♪♪
-I always remember a story Humberto talks about a lot
of how when he was a little kid,
there was an enormous river in front of the village
where he lives, in the forest.
And one day it just became
absolutely ridden with black oil.
♪♪
When you see the river on fire
that your people have depended on for a thousand years,
because of oil contamination,
you see your life and your future...
go up in flames.
♪♪
-What some environmentalists
call the world's worst oil-related disaster.
-My name is Steven Donziger.
I was there in Ecuador when indigenous groups
and Amazon communities were fighting Chevron
in an epic battle for justice.
♪♪
My first trip to Ecuador
was in April of 1993.
I went down with some lawyers and scientists
to investigate reports
that Texaco had dumped literally billions of gallons
of toxic oil waste into the pristine Amazon rainforest
where indigenous groups live.
No one really knew what would happen as a result of the trip,
but one thing that did happen is those who went on it
all committed to trying to do something
to address the problem and to help the people
and to hold Texaco, now Chevron, accountable
for what looked like a massive human-rights problem
that was done deliberately.
On my first trip, I was shocked by what we found.
I expected to see pollution.
I was shocked by the extent of it.
Massive pools of oil, literally thousands of them
all over the rainforest.
The oil was on their clothes.
It was in the air they breathed. It was in the food they ate.
It was in the water that they drank.
It was an apocalyptic nightmare.
♪♪
When you drill an oil well,
you go thousands of feet underground,
and all this rock and heavy metals
and manmade chemicals that cause cancer
come up out of the ground with the oil,
and you have to put it somewhere.
And they just put it in unlined pits in the jungle.
In many of the pits, they built pipes on the sides
to take the overflow into the nearby rivers
and streams where people were using for their drinking water,
without telling the people that they were doing this.
[ Speaking Spanish ]
I saw things that were unbelievably horrid.
People living in abject poverty
because they couldn't escape the contamination.
-There are people there that are -- are sick.
It's a very poor region.
There's absolutely no evidence
that there's an increase in cancer rate.
[ Projector clicking ]
-And once you see it, and this was certainly true for me,
you can't really turn your back on it.
♪♪
The trip changed my life.
-[ Singing ]
-Out of that trip, we talked to people
who wanted legal representation.
These are all unique cultures -- the Siona, the Kichwa,
the Cofán, the Secoya, the Waorani
all have their own languages and their own villages.
Some are more farming-oriented, others are more hunting,
but all of them were 100% dependent on the forest
for their survival.
♪♪
But once the oil came and poisoned
this delicate ecosystem, they could no longer rely
on their traditional sources of food and water.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
During the first 10 years of the case,
we were fighting to have a jury trial in the United States.
Texaco and Chevron did not want that.
They were petrified of a jury.
They were desperate to shift the case back to Ecuador,
where they would continue with their impunity.
The case ended up getting shifted to Ecuador.
On the very first day of the trial
in October of 2003, in Ecuador,
after Chevron had agreed to accept jurisdiction there,
literally the first thing they did was challenge jurisdiction.
They accepted jurisdiction in the United States
to get it to Ecuador, then we got there
and they're like, "Oh, you don't have jurisdiction over us."
And that began years and years of completely bad-faith --
in my mind, unethical -- litigation tactics.
Chevron's trial strategy was to sabotage the trial.
[ Speaking Spanish ]
Chevron did not want any litigation
on the merits of the claims of the Ecuadorians.
They wanted to avoid that at all costs.
They paid one of their employees, Diego Borja,
to try to entrap a judge in a bribery scandal.
He taped it through a pen.
[ Speaking Spanish ]
-This is all the -- the Chevron/Texaco case.
-And you've read all of this?
[ Speaking Spanish ]
-They were constantly filing dozens and dozens
of trial motions in, like, a very short period of time,
like an hour,
to stop the court from functioning properly.
[ Speaking Spanish ]
Chevron would then file more motions
to recuse the judge from the case,
and that motion would then go to another judge
and it would delay the trial for six months.
Part of Texaco's strategy is to bankrupt us.
So Chevron has gone out of its way
to avoid talking about the real issue,
which is that it committed environmental crimes in Ecuador
that have devastated indigenous groups,
devastated farming communities,
poisoned this incredibly important ecosystem
that's critical to the survival of the planet for all of us.
They don't want to talk about that.
Why?
Because it will undermine their business model.
Chevron and other fossil fuel companies
like to go into areas,
take out the oil, get all the profits they can,
and leave behind massive pollution
that the public or the area communities have to pay.
They report these enormous profits,
but we, meaning the people, are actually subsidizing them
'cause we're paying the cost for their pollution
while they get the profits.
♪♪
So, the case in Ecuador ended on February 14, 2011,
with a resounding victory for the affected communities.
But up to this point,
even though the people in Ecuador won the case,
they have yet to receive the first dollar of their judgment.
[ Speaking Spanish ]
Chevron knows if the people of Ecuador who've won this judgment
are able to collect it, the floodgates will open
and there will be potentially
a trillion-plus dollars of liability,
'cause what they did in Ecuador,
they've done in dozens of countries around the world.
-There are environmental problems in the region.
We're not denying that.
[ Speaking Spanish ] -Es petróleo.
-But those environmental problems
are the responsibility of the Ecuadoran state.
We did our part.
Texaco did its part.
-For someone to say that we just pushed dirt on these pits,
it's -- it's -- it's absolutely true -- untrue.
-They basically have concluded that it's cheaper
to pay hundreds of lawyers to fight this
than to pay the people they harmed,
'cause once that happens once, the chances of it happening
dozens more times increase dramatically
and their whole business model gets destroyed.
It is a business model based on privatizing profits
and socializing costs
to the most vulnerable people on the planet.
This case is about challenging that,
ending it,
holding it accountable.
♪♪
Which is why they are spending massive sums of money
to try to destroy my life
and hold me up as some sort of scalp
that they can put on the walls of their homes
like hunters put a moose head up.
That's really what they want out of me.
I am a human rights lawyer
detained in the United States of America,
on bogus charges, to help a U.S. company
evade a $10 billion environmental liability
owed to the most vulnerable indigenous groups in the Amazon.
So what's the point of this, other than to punish me
for my successful human rights advocacy
for the people of Ecuador?
Their entire strategy now is to sue anyone
who wants to help the case,
including the lawyers, including me.
[ Singing in native language ]
You know, I think there's a larger lesson
to be learned from this experience.
If we let the fossil fuel industry continue
along its path, we will no longer have a planet.
And, you know, you can look at this as,
oh, there's this pollution and they sued
and there's all this litigation, or you can look at it
as the first step of a new way of thinking.
The idea that you can leverage resources
such that communities understand
that they have the power
to form alliances around the world
to hold the perpetrators of these environmental crimes
and human rights violations fully accountable,
such that they stop doing it.
We will have a better world.
♪♪
And, like, it's important not to get distracted
by what's happening to any one individual -- in this case, me,
'cause I'm in a difficult situation.
It's important to understand that and to help me
and to protect me and others like me.
But we cannot preserve our planet
for our children, for our grandchildren,
for future generations unless this work is done.
♪♪
It's important to understand that and to help me
and to protect me and others like me.
But we cannot preserve our planet,
for our children, for our grandchildren,
for future generations unless this work is done.
♪♪