​It’s hard to believe, but these photos are nearly 30 years old now. My face doesn’t show it, but I was full of rage at what I’d seen on this trip.

My first trip to Ecuador was in April of 1993. I went down with some lawyers and scientists to investigate reports that Texaco had dumped billions of gallons of toxic oil waste into the pristine Amazon rainforest, where Indigenous groups live.

I was shocked by what we found. I expected to see pollution. I was truly shocked by the extent of it. Massive pools of oil, literally thousands of them all over the rainforest. People were living there in and amongst this very intense pollution. The oil was on their clothes. It was in the air they breathed. It was in the food they ate. It was in the water that they drank.

I really cannot overstate the damage Big Oil was knowingly doing. It was an apocalyptic nightmare. When you drill an oil well, you go thousands of feet underground, and all this rock and heavy metals and manmade chemicals that cause cancer come up out of the ground with the oil, and you have to put it somewhere. And they just put it in unlined pits in the jungle. In many of the pits, they built pipes on the sides to take the overflow into the nearby rivers and streams that people were using for their drinking water, without telling the people that they were doing this. I saw things that were unbelievably horrid.

And once you see it you can’t really turn your back on it. The trip changed my life. I’ve dedicated my professional life to helping these people and righting the horrific environmental wrongs that
were inflicted on them.

And Texaco/Chevron has fought us every step of the way.

During the first 10 years of the case, we were fighting to have a jury trial in the United States. Texaco and Chevron did not want that. They were petrified of a jury. They were desperate to shift the case back to Ecuador, where they thought they could continue with impunity. Here they had their first success; the case ended up getting shifted to Ecuador. On the very first day of the trial in October of 2003 in Ecuador,
after Chevron had agreed to accept jurisdiction there, literally the first thing they did was challenge jurisdiction. And that began years and years of completely bad-faith — in my mind, unethical – litigation tactics. Chevron’s trial strategy was to sabotage the trial.

Chevron did not want any litigation on the merits of the claims of the Ecuadorians.

They wanted to avoid that at all costs. They paid one of their employees, Diego Borja, to try to entrap a judge in a bribery scandal. He taped it through a pen. They were constantly filing dozens and dozens of trial motions in a very short period of time, as short as an hour, to stop the court from functioning properly. Chevron would then file more motions to recuse the judge from the case, and that motion would then go
to another judge and it would delay the trial for six months. Part of Chevron’s strategy is to bankrupt us.

So Chevron has gone out of its way to avoid talking about the real issue, which is that it committed environmental crimes in Ecuador that have devastated Indigenous groups, devastated farming communities, poisoned this incredibly important ecosystem that’s critical to the survival of the planet for all of us. They don’t want to talk about that. Because it will undermine their business model.

Chevron and other fossil fuel companies like to go into areas, drill out the oil, get all the profits they can, and leave behind massive pollution that the public, or the area communities have to pay to clean up. They report these enormous profits, but we, meaning the people, are actually subsidizing them because we’re paying the cost for their pollution while they get the profits.

So, the case in Ecuador ended on February 14, 2011, with a resounding victory for the affected communities, a $20 billion judgment. This was later reduced on appeal to just under $10 billion, but it was then, and is still, the largest environmental judgment ever awarded by a court of law.

As you know, Chevron has never paid it.

Chevron knows if the people of Ecuador who’ve won this judgment are able to collect it, the floodgates will open and there will be potentially a trillion plus dollars of liability, because what they did in Ecuador, they’ve done in dozens of countries around the world. They have concluded that it’s cheaper to pay
hundreds of lawyers to fight this than to pay the people they harmed, because once that happens once, the chances of it happening dozens more times increase dramatically and their whole business model gets destroyed. It is a business model based on privatizing profits and socializing costs to the most vulnerable
people on the planet.

Which is why they are spending massive sums of money to try to destroy my life and hold me up as an example of what happens if you try to go up against Big Oil. I am a human rights lawyer detained in the United States of America on bogus charges, all because Chevron wants to evade a $10 billion environmental liability owed to the most vulnerable Indigenous groups in the Amazon. Their entire strategy now is to sue anyone who wants to help the case, including the lawyers, including me.

I won’t let Big Oil silence me, or our movement, and I won’t disappoint that idealistic young lawyer in these photos. Even after all these years, I still feel the same fire and passion for the Amazon communities and the same rage at Chevron for the destruction. and pain they’ve caused, all in the name of profits.
I have appealed the bogus convictions they leveled at me, but the only realistic way for me to continue this extraordinary fight is to get a pardon from President Biden. He announced he won’t be seeking a second term, so our time is short.

We only have until January. The donations I’m seeking will help me increase the pressure of my pardon campaign this fall. That will include a direct education campaign with White House officials — and hopefully a full-page ad in the leading US newspapers. We’ve got to get President Biden’s attention before he leaves office in January. We’ve got to make him understand that thousands of people around the world
support the communities of Ecuador and are watching.

Big Oil cannot silence me. They cannot silence the affected communities in Ecuador. They cannot silence our climate movement. We will keep fighting for the environment and holding these money-hungry corporations accountable for the destruction they’ve caused. Thank you for your help!
Steven Donziger, website

Thank you again for your continued support of my fight for my freedom. My pardon campaign is gaining momentum and we are fundraising for a big push this autumn as Biden completes his last few months in office. Please sign the petition.
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