Here’s the introduction to the piece. This environmental lawyer can’t travel Chevron are taking advantage …
To this day, Chevron hasn’t paid a cent of the $US9.5 ($13) billion in damages, leaving the plaintiffs with no funding to clean up the oil spills and waste, or even treat the resulting illnesses.
Here’s the first half of the report
“My liberty is deprived,” he said on Zoom from his kitchen. “They’re trying to crush me so I’ll give up.”
The attorney, now in his mid-50s with a head of thick, graying hair, stood bent over his counter, looking directly into his webcam through thick-framed glasses. But though his expression was weary, he made it clear he was not out of energy.
Donziger’s work used to take him to all corners of the world, including to the depths of Ecuadorian Amazon. Nearly twenty years ago, he sued a multinational oil giant on behalf of thousands of the rainforest’s residents. The ensuing legal saga landed him in home detention on August 6, 2019.
The story exemplifies what the lawyer calls the “corporate capture” of the U.S. legal system, and for the climate movement today, its implications are terrifying.
In the 1970s, the multinational energy company Texaco set up oil fields in northeast Ecuador. The operations spilled more than 16 million gallons of crude oil, 80 times more oil than was spilled in BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. The company also dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into hundreds of unlined waste pits in the lush rainforest using disposal processes which had long been outlawed in Texas. Luis Yanza, an Ecuadorian Indigenous environmental activist and president of the Amazon Defence Coalition, first moved to the affected area as a teenager.
“From when I first arrived there in 1977, I saw the oil pooling… and there was the smell of fuel,” he said speaking through a translator. “We would get fungus on our skin, on our hands, on our faces, and it would change the colour of the skin, we would get white spots… When we were in school when we were kids, we would laugh about the discoloration. But it was a consequence of contamination.”
Indeed, the pollution, which leached into the soil and water local communities relied on to drink and bathe, has been linked to not only dermatitis, but also increased rates of cancer and birth defects.
In 1992, Texaco’s contract ran out and the company exited the region, leaving a legacy so toxic that it’s been called “Amazon’s Chernobyl.” Texaco said it remediated its damages, but the majority of the wells it claims to have cleaned were still full of toxic pollutants.
“There continued to be cases of cancer, infection problems and various things. Wildlife died off. And the crops in that area were not the same,” farmer Hugo Camacho, who has lived in the contaminated area since 1980, said through a translator on a WhatsApp call from his home in the Amazon.
The following year, 30,000 Indigenous people and peasant farmers, including Camacho and his wife, decided to take action. Aided by community organiser Yanza, the group decided to take the company to court and called on attorneys, including Donziger, to help them.
“I was, frankly, shocked at what I saw… in terms of the degree of pollution, the open dumping of toxic waste,” Donziger said of his first trip to the region, known as Lago Agrio. “It was designed to pollute, designed to keep costs as low as possible and inflate profits as high as possible at the expense of the people who lived in the region.”
Read full article at. https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/08/chevron-is-trying-to-crush-a-prominent-climate-lawyer-and-maybe-the-world/
