Zoi. Houstina piaguahe president La Nacia Masoni Guadiana.
Houstino Pia Guage was born here in the Amazon. His father led the Seco Pie nation sometimes referred to as the Sequoia, and now that job has fallen to Houstino and some of his brothers. The Seco Pie's ancestral home was splintered by a war between Peru and Ecuador. If you're not super up on your South American geography, Peru is on the west coast of South America, ecuadors to the north of it, Colombia is north of Ecuador, and Venezuela is just around the bend further north. All of
these countries are to the west of Brazil. A lot of times when people hear Amazon, they think Brazil, but the Amazon actually crosses into several other countries. There are less than seven hundred and fifty people left in Ustino's tribe, and they're currently under very serious threat from COVID nineteen. Several have sought refuge in the Amazon, but they may struggle to find clean water there.
Rio Aguarico as a Impostexaco.
With Tiero Petroleo.
This is a video of Hustino on YouTube. He's standing on a bridge over a huge rushing river and he's saying, this river, the Aguarico River. Long ago, when they were exploring for petroleum, the oil companies dumped thousands of barrels of oil into it.
Bi piero.
Pianos the aliments.
They dumped toxic water into this river. He means wastewater from oil and gastriline into this river that for thousands of years nourished us.
Joso testigo, the komasido victima, norahente senuer to the cancerdades non podido aliment is a emoc and bossy.
I am a witness to how our people have been victimized. They have died of cancer, they have died of disease, they have not been able to eat well, and that continues today in Latin America.
Ecuador is seeing one of the world's worst coronavirus outbreaks, with possibly thousands dead.
But that on top of various ongoing health issues. Ecuador has been a global hotspot during the COVID nineteen pandemic. Some Psycopi elders have already died from the disease. To access clean water and avoid further content act with the virus. Houstino and his tribe have been venturing further and further
into their ancestral lands deep in the Amazon. But those lands are surrounded on all sides by oil fields, and because they've been breathing air polluted by oil and gas refineries and of course cars and other factories too for the past few decades, these people are more likely to die if they do catch the virus. Quarantine looks really different. If to really be safe, you have to hide deep in the jungle and hope no one dumps oil or
wastewater into the river you drink from. Meanwhile, three thousand miles away in Manhattan, quarantine also looks really different. For Steven Donziger, Hey, yeah.
Can you give me one minute?
Yeah, yeah, go for it. Donziger is talking to me from his two bedroom apartment in Manhattan. We spent May and June talking every weekend by zoom him, me and my co reporter on this season, Karen Savage.
Hi, Karen, Hey, how are you.
I'm good?
How are you?
I'm good? Back in Boston? Yep, Sorry about that.
He liked to leave the video on and would spend the majority of our time kind of hanging his head out the window trying to get fresh air and sunshine. He's got all the clean water he needs, but sun and air are hard to come by.
Everyone goes outside, even with the pandemic and with a face mask in New York right now, and they go walk in or get exercise or walk in the park. But I can't do that.
Well, we were all calling quarantine lockdown. This year, Donziger has literally been on lockdown. He's been on house arrest for over a year at this point. To leave his apartment, he has to submit a request to the court forty eight hours in advance and then provide documentation of where he's gone. We'll find out why and what that has to do with a river in the Amazon. After this quick break, I want to recommend one of my favorite podcasts to you, In the Dark. In the Dark investigates
critical stories that might not otherwise be told. The second season covered Curtis Flowers, a black man tried six times for the same crime, and Doug Evans, the Mississippi prosecutor determined to see him executed. In the Dark's team of reporters revealed new facts and evidence which proved pivotal in the Supreme Court's decision to hear Flowers's case this past spring. Recently, the state of Mississippi announced that it will drop all charges and not seek a seventh trial in the case.
Against incredible odds. Flowers is a free man. You can listen to in the dark wherever you listen to podcasts him Amy Westervelt. Welcome back to Drilled. This is season five. L Lucha and La Humbla The Rumble in the Jungle.
The judge in Ecuador has ordered the oil company Chevron to pay more than nine billion dollars in damages and other costs. It's the result of a long running lawsuit involving pollution in the Amazon Jungle. The damages are more than exon.
Back in twenty eleven, Stephen Donziger helped win a big case against the oil giant Chevron. As a result, Chevron was ordered to pay more than nine billion dollars to clean up waste pits of oil and refining fluids left in the Ecuadorian Amazon by Texico, the company's Chevron acquired
in two thousand. But the case didn't end there. Back in the ub Us, Chevron took Donziger and the other lawyers to civil court, finding a racketeering case against them, otherwise known as a Rico case, and accusing them of fraud. Donziger and the other attorneys lost that case back in twenty fourteen. Put in twenty eighteen, the judge that Rico case came after him.
He ordered me to turn over my computer and cell phone to Chevron's lawyers in the middle of a litigation. And it's sort of like, you know, asking a laurier to turn over his or her confidential case file to your adversary council right in the middle of a litigation. It's obviously a major intrusion into my rights, into the rights of my clients who are entitled to have confidentiality with their lawyer. And I just felt like it was
an illegal order. So I told them, like, you know, I can't turn this over without violating my ethical duties to myself to my clients in Ecuador. So I'm going to appeal it.
Donziger was in the process of filing that appeal when he heard from the judge again.
So what happened was I was up in Toronto working with the legal team for the Ecuadorians in Canada, because that's the country, where there's a lot of work being done to enforce the judgment against Chevron internationally, and over my computer, it came a notification that this judge should charge me with crimes. I was shocked, to say the least, and he had ordered me to appear in court I think.
A week later, Judge Kaplan charged him with criminal contempt, but in conjunction with a civil case. So while the original case could result in fines, this one could actually land Donziger in jail.
Basically, there's no statute for it. You know. It's not like assault or a burglary or a murder. It's basically, if a judge decides that a person, a lawyer who practicing before him, treats the court with disrespect or somehow doesn't comply with an order that the judge feels is in a sufficient kind of way, the judge can actually take that, on his or her own relition, with no check on his or her power, can charge a lawyer
with a crime. That's an awesome, enormous power that is easily subject, in my view, to abuse.
Caplin, a senior US district judge for the Southern District of New York, has charged Donziger with contempt for refusing to hand over his files and for a few other things that we'll get to in future episodes. When he got back from Canada a few days after this trip he was on, Donziger headed to court intending to ask for a couple of weeks to give him time to hire a lawyer. He thought it would be a pretty straightforward, administrative thing. His wife and a couple of friends came with him.
The first day. I walked into court in August six with my wife and a couple of friends, and I was like, you know, this is going to be like no problem. I mean, you know, I've been coming to court for ten years in this courthouse, and I'm a lawyer, and you know I've never committed a crime, and you know they're just gonna I'm just gonna ask for two weeks so I can figure out how to hire a lawyer, and then we'll come back and we'll figure out what
we're going to do instead. I realized pretty quickly there was like this thing in the air, the hostility of like the judge and her clerks and the court personnel.
So when a judge like Caplin charges a lawyer with criminal contempt. They're not allowed to oversee that case themselves. Instead, another judge is supposed to be selected at random. This is to cut down on any personal animals or bias a judge might have against a lawyer who has disrespected him or his court. Donziger has accused Caplain of hand picking the judge for his case. Her name is Loretta Presca. She's a fellow of the Federalist Society, just like Kaplin
and Donziger thinks it's all suspicious. Here he is again.
They subjected me to an interview with what's called a pretrial Services officer, which is an office and office in the courthouse that interviews are people charged with crimes to determine what their conditions or release and any should be. And they assess your financial assets and your likelihood that you're going to flee. And they were treating me like I was just like a criminal. They require me to give up my passport and like, did you have your
passport on you or did you No? No, I didn't, I didn't They They what they do is they give you a few days to comply, with the threat of jail hanging over you if you don't comply. And I mean, obviously I'm going to give up my passport a order by the court. And also I had no lawyer. You know, I'm not a criminal defense lawyer, and just because you're a lawyer doesn't mean you're a good lawyer for every situation by any means. And I needed a lawyer, and I told the judge I really don't want to do
anything without a lawyer. So she found a lawyer for me in the courthouse who agreed to represent me just for purposes of part of this what's called an arraignment. So I had to wait for him to show up.
So this is all happening behind the scenes in the offices of the courthouse. Meanwhile, Donziger's wife and friends are waiting for him, and time is passing and everyone is just starting to get really worried.
And I remember we went back to this to the jury room, which was empty so we could have some privacy, and he looked at me and he goes, he goes, You're living a nightmare. And you know, when I walked back to that jury room, I passed my wife who was sitting in the gallery, you know, completely flipped out, and she was with a good friend of mine Karen Hinton, and I mouthed to them, I said, I think they're going to try to put me in jail today.
At this point, Donziger's memory of this day starts to get a little hazy, the way your memory does when you're in an incredibly stressful situation. He doesn't remember much about standing in front of the judge, but he does remember the prosecutor.
There was a prosecutor. There actually three of them. And this was another very bizarre feature, I think unprecedented, was the judge Caplan's criminal charges, who first took them to the US Attorney's Office in New York. That's the office that was the regular prosecutor, and they looked at the charges and refused to prosecute the charges, you know, which
I think speaks volumes about whether they're worthy. Instead, he appointed a private law firm, that is, he went to a corporate law firm and said, you'd be the prosecutor. I'll use my inherent power as a US judge to let you act as the US government. The firm was called Seward and Kissel.
By the time he left that courtroom, Donziger was terrified and in a daze.
Basically, they said I had to put up an eight hundred thousand dollars bomb, give up my passport, and wear an ankle bracelet twenty four to seven and not leave my apartment. I was so freaked out. Like by the time I walked out of court to go get my ankle bracelet, I almost was just relieved to be going home, right, And they could have put me in handcuffs, ankle bracelet and shacks, and like I would have been in a
weird way relief to just go to my house. Man, I needed to get the hell out of there and get home and just regroup and get a lawyer and figure out my next step. So you know, I then had to go to this office and I had to wait around and I got fitted with an ankle bracelet and fingerprinted.
Then he had to go straight home, no lunch, no stops along the way.
You know. We finally got out of there like two hours later. You know, the hearing had been at ten am, so you know, he finally maybe left the court at one o'clock. And from that point on I had not been a free man, Like I couldn't go grab lunch. I had to go right to the subway. I had to sort of be that person with an ankle bracelet, so you're always aware of the subway whether your pants are covering your bracelet, which is the bottom of your leg. People were good at funny.
That relief he felt to be going home was pretty quickly replaced by a panic. He still had to come up with eight hundred thousand dollars or he'd be put in jail, and the judge had given him one week to come up with that money. He decided to put his apartment up as the bond, and the court accepted that, so he was in the clear.
About a week later, Chevron, as I said, their lawyers were in court and monitoring my criminal case. So on the civil reco case, they had convinced Catherine to impose court costs on me to cover some of their costs. So, in addition trying to destroy my reputation, trying to take all my money, freeze my bank accounts, and then ultimately deprive me of my liberty. So it's part of the
financial feature of the attack. Chevron had prior to my appearance in the criminal contempt case, they had gotten a eight hundred thousand dollars cost order against me from Judge kaplan to pay some of their court costs in any event, when I hosted the bond secured by my apartment, suddenly the prosecutor showed up with a new letter saying we're concerned about it because Chevron has some sort of notice of lean on his apartment because of this eight hundred
thousand dollars cost order that Capitain had issued against me like a year or two before. And they said that as a result, that apartment is not unencumbered and it's it's not adequate to post the bond because Chevron has a claim on my apartment. So the judge get appointed by Kapitla immediately issues in order agreeing with the prostitute are giving me forty eight hours to find a substitute bond.
This stressed me out when Donziger told me about it, and it stresses me out again just listening to it. If you've ever worried about how you're going to pay rent or a medical bill or grocery bill, the idea of having forty eight hours to come up with eight hundred thousand dollars or you're going to jail. Wow. And just a note here that of course, this happens all throughout our criminal justice system. There are people sitting in jails all over the country right now because they couldn't
afford a bond. Whether it's eight hundred dollars or eight hundred thousand dollars, it's a terrible situation to be in. So at this point, Donziger is having a full blown panic attack.
I wrote an email and based we put it out there and explain the exact situation, and I sent it out to five people. It's probably eight o'clock at night, and the most bizarre thing happened. I got a phone call ten minutes later. Wow, from a man who lives in San Francisco that I've known for twenty twenty five years. He's probably before this happened. He was one of the people I admire most in the world. He's done a
lot of work in equital for indigenous peoples. And he called me up and with like literally no questions asked, he says, I'll do it.
Wow.
I mean, honestly, just thinking about it, you know, it brings tears to my eyes because well, it's sort of hard to explain, like when you're really down, yeah, and you put out a plea to the world, and it just kind of reinforces your faith because you know, most people give a shit, they really care.
So he avoided jail, but he can't set foot outside his apartment door without his ankle bracelet going off. And like I said before, if he wants to leave the apartment, he has to request permission forty eight hours in advance, and it might not be granted. It's not an automatic thing.
I'm tracked twenty four to seven even around my own apartment. My ankle bracelet, which kind of is very big and feels like a garage door opener, you know, on my ankle. I call it the black claw. It talks to me sometimes wakes me and my wife up in the middle of the night when the battery runs low. It says this weird kind of Caucasian male voice that's taped comes on and it says, uh, something like I've heard it
so many times. I getected exactly right now, but it says something like battery low recharge unit, battery low recharge unit. And it just keeps repeating it over and over, so you know, I have to get up and go. There's a base where the battery the other batteries charging it have to change the battery in the middle of the night. But the crazy part about that, I mean, you know that might happen once every couple of weeks when I don't get the timing right or the battery didn't charge right.
But like literally every night I go to bed like worried it's going to happen again.
Donziger has still not had a trial. The charge against him is a mist to mean. He's been on house arrest for more than a year. I spoke with him just a few days before his trial is supposed to happen. He's been asking for it to be postponed again because the COVID restrictions make it impossible for his lawyers to
show up. There's been a hole back and forth. The court seems to be pretty intent on pushing the trial forward, and Donziger is really really worried that their whole goal is to just put him in jail.
Oh right now, it's the week before labor d eight, twenty.
Twenty, and I have my criminal contempt trial without a jury, without my lawyers because they were just disqualified as scheduled for six days from now, and the judge is trying to force.
Me into trial, taking extraordinary measures to put me on trial, in my opinions, so they can incarcerate me and basically a proceeding that would be totally unfair and unconstitutional.
When we spoke before about this possible ability, he said he's worried about what might happen to him there. It's not just about being locked up, especially during a pandemic when COVID rates are quite high in prisons. This past year has not been good for his mental health.
I have an adolescent son, of thirteen year old son, a wife and a family and very uncertain future. It's enormously stressful.
YEA.
It affects your sleep, It affects your outlook, it affects everything about life. It's very psychologically destabilizing, and I would argue it's designed to be. I mean, that's why they're doing.
So.
We know how dons that are wound up with an ankle bracelet under house arrest in his Manhattan apartment. But you might still be wondering why why would an oil company, as Donziger alleges, go to this much trouble to shut him down. On our next episode, we're going to get into all of that and how the heck this all happened. This is a story with a lot of different sides, and sometimes even people who seem like they'd be on the same team don't see eye to eye in any
way at all. Ultimately, after reading thousands and thousands of pages of court documents and spending dozens of hours talking to people involved in the case, I think I probably agree most with this guy. Okay, yeah, that's Alec Baldwin. Somehow he wound up involved in this case too.
There's only one issue that needs to be discussed here, and that is what is the right thing to do on behalf of the ecuador And people.
Of course, not everyone agrees on what exactly the right thing to do for the Ecuadorians is. Either to try to suss all of that out, we'll head back to Ecuador and back in time, all the way to the nineteen sixties, come back for that. Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency podcast Network. It's reported and produced by me Amy Westerveldt. My co reporter on this season is Karen Savage. Our editor is Julia Ritchie. Mixing
and mastering by Mark Busch. Additional reporting from Emily Gertz, additional production help from Sarah Ventry. Original score was composed by b Beeman. Matt Fleming created our beautiful artwork for this season. Our fact checker is wood On Yon, our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton, and the First Amendment Project Maggie Taylor is our marketing director. You can find supplement stories, documents, photos, and interviews on our website at
drillednews dot com. If you're a Patreon subscriber, thank you. Your membership is paying for this podcast right now. Patreon subscribers get access to an ad free podcast feed, and we're working on getting you more perks for your membership, including early access to episodes for this season. If you don't want to wait a whole week for the next episode, consider becoming a member at Patreon dot com slash drillt that's it for this time, Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon.