March 15, 2021
Decades of reckless oil drilling by Chevron have destroyed 1,700 square miles of land in the Ecuadorian Amazon, but the company has refused to pay for the damage or clean up the land despite losing a lawsuit ten years ago, when Ecuador s Supreme Court ordered the oil giant to pay $18 billion on behalf of 30,000 Amazonian Indigenous people.
Instead of cleaning up the damage, Chevron has spent the past decade waging an unprecedented legal battle to avoid paying for the environmental destruction, while also trying to take down the environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, who helped bring the landmark case. Donziger, who has been on house arrest for nearly 600 days, says Chevron s legal attacks on him are meant to silence critics and stop other lawsuits against the company for environmental damage. Chevron and its allies have used the judiciary to try to attack the very idea of corporate accountability and environmental justice work that leads to significant judgments, Do