When I know. This is Pablo Fajardo. He's the guy who, along with Luisianza, won the Goldman Prize back in two thousand and eight for his work fighting Texaco and then Chevron in Ecuador. Remember, Chevron took an ad out about how he and Luis were frauds. Fajardo was actually the lead attorney on the case against Chevron in Ecuador, but because Chevron targeted Donziger in its press push, he shows up less and less in stories about the case from
twenty ten onward. But he's still working on it today. We're going to get into more of that as the season goes on. But first a quick recap because we're halfway through this season and it's a very complicated story. Okay, So to recap. From the late nineteen sixties to nineteen ninety, Texico drilled for oil in the Ecuadorian rainforest. The company helped to start the oil industry there. A large group of both indigenous and non indigenous residents say Texico left
a big mess and they should clean it up. An Ecuadorian lawyer named Cristobald Bonifas first filed a suit against Texico in New York in nineteen ninety three. When Chevron bought Texico in two thousand and one, it inherited this case, which was still going on. Like Texico before it, Chevron lobbied for the case to be tried in Ecuador. In two thousand and three, the New York courts agreed and the case was refiled, this time against Chevron in Ecuador.
At this point, Bonifas kind of fades into the background. Donziger and Fijardos start to get a lot more involved, and they start to bring worldwide attention to the case. But still it drags on for years and years and years. When we left off last time, it was two thousand and nine. The plaintiffs were on a bit of a winning streak and Chevron was gearing up for a fight, or really another round in this fight. I didn't call
this season Laluja munggla for nothing. In episode four, we dug into the details of one particular tactic, filing a complaint before an international arbitration tribunal that happened in September two thousand and nine. Weeks before that complaint was filed, Chevron released on YouTube a batch of videos taken with hidden spy cameras like those pen cameras that you see in novelty shops or advertised in skymall, teeny tiny cameras
hidden inside normal looking pens. Chevron claimed the videos showed that the judge in the Ecuador case was being bribed. It all had a very national Enquirer caught on tape judge accepting bribes sort of vibe to it. In most of the tapes. An Ecuadorian man named Diego Borgia and an American named Wayne Hansen. We're meeting with the guy who was the judge in the case at that time,
Judge Juan Nuniez. Here's a tidbit from one of these videos, and just to note the audio quality is terrible because you know pen.
Cameras Spener who is maximum Santa fifty three.
So to set up these meetings with Judge Nuniez, Borgia and Hansen had claimed to be environmental remediation experts who were tracking the case because there might be work in it for them. Eventually, when these videos came out, Judge Nunia said, yeah, I met with these guys. I explained the case to them and how Ecuadorian law works. None of that's illegal. That all tracks with the tapes that
he's in. He insisted he'd done nothing wrong, but still in September, right around the time Chevron was filing its arbitration claim, Nuniaz recused himself from the case because of this whole scandal that set the trial back months, because a new judge had to come on board, familiarize himself with the case and read through thousands and thousands of pages of documents and filings and transcripts, all of that.
A couple weeks after all of this was in the news, the Associated Press published a story that poked a lot of holes in these videos, especially the credibility of the American Wayne Hansen. As the story unfolded over the next few months, it just kept getting weirder. It sounds more like a Cohen Brothers movie than a law case. And that was the tip of the iceberg, that wild ride. Right after this quick break, I want to tell you about one of my favorite climate podcasts, Mothers of Invention.
Their tagline is a man made problem with a feminist solution, so good, and Mothers of Invention is a climate justice podcast like you've never heard before, joined former Irish president Mary Robinson, comedian Maeve Higgins and series producer the Molly Kadi Kara as they celebrate black, brown and Indigenous leaders all over the world fighting from the front lines. Of course, one of my personal favorites is their recent episode with Mary Annie's Hegler, my co host on Hot Take and
my favorite person to listen to on climate justice. But really I listen to every episode. They're all great find mothers of invention wherever you listen to podcasts. Quaene Hansen does a great job of playing the bumbling, confused American in these videos. Here he is asking how much longer the trial might go on?
And we have much for the forty five more days than the trial was over.
Again, Hanson claimed to be a remediation expert who was hoping to get in on some of the work on that front once Chevron was found guilty, But in October two thousand and nine, the Associated Press reported that Hanson was in fact in ex con with no verifiable experience
in remediation work. That story read quote. Hanson, in two brief interviews, told AP he had water treatment projects in Mexico and Ecuador, but when a reporter questioned those claims, he hung up Chevron claimed to have no association with Hanson, but the company did offer to pay for any security and legal fees that resulted from his role in these videos. But remember there was someone else in those tapes too,
Diego Borgia. And Borgia was a different story. Initially, Chevron described him as a quote unquote good Samaritan, but later it came out that Borgia and his wife, Sarah Portilla, had both worked for Chevron at various points. At that point, Chevron updated their description of Borgia to a logistics contractor for them, but also Borgia, his uncle, and Chevron's attorneys had offices in a building that Borgia's uncle owned. In June, a couple months before the videos were released, Chevron moved
Borgia and his wife to the US. The company claims that was done to protect the Borgias. They rented the couple a house in California and paid them a stipend of ten thousand dollars a month for about two years.
We only know all this stuff because the plaintiffs hired a private investigator to look into Borgia and Hansen, which turned up all kinds of stuff, including some tapes of their own audio recordings of calls between Borgia and an acquaintance that make Borgia seem like, well, let's say, not quite a good samaritan. Here's a moment from one of those tapes. You'll hear Borge's acquaintance first and then him
you can tip the balance to either side. His acquaintance says, so I had to, of course, and for either of the two sides. Look at how much it tipped just now says this was around the time that Nunia's had just recused himself.
And looking up for.
What they haven't been able to do and how long a year or something, Borgia says they threw that judge out in what three days? Two days? There are several of these tapes, and some of them also called Chevron's scientific experts into question. Borza talks about collecting samples for the company, which he says he's been doing since two
thousand and four. He also claims to have set up a bunch of supposedly independent labs to test samples for Chevron, and documents that were submitted to the ECUADORI in court do show not only that Borges's wife worked for the lab that Chevron used to test contamination samples, but also that Borgia was handing some samples off directly to her.
None of this looked good for Chevron, But by this point, late two thousand and nine, they had brought on the law firm Gibson Done and lawyer Randy Mastro was busy gathering evidence of his own about the plaintiffs scientific experts.
There were a series of wow moments.
Here's Mastro talking to us via zoom from his place in New York describing what he dug up on the plaintiffs once Chevron brought Gibson dun in to help.
What are the very first of these subpoenas that we were able to issue in the United States was to compel the testimony of a scientific expert Steve Donziger had hired, named doctor Charles Combacher from Georgia.
If you're wondering how Chevron's lawyers were able to subpoena things from the plaintiffs when the case was still going on in Ecuador, I get it. It seems very weird. Here's the deal. There's a section of the US Legal Code called Section seventeen eighty two, and it says, basically, if you're an American or an American company or organization, and you're involved in a lawsuit in another country, and there are documents or American witnesses that might help you
in that litigation, you can subpoena them. That's what Master used to get Combacher's deposition.
And he was supposedly played this expert in Ecuador confirming that based on the research and tests that he had done, that there was significant environmental contamination done in the Amazon.
But when we compelled doctor Combacker's testimony in Georgia, what he actually testified was that the report that Steve Donziger and his Ecuadorian lawyers submitted to the court in Ecuador, what was not Combacker's conclusion that he had not in fast concluded that it was a significant environmental damage, and the work that he had done was further revealed that Donziger had asked him for signature pages separate from his report.
The plaint is, of course deny this. They say Combucker was fired, that he thought they owed him money, and this deposition was some sort of revenge. Donziger says Kalmbucker authorized the submission of his report and that he sent his signature separately because he'd already returned home to Georgia. In any case, it was enough for Gibson Done to get to go ahead from a US judge District Court Judge Lewis a Caplan of the Southern District of New
York to file more subpoenas. Next, Mastro went after Douglas Beltman, the executive VP from Stratus Consulting, that we heard from last time. It's a disgrace. They treated Ecuador like a trash heap. He also subpoenaed Beltman's colleague and Maeste. At issue is the report by Richard Cabrera, the court appointed expert. Remember I mentioned before that this guy was going to
come up again and again. Cabrera and the Cabrera report were becoming increasingly contentious, in part because Donziger was talking about the report a lot in the press, and because it was Cabrera's report that said, this is how much Chevron should owe to clean up this mess, and it was in the many, many billions of dollars. According to Mastro, Cabrera was supposed to be neutral and not tied to either side in the case, and he was increasingly finding
that that was not the case at all. Here's Master explaining more.
We sought by subpoena the records and then testimony from a firm that became a principal outside expert for Donziger Andess, Ecuadorian lawyers, Stratus scientists at Stratus, and when those records were ordered produced pursuing too our subpoena, and they showed that the supposedly independent expert in Ecuador, who had been appointed by the court to be an objective, independent party in assessing environmental damage and how much there was and
attributing it to two parties if there were found to be environmental damage, that in fact that was not an independent objective report, had been ghost written word for word by Stratus.
Donzegher says, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this.
That allegation is just a bunch of bs on every level. Stratus did write or draft most of the Cabrera Report. Cabrera, though reviewed it, signed it. They worked together. There was a massive amount of information, you know, literally tens of thousands of chemical sampling results in any single individual would never have the capacity to pull that together analyze it by himself or herself. So we did what Chevron did and what's customary, and courts all over the world, including
in the United States. We used our experts to support Cabrera, who was also our expert, because we were the ones who asked for his report and Chevron did not.
In fact, Donziger says Chevron was doing the same thing with their experts.
So Chevron used the same method in support of its experts, you know, would use its US based experts to help its equador and experts write their reports. And this was standard operating procedure under Ecuadoran law in terms of how expert reports were done in Ecuador in all cases, in particular this case.
But Master thought the plaintiff's involvement with Cabrera was fishy and Kaplan a US judge agreed, So in May twenty ten, he okayd Masters next and possibly most critical move, a subpoena for all of the outtakes of the documentary, crued some six hundred hours worth of tape shot by documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger.
So you have this building block, you have what happened with Combacker. Simultaneous to this, there's proceedings are going on to get documents and testimony from Stratus status officials. Right,
Joe Berlinger had made a documentary Crude. It had been on the film festival circuit, and the issue of whether Cabrera was an independent objective expert who'd done an independent report and reached conclusions independently was critical in the Ecuadorian proceeding because it was the basis on which Donziger and his Ecuadori lawyers were asking the Ecuadorian court to impose
billions in damages on Chevron. So Joe Burlinchard produces Crude, and it shows on the festival circuit, then it comes out on Netflix, and a curious thing was picked up
by the Chevron team. There was a change in scenes from the film festival version to the Netflix version, and the scene that had been changed or deleted was a scene that showed someone supposedly working as an independent expert for Cabrera, was in fact meeting with the plaintiffs lawyers and their clients at a session that Joe Berlinger was Steve Donziger in attendance, and then by the time it came out on Netflix, that scene had been deleted.
The filmmaker Joe Berlinger fought this subpoena and the characterization of his work is not journalism. It became a really big, high profile First Amendment case in its own rate, and we're going to get into that in future episodes, but for now, keep in mind this is all happening in twenty ten and heading into twenty eleven, and there's still no verdict in Ecuador yet. So you've got the international arbitration proceeding happening, then you've got all this seventeen eighty
two action from Mastro. Eventually he does get the crude out takes, and he fils more and more subpoenas. They get Donziger himself for weeks of depice positions, and he's even required to hand over his personal diary and various correspondences between himself and the lawyers in Ecuador, him and Pablo Fajardo, him and various litigation financers. Everything. Again, this is while the case is still going on in Ecuador. Even with all that, though, you.
Know, it was very clear in i'd say December of two thousand and ten January twenty eleven that the case was going to end and they were going to lose. I mean, it was just obvious, you know, that all their little tricks had not worked and the case was ripe for decision the evidence against them was overwhelming and
they were going to lose. So instead of just accepting that fact and appealing, they prior to the issuance of the judgment and Ecuador, they filed the RICO case against us, describing what they thought was a criminal conspiracy to extort money from them.
RICO stands for racketeer, influence and Corrupt Organizations. It's a US federal law that was created to deal with the mob and various other types of organized crime. In more recent years, it's been used against big corporations. For example, RICO has been invoked in a law of the opioid litigation. In its initial RICO complaint against Donziger and Fajardo and the plaintiffs, Chevron alleged that the legal team had cooked up a sham case and then set about falsifying evidence
and bribing judges to make it stick. About two weeks after this RICO case was filed, the Ecuadorian courts finally delivered a judgment, eight years after the trial had started. Chevron was guilty and I owed more than eighteen billion dollars in damages.
So when the decision in Ecuador came down in our favor, that came down two weeks after Chevron had already tried to preempt it by suing US under the Rico case. So when the decision came down in Ecuador, I was in New York and, you know, with some other lawyers in the US who had been working on the case, and we got the news and we were obviously thrilled, but we were also at that point dealing with the Rico case. So it was all confusing, and in a weird way, Chevron had stolen the moment.
The judge in Ecuador by this point, a guy named Nicholas Soembrano, made a point of saying that he had not relied on either Combacker's report or the Kaber report, not because he'd found evidence of a problem with either one, but because he didn't want the controversy swirling around the two to undermine his ruling. Next time on drilled.
So in the mornings, we would be lined up in this very long line. We had to get there very early in October November, so it was cold, so we
would be all bundled up. We would be in this long line to get through security to get into the courthouse, and we'd have our blow ups and our boxes with us and our briefcases, and then you would see a row of five black Lincoln suburbans arrive with tinted windows, and out of it would come the senior management of Chevron, their head of litigation, their entire legal team, and they were ushered in through a separate entrance as VIPs, so they didn't have to stand in the line with all
the rest of us. They would get out and go straight into the courtroom. So we would have been in line for forty five minutes when they would arrive and go straight through.
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 Beeman, fact checking by wodn Yan. Our artwork for this season was done by the super talented Matt Fleming. Special thanks
to Trevor Gowen and Emily Gertz. If you are a Patreon subscriber, thank you your money is helping to make this season, And as a special thank you to Patreon members, we're providing a variety of benefits, including bonus content and early access to episodes in this season. If that sounds appealing to you, or you just want to support our work, go over to patreon dot com slash drilled and sign up.
We also have some merch associated with that. 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.