Two Chevron Lawyers Indicted in Ecuador

Two Chevron Lawyers Indicted in Ecuador
Alison Frankel
09-15-2008

Chevron's Ecuadorean quagmire got deeper and dirtier Friday, with the announcement that two longtime lawyers for the company have been indicted by the Ecuadorean government.

In-house lawyer Ricardo Reis Veiga and outside counsel Rodrigo Perez Pallares are accused of being part of a conspiracy to fraudulently certify that Chevron predecessor Texaco had completed the cleanup of more than 100 mines in the Ecuadorean rainforest in the 1990s. The government released Chevron from liability on the basis of those certifications.

Chevron, which is stuck in a potentially devastating environmental tort case in Ecuador, claimed Friday afternoon that the indictments are related to that multibillion-dollar civil litigation.

"The politically motivated indictments mark a renewal of the Ecuadorean state's attempts to disavow contractual obligations owed to Chevron from contracts signed in 1995 and 1998," the company said in a statement."Recent events in Ecuador leave no doubt that there is improper collaboration between the government and plaintiffs lawyers . "

But a lawyer for the Republic of Ecuador, C. MacNeil Mitchell of Winston & Strawn, told The Am Law Daily that the government is not involved in the environmental tort litigation -- and that Chevron's attempt to link the indictments to the environmental suit is part of the company's strategy to discredit the Ecuadorean courts.

Read more: http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202424507581

at the time that their subsidiary, Texaco, dumped 30 times more oil than the Exxon Valdez and billions of tons of toxic wastewater into Ecuador's rainforest, causing skyrocketing cancer rates in the 30,000 indigenous people of the rainforest, leaving 700 toxic pools, some the size of football fields, and polluting drinking water all the way to Peru, in what some experts consider the worst ecological disaster on earth, outside of Chernobyl. That is the plain English language reality behind this article's legal arguments. How could Chevron-Texaco know that Ecuador would have an honest government some day?

They want the old rules back, whereby they bribe the government, which "certifies" that 30 times more oil than Exxon Valdez and billions of tons of toxic wastewater is a "cleanup," they bribe the court to sign off on it, and they get to walk away with $30 billion in profit.

That's basically what Texaco--Chevron's subsidiary--did. Chevron bought this liability with their purchase of Texaco, in the confidence that Ecuador would continue to run by a corrupt, entrenched, rightwing elite.

Surprise, surprise! Democracy happened in Ecuador!

Very, very important lawsuit. Can democracy work? Can honest government prevail? Or will the Bushwhacks convince remnants of the fascist elite to "secede" from Rafael Correa's national government, and take Chernobyl II with them, and set up a kangaroo court in their separatist enclave, to exonerate Chevron-Texaco--meanwhile depriving Ecuador of its oil resource, as the Bushfucks are trying to do in Bolivia, and, according to Correa, have a three-country plan to do in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela? In the fascist mini-states that the Bushwhacks aim to create by civil war, there will be no liability for global corporate predators for anything they do; and they get multi-trillions in profits while the vast poor majority gets less than nothing, not only no schools, medical care, housing, infrastructure, emergency services or any other basics of a decent life, they also get murdered (15 indigenous farmers machine gunned by the Bush-backed white separatists in Bolivia this week), brutalized and poisoned, and their children die of cancer.

Will democracy and honest government prevail--anywhere? Will we see the U.S.-Bush military (or will it be Blackwater mercenaries, or Colombia death squads) in Ecuador before these prosecutions are concluded?

The Bushwhacks got bushwhacked in Bolivia, I think, when neighboring Paraguay elected a leftist--the first in its history--this year, thus depriving the Bushites of the most likely staging area for U.S.-Bush military support for the white separatists in the adjacent provinces of Bolivia. Those white separatists are very isolated, in land-locked Bolivia, and will be forced, by the surrounding leftist democracies (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay) to compromise. Brazil and Argentina are their chief gas customers, who won't put up with Bush-backed secessionists blowing up their pipelines.

The situation in Ecuador and also Venezuela is different. Ecuador and Venezuela are actually more vulnerable to Bushwhack interference. Both have long coastal areas (Ecuador on the Pacific, Venezuela on the Caribbean), both have long borders with Colombia (highly militarized Bush Cartel client state, which bombed/raided Ecuador earlier this year, more than likely orchestrated from the U.S. embassy in Bogota), and both are members of OPEC, and have lots and lots of oil. Venezuela's oil rich Zulia province is right on the Caribbean, where the Bushfucks have reconstituted the U.S. 4th Fleet--to alarms throughout Latin America.

These prosecutions of Chevron-Texaco are intimately related to Bushwhack war plans, we can be sure. The Bushwhacks goal is not just restoring global corporate predator control of the oil; it is destroying democracy--fairness, justice, good government--in South America, and everywhere, including here. I don't think their war scheme in South America will succeed, but, as we saw in Bolivia this week--with Bush forces machine gunning peasants--they are capable of causing much grief and horror as they fail.

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