Latin America
Related: About this forumThe Cheese Smelled Funny So We Threw It in the Jungle
Vultures' Picnic: Chapter 5
by Greg PalastSeptember 27, 2021
[Amazonia, Ecuador, 2009]
Ricardo and I were dumped off at the end of a jeep track on a riverbank in a downpour to wait for our riverboat, which I assumed would be something like the steamer Humphrey Bogart piloted down the Ulanga River in The African Queen. The day before, I had received a message that the Cofan Natives of the Amazon forest would have a boat waiting to take us across an Amazon tributary to their village.
Our driver pointed to a canoe, a dug-out log with a hand-carved paddle, deep in mud, tied to a tree. Su barco. Your boat, he said.
Palast in the Amazon with Chevrons poisonous, murderous sludge.
Rick remained calm I hate that in him as we sank in the muck to untie it. I did my clown-on-a-tight-rope walk to the back of the canoe. I made it, but Ricks $500 microphone didnt: Id dumped it in the gray rushing river. Rick remained calm. And I kept thinking, Anderson Cooper wouldnt do this. How could they get his makeup guy into the canoe?
We got lucky. A Cofan came out of the forest, and having mercy on these dumb-ass white guys, untied the log canoe and paddled off alone into the rapids to the village, returning half an hour later in another, longer canoe, this one with a little outboard motor.
I was on the hunt for Emergildo Criollo, a con man, a trickster, perpetrator of the biggest fraud in history. Thats how a Chevron Oil Corporation lawyer described him to me.
More:
https://www.gregpalast.com/the-cheese-smelled-funny-so-we-threw-it-in-the-jungle/
TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)Judi Lynn
(160,219 posts)Previous postings at DU on the subject:
30 Years Ago Today: Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (Warning: Graphic images)
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100211948535
~ ~ ~
How a company got away after committing the worst oil spill in history
By Ben Heubl
Published Thursday, February 4, 2021
Open-source intelligence and interviews tell a story about how oil-giant Chevron, when accused of devastating pollution in the rainforest of Ecuador, managed to make its defence a personal case against a human-rights lawyer. Ben Heubl explains the successful tactics and efforts with open information and shows how it shifted Americas attention away from one of the biggest environmental disasters in history.
Steven Donziger is a human-rights lawyer. He has spent the past one-and-a-half years at home. But not, like many of us, under lockdown. He was put under house arrest, on the orders of a judge in the state of New York.
In 2014 that judge, Lewis A Kaplan, had found Donziger and his Ecuadoran allies guilty of bribery and fraud in the US. Kaplan was holding investments in multiple funds with Chevron holdings at the time of his rulings. This judgement complicated the fight by the plaintiffs to collect compensation in the US for the environmental damages in Ecuador. The house arrest was later imposed because the lawyer refused to turn over confidential client information on his electronic devices to Chevron without any legitimate basis, he said.
As a human rights lawyer I have been confined to my apartment for almost two years without trial as obvious retaliation by Chevron and certain judges for successfully helping indigenous communities win a historic pollution judgment that threatens the business model of the fossil fuel industry, Donziger tells me. This has been incredibly difficult for me, my wife, and my son. But we are strong, determined, and optimistic about the future. Chevron would not be doing this to me if the company wasnt trying to shift attention away from its massive toxic dumping in the Amazon, which multiple courts have confirmed.
Judge Kaplan brought criminal contempt charges against the lawyer, which led to prosecution under Kaplans watch and in 2019 to led to house arrest, an $800,000 bond co-signed by Donzigers wife and a GPS-powered ankle bracelet. Last year, 200 lawyers filed a judicial complaint against Judge Kaplan over misconduct and targeting the human rights advocate Donziger. They stated that Judge Kaplans rulings have been in lock step with Chevrons interests and requests.
The judge who now presides over the case, District Judge Loretta Preska, was hand-picked by Kaplan and is a leader of the right-wing Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor.
More:
https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2021/01/lasting-effects-from-the-rainforest-oil-spill-in-ecuador/