Steven Donziger on the ‘Amazon Chernobyl’ Happening in Ecuador

Hosted by Paul Holdengräber, The Quarantine Tapes chronicles shifting paradigms in the age of social distancing. Each day, Paul calls a guest for a brief discussion about how they are experiencing the global pandemic.

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On Episode 157 of The Quarantine Tapes, Paul Holdengräber is joined by lawyer Steven Donziger for a two-part conversation. Steven tells the staggering story of his role in bringing a successful case against Chevron for their deliberate pollution in the Amazon, and Chevron’s subsequent case against him that has led to Steven living under house arrest for more than 500 days awaiting a trial.

Steven breaks down how his case reached this point and why he feels he has been unable to get a fair trial. Postponements due to COVID, judges with conflicts of interest, and a lack of media attention have all played a role in this extraordinary case. Steven calls himself a canary in the coal mine for other human rights lawyers and environmental activists who could be affected by the precedent set in his case.

From the episode:

Steven Donziger: What really is happening is Chevron is doing violence to their culture, and they’re really destroying their culture by dumping toxic oil waste onto their ancestral lands such that they can no longer sustain their existence as they knew it. And by the way, there’s a word for this. It’s called ecocide. Which is a new type of crime that describes a situation where some corporation or some government deliberately destroys the natural environment to such a degree that the people living there can no longer survive, and they die. That’s ecocide.

Paul Holdengräber: Right, a variation on genocide.

Steven Donziger: Exactly. It’s an atrocity crime. By the way, it hasn’t been accepted yet by international law, but there’s a movement globally among some of the world’s leading atrocity crimes scholars to make the type of thing that Texaco and then Chevron engaged in an international crime punishable under international law. And what Texaco and Chevron did in Ecuador, to me, is the very definition of ecocide, which is deliberately destroying the environment knowing that the people who live in that environment and depend on it will die, will not be able to survive. That’s ecocide, and it really is what happened at Chevron Sands in Ecuador, in my opinion.

Paul Holdengräber: If this pollution had happened, let us say, in Europe or in the United States, how do you think the case might have played out differently?

Steven Donziger: That’s an interesting question. First of all, I don’t think it would have happened the same way. I’m not saying oil companies aren’t capable of significant acts of pollution in the US or Europe. They are. We have a record of that. But to openly, notoriously, brazenly, systematically build pipes to dump four million gallons of benzene-laden cancer-causing water production that comes out of the oil wells into rivers and streams that people drink out of to survive—I mean, that’s an act of audacity that I don’t think you would see in countries that have regulatory systems to at least deal with that in some sort of even modest degree.

This is the worst oil problem in the world. It’s called the Amazon Chernobyl. And the fact it was done deliberately, it was not an accident. Remember the BP accident, the Gulf of Mexico? That was in 2010, Deepwater Horizon. That was terrible, and BP has paid 50, 60 billion in damages and fines. But that was an accident. This is a product of deliberate design, and Chevron has yet to pay the first dollar to the people at harm. I believe that if they had done this in the United States, their executives would have been prosecuted criminally and probably put in jail, not to mention the fact they would have been forced to pay compensation to the thousands and thousands of people they harmed.

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