The Jerusalem Post - The Jerusalem Post Magazine
Steven Donziger’s perspective
There is a reason that Martin Garbus has agreed to defend Steven Donziger.
Donziger recounts his harrowing experience visiting Ecuador in 1993 to the Magazine.
“I saw what looked like an apocalyptic nightmare of pollution. Large lakes of oil from the floor of the Amazon rain forest left by Texaco (now Chevron). Hundreds of open-air waste pits gouged out of the jungle floor that were leaching through pipes into rivers and streams that local communities and indigenous groups relied on for their drinking water. It was very clear this was a mass industrial poisoning and that something needed to be done.”
As a result of being exposed to such massive amounts of toxicity, Donziger tragically reports, “Many people I’ve met have since passed away from cancers and other oil-related diseases.”
Donziger reveals details of the corrupt tactics he believes Chevron has employed to destroy, defame and intimidate him.
“I’m a victim of the most well-financed corporate retaliation campaign directed against a single individual in American history. They [Chevron] have used 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers and spent upwards of two or three billion dollars to attack me. They decided 11 years ago – and this was demonstrated in internal emails from the company – that their defense strategy on the case was to demonize me to try to get people not to think of the environmental atrocity they had committed in Ecuador, so they’ve subjected me to lawsuits, to freezing my bank accounts, to destroying me financially, to getting a fake court judgement against me based on paid-for-bribe witness testimony, and then, ultimately, getting me disbarred. When none of that worked and we kept winning all sorts of court decisions in other countries, they figured out a scheme to lock me up without a jury. I’ve been in my home now for almost two years without trial on a misdemeanor criminal contempt charge. No one in American history has ever been held pre-trial for even one day on a federal misdemeanor, and I’ve been here almost two years.”
The case against Chevron has already been won in Ecuador. Donziger won the case when it originally went to trial at the Ecuador Supreme Court, at Chevron’s request, and also in Ecuador’s constitutional court.
“The important point is, the people of Ecuador won the case and these attacks against me are happening precisely because of their success and my success as one of their lawyers,” Donziger notes. “They’re not happening because we did something wrong. They’re happening because we did everything right.”
There is an active online smear campaign against Donziger, which picked up speed the closer he got to going on trial on May 10 for the contempt-ofcourt case filed against him.
“I’ve been getting a fair amount of good publicity as of late,” he discloses, “and whenever that happens, they (Chevron) just up their Google ad buys so that when these articles appear, right above it is their propaganda, which is an attempt to smear my reputation. They’ve actually built dedicated websites designed to smear me.”
He concludes by warning, “Any country that does business with Chevron does so at its peril, given the company’s pattern of environmental abuses and lack of respect for local communities and the rule of law.”
– E.G.