In 1993, Ecuadorians filed suit against American fossil fuel giant Chevron, arguing that the company was responsible for contaminating that land and sickening people through decades of drilling in the Lago Agrio oil fields. The suit dragged on for over two decades, and Monday, a federal U.S. court finally handed down its decision: Some 30,000 native Ecuadorians have lost out on billions of dollars in damages.
Though Chevron pulled its operations from Ecuador in the early 1990s, it left behind billions of gallons of toxic waste in the Lago Agrio region, poisoned water, and people suffering from cancer. The contamination was so great that it’s sometimes dubbed “the Amazon’s Chernobyl.”
In 2011, Ecuador’s Supreme Court ordered Chevron to pay $18 billion in cleanup and damages, a fine that was later reduced to $9.5 billion. American lawyer Steven Donziger — who has worked the case for decades — moved the case to the U.S. in the hopes an American court would force Chevron to comply with the Ecuadorian judgment.
But a federal appeals court in New York upheld a decision on Monday that Donziger and his legal team obtained the Ecuadorian judgment through bribery, coercion, and fraud, and is therefore unenforceable.
Ecuadorians may seek justice outside the United States, in Canada and “other countries where litigation is underway to seize Chevron assets,” according to Karen Hinton, American spokeswoman for the Ecuadoreans.
For more on Lago Agrio, Steven Donziger, and the long fight against Chevron, check out this episode of Alec Baldwin’s Here’s the Thing.
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