Combe Conger, give us a comic comb.
This is Maria Aginda, an indigenous woman in Ecuador, singing about the damage that oil companies have done to her community.
She was the lead.
Plaintiff in the case against Texaco and then Chevron in Ecuador. It's usually referred to as the Aginda Case after her. In the decades since the case began, there have been various attempts alternately to lionize and discredit her, to cast her as a victim of the oil companies or as a pawn of the plaintiff's attorneys. There is a mountain of situations like this in this case, where one side says one thing, the other side says the exact opposite thing,
and there's no way that both could be true. These sorts of things started to really pile up in two thousand and eight, five years after the case had initially kicked off again in Ecuador.
Basically, to close a pit require eight different steps.
This is Ricardo rays Vega, who led Chevron's legal team in Ecuador on this case. In this video with lots of cheesy sound effects, he's explaining the steps that Texico took back in the nineteen nineties to remediate its drill sites in Ecuador.
You had to take the oil out, you had to clean the sludge. You had to freak the water and take the water out, but you had to pass tests of the water. You had to solidify the basis. Then you had to put new dirt and revegetate.
Around the same time that the case against Chevron was filed in Ecuador, in two thousand and three, the government of Ecuador filed a criminal complaint against Raisvega and another lawyer working for Chevron on the case, Rodrigo pees Paladis. The complaint alleged that the two had falsified documents around Texaco's remediation work. You might recognize pees Paladis's name from
episode two. He was the Texico attorney meeting with the president at his beach house to discuss the company's troubles back in nineteen ninety four. In two thousand and three, the government was questioning whether the nineteen ninety eight document releasing Texico of all future liability for its operations in the country was the product of fraud. That complaint was thrown out in two thousand and six for lack of evidence,
and then refiled in two thousand and eight. At that point, Viga and Paladis were indicted for conspiracy to fraudulently certify Texico's cleanup. Chevron says this was all rigged up by the plaintiffs and points to it as a clear indication that the government and the court's under President Rafael Correa were in cahoots with the plaintiffs, that there was no
way they could get a fair trial in Ecuador. Here's Randy Mastro, an attorney who's been working on this case for Chevron since two thousand and nine.
He got Ecuadorian authorities, without any basis whatsoever, to bring criminal charges against two of the old Texico lawyers who were involved in negotiating the releases. When Texico left the country in the early nineties, those two lawyers faced criminal charges. They couldn't even travel. One of them was had to leave family in Ecuador, all right, on bogus criminal charges. They had done nothing wrong.
The he in that sentence is Donziger, and it's striking how much Mastro's description of what happened to these lawyers in Ecuador matches how Donziger describes his situation today.
I cannot travel, I don't have a passport.
I cannot leave my apartment.
This kind of he said, He said, has going on for years in this case, with each side calling out the tactics of the other, each side trying to get the other to flinch. In an outtake from a documentary about the case, Donziger talks about this dynamic between the legal teams.
We have to keep pushing on all fronts at all times.
That's simple, all fronts at all times.
Push, push, push. It's just a matter of force. It's a pure force. Who can put the most pressure and who can resist. It's just like all this bullshit about the law on facts. You know, Yeah, that factors into it because that affects the level of force. But in the end of the day, it is about brute force. Who can apply the pressure and who can withstand the pressure, and can you get them to the breaking point. It's the only way to litigate a case against a powerful company on behalf of people who.
Have no how that pushing was happening in the legal sphere. Of course, as the case dragged on, each side accused the other of obstruction and delay tactics, but both sides were also meeting with judges and playing politics, both in the US and in Ecuador, and the case was really playing out in the press. By two thousand and eight and two thousand and nine, the plaintiffs seemed to be winning on all fronts. Welcome back to Drilled Season five,
La Lucha and Lunga. If you haven't listened to the first three episodes, you're going to need to do that for this one to make any sense. Today we're going to get into how this case played out in the press and how that played into the verdict in Ecuador. All of that coming up right after this quick break. In twenty nineteen, the Washington Post reported on the remarkable case of a woman who'd spoken out to make sure that the man who sexually assaulted her was brought to justice.
The post new investigative podcast explores everything that happened after. It's called Canary. The Washington Post investigates. You may have seen their cover art in the podcast apps I Love It. Canary is a podcast about what happened when that unusual public warning connected to women, and how that warning led to a devastating allegation about a powerful man in the DC criminal justice system. You can find Canary the Washington Post investigates right now, wherever you get in your podcasts.
In two thousand and seven, William Languish was getting ready to run a big feature in Vanity Fair on the case against Chevron in Lago Agrio. He had done his homework. He'd gone to the town and to the remediation sites. He'd met with various scientists, He'd talked to the lawyers on both sides. The last thing he needed was responses from Chevron to a list of technical questions.
One of the list of questions that I assembled with Donsker's help, very technical ones. There were sites specific how the remediation went and then what the findings were during the sort of opposing sample sampling that was done during the court case. They said that they wanted to talk to me, and they wanted me to come. I said, look, I'm happy to talk to you, but only if you answer those questions first.
Seven years later, those questions became a weapon that Chevron used to question Languish's journalistic integrity, mainly because he asked Donziger for his input on them, which frankly is a little weird, but Languish explained that he needed Donziger's input on some of the more technical questions for accuracy, and that he was hoping Donziger could help him freeze the questions in such a way that Chevron would feel more
compelled to answer at any rate. Here's what happened as he was working on the story.
Answer those questions yes or no, tell me what your response is, and if you answer the questions, I'm very happy became at that point. For they never, of course answered the questions. They were very specific questions. Yeah, and then they went after Conde to asked, but they had Grayton Carter and Graydon Carter had balls.
Graydon Carter, of course, was the longtime editor of Vanity Fair.
Those are the days when it was kind of the last years of Braydon Carter being like, don't mess with Braidon Carter. So they when the threat of lawsuit came in, when Chevron started pulling that stuff and threatening, you know, basically saber rattling, heat it up to it, and we went through We did go through a verification process. The piece was in no sense affected by that process. There was absolutely no censorship of any kind. But what did happen is that I in that piece had lines that
were intentionally surreal and facetious. Anything it wasn't absolutely factual had to leave. So the effect of that on the piece at the time, I thought that basically dulled the piece down, like, who the hell wants to read this thing? It's as dull if it has no life to it anymore, And then maybe you saiveryone had that effect, although recently, and because of the Donziger's current troubles, saying maybe six months ago, I read the piece again, I think that's
a pretty damn good piece. Actually it wasn't as bad as I thought it was at the time.
That piece triggered an uptick in media attention on the case, which kept building in two thousand and eight. Then in April that year, the two Ecuadorians who'd been lead eating a lot of the work on the ground, Luis Giansa, who we met in episode two, and Pablo Fajardo, were awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prives.
Unas Tarvis control stodas Hsi mass in his semi processway formsion ilucha parechos aravida on tano jalla Housticia.
I happened to be living in San Francisco at that time and was actually at this awards ceremony. I remember Luis and Pablo getting a standing ovation from the crowd. This was happening right in Chevron's backyard, and they weren't super pleased about it. They took out a full page ad in the San Francisco Chronicle calling Fajardo and Yanza frauds, but it didn't seem to work. The press continued to stack up in favor of the plaintiffs.
Now we want to go to Ecuador, where an epic lawsuit hits an American oil giant against a group of Indians from the Amazon rainforest and environmental activists.
We turned out to Chevron oil giant based in California that's being accused of promoting geopolitical blackmail and its effort to stave awful lawsuit accusing it of contamidating the Ecuadoran Amazon rainforest.
It's been many years now since residents of eggs. In response,
Chevron amped up its pr and lobbying efforts. Its lobbyists began pushing against a trade deal that would benefit Ecuador, and in an email dated September two thousand and eight, various Chevron pr folks are going back and forth with one of their external publicists, a guy named Chris Guidez, who at the time was with the firm Helen Knowlton, about a report that they're preparing the cast doubt on the Equadorian plaintiffs and on some of the evidence that
they've presented in this case. They're also cracking jokes about not wanting to eat anything that comes out of the water in Lago Agrio. A lot of the report that the pr team is working on and talking about in these emails seems to focus on the science in the case. As we heard last time, it's common in Ecuador for both plaintiffs and defendants to commission their own expert reports and submit those to the court, and both sides did.
The plaintiffs hired a US firm called Stratus Consulting. Here's one of their experts, Douglas Beltman, talking to sixty minutes.
It's a disgrace.
They treated Ecuador like a trash heap.
Hey with those stream here.
It's Doug Beltman worked for the EPA on super fun sites in the US. He's now the scientific expert for the people suing Chevron.
Are you saying that.
Texico never could have gotten away with this in the United States.
Oh, absolutely not. It wouldn't have happened in the United States, and if it had happened, they wouldn't have gotten away with leaving it here for thirty years.
And here is a Chevron appointed expert, Pedro Alvarez, professor of Civil and Environmental engineering at Rice University.
When Techaco left Ecuador, the site that it operated a would consider represented a relatively safe scenario for with regards to potential impacts to human health, both because of the measures that they took to contain and clean up any contamination, and because of the nature of the contaminants that have very little mobility and therefore little probability to reach a potential receptor.
On the charge of lasting environmental damage.
That is a vastly exaggerated charge that is unsupported by the evidence.
You can see why the judge might want a report from an independent expert. The court appointed a guy named Richard Cabrera. He was tasked with taking and testing samples from all of the former well sites and drafting a report about which sites had been remediated, which sites were still contaminated, and how much it would cost to clean everything up. He comes up a lot in this story
from here on out, including in Chevron's PR emails. Just a couple weeks after the Chevron reps were emailing about Cabrera in this report, Chevron's longtime PR consultancy Singer of Singer Associates, sent the team a new strategy. It breaks down into three key areas to focus on. One corruption in Ecuador and Corea as the strong man of Ecuador. Two counter attacks against the plaintiffs, including questioning the funding and motives of Cabrera, Donziger and Ecuadorian lawyer Pablo Fajardo.
Three Petro Ecuador is the real culprit. It's a full court press. There are four separate PR agencies, including singers, and they're coordinating with Chevron's PR team. It includes plans for all forms of media and advertising, and even money for a front group or a singer puts it quote the US Chamber of Commerce or another think tank or organization to create an organization solely devoted to addressing the issues of Ecuador and actively attacking its positions on business,
the media, international loans, and socialist policies. But before this strategy could deliver results, the plaintiffs continued to pick up some wins. First, a bill that extended trade benefits to Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia, a bill that Chevron had been lobbying against. It passed.
Thank you all for coming.
I'm pleased.
That legislation extending the nd and Trade Preference Act has made it to my desk, and I'm looking forward to signing this piece of legislation.
Then in two thousand and nine, a documentary on the case called Crude was announced.
Locate On.
Now has just been in destruction.
The total area in which texacooted.
In March, the Chevron PR team was strategizing again, and chrisky Is wrote, quote, our lt long term strategy is to demonize Donziger. This film provides us a great opportunity to do so.
It's not by a single.
Before the film came out sixty minutes aired, it's special on the case.
These are people who never believed they had a right to sue an American company in their own court system.
Yeah, but you know what Chevron says.
They say that this is being driven by a New York plaintiff's lawyer, and they don't mean that as a compliment.
I'm well aware of that.
They've taken out advertisements in the equadorm press with my name, trying to attack my reputation.
What do you think of that?
Well, I think that it puts me in the membership, frankly, of a very distinguished club of people.
With the media narratives spiraling out of its grasp, Chevron brought in the big dogs, the law firm Gibson Done in fall two thousand and nine. The firm was just wrapping up a landmark case for Dole, the food company, which had also been fighting a damages suit in Latin America for decades. Nicaragua and Banana farmers had sued the company for knowingly spraying their fields with a pesticide that
causes sterilization. They won in a Nicaragua court, but Gibson Dune attorneys argued that that court had no jurisdiction over Dole, an American company.
When did you get involved in the case?
What year?
Late two thousand and nine, early twenty ten.
That's Randy Mastro again. He led Gibson Dunn's work for Chevron on the case.
In Ecuador, Okay, and what were you know? What was sort of the task.
Gibson Dun was asked to join the team of outside council representing Chevron in connection with the litigation in Ecuador and in connection with trying to find out the truth about what was going on in Ecuador.
By this point, not only was the media tipping in favor of the plaintiffs, but President Correa had been publicly supportive of the suit as well. Luis Jansa, Ecuador says it wasn't even so much that Correa was a great friend to the plaintiffs. He just wasn't as much in the pocket of oil companies as previous Ecuadorian presidents had been.
Losioris sien pre estaman.
In parcel comp Previous governments were always biased in favor of the company, he says, nonsotrosimos. We had to have a lot of actions in Quito, with marches, meetings, press conferences, meetings with politicians, all of that, a lot, a lot, a lot of work to neutralize the government just so they didn't bow completely to the company. When Correa was elected, though.
He.
Visited the area and talked to the people and realized the magnitude of the damage the company had done and that the struggle we had been carrying out for more than a decade was just and he decided to support it. He end the CEO. And on top of all that, in two thousand and eight, Ecuador had ratified a new constitution, one that gave equal rights to indigenous people, and that included a radical new idea, yeah, the rights of nature. Ecuador was the first country to include these rights in
its constitution. At some point, we're going to do a whole season on rights of nature because it's fascinating and it's really become an interesting new legal tool. But in broad strokes, if you think about private property rights and how they ascribe control over nature to whatever human has purchased this piece of land, rights of nature says, forget that nature has its own rights. All life forms have the right to exist and to continue living. And here's
where it gets interesting from a legal perspective. It says that legally, we the people have authority to enforce these rights on behalf of ecosystems. The ecosystem itself can be named as the defendant. It's hard to imagine Chevron or really any oil company being happy about this kind of thing. And so, in two thousand and nine, with multiple pr firms and a new legal team, on board, the company started to tell a different story.
A bitter environmental lawsuit against Chevron, the second largest oil company in the United States, appears to be entering its critical phase in Ecuador.
First, they hired former CNN reporter Gene Randall to host a mirror image version of the sixty minutes documentary with their side of the story.
Chevron asked toxicologist Thomas mchu to study the issue.
The health effects that reported are attributable to exposure to bacteria, which is widespread in the drinking water sources. They're not attributable to petroleum exposure, no.
Doubt about that.
There's no doubt in my mind.
Despite the claims that's correct, there are fears such findings may be trumped by politics. Ecuador's President Rafael Correa loudly supports the case against Chevron's At Correa's instigation, with the support of the Amazon Defense Coalition, seven Ecuadorian officials who signed Texico's environmental liability release faced criminal charges.
He's talking about the attorneys we mentioned at the top of this episode, Ricardo Risvega and Rodrigo Perez Palaris, along with seven Ecuadorian officials. They were accused of tampering with a release form that had become pretty central to Chevron's defense in this case. Shortly after that nineteen ninety four meeting we mentioned in episode two, where Texico's lawyer was meeting with the president and various environment ministers, the government
came to an agreement with Texaco about remediation. Here's Chevrons spokesperson Kent Robertson explaining that arrangement to NPR. In late two thousand and eight.
Texico held a thirty seven percent interest in the consortium, with its majority partner being Petro Ecuador. Texico is not operated in Ecuador for eighteen years. When it was time for Texico to depart Ecuador, the party sat down and worked out a remediation program where Texco would address its proportionate share of the consortium thirty seven zero point five percent, and Petro Ecuador assumed responsibility for the balance of the operations.
In nineteen ninety eight, after they had remediated thirty seven point five percent of the pollution, Texico submitted documentation to the government and the government signed a document releasing the company from any further cleanup. Again, the argument the plaintiffs make, and that the lawyer and researcher Judith Kimerling made to us as well, is that Texico was the operator, and that means they set everything up and they taught everyone
how to do things. They created the oil industry in Ecuador, and they set a low standard for environmental responsibility. I asked Randy Mastro about that.
We've had a few people kind of float this idea of like, yes, okay, technically Petro Ecuador has been doing all this stuff, but you know it was Texco who trained them, and it Texco who built the whole system. What is the response to that kind of line of thought?
Wow, that is revisionist history and you know, trying to put the blame where it doesn't belong. Texago got kicked out of the country starting in nineteen ninety. Texico spent you know, back in the early nineties, you know, forty plus million dollars on remediation and other relief, and in those days, that was a lot of money. And in independent testing services confirmed that Texico did what it was supposed to do.
Like a lot of things in this story, this is kind of true if you squinted it for long enough. Texico began exploring for oil in Ecuador in nineteen sixty four thanks to an agreement with the military junta that controlled the country at the time. The company struck black Gold in nineteen sixty seven. At that time, Texico was in a partnership with Golf Oil, and both companies were
eventually acquired by Chevron. In nineteen seventy four, Ecuador formed a state owned oil company, which would later become Petro Ecuador. Texico and Golf each gave up a portion of their ownership to the new state oil company, and then in nineteen seventy seven, Petro Ecuador bought Golf out and they became the majority shareholder. Texico retained ownership of thirty seven
point five percent of the concession. That's why that number keeps cropping up, but it continued to be the operator overall of all of the consortiums exploration and production assets until nineteen ninety. In September nineteen eighty eight, Petro Ecuador alerted Texco that it intended to take over as operator by nineteen ninety. In nineteen ninety, texpet and Petro Ecuador entered into an agreement to transition operations of the oil
fields from Texpat to Petro Amazonas. Texico retained its minority stake in the concession until its original contract expired in nineteen ninety two, and in nineteen ninety four, Texico's lawyer was being flown in Petro Ecuador's plane to the president's beach house. Which doesn't exactly sound like they were kicked out of Ecuador. Here's Mastro again.
So a professional and you and a company expert in doing these things got kicked out of the country and remediated the wells that it was responsible for, and at every level of the Ecuadorian government there were releases for
that activity. Then over the next twenty years, because Ecuador kicked Texaco out of the country, only Petro Ecuador drills and spills, no oversight, none of the kind of you know, professionalism that might be expected, you know, just drilling and spilling to make money for Ecuador.
Just a reminder, here's Judith Kimberling on what she saw when Texico was drilling professionally in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the nineteen eighties.
The company had just dug a hole in the ground, dumped their toxic drilling waste, and then abandoned it in the rainforest. And when you abandon toxic waste in the rainforests.
Some of it seats into the ground.
You also get a lot of rain, so it overflows into the surrounding areas, and I was appalled.
Mastro and his firm were hired in lead. Two thousand and nine, the sixty Minutes special had come out. Equadorian attorneys Luisiansa and Papa Cardo had gotten the Goldman Environmental Prize, Equadorian President Rafael Correa had voiced public support for the case, and the Constitution of Ecuador had been changed to include
the rights of nature. A documentary about the case by an award winning filmmaker was about to debut at Sundance, and the balance of power in this case was about to shift again next time on Drilled.
No way would any rational person, He's very rational, jeopardize things by cutting horse. He did nothing, He didn't bribe anyone. He has a big mouth and he mouthed off this guy kill prill insurer.
I think if I had it to do over, I would advise my client to completely protest the trial. And unfortunately Steven didn't have that option. Because Steven lives in New York and he's subject to the jurisdiction of the court and he has to defend the case. But my clients did have that option, and that was not a card we chose to play.
You know, I'm not trying to encourage you guys to focus on the misconduct. I think that's what Chevron wants us to all being. But the point I want to make is that, you know, while I think that the actions against Steven 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.
Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency podcast Network. It's created and reported by me Amy Westerveldt. My co reporter on 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 Beeman. Special thanks to Larissa Ikeda, Trevor Gowen, and Emily Gertz. Our fact checker is wu Dan Yan. Our First Amendment
attorney is James Wheaton with the First Amendment Project. Our artwork for this season was created by the talented Matt Fleming. If you are a Patreon subscriber, Thank you. Your money is helping to make this season. As a special thank you, we will be putting bonus content in the Patreon feed and also releasing episodes early there. If you're not a member and you want to support our work, please check
out patreon dot com slash drilled. That's it for this time, Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.