People don't understand the incredible inequity in our legal system. To finances, it's Microsoft can only go up against Google, Apple can only go up against Samsung. Chevron can only go up against Exon Mobile and vice versa, because that's the only way to do it right. To meet every expert, to meet every motion, you need exactly the same resources. And unfortunately, our judicial system does not take that into account.
People have this tendency to forget where laws and the justice system come from. It's not like this neutral, fair thing that it's sometimes painted as. You know, It's like most of the laws were written by, let's face it, wealthy white guy is in an attempt to maintain their wealth and power.
Right, the idea that.
It still tends to mostly work in favor of people with power and wealth should not surprise us.
Right, yeah, yeah, Well, I said, have those thoughts that always come back to the Ecuadorian court system, Yeah, which affirmed the.
Ruling at all of the levels.
Yeah. And so part of me says, you know, here is the US and a US judge and a US corporation interfering with another.
Country's judicial system. Yeah.
I mean, what would happen if someone came in here and did that to our judicial system?
Yeah, it would never happen. It would never happen. Okay.
So I described this show as a true crime podcast about climate change, but this season was by far our most true crime and I feel like we need to address the elephant in the room, Donziger.
The fact that this whole thing is built on a house of cards with a lying witness makes the case really vulnerable. And I think that explains why they're going after me, because I tell the truth about it and I have a lot of credibility. Other courts are probably going to be looking at this, I mean in other countries who enforced the judgment, And it's in Caplan's interests,
in Chevron's interest that I be silenced. So you know, what better way to do that than to make up these criminal contempt charges and make me the first lawyer in US history ever detained pretrial and a criminal contempt case where I can't travel my passports confience gate, and I can't go into court.
Did he do any of the things Chevron accused him of?
All of them? None of them? Does it matter?
Karen and I had some variation of this conversation a lot, in part because Donziger tried to control the story a lot, and we wanted to make sure that we weren't being influenced by what he alone was telling us. On a much smaller scale, we could really relate to what filmmaker Joe Berlinger told us about his experience covering this story.
Here's the ten page memo from Donziger in which he's asking me to make a zillion changes, and I didn't make those changes and wrote him a terse email in response saying, Hey, I'm not making these changes. I'm the filmmaker, I have final cut.
Okay, I'm going to ask I'm going to ask you the million dollar question, Karen, Uh, what are your thoughts?
I'm Stephen Donziger.
I'm trying to put this in the right in the right words. I think that regardless of whether you know, you can look.
At the at the.
Documents, as they're presented, which you know they've set our out of context. It's Donziger and the plaintiff has said set our out of context and not.
You know, the narrative is not correct.
So whether you believe that narrative that Chevron put out there or not, I think if you look at the heart of what is happening, I think that the intent, which was to get justice for the Ecuadorian people, is true. And I do think that this is one of those cases that you.
Can look at it. In fact, I've done it myself.
If I'm reading stuff that Chevron has put together, I'm.
Like, Wow, this is looking really bad for this guy.
But then if I look at stuff that that that Stephen Donzegrant and his team have put together, I'm like.
Of course, why is Chavre even trying to say that? So you know, I go.
You know, if you if you get your head too far deep into one narrative or the other, it's easy to see that side. So honestly, I cannot tell you what happened, but I can tell you what is still happening, and that's what the Ecuadorians have not gotten justice, and you know, they're doing everything they can, Like you said, they're you know, they're they're they're.
Doing as much natural remediation if they can.
They're doing their own litigation, you know, hoping to get the accountability. But at the end of the day, all of these more powerful people failed them, yes, in whatever way it was, you know, and it's just it just makes me sad that these folks are still dealing with I mean, this is going on several generations. It's not just like, you know, oh, when your kids are little,
they're exposed to this, and now they're not. It's like, oh, when you are little, you're exposed to this, and now you're grown, and you have kids who are exposed to this, and now they have kids, and your grandkids are exposed to this, and their kids are going to be exposed to this.
I keep thinking about this thing that Joe Berlinger said.
I am not smart enough to tell you whether or not Chevron has wrapped itself up in enough legal arguments to be legally correct in this situation. But there is a moral issue here. There's a moral flaw that with such devastation, why are we not cleaning it up now and figuring out the legal responsibility later?
Ultimately, even people who didn't necessarily like Donziger or the way he approached this case, think what's happening to him now is totally unjustified. In fact, folks pretty consistently see it as a very scary precedent that a company would go after a lawyer personally in the way that Chevron has gone after Donziger. Judith Kimerling was pretty critical of Donziger. She said this, for example.
But the point I want to make is that, you know, while I think that the actions against Stephen are excessive, I don't think that he's just a victim because he's a human rights defender. I mean, I think that narrative is very simplistic. That we're pressed that Rico trial, who were asking me, well, you know, if they're real injuries, why why did these guys have to engage in fraud? And that's the question that Steven's conduct is begging. And the answer was, well, we have to win a battle
in the with the press. And you know my response to that was you can win with the truth. And this you know, Chevron loves having the story be about Stephen. They're using it to discredit the real people who've been injured. It's problematic in many ways, and I think it's unfortunate. I don't see any soul searching, you know, on the environmental side about you know, what the mistakes were made
and how it could be done better. Instead, it's just Steven's a victim, and you know, this is all because of how bad Chevron is and has nothing to do with his decisions and choices.
But she also said this, I do think.
That what's happening to Steven it's really excessive. I think that you treating Stephen like a criminal is really excessive.
When we talked about this, Karen's take was basically, look, even if both sides did the exact same corrupt things, and we're not saying that they did, but if they did, one was doing it to try to clean up pollution and help a bunch of indigenous people and subsistence farmers in the Amazon, and the other was trying to protect shareholder profits a company losing profits and people not having clean water to drink for generations and being poisoned for generations are not equal.
Right.
That is it for this season.
Thank you so much for staying with us.
If you have.
Questions or comments, please send them our way you can reach me at Amy at drillednews dot com. Big thanks to our Patreon subscribers. You guys helped make this season happen. If you would also like to support our work, go to Patreon dot com slash drilled. Big announcement, we are in the process of taking this podcast entirely ad free.
If you're a listener to the podcast, you know that I have been reading ads for a while, and you might also suspect that it's something that makes me deeply uncomfortable. So you know, we have a few ads that have been sold already that I'll be reading in the coming weeks. But we are going the route of being entirely ad free, so I do hope that more folks will sign up for the patrio to make it possible for us to
do that. You'll also get access to bonus content. We're going to drop some longer interviews in there related to this season, so you'll hear more from several of the folks that you heard a bit from this season, and we will have some update episodes for you on a few things. Donziger will eventually go to trial next year, so we'll have an update.
Then.
We'll also have an update for you soon on whether the Ecuadorian government decides to appeal the arbitration decision or not. Stay tuned for those, and then next year we will have a two part season that traces the fracking boom to the plastics boom. Come back for that and more. Thanks again, and hope you're all closing out the year with a nap. Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency Podcast Network. The show was created, reported, and
written by me Amy Westerveldt. My co reporter this season is Karen Savage. Our editor is Julia Ritchie. The show's editorial consultant is Rika Murphy. Mixing and mastering by Mark Bush. Original score by b Beman, fact checking by woudn Yan. Our artwork for this season was done by the super talented Matt Fleming. Special thanks to Trevor Gowen and Emily Gertz. You can find stories, documents, and photos related to this
season on our website at drillednews dot com. That's it for this time, Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.
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