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Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Lawless Planet ad free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. El Dorado.
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Fabulous city of gold.
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The glittering lure that centuries ago drew ambitious men to the unknown land of South America.
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For hundreds of years, outsiders have been arriving in the Amazon rainforest in search of riches, first for gold, then rubber, and finally, in the 1930s, they came for oil. The possibilities were endless. According to this old promotional film from Walt Disney called Amazon Awakens, this great
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fertile valley is the challenge and the hope of the New World. A paradise of riches beyond man's wildest dreams.
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When Royal Dutch Shell started exploring in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 1937, they carved a home base into the western edge of El Oriente, a v stretch of unexploited jungle east of the Andes mountains. Shacks were erected to house workers. An airstrip appeared where supplies like drills and tractors were flown in daily. Even live pigs and sheep were dropped in by parachute to find what would one day be billions of dollars of untapped oil wealth. Geologists and laborers ventured into the unknown, hacking their way through forests teeming with anacondas, vampire bats, and some of the largest mosquitoes on ear. They named the area Shell, after their own company, as if they were the first people to arrive in this land. But there was an understanding amongst the prospectors that they were not alone. Somewhere deep in the jungle were what they called the aucas, an epithet meaning savages. In January 1942, a group of indigenous men crept toward Shell's makeshift jungle town. In their hands were nine foot palm wood spears. When they were in striking distance, the men hurled their weapons toward a group of Shell employees. In an instant, the camp was ambushed and a foreman and two laborers were killed. The message was, outsiders are not welcome here. The attack was the world's first introduction to the warriors of the Wadani tribe. But for the workers of Shell, it would foreshadow more trouble. Over the next five years, nine workers would be killed by the Wadani. Eventually, Shell decided they'd had enough. In 1947, after millions of dollars of investment, Shell packed up and left the Amazon without any oil. While there was a confluence of reasons for their departure, the Wadani believed they had successfully protected. In the coming years, more outsiders would arrive, including Christian missionaries who did something that Shell had not been able to make peace with the Wadani. And that paved the way for oil companies to return. When a new group of oil men arrived in the 1960s from the American company Texaco, they no longer had to contend with the attacks that had stymied their predecessors. Working alongside the missionaries, the company for a path into the jungle. It wasn't long before Texaco had discovered oil. A lot of it. And the Watani could do little but watch their worst fears about outsiders come true. From audible originals I'm zach goldbaum and this is lawless planet. Each week we tell a new story about the true crimes fueling the climate crisis and the people fighting to save the planet or destroy it.
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I worked there. I saw it all. I knew we had all the proof to say there was no way to lose. Because we were.
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By 1972, five years after Texaco discovered oil, they completed a 313 mile pipeline to transport crude from deep in the Amazon through the Andes Mountains and all the way to the Pacific Ocean. And when the oil was finally flowing, it was a cause for celebration. As legend has it, the first barrel of crude oil extracted from the Amazon was carried through the streets of the capital like a trophy. Residents could even get their own drops of oil as a souvenir. The discovery turned Ecuador into the second largest oil exporter in Latin America, doubling the country's per capita GDP within a decade. To this day, oil production is the backbone of the Ecuadorian economy. And that dependence made it easy to ignore what Texaco's operations set in motion an ecological and public health disaster. The most severely impacted were indigenous tribes like the Huatani, as well as the Quechua, Kofan, Sequoia and Siona, who years later would once again be forced to fight back. But instead of spears, this time, they filed lawsuits. And what came next was an epic courtroom drama that we'll be telling over the course of two episodes. It spans multiple decades in multiple countries and cost billions of dollars. On one side of this fight is Texaco, which I'll sometimes refer to as Chevron, because in the middle of this court case, the companies merged. And on the other was a legal team led by two outspoken attorneys. One an outsider from America who wasn't afraid to make some enemies, and another from Ecuador who risked his life to stand up for his people. Mi nombres Pablo Fajardo y Soyo Mestizo Equatoriano.
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My name is Pablo Fajardo and I am an Ecuadorian mestizo. I was born on the coast of Ecuador and In the year 87, I migrated to the northern Ecuadorian Amazon.
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In 1987, Pablo Fajardo was just 14 years old when he boarded an old yellow bus and headed east. He had never left his province on the northwest coast of Ecuador before and didn't know what to expect as he watched the Pacific Ocean vanish and give way to the steep hills of the Andes. Eventually, he arrived at his destination in the lush, green Amazon basin, in an oil town called Lago Agrio.
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At that time, Lago Agrio was jungle, completely jungle. And indigenous people lived there, the Cofan people. They lived in a territory whose real indigenous name was Amisacho. When Texaco arrived, it renamed it Lagoagrio. Why? Because Texaco had worked in Texas and had a town called Sour Lake. So when they came here, they translated it to La Goagrio.
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Pablo, who is stoic and reserved and has close cropped black hair, was the fifth of 10 children. His parents were both illiterate and labored in the fields. But his family struggled to find work, and now they were in oil country looking for opportunity.
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When I arrived and got off the bus, the first thing you stepped on on the road was oil. Because it was fresh, it would stick to your shoes.
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The company would literally wash the streets with crude oil to keep down the dust from their operations. The air was thick with black smoke. Tropical rain was laced with soot, and leaky wells and spills would occasionally turn the streets into rivers of oil. But at the time, that oil was seen as a path to a better life. And soon after his family arrived, Pablo went to work in Texaco's fields.
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I began working for the company, Texaco, or Petro Ecuador, at that time. And the work I was told to do was varied. They called them miscellaneous tasks from cleaning oil spills, covering them with dirt, clearing brush, cleaning pipelines.
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He toiled away in the forests and fields alongside his closest brother, Wilson Fajardo. Together, they saw Texaco's operations firsthand. The company's footprint was everywhere, with wells scattered randomly across more than a million acres of jungle. Texaco would make a clearing in the forest, and in the middle was a platform where the oil would be extracted. And what made Texaco's methods in the Amazon different from how the company operated elsewhere was that around the platform, the company dug what looked like shallow pools or trenches. That's where they'd collect all the toxic wastewater and radioactive chemicals that come out of the ground when you're drilling for oil. But instead of disposing of that waste, it just stayed there, festering in unlined open pits where it would leach into the forest floor, rivers, streams, and eventually just about everything that the local community ate and drank. This method was so destructive that it had long been obsolete. Inside the United States. But this was Ecuador, where there were few rules and regulations.
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When I arrived in that territory, I worked several years as a volunteer in the Catholic Church.
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In the early 1990s, Pablo spent his nights studying at a local mission run by Franciscan monks. There he was introduced to the work of revolutionaries like Che Guevara, Gandhi and mlk. And it was in reading their work that Pablo came up with an idea. He would start a collective to deal with the injustices facing his small town.
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And the most common problems were with oil companies, with Texaco at that time, people getting sick, people without water because the water was contaminated with oil, and also many animals of farmers and indigenous people dying.
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With help from the Franciscan fathers, the mission became a hub of resistance, with Pablo as a de facto leader.
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I mean, I personally received complaints on weekends and whenever we went to make claims or file complaints with authorities, with a judge, the commissioner, the mayor, almost always the response was find a lawyer to help you. So that's when we began to think about studying to become lawyers.
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By the time he was 16 years old, he'd already organized strikes against the oil company and the only other local employer, a palm oil plantation. Seeing something in Pablo, the priests offered to help pay for him to study law. And Pablo set out to become the town's first and only lawyer.
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I never, never thought of becoming a lawyer for big cases. No, it was to work on cases with communities, with indigenous peoples, with women, with local people, directly.
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Just as Pablo was beginning his studies, the world was about to wake up to what Texaco had tried to bury inside the jungle. In the late 1980s, a Yale educated environmental attorn, Judith Kimmerling, conducted the first environmental assessment of the area owned by Texaco. In her research, she came upon the same open pits that Pablo Fajardo had encountered while working for the oil company. Hundreds of them. Some were 20 meters in diameter, others reportedly as large as football fields. Kimberling estimated that there was 4.3 million gallons of toxic waste entering the local water supply every day. In 1991, Judith Kimmerling published a book of her findings called Amazon Crude. It was the first time people outside of Ecuador were exposed to what Texaco was up to deep in the jungle. And soon it caught the eye of some lawyers in America.
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We went down to the Amazon of Ecuador, fanned out over the affected area. What we found was really an apocalyptic nightmare.
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That's Stephen Donziger, a 6 foot 4 former journalist who spoke fluent Spanish and in 1993 was just two years out of law school. That Would be Harvard Law, where he'd played pickup basketball with a Hawaiian guy named Barack Obama. That same year he was invited by an Ecuadorian American lawyer on a fact finding mission to the Amazon with a group of 10 attorneys and doctors and to see if there was a case to be made against Texaco. By then Texaco's oil contract with Ecuador had expired. And after 28 years the company had handed its operations over to the state run Petro Ecuador. But the Americans had left behind a mess.
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Listen, I wasn't naive, man. I expected to see pollution. When I got there and actually opened my eyes and toured the area, I couldn't believe how much worse it was than I thought it would be. You're talking about Olympic sized swimming pools of oil waste that had been gouged out of the jungle floor in really one of the most pristine ecosystems in the world.
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Steven Donziger and the other lawyers came home with evidence that they said showed that over two decades, Texaco dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic waste in the forest. And it became clear that the environment wasn't the only victim. Locals described going to the streams and pushing a layer of sticky black crude off the top to reach the water underneath. With nothing else to drink, the villagers collected rainwater in rusting old Texaco oil drums. And the air they breathed was thick with smoke, A product of the ever burning gas flares and massive oil fires that illuminated the jungle.
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Unconscionable really, to think that some people somewhere decided to do this because this was done deliberately. All the systematic discharging of oil waste into waterways that local communities were relying on for their drinking water and their bathing and their fish, all of that was part of the design. It was deliberate. They made a decision to do that to save money.
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Across the affected area of El Oriente, one could find children with birth defects, adults missing limbs from cancer surgery, and a small cemetery where an entire family had been wiped out by the disease. In one village where Texaco had more than 30 wells and four gas torches burning around the clock, residents were more than twice as likely to get cancer than those in Ecuador's capital, Quito.
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People were just desperate. I mean, they didn't have the word cancer in their languages, you know, until Texaco showed up. And then it took them years to like figure out what the hell was happening to their health.
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In addition to cancer, there were miscarriages and several tribes were nearly pushed to extinction. Malnutrition rates were as high as 98%. Those that escaped sickness and death could barely live off the Land as livestock and fish were dying and the water had turned to poison. It was those conversations with the folks that were living through this nightmare that moved Donziger to action. The swashbuckling lawyer was able to convince major investors to put up money for a lawsuit against Texaco. The idea is that if these litigation finance firms win, their investment will be returned in spades. And not for nothing, Steven Donziger was also poised to come out of the lawsuit an extremely rich man if everything went his way.
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This is a private plaintiff side case, which is a critical point because that allowed us to get financing to really compete with the Texaco lawyers. They were out spending us minimum hundred to one. That is for every dollar we spent, they would spend a hundred.
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So not long after Donziger returned from Ecuador, his team filed a class action lawsuit in the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs numbered 30,000 and they were known as Los Effectados, the affected ones.
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After the case was filed in 1993, it was very evident from the get go that Texaco's entire defense strategy would be essentially to delay the trial. And they're experts at the art of using the procedure of the legal process to prevent any substantive resolution to the claims.
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For eight years, Texaco did exactly that. They challenged every bit of evidence, filed hundreds of procedural motions, appealed every decision, and demanded the trial move to Ecuador, where Donziger believes Texaco thought they were better suited to influence the outcome.
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Texaco argued it should be held in Ecuador. They were desperate to move it down there because when you operate for years and years with impunity, dumping toxic waste in their minds, logically they think, well, there's no way this court system is ever going to hold us accountable. Let's just move the case to Ecuador and it will disappear, it'll be dismissed. We were trying to get the trial held in the United States, preferably before a jury where they could judge what Texaco did.
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But in 2001, a federal judge sided with Texaco, ruling that the case had, quote, everything to do with Ecuador and nothing to do with the United States, despite the fact that Texaco is a
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US Based company and the decision to pollute an Ecuador was made in the United States.
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It was exactly as Donziger and the plaintiffs feared at the time.
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Our clients, the communities down there, did not trust their own court system because Texaco had been operating there for decades and like no one, had faith that the Ecuador court system was capable of dealing with this powerful American company that seemed to be running roughshod over the entire country of Ecuador.
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To make matters worse, the second largest oil company in the U.S. chevron, had just acquired Texaco. So now they were up against an even larger behemoth who could simply pay to slow walk the lawsuit or maybe just make it go away. Side note, that's also why from here on out, you're going to hear people refer to the defendants in this case as both Texaco and Chevron.
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American lawyers can't practice there. We don't know the ins and outs of the legal system in a foreign country. The hurdles at that point become much higher for a US based legal team than if the case were to be held here. And they were counting on us quitting at that point.
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But that's not what happened. And in 2002, the case moved to Ecuador, to the town where Texaco had run its operations and where Pablo Fajardo had first arrived in the Amazon, Lago Agrio.
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Lago Agrio was two towns, two worlds. There was a fence, a wire fence, and inside was Texaco with its operators. They had restaurants, permanent electricity, water, hospitals, airports, all services. And outside the fence lived the farmers, indigenous people and others. There was no electricity, no water, no hospitals, no roads, no life. Only oil and oil soaked roads. Two worlds separated by a fence that was.
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By the early 2000s, Pablo had a wife and a young daughter, and he was close to completing his law degree. After being blackballed from the oil industry because of his activism, Pablo had gone to work at a human rights office run out of a local mission, where he was making next to nothing. But then he became aware of the lawsuit that a bunch of gringo lawyers were pursuing on behalf of the people of eastern Ecuador. Donziger and his team were shuttling back and forth between New York and Quito, the capital of Ecuador. They were raising funds, strategizing, and preparing to start the case anew in a totally unfamiliar legal landscape. So they needed someone who knew the region, who could be their eyes and ears on the ground. Unfortunately, there wasn't a single lawyer in the town at the time, but there was one law student.
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Just as the case began here in Ecuador, there were two Ecuadorian lawyers on the case. But in the region in the Amazon where the trial was held, there was no lawyer handling the case. I was studying and working, coordinating the community and all of this. So I began working as an assistant to the lawyers from Quito on this case.
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Not yet out of law school, Pablo Fajardo was being recruited to take on his former employers in what was to become the biggest environmental trial in his country's history and the first trial of his career. On October 21, 2003, a full decade after Texaca was first taken to court in the U.S. the trial for their new parent company, Chevron, was beginning. Outsiders flooded into La Gurio, Ecuador. Journalists from the Washington Post, New York Times, the BBC, lawyers from Quito, California and New York, all arriving in this little boom town in the jungle. And specifically to a four story shopping mall that's home to a credit agency, a copy and print shop, and Lago Agrios courthouse.
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I got out of a taxi on the street in front of the courthouse, and it was a drizzly morning, and I see these armed soldiers in front of the courthouse. And I became furious. Like this rage started to billow up in my soul because I just, I knew what this was about. It was about telling the indigenous people they can go fuck themselves.
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Back when Texaco operated in Ecuador, the army served as private security to protect their assets. To Stephen Donziger, it was outrageous that this foreign company was once again using a national army for its personal security. But then Donziger noticed something else.
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The first day of the trial in Ecuador, there was this big, like, flatbed truck on this dirt road in front of this kind of makeshift courthouse. And I remember Pablo made a speech from the bed of the truck. And I was like, that's a damn good speech.
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By this point, Steven Donziger was increasingly aware of Pablo Fajardo, who had become his team's man on the ground in Lago Agrio.
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And I had noticed Pablo, but he was not a lawyer yet. I would say he was like more like a paralegal, like he was helping with papers. And it turned out that Pablo was brilliant.
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Pablo noticed Stephen too. How could he not? By this point, he was playing an outsized role in the legal team.
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He was the one who became most involved in the work here and who came frequently when the case came to Ecuador. His role was information, coordination, communication, and fundraising to finance the case. So he had a very visible role.
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And on the first day of the trial, as Steven Danziger lingered outside the court, more people began to arrive.
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There were thousands of indigenous people and farmers, men, women, children, marching outside the court, demanding justice, demanding that the judges act according to the law.
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Among the indigenous plaintiffs were Watani Indians and farmers who had come straight from the fields. The plaintiffs mobbed the courthouse, holding an enormous banner that read Justicia. At one point, Steven Donziger got on the top of the flatbed truck that Pablo had spoken from moments before and
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I took the mic and I said, listen, I said, this is your courthouse. This is a courthouse for all the people of Ecuador. You have a right to attend your own trial. This is your trial, okay? So I said, those guys there with those guns, they can't stop you. They cannot stop you. So I said, whoever wants to go up to the courthouse right now, come with me, and we're going to walk together past these SWAT guys, up the stairs into the courthouse. And dozens and dozens of people came with me up those stairs, and they sat in court and began to watch their own trial.
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Stephen Donziger led the way as they filed inside up to the third floor and into a little room with no air conditioning where the trial would take place
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that day. It was first a feeling of joy because we were finally able to truly begin a trial against a criminal company like Chevron. We knew we had all the evidence. I knew it. I worked there. I saw it all. I knew we had all the proof to say there was no way to lose, because we were right inside.
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Chevron was waiting.
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It was very clear to me that Chevron was freaking out. They were pouty, they were nervous, they were perspiring. Like their shirts. I mean, the courtroom were just wet. They cannot believe that they were now having to come back to that crime scene and defend themselves.
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That magical scene I just described with the indigenous people in traditional clothing and farmers straight from the fields staring down the Ecuadorian army and Chevron's expensive lawyers. That wasn't spontaneous. Steven Donziger had actually paid for them to come to town.
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And my idea was to just inundate the town with, like, thousands of people who otherwise, you know, had never been in court before. So we gave some money to pay for transport for anyone who could come. I mean, but I'm talking about, like, people sometimes would walk for two days to get to town, where they'd be in canoes.
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It was effective. The trial was covered in newspapers around the world. But that wasn't spontaneous either. There was a media circus in La Guagrio, and Steven Donziger was P.T. barnum.
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I had convinced reporters from the top four American newspapers that year to come to this isolated jungle town to cover the beginning of this trial. It was such a dramatic story, and I also needed that coverage to validate the seriousness of what we were doing. I felt like in Ecuador, given Texaco's power, Chevron's power, that it would be very hard for the court to drive this case forward unless it got massive amount of media attention, such that it was in the public eye.
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Danziger understood that there were forces outside of the courtroom beyond his control that were influencing the trial. And he needed to fight Chevron in those arenas as well. In January 2004, Pablo Fajardo finally graduated from law school. He took the bus to the city for the ceremony with his brother Wilson.
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He was the only person in my family who accompanied me to the graduation. No one else came because I studied in a province in the south of Ecuador and I lived in the north, so it was difficult for my family to travel.
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By that point, Pablo was a critical member of the team, especially since the lead Ecuadorian attorney stationed in Quito was reluctant to schlep to the tiny backwater of Lago Agrio.
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It was very clear that this guy is not going to be able to come down to the jungle for months at a time and litigate this case. It's like, not where his head is at.
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So unbeknownst to his Chevron counterpart, Stephen decided to make some personnel changes.
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I got a call one day from one of Chevron's lawyers, and she said, hey, Steve, I need to ask you for a favor. Like what?
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In typical Chevron fashion, the lawyer was asking to delay their next trial date.
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I said, but it's not my decision anymore because Pablo Fajardo is now the lawyer. You're gonna have to call him. She goes, what? Yeah. I said, pablo Fajardo is the lawyer. She goes, steve, don't bullshit me. She goes, you know, you can make this decision. I said, no, I'm not making this decision. You gotta call Pablo.
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To Chevron's surprise, Steven Donziger and his team of American lawyers had just replaced their lead Ecuadorian attorney, a veteran lawyer and a former Supreme Court justice, with Pablo Fajardo fresh out of law school. But Pablo never felt intimidated.
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On their side, they had an army of lawyers. They had more than 200 lawyers here in Ecuador. They had communication firms, security firms, lobbying firms. It was a gigantic machine that Chevron had against us. And for a time, I was here alone. But honestly, we never felt inferior. We had everything needed to show that Chevron's crime existed and that the crime was real. And in addition, we were accompanied by thousands of farmers and indigenous people who were with us, and that made us feel equal.
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Plus, Pablo had a home field advantage.
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I am also one of the affected. So of the 30,000 affected people, I am also one of them. That makes it a bit different from other colleagues who come from outside as lawyers. So I know almost everyone. Indigenous people, farmers, Mestizos, I know them all. And there are many stories that are very, very hard because of the reality people have had to illness, abandonment, poverty, misery, exclusion, persecution. And those stories, we don't just know them, we live them together.
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But now that Pablo was the public face of the contentious trial in Lago Agrio that also put him and the people around him in danger. On the afternoon of Monday, August 9, 2004, Pablo was with his little brother Wilson, who had toiled with him in the oil fields and accompanied him to graduation.
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We were at my house and I left for La Goaglio that afternoon and he went out that evening.
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The next morning, Pablo boarded a bus at the crack of dawn to get a head start on the day. But not long after he arrived at the office, he got a phone call. It was the local police. They explained that they'd been called to a community center where the body of a 28 year old male was found stabbed and shot. Pablo Fajardo arrived soon after to identify the body of his brother, Wilson Fajardo.
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They had tortured him. He was very destroyed. A brutal, savage torture, and then they dumped him somewhere.
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While there were reports that Wilson was killed in an altercation with a group of locals, Pablo insists his brother was a good man with no enemies. To this day, the case remains unsolved.
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So I say one can never know exactly what happened. One can presume, but I can never confirm that it was because of this fight against Chevron. But the doubt remains, because given everything that happened before, it's hard not to think it had a lot to do with all of this.
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According to Pablo, the chief of military intelligence in his small town told one of his brothers that Pablo was being followed and that the killers had made a mistake. Apparently, Pablo was the intended target. After his brother's murder, Pablo Fajardo sent his family to his wife's parents. While he moved out of his home and into a small rented room, he started to carry a gun and no longer walked the streets alone, moving everywhere by taxi as much as he could.
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I've always said that for me, the most difficult months of my life were after his death. Some of my siblings thought that because of me they had killed him. And having your own family accuse you, that's also very hard. Then part of my family have to leave the area. Even my mother, who was living there at that time, had to be taken out of town and moved to another city on the coast because it was very dangerous.
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Pablo laid low. But when he did dare to venture out to dinner or to his office. He believed that Chevron was always there.
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Chevron had work teams. They had rented offices across from ours with security teams to surveil us intensely, to control us. There was no space. I went to no restaurant where I went to eat, where there wasn't a Chevron spy watching me. It was a situation of permanent persecution.
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According to a legal petition filed by an international human rights commission, late on the evening of October 14, 2005, the phone rang in Pablo Fajardo's office. The anonymous caller told Pablo that he was carrying out a cleansing of the region of politically undesirable elements and that they knew who works in the office and where they live. Then, two weeks later, a computer and some documents related to the Chevron lawsuit were stolen from the law office. According to one human rights group, the break in had all the telltale signs of an operation from a secret military intelligence unit, often used to intimidate opponents of the government.
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I do have information and testimony from very, very reliable people that on at least two occasions, they tried to assassinate me.
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Pablo doesn't know who they are, and there is no evidence that Chevron has ever tried to have him killed, or anyone else, for that matter. But as his visibility increased, so did the threats on his life. Sometimes men on motorcycles would stalk him. Once, a friend saw them waiting for Pablo at his rented home, only to leave in the morning. When he didn't come home that night,
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for some reason, thanks to God, I'm here. But I took measures. I didn't stay in one place. I was always moving, always accompanied. You do many things because in the end you want to survive.
- [36:59]
A
Pablo and the other attorneys working the trial submitted a petition for protection, claiming their lives were in danger. But in 2006, as the case kicked off, Pablo bravely faced Chevron in public. That's Pablo saying that Chevron tried to sway public opinion and the courts by arguing its business practices in Ecuador were standard around the world. This moment was captured in a documentary called Crude. As part of his media blitz, Steven Donziger had invited a filmmaker to come and document the trial as it unfolded. More than a billion gallons of poisonous toxic water were dumped into marshes and rivers of this area, says Pablo. He's wearing a straw hat and a yellow oxford shirt, talking to the judge. But Pablo isn't at a courthouse. He's at an alleged contamination site where the first phase of the trial is taking place. The judge, the plaintiff's lawyers, and the defense lawyers all attend field inspections, where, along with their respective technical teams, they present their Arguments and take evidence. Fajardo shows the judge sites where oil entered rivers and sources of drinking water, saying what the people demand is the complete remediation of the area Texaco contaminated. He says then it's time for Chevron's lawyer to speak. What these people seek, he says, is not environmental remediation. It is not a cleanup. It is not a better quality of life. It is two checks. He's claiming that the case is only about getting one payday for the plaintiffs and one for their lawyers. This line of attack would come up over and over throughout the trial. And it's true. This was a massive tort case. An expert for the plaintiffs had estimated that chevron should pay 27 billion in damages. And again, Steven Donziger would do extremely well if his side won, he'd be in line to collect more than half a billion dollars. With that much money riding on the case, it's no wonder that things were getting increasingly Bitter. In a 2008 interview with Newsweek, a Chevron lobbyist said the case could set a dangerous precedent, saying, we can't let little countries screw around with big companies.
- [39:46]
C
Here in Ecuador, when we already started the case, when it was the strongest phase of the trial, with the fieldwork, the judicial inspections, that is when the persecution against us increased and it went farther. In the us, Chevron launched a massive communications plan to demonize Ecuadorian government and us. They attacked us publicly.
- [40:13]
A
But behind the scenes, Stephen Donziger was working to ensure the case had a fighting chance, because it wasn't only being waged in a tiny courthouse in La Gua Grio, but in the court of public opinion. And with Donziger orchestrating strategy and Pablo Fajardo litigating in the field, momentum was beginning to shift. In 2008, Pablo Fajardo and a fellow activist from Ecuador involved in the case were awarded the Goldman Prize, which is probably the most prestigious award you can get as an environmentalist. Pablo was also awarded the CNN Heroes Prize, and Vanity Fair published a 13,000 word magazine profile. And in 2009, the film Crude, which had followed parts of the trial as it unfolded, premiered at Sundance. Spotlighting the devastation had become a kind of pilgrimage for international media. They even had a name for it, the Toxic Tour. The world was paying attention to what was happening in Pablo Fajardo's small Ecuadorian town. And suddenly it seemed like they could actually win.
- [41:36]
C
We always say that if you take on a case, it's to win it. Not to tie, not to lose, but to win it, right? And that Means you have to make a big effort to rise to the level of a case as gigantic as this one.
- [41:52]
A
In late January 2011, the plaintiffs submitted their final arguments. And on February 14, nearly a decade after the case started in Ecuador and nearly 20 years after the trial began in the US Judge Nicolas Zambrano released his verdict.
- [42:12]
C
I was having lunch with a colleague when a journalist called me asking what I thought about the ruling. I didn't know it yet. Back then, notifications weren't electronic. You had to go to court and check your box. I went immediately. The ruling was there. I read the operative section. It was favorable. It was a huge satisfaction. Ten years of struggle had results. It gave hope for justice and reparations.
- [42:53]
A
In a 188 page ruling, Zambrano found Chevron responsible for $8.6 billion in damages. And if Chevron didn't apologize within 15 days, that amount would double. Separately, there was $860 million for the plaintiff's legal team. In total, Chevron was potentially looking at a bill of around $18 billion. In a statement, Chevron called the judgment illegitimate and unenforceable. Chevron did not respond to requests for comment. For this episode,
- [43:28]
C
my phone exploded with calls from journalists worldwide. Needed hours to read the 180 pages and explain it to the community leaders because they decide, not me. Then we communicated our position. It was a huge joy, but also a lot of work.
- [43:54]
A
Pablo Fajardo called the ruling a triumph of justice and said the plaintiffs would even appeal for a larger settlement. In an emotional press conference, Pablo says, it's a shame, shame it took so long, but the persistence of the people, the unity of the people, has finally paid off. But while the plaintiff's lawyers celebrated, one person was noticeably absent in la. Steven Donziger.
- [44:30]
B
So I was going down to Ecuador on February 1, 2011, one of my frequent trips. And I usually flew American airlines out of LaGuardia to Miami. And I got off the plane in Miami and I remember I had a BlackBerry then. So when I got down to the ground, I turned on my BlackBerry and it blew up. They had sued me.
- [44:59]
A
After nearly 20 years, the epic trial to hold Texaco and Chevron accountable for their actions in Ecuador wasn't over yet. And now the tables were turned.
- [45:10]
B
They were trying to crush me. Crush me.
- [45:15]
A
That's next week. Follow Lawless Planet on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of Lawless Planet ad free by joining Audible. On the next episode of Lawless Planet, the conclusion of our two part series on the Amazon Chernobyl.
- [45:42]
B
People started to really question me, and if you read their complaint and don't know anything else, I look like the worst person in the world. And the next several months was really some of the most intense weeks of my life where I truly didn't know if I'd be able to survive.
- [46:02]
A
For today's episode, we relied heavily on William Longavichi's Vanity Fair profile Jungle Law, Patrick Radden Keefe's New Yorker article Reversal of Fortune, Joe Berlinger's documentary Crude and the book Law of the Jungle by Paul M. Barrett. Lawless Planet is produced by Audible. This episode was written, produced and hosted by me, Zach Goldbaum. Our senior producer and senior story editor is Derek John. Senior producer for Audible is Andy Herman. Our senior managing producer is Lata Pandya. Our managing producer is Jake Kleinberg. Our producer is Lexi Peary. Sound design by Kyle Randall Music by Kenny Kusiak Voice acting by JD Montalvo. Our music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Frison Sync Fact checking by Naomi Barr Translation assistance by Nicholas Sotomayor Our legal counsel is Shepard Mullen, executive executive producer for Audible Jenny Lauer Beckman, head of Creative development at Audible Kate Navin, Head of Audible Originals North America Marshall Louie, Chief Content Officer Rachel Giazza Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC Sound Recording Copyright 2026 by Audible Originates, LLC thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.