Meet Steven Donziger

After Texaco left in 1993, indigenous groups known as “Los Afectados” spent nearly 20 years putting Texaco, then Chevron, on trial. Chevron, the U.S.’s third largest corporation, makes four times as much money as the entire country of Ecuador each year (Keefe, 2012).

“Thedisputeisnowconsideredoneofthenastiest legalcontestsinmemory,aspectaclealmostas uglyasthepollutionthatpromptedit.”(Keefe, 2012)

Steven Donziger is a New York-based lawyer who represented Los Afectados. He faced an uphill battle as Chevron denied the pollution itself, and denied the negative health effects it caused. Furthermore, bribing police and judges was common practice, and Donziger worried about Texaco’s outsize influence. They had hired hundreds of lawyers—and those lawyers had bodyguards (Keefe, 2012).

When the judge finally ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, Chevron struck back, suing Donziger for extortion and fraud (Keefe, 2012).

“Thisisthefirsttimethatasmalldevelopingcountryhashadpowerovera multinationalAmericancompany.”

-StevenDonziger(Keefe,2012)

Donziger kept the case going through fundraising and publicity, hoping to set a precedent for small countries to hold large corporations accountable for human rights violations. Ultimately, however, the outtakes from a documentary captured him expressing a lack of faith in the Ecuadorean court system and its potential for corruption, and this led many to question the case he was building (Keefe, 2012, Grullon Paz 2021)

Donziger has been called a “fraud” by oil companies, despite maintaining hero status in the eyes of activists and indigenous people in Ecuador (Burdyk, 2022, Richmond Standard, 2022). He was sent to prison in 2021 after being found guilty of contempt of court (Grullon Paz, 2021).

In 2011, Chevron was ordered to pay $9 billion in damages.

“The award against Chevron ‘is one of the largest judgments ever imposed for environmental contamination in any court,’ said David M. Uhlmann, an expert in environmental law at the University of Michigan…

‘Whether any portion of the claims will be paid by Chevron is less clear.’”

(Romero & Krauss, 2011)

In 2011, Chevron vowed to appeal this decision, claiming this sum was inflated and unenforceable

(Romero & Krauss, 2011)

The 2009 film CRUDE documented the damage done to the Amazon, leading to this judgment: Part of Donziger’s effectiveness came from his ability to court celebrities and generate publicity: he was the one who approached the filmmakers to pitch the idea! The film was later criticized by Chevron as “propaganda” (Keefe, 2012).

Despite Ecuador exporting so much oil, fuel prices and food shortages caused by road blockades still affected people all over the country. By the time the protests ended, six people were dead (Sands, June 27, 2022).

The protests seemed to end in part when fuel price cuts were promised (BBC, July 1, 2022).