When we left off last time, it was two thousand and three, and the Ecuadorian plaintiffs had just agreed to refile their case against Chevron Texico down in Ecuador. At the center of this case were these waste pits, unlined pits where Texico would dump toxic wastewater from oil drilling. When the case was first filed in nineteen ninety three in New York, Texico said it had cleaned up its
fair share and anything left was Petro Ecuador's mess. The plaintiffs said the cleanup was no good and that Texico had overseen all operations and should clean it all up, that it should be based on who did what, not who got what percentage of the profits. Ten years later, the arguments hadn't changed, but the defendant had. Chevron's acqui position of Texaco was complete in two thousand and one, and it had inherited this case as part of that acquisition.
Today we're going to.
Look at what happened next as the trial got underway in Ecuador. I want to tell you about one of my favorite podcasts. It's called Floodlins from the Atlantic. In this year of crisis, it's worth remembering that the country has been through a lot of big extreme weather disasters before, and history often repeats itself. Floodlines is about Hurricane Katrina
in New Orleans. It follows the lives of four people who lived through the flooding and its aftermath, and it shows how government failures and misinformation led to tragedies beyond what the hurricane caused. Host Van Nukirk shows what we can learn today from that disaster fifteen years ago. Listen to Floodlines wherever you get your podcasts. A bunch of people told us that if we wanted to understand what the oil pollution in the Amazon really looked like, we
had to talk to Donald Moncayo. He was born and raised right at the epicenter.
Minore Donald Moncayo, and.
He was born about two hundred meters from the second well Texico drilled in the Amazons in nineteen sixty seven. I'm Ammy Westervelt and this is Drilled Season five, La Lucha Longa. This is episode three, the Trial. If you haven't listened to episodes one and two, go back and do that. This is one of those seasons you're going to have to listen to the episodes in order to keep up.
All right.
American attorney Stephen Donziger would partner up with Ecuadorian attorneys who would file the case in the courts there. When the case started kicking off in Ecuador in two thousand and three, Donald Moncayo was the guy who would lead court officials and any visiting press on what the plaintiffs called the quote unquote toxic tour, showing them abandoned waste pits and pools of oil. People who took that tour would have heard him say something like this.
Thing too toxico dosuecos cannot be memento.
In short, all the toxic waste was released into these unlined pits. Also, they put in a curved tube so that the pit would not overflow and the oil would settle on either side. They called these tubes.
Goose necks yelci and porss estavan dirihidos asia rios law.
And one of these goose necks were directed towards rivers, lagoons, or streams, so all that toxic waste are pumping out would disappear into the lagoons, rivers, or streams.
No sotros in la the loriosqui, so those of us who were at the lower part of the river.
We had no drinkable water, and still today there's no drinkable water in the countryside. When Stephen Donzeger had first gone to Ecuador in nineteen ninety three to help with research for this case, he saw a lot of the things that Mancayo talks about, and it was.
Just almost unimaginable the degree of creation the open air toxic waste pits that have been deliberately galged out of the jungle.
Also in nineteen ninety three, the original case was filed against Texico in New York. That same year, the US signed a bilateral investment treaty with Ecuador. These treaties basically exist to protect US companies that are doing business in other countries and to boost American exports. One important thing they provide is access to international arbitration, a separate system that allows the parties to circumvent local courts. Marcos Oriana
is an expert on this system. He teaches law at American University and is the EWAN Special Rapporteur on Toxics and Human Rights.
The international investment arbitration can be described as a private system of adjudication that decides on the propriety of governmental measures, but it lacks the safeguards for accountability and transparency that characterized constitutional democracies governed by the rule of law. If we look back in time. In its origins, and international investment arbitration came to replace colonial system colonial systems of extraction of domination.
In other words, once it was companies rather than countries that became the colonizers in the world, they needed a new system.
When the former colonies acquired independence in the advent of decolonization, largely after the Second World War and the advent of the United Nations, the former imperial power needed a legal system to protect the economic interests of their corporations, and international investment arbitration offered such an alternative. Today, in this current day of age, many in civil society see the
arbitration regime as yet another tool of corporate globalization. And this is because when governments regulate in the public interest, they become the targets of corporations that utilize the arbitration system to challenge those acts of authority.
The US Ecuador Investment Treaty went into effect in nineteen ninety seven, so by the time this case that was originally filed against Texaco in New York in nineteen ninety three, was refiled against Chevron in Ecuador in two thousand and three. The system Oriana describes was very much in effect. On top of that, Lucio Gutierrez was president. Jets had been elected as something of an anti corporate revolutionary, but within the first few months of his presidency he had become
very protrayed and particularly cozy with the United States. None of that voted well for the indigenous plaintiffs seeking compensation for the damage that had been done in the Amazon. In two thousand and two, the Appellate Court in New York had ruled that the case against Texaco, which was now Chevron Texico, should be tried in Ecuador. But the New York court said any final ruling and financial penalty imposed against Chevron Texico would be enforceable in the United States.
We filed and there was a hearing very first day. You show up and both sides present their case or their theory of the case the very first day, and on that day I'll never forget Texico. Chevron's lawyer, local lawyer, his name was A daffel kyehas been with the company for years and years. Read their response to our lawsuit, every word of it. It must have taken him hours,
you know. And that told me two things. One is, their entire strategy was obstruction and delay, Like you don't need to read every word of a one hundred page document, you just could have summarized it. And number two is a main defense was that they were denying that the Ecuadorian courts had jurisdiction because they were chevron and even though they had bought Texico, it was Texico that did it,
not them. So they had agreed in the US as a condition of getting the case out of US courts and avoiding a jury trial, they had agreed they would accept jurisdiction in Ecuador. And the first thing they did on the first day of the trial is to claim the case should be dismissed because of a lack of jurisdiction. And Holy Moses, I mean I just couldn't believe it.
I mean maybe I was naive, but like, how do you argue one thing in one place and then you go to that other court where you're bound by your promise and you just try to switch it.
On the first day, the request for dismissal was denied and the trial got underway in two thousand and three. Trials in Ecuador work a lot differently than they do in the US. They run according to the civil law system, also sometimes called the Roman system, whereas the US got its legal system called the common law system from the UK. The key difference lies in jury trials. We call up Alejandro Godo, an expert on Latin American law, to explain well.
One aspect of American exceptionalism, which I think is truly exceptional, is the jury system in non criminal cases, in civil cases in the Chevron case. Even England, which is another country from where the United States copy the Jurish system, abolished it in the nineteenth century and there are no more jeurry civil cases juris civil cases in England.
The initial hearing in the Chevron trial in Ecuador only lasted six days. Both sides presented their case directly to a judge. But in Ecuador it's the judge's responsibility to figure out the truth. In legal cases, to investigate figure things out, and that can take months or years. We had Donziger walk us through that first day in court in Lago Agrille, so you.
Know, I'll never forget the first day of the trial in Ecuador, just like I'll never forget my first trip, you know, in nineteen ninety three. It was the first day. The trial was in in October, but the first day was really important because the effected communities, the indigenous groups.
There's five indigenous groups that were part of the lawsuit and a lot of other non indigenous Amazon community They organized to come in from all over the surrounding you know, Amazon rainforest, you know, by canoe and bus and walking, and you know, however they could get to this town
where the trial was going to be held. The town's called Lago Agrio, which has so much symbolic importance because the only reason Lago Augrio exists is because that's the place Texico first found oil in nineteen sixty seven.
There were very few people in the courtroom initially in the morning, which Donziger thought was strange. He thought maybe the guards had scared some of the plaintiffs off, or maybe they just weren't used to being able to go into the courtroom.
It was a very kind of wild West town and that's where the trial was convening, in a building it was like a commercial building that was rented out by the local court to have a court there. People had come in from all over the Amazon and they'd organized this big march and there were pictures and signs, hostsia and everyone was dressed up in their traditional clothing. I got to the court and to the building that housed
the court. The courtroom was upstairs, maybe three flights of stairs, and the first thing I saw was these arm guards. They looked like swat teams from the military that were
standing guard outside the court. And as the morning wore on and the Chevron lawyer Ka has started reading this really boring opposition that just started to take hours, I was like, wait a second, you know, I can't wait for there to be a lunch break, because I'm going down to the street and I'm going to bring everyone up into court and probably around I don't know, eleven thirty in the morning, you know, late morning, when we're
soon about to break. I suddenly hear this like right chant from the street, you know, you know, all sorts of chants and noise, and it was like the crescendo. It was like building into a crescendo, but you could hear the noise rising and rising, and it made me feel so good because I knew exactly what it was. I know it was the people affected after decades of abuse, were coming to assert themselves and kind of let it
all out. And by then, I mean, there had to be hundreds, maybe a thousand, two thousand people on this little street, this dirt street, right in front of the courthouse, and they were standing on trucks and there were microphones. I started talking to some of the people who had traveled, you know, from their ancestral lands to this town, and I'm like, why aren't you guys in the courtroom come up with you? Come up with me. And many of them looked at me and they're like, oh, we can
go into court. I'm like, yeah, it's your country, it's your court, it's your case. Yes you can come. When we went back in, I marched up the stairs with you know, who knows how many people behind me, Digenous women who traditional clothing and all sorts of people, and we just packed the hell out of that courtroom. And you know, it was really an emotional day.
If Chevron had entertained ideas that this case would move to Ecuador and be forgotten, Donziger's media savvy took care of that. Reporters flew in from all over the world, met with Donziger, and the Ecuadorian attorneys took the toxic tour with Moncayo and sent reports back home. Here's a clip from NPR's All Things Considered as the trial got underway in October two thousand and three.
In northern Ecuador, a trial is underway against Chevron Texico.
The civil suit accuses the.
Company of contaminating the groundwater of a formerly pristine area of the Amazon. The Ecuadorians, who.
After that initial six day trial ended the court and both legal teams brought in various experts to conduct field investigations to determine the extent of contamination in the areas where the plaintiffs lived, and whether or not the cleanup that Texico had done back in the nineties was sufficient. The court gathered various other pieces of information, too, including historical information on whether or not it really was common presscice in the oil industry to dump wastewater in unlined pits.
Tim Lagonegro, the geologist and longtime oil industry worker we heard from last time, was pretty emphatic that it was not.
You would never put wastewater in an unlined pit. Never. Everyone knows that it's toxic water putting that into a rainforest. They had tarps in those days, too, impermeable vinyl sheeting. It's just normal, has been forever.
But given how long the case had been going on by this point, and how much time had passed since Texico had left the country, the trial dragged on and on one year than it was two years, three years. In December two thousand and six, more than three years after the trial had started, in Lago Agrio, Chevron filed a complaint against the government of Ecuador for failing to
resolve cases quickly. That complaint was in reference to a different set of cases, complaints that Texico had brought up back in the nineties, but the message was clear, speed it up already, or will see you in arbitration. On top of all of the obvious reasons Chevron may have wanted to officially complain about the Ecuadorian court system, there was a major change around this time in the country's leadership.
Lalo Rodos, Rafael Forrea, ALIANAI.
In the run up to the election of Rafael Correa in November two thousand and six, various business analysts and think tanks in the US warned that if he were elected, Ecuador would go the way of Venezuela and Bolivia, turning against US corporate interests. Among other concerns was the fact that Corea was staunchly against extending the bilateral investment treaty with the US, which was set to expire at the
end of two thousand and six. Even fairly mainstream media outlets like NPR played into the idea that Korea was the scary second coming of Chavez. Yesterday's balloting reduced a field of thirteen to two men, one a banana tycoon, the other a left wing supporter of Venezuela's president Uga Chavez.
Alva and Noboa, who rested control of his family's banana business to become one of Ecuador's wealthiest men, held a slight lead through the night. Running a close second was Rafael Coorea, a former economy minister who challenged the political orthodoxy, advocating cheap credit for the poor and renegotiation of all foreign oil contracts.
By this point, Texico had long since pulled out of Ecuador, and Chevron wasn't doing business there either. In fact, they never had, but still a president that was promising to renegotiate foreign oil contracts. That's not really what you want when you're a US oil company defending yourself in Ecuador's courts.
It would be.
Another five years before the judge and Ecuador would rule on the case against Chevron, and a lot would happen in the meantime. Next time on Drilled, we hear from the other attorneys in this case.
He's talking about mobilizing to put people in front of the courthouse, the thousand people in front of the courthouse, to pressure and he's saying, literally, we have to pressure the judge.
We have to make him know who's boss.
Chevron's attorneys get indicted, Accusations of fraud and bribery fly on both sides, and an incredible international pr war kicks into gear.
The Sequoias took us to their community hut, where we saw the driving force behind the suit, Stephen Donzinger, a New York lawyer, far from home. 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 plaintiffs lawyer, and they don't mean that as a compliment. Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency Podcast Network. The show was created by me Amy Westervelt. This season, my co reporter is Karen Savage. Our editor is Julia Ritchie. Sound design and mixing by Mark Busch, original score by b Beeman, additional production help from Sarah Ventry. Special thanks
to Larissa Ikeda. Thanks to NPR for some of the clips used in this episode. Our artwork for this season was drawn by Matt Fleming. You can find corresponding stories, photos, and documents for this season on our website at drillednews dot com. If you are a Patreon subscriber, thank you. Your support is helping to make this season. And as a special thank you, if you would like to get next week's episode early, go check your feed because it's
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