Chevron/Texaco is killing people

[loki]

Please bear with this next article, I came across it just now and ive translated it using Google translate. Sometimes this tool can be a bit hit and miss.

Ecuadorian lawyer explained in Spain lawsuit against Texaco by pollution in Amazonia
9/2/2008 9/2/2008

Zaragoza, EFE Zaragoza, EFE

The Ecuadorian lawyer Pablo Fajardo explained in Spain today the details of the lawsuit millionaire who remains in the courts of his country against the oil major Texaco for having polluted "premeditated manner", "irresponsible" and "racist" rivers of the Amazon.

Fajardo spoke at one of the forums of discussion at the International Exhibition of Zaragoza, which is focused on water and sustainable development.

The lawyer said that the company Texaco, now part of Chevron, has caused irreversible damage to the people of the Ecuadorian Amazon as malformations, dermatological problems and a higher rate of cancer, in addition to having caused the disappearance of two peoples.

He asserted that there is an expert opinion that a figure between 8 000 and 16 000 billion euros (between 11 700 and 23 400 billion dollars at the current exchange rate) compensation for this event, which began in 1993 and for which it expects a ruling on next year.

However, he stressed that any amount is "insufficient and unjust" and does not want to distribute the money, but continue struggling to repair the dignity of those affected and to live in an environment that does not pose a threat to their children.

"I never could restore the culture of people who have disappeared. With no money in the world can return the lives of people with cancer who has died for this cause," he said.

Fajardo said that the reasons which prompted Chevron to pollute the rivers and watering the roads with oil are mainly economic benefit and "racism".

He criticized the company under, who were unaware of other technological resources, that's when something totally untrue ", since in Texas is not acting in the same manner as in Ecuador, where Texaco was established in 1964.

Fajardo complained that during the trial received threats and added that his brother was killed during the process: "I can not say that Chevron killed him. Nor can I say other than them."

"They recognize the harm they have caused, they know the crimes they have caused to mankind, but they want to stop this judicial ruling. There has been pressure on the court of Justice, the experts and pressure us," he said.


Derechos reservados ® 2001-2008 GRUPO EL COMERCIO CA Copyright ® 2001-2008 TRADE GROUP CA
Prohibida la reproducción total o parcial de este contenido sin autorización de Diario El Comercio No reproduction of all or part of this content without the permission of The Commerce Journal
http://translate.google.com/translat...-8&sl=es&tl=en

Heres another article on the case:

Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Chevron Paying Heavy Price For Texaco's Mistakes in Ecuador, Says Amazon Defense Coalition

Talk of Settlement Reflects Dwindling Legal Options After Court Expert Finds Damages in Billions

QUITO, Ecuador, Aug 18, 2008 (via Amazon Watch) -- Chevron's surprise announcement on Friday that it would be open to talks to resolve a possible $16.3 billion liability for environmental damage in Ecuador reflects the company's dwindling legal options in a long-running lawsuit over who pays for the clean-up of what even Chevron now acknowledges is a huge disaster, the Amazon Defense Coalition said today.
It also reflects how boxed in Chevron has become by a series of questionable legal and operational decisions made years ago by Texaco, a company Chevron bought in 2001 eight years after the Ecuador case had been filed in U.S. federal court. Even though it had never operated in Ecuador, Chevron has assumed defense of the case and will bear any liability.

Chevron voluntarily subjected itself to jurisdiction in Ecuador in 2002 as a condition of the case being transferred out of the U.S. court and is likely bound by any ruling there. Chevron's statement on Friday - that it would be open to "a fair and complete resolution" to the Ecuador lawsuit if Ecuador's government also meets certain conditions - was a marked departure from previous statements made by company management that rejected all possibility of an out-of-court settlement. It came after Ecuador's President, Rafael Correa, said in a speech that the government would be willing to mediate talks between the Amazon plaintiffs and Chevron.

Correa said Chevron had approached his government about trying to resolve the case, which went to trial in 2003 in the town of Lago Agrio in Ecuador's Amazon region.

Pablo Fajardo, the Ecuadorian lawyer for the plaintiffs, said he and other representatives of the 30,000 Amazon plaintiffs welcomed Chevron's statement but said they were fully focused on the actual trial, which is expected to result in a judgment in 2009. A court-appointed Special Master recently fixed damages at between $7.2 billion and $16.3 billion.

Although Chevron claims it is the victim of an unfair judicial process - a charge disputed by the plaintiffs, who blame the company for years of delays and political interference in the trial -- there is much more to Chevron's problems in the Ecuador case than the company has let on publicly. For example:

-- The evidence in the trial increasingly points to Chevron's guilt. The court's special master reviewed more than 70,000 chemical sampling results and concluded that three different entities -- Chevron, the plaintiffs, and his own court-appointed technical team - had separately verified extensive levels of toxic contamination in soils and waters at 100% of Texaco's former well sites in Ecuador inspected by the court. Some of the sites operated exclusively by Texaco contained toxins thousands of times higher than the maximum amounts permitted by law. Chevron, in other words, has helped to prove the case against itself.

-- Texaco's original decision in the 1960s to dump highly toxic "produced water" into Amazon waterways instead of re-injecting it into underground wells is now haunting Chevron. All told, Texaco dumped 18.5 billion gallons in just over two decades - in the process, killing off much aquatic life and poisoning groundwater that the population relies on for drinking. The practice was not considered customary in the industry at the time and it had never been done in the Amazon rainforest, considered a highly delicate ecosystem.

-- Texaco's decision in 1995 to try to end-run the pending lawsuit brought by Amazon communities in U.S. courts and pay $40 million to Ecuador's government for a so-called clean-up and release has backfired almost completely. Not only did the clean-up fail to address most contaminated sites, but trial results demonstrate clearly the sites that were "remediated" still have extensive levels of contamination. Texaco was given a "release" before any work was done. Two of Chevron's representatives are being investigated for fraud and corruption relating to the clean-up.

-- The release Texaco received for the so-called clean-up - and on which Chevron hinges its defense -- has caused various problems for Chevron in various courts. The release specifically carved out the claims of private citizens who were not a party to the agreement. Chevron's claim to the contrary has never been accepted by any court, and its legal prospects on this important point seem dim.


About the Amazon Defense Coalition
The Amazon Defense Coalition represents dozens of rainforest communities and five indigenous groups that inhabit Ecuador's Northern Amazon region. The mission of the Coalition is to protect the environment and secure social justice through grass roots organizing, political advocacy, and litigation.
Posted by Ecuador Rebelde at 1:06 PM

http://ecuador-rising.blogspot.com/2...r-texacos.html

And another showing the shit these fuckers get up to, to save their own necks:

Criminal Indictment of Chevron Lawyers Based on Wide Body of Scientific Evidence

Seven Ecuadorian Government Officials Also Charged with Conspiring with Chevron to Falsify Remediation Results

Company Hit with Multiple Scandals in Matter of Days

QUITO, Ecuador – A criminal indictment in Ecuador against two Chevron lawyers, one an executive vice-president, is based on scientific evidence that the oil giant conspired with Ecuadorian government officials to falsify the results of an environmental clean-up to escape a potential multi-billion dollar civil liability pending in U.S. federal court.


Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the ongoing civil trial, which alleges Texaco (now Chevron) dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into Amazon waterways, say Chevron is misrepresenting the indictment as "politically motivated" when it is actually based on a large body of soil samples generated by an independent investigative agency and corroborated by three other sources, including Chevron itself.

"Chevron has a serious problem because there is extensive evidence that a fraud was committed and much of that evidence comes from Chevron," said Pablo Fajardo, the Ecuadorian lawyer for the plaintiffs and a recent winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Award.

"Chevron always cries 'political interference' when it lacks a defense," he added.

Chevron's potential liability in the civil trial, which is being heard in Ecuador at Chevron's request, was assessed at between $7.2 billion and $16.3 billion, according to a report by a court-appointed expert released in March. A final decision in the civil trial, which began in 2003, is expected in the coming months.

Those indicted include Ricardo Reis Veiga, a Chevron vice president based in Miami who oversees legal affairs for the company in Latin America, and Rodrigo Perez Pallares, Chevron's legal representative in Ecuador for more than three decades. Reis Veiga and Perez Pallares supervised the purported clean-up for Texaco in the mid-1990s that is the focus of the indictment, and both continue to play active roles in supervising Chevron's defense in the civil trial.

The indictment also targeted seven former Ecuadorian government officials who signed documents certifying the remediation. Among them is Patricio Rivadeneira, Garcia, a former Minister of Energy and Mines.

Residents of the Amazon region, including the leaders of five indigenous groups, have alleged for years that the Chevron remediation was a fraud and was orchestrated to secure a release that could be used to dismiss the class action civil case then pending in U.S. federal court in New York. Texaco's lawyers at the time tried repeatedly to use the release – provided before any clean-up work was actually done – to persuade the U.S. court to dismiss the case.

The U.S. judge at the time refused to accept Texaco's contention that the release applied to private claims being pressed by the rainforest residents, and the lawsuit continued. However, Texaco did win a hotly contested motion to transfer the case to Ecuador by claiming its courts were fair and a more appropriate forum for the trial. An Atlanta-based firm, King & Spalding, represented Texaco at the time.

The indictment, released by Chevron on Friday, is based largely on soil sampling of remediated pits and was performed in 2001 by an independent Ecuadorian government agency, called the Controlaria. The sampling by the agency, which is similar to the General Accounting Office in the U.S., is part of the civil trial's official record.

The indictment alleges that Reis Veiga and Perez Pallares signed documents certifying the remediation had been carried out when in fact it had not. Signing the documents violates various anti-fraud provisions in Ecuador's penal code, according to the indictment. The fraud charges carry maximum prison sentences of ten years under Ecuador's penal code.

To defend against the charges, Reis Veiga and Perez Pallares also will have to deal with scientific evidence from the civil trial provided by three separate sources – Chevron, the plaintiffs, and the independent court expert, Professor Richard Cabrera. When Cabrera reviewed roughly 64,000 analytic results produced by these parties, he found that more than 80% of the supposedly "remediated" pits have levels of toxins that violate the law.

Evidence in the civil trial shows "remediated" waste pits with Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons (TPH) of up to 206,512 parts per million (ppm), or 206 times higher than the Ecuadorian norm of 1,000 ppm, according to Douglas Beltman, a scientist at Stratus Consulting in Boulder who works with the plaintiffs. TPH are a body of toxic chemicals that include benzene, a known human carcinogen.

A complete list of the so-called remediated pits that violate Ecuadorian norms – taken from the Cabrera report – can be found here.

Fajardo indicated that there is additional evidence available in the public record that could be used to broaden the prosecutor's case. This includes proof that the two Chevron officials utilized a secret laboratory test that made it technically impossible to detect amounts of toxins in violation of norms.

"Texaco gamed the laboratory test to guarantee acceptable results," said Fajardo.

The timing of the indictment appears to result from the fact the statute of limitations would have expired on Sept. 28, ten years to the day after the final documents were signed indicating the end of the clean-up.

News of the indictment came just one day after Chevron was implicated in a drugs and sex scandal related to the payment of oil royalties to the Department of Interior, and just weeks before Chevron will stand trial in U.S. federal court in San Francisco on charges it violated the human rights of local villagers in Nigeria. The plaintiffs in Ecuador have alleged they have been subjected to death threats and a series of robberies.

The civil lawsuit alleges Chevron dumped 18.5 billion gallons of toxic waste water into Amazon waterways and abandoned hundreds of unlined waste pits gouged out of the jungle floor, causing a spike in cancer rates and forcing five indigenous groups to abandon most of their ancestral land. As the exclusive operator of a large oil concession, Texaco extracted 1.3 billion barrels of oil from the country between 1964 and 1990.

http://www.chevrontoxico.com/article.php?id=474

And then this:

Press Release
September 16th, 2008


Amazon Defense Coalition: Ecuador Court Report Underestimates Damages for Chevron's "Amazon Chernobyl" in Ecuador


$16 Billion Chevron Liability Could Rise If Groundwater and Surface Water Damage Included, Plaintiffs Say

New Criminal Indictment of Chevron Lawyers

QUITO, Ecuador (BUSINESS WIRE) – An independent court-appointed expert in the environmental trial against Chevron in Ecuador should impose additional damages on the oil giant for groundwater and surface water contamination that could significantly increase the current $16.3 billion liability estimate, lawyers for the plaintiffs say.

In a response to the expert's 4,000-page report, the plaintiffs today submitted papers to the court asking the expert to calculate how much it would cost to remediate the damage to groundwater and surface water, both of which were not included in the expert's assessment. The surface water contamination comes from Chevron's deliberate discharge of 18.5 billion gallons of toxic "produced water" into the Amazon from 1964 to 1990, when it was the exclusive operator of an oil concession that covered an area the size of Rhode Island.

"There is significant evidence of groundwater and surface water contamination in the record, yet there are no damages imposed to remediate the impacts," said Pablo Fajardo, the Ecuadorian lawyer for dozens of Amazon communities and five indigenous groups who are suing Chevron.

Fajardo said it was up to the expert to calculate the amount of the additional damages, but he estimated the number could be significant if the expert accepts the request. An earlier assessment by a plaintiff's expert had estimated groundwater clean-up alone at more than $2 billion.

A final decision in the case, which Chevron has fought for years to delay since it was filed in 1993 in U.S. federal court, is expected in the coming months. If the Ecuador court expert's damage assessment is accepted by the judge, Chevron could be hit with the largest environmental damages claim in history–not unexpected, according to the plaintiffs, given that scientists believe the magnitude of damages is the largest ever for an oil-related contamination.

In any event, any Ecuador judgment likely will be enforceable in the U.S. because Chevron voluntarily submitted to jurisdiction there as a condition of having the case transferred to Ecuador in 2002. At the time, Chevron submitted ten sworn affidavits from legal experts praising Ecuador's courts as transparent and fair.

The plaintiff's response to the expert report is based on a technical review by over a dozen prominent scientists from the U.S., Ecuador, and Spain. In additional, Richard Cabrera, the court-appointed expert, worked with a team of 14 scientists who reviewed roughly 64,000 chemical sampling results and more than 200,000 pages of trial evidence, and conducted their own field analyses.

In all, more than 25 scientists – most from the U.S. or Ecuador – were involved in either preparing the Cabrera report or reviewing it.

In its response, the plaintiffs made the following points:

• * The overall damages assessment, once the excluded categories are included, is a reasonable amount and consistent with damages imposed in other large environmental disasters around the world. Several examples were cited.
  
• * The report underestimated the number of deaths from cancer due to the oil contamination by failing to take into account population growth in the region. Cabrera estimated 428 excess cancer deaths due to oil contamination, while the plaintiffs believe the number of cancer deaths could be at least three times that high if current population data is used.
  
• * An amount for "unjust enrichment" – $8.3 billion – should be added to actual damages because it is simply impossible, from a clean-up standpoint, to restore the rainforest to its original condition given the extent of the damages. That amount raises the total damages award to $16.3 billion plus the additional categories, said Fajardo.

The Cabrera report, released last March, estimated Chevron's damages in the long-running trial between $7.2 billion and $16.3 billion. The lower number covers actual damages, which includes soil cleanup, a water system to provide clean water, health care services, compensation for cancer deaths, and the buying back of ancestral land of indigenous groups.

The higher number – called "unjust enrichment" – includes $8.3 billion for the disgorgement of monies Chevron saved by using sub-standard production practices that violated Ecuadorian law and industry custom. At the time Chevron began operating in Ecuador, for example, it was customary to re-inject the formation waters into the ground instead of dumping them where they could poison fresh water sources.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs also blasted Chevron for using "junk science" in its own rebuttal. Chevron claimed Cabrera used "fabricated" evidence to reach "erroneous" conclusions.

In fact, most of the scientific evidence used by Cabrera was provided by Chevron itself.

"Chevron has been trying for years to deceive the court by manipulating its interpretation of lab results for litigation purposes," said Fajardo. "The company has never even funded a health evaluation after more than four decades of contaminating the rainforest, but it spends millions to attack those like us who dare to try to hold the company accountable."

"There is no court in the world that is good enough for Chevron if that court acts independently," he added.

Cabrera was paid by Chevron in an earlier part of the trial when he served as a court-appointed expert for a judicial inspection. Chevron did not object to his qualifications at the time.

The court submission comes just days after two Chevron lawyers, including a high-level executive based in Miami, were indicted in Ecuador on fraud charges for allegedly lying about the results of a purported remediation of the contamination. The lawyers, Ricardo Reis Veiga and Rodrigo Perez Pallares, are continuing to supervise Chevron's defense in the civil trial.


About the Amazon Defense Coalition
The Amazon Defense Coalition represents dozens of rainforest communities and five indigenous groups that inhabit Ecuador's Northern Amazon region. The mission of the Coalition is to protect the environment and secure social justice through grass roots organizing, political advocacy, and litigation.

http://www.chevrontoxico.com/article.php?id=476

But what really got to me was this article, which IMO is really an admission of guilt on their part:

Chevron lobbies Bush Administration for bail out on lawsuit by Amazon tribes
mongabay.com
July 31, 2008

Lobbyists for big oil are working feverishly to persuade the Bush Administration and Congress to let Chevron off the hook for a potential $16 billion liability in an environmental lawsuit.

The long-running suit alleges that Texaco — acquired by Chevron in 2001 — dumped 18.5 billion gallons of toxic waste into Amazon waterways from 1964 to 1990, harming local indigenous communities and damaging the environment in one of the world's most biodiverse ecosystems. The oil company built roughly 1000 unlined open-air waste pits that have been leeching toxins into the soil and groundwater for decades.

Chevron had dragged out the legal proceedings for years but in March of this year, a court-appointed special master in the lawsuit found that environmental damage and other damages in the case amounted to between $7.2 billion and $16.3 billion. With an SEC investigation looming, the ruling forced Chevron to disclose the liability to the first time to its shareholders -- the oil giant would have to pay 100 percent of the damages if the judge accepts the assessment.


Now Chevron has hired former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, former Clinton White House Chief of StaffMac McLarty, former Democratic senator John Breaux and John McCain fund-raiser Wayne Berman to lobby Susan Schwab, the United States Trade Representative; key Members of Congress; and John Negroponte, Deputy Secretary of State. Pablo Fajardo, the lead Ecuadorian lawyer for the plaintiffs, says that Chevron's lobbyists aim to "use the threat of canceling trade preferences to intimidate Ecuador's government into extinguishing the legal rights of its citizens to save the country's economy." Luis Gallegos, Ecuador's U.S. ambassador, estimates that a failure to extend the trade preferences by the end of the year could cost Ecuador 350,000 jobs and force 1.2 million people into poverty.

In response, a group of indigenous leaders - from the Cofan, Secoya, and Siona tribes - are planning a trip to Washington, DC in September to talk directly with Members of Congress and the office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The plaintiffs have also tapped Democratic fund-raiser Ben Barnes to help make their case among U.S. government leaders.


Suggested reading:

Savages, a book by Joe Kane, tells the story of the Huaorani, a tribe living in the deepest part of the Amazonian rain forest in Ecuador, and their struggles with Texaco.

http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0731-chevron.html

So as well as an admission of guilt, they've been proved guilty and they then go on to lobby the US governement to basically boycott trade with Ecuador, admitting that this will force more millions into poverty.

Fuck them all!