Real classy, Chevron. Not content with ruining the lives of thousands of indigenous people across the Amazon by poisoning the land they live on and the water they drink, Chevron is suing them.

Hunh? You heard right. Chevron is suing Amazon tribesmen whose only crime was imagining they might get Chevron to take responsibility and clean up the mess they made.

As Zach Shahan puts it at Planetsave, “Chevron must have been jealous of BP in 2010, because it is taking corporate irresponsibility to another level in Ecuador.”

Here’s the backstory:

Texaco (now Chevron) drills for oil in the jungle. It’s just jungle, right? Not like anyone lives there. They don’t bother cleaning up, instead dumping toxic chemicals in pits dug in the ground.

The people who live in this once-pristine garden of Eden get sick.

In 1993, they sue in New York courts. Texaco/Chevron claims that New York has no standing, and the suits must be brought in Ecuador. The judge agrees in 2002; this buys Chevron a few years, and a few of the sick natives die in the meantime.

More years of litigation drag on, with Chevron pulling every dirty trick in the book, ranging from challenging the right of Ecuador to try the case at all (after insisting the case HAD to be tried in Ecuador, not New York) to trying to boot the judge off the case.

Now that it looks like they’re going to lose – $27 billion or more! – Chevron is counter-suing the tribes. In New York. For a case they insisted only Ecuador had jurisdiction over.

Yeah. Classy. Chevron has:

…Threatened the trial judge with criminal liability for refusing to grant the oil giant’s motions to dismiss the case; sued each of the 47 impoverished indigenous and farmer plaintiffs in Ecuador’s rainforest in New York federal court; sought an unprecedented injunction from a U.S. federal judge to bar any American lawyer from enforcing a judgment out of Ecuador anywhere in the world; and finished its 13th day deposing one of the plaintiff’s American lawyer, apparently breaking the record for the longest deposition of a lawyer on a sitting case. The company also filed a civil RICO suit in New York yesterday, claiming the indigenous groups were trying to extort money from Chevron via the lawsuit. (Via Planetsave)

Watch 60 Minutes’ report on the Chevron lawsuit, “Amazon Crude”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hMdsxrAyT0

Watch the trailer for the “Crude” documentary:



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