Goldhaber’s reporting consistently downplays this core story and discounts the basic facts of the case. Chevron (via its predecessor company Texaco) engineered and operated a system of oil extraction in Ecuador’s delicate rainforest ecosystem that was designed to pollute, and pollute it did. From 1964 to 1990, Chevron by its own admission discharged into the waters and streams of the Amazon 16 billion gallons of toxic waste water. Chevron also gouged 916 unlined waste pits out of the jungle floor to permanently store oil sludge and cancer-causing toxins that were used in the drilling process. These practices violated industry custom, Ecuadorian and U.S. laws, and Chevron’s operating contract. The company also flared millions of cubic meters of dioxin-laden gas, dumped excess oil on dirt roads, and spilled 17 million gallons of pure crude from its pipelines. Chevron had so little regard for the local population that it never took a single known soil or water sample to determine the impact of its operations on human health.
Chevron hardly could have been shocked when in 1993 indigenous and farmer communities sued it for clean-up in New York federal court. The company’s primary response was to submit 14 sworn affidavits heaping praise on Ecuador’s justice system. The goal was to convince U.S. federal judge Jed S. Rakoff to shift the trial to Ecuador where Chevron probably expected the plaintiffs to lose the support of their American lawyers and melt back into the jungle. Instead, the plaintiffs re-filed the same lawsuit in 2002 in the Amazon town where Chevron perforated its first well. Chevron’s legal gamesmanship in the U.S. had bought it a decade of delay. But once the scientific evidence poured into Ecuador’s court showing harmful toxins at 100% of the company’s 378 former oil production sites, it was clear to Chevron that it faced major risk. Suddenly, the Ecuadorian courts Chevron had previously praised became “corrupt” and the company vowed to fight the plaintiffs “until hell freezes over.”
