Chevron has been in court since 1993 over its contamination in Ecuador. In that year, the class-action suit Aguinda v. Texaco was filed in New York, where Texaco was headquartered at the time. The company petitioned for years to have the case relocated to Ecuador, submitting numerous affidavits praising the integrity of Ecuador's judicial system. In 2002, after a series of appeals, the company's request was granted and Chevron agreed to submit to the jurisdiction of the Ecuadorian court. The affected communities refiled their lawsuit in Ecuador in May of 2003, and Chevron immediately began to argue that it should not have to defend itself there either.

One of the specious arguments that Chevron used to try to avoid trial was to insist that the government of Ecuador had released it from any further responsibility after it agreed to remediate a small portion of its contaminated sites in 1993. This "release" was negotiated with the government while the Aguinda case was already proceeding, and it explicitly excluded such private claims against the company. For this reason, Chevron's argument has been summarily dismissed whenever they have made it in court, although they still trot it out in press releases. Additionally, the clean up on which the release was conditioned appears to have been a fraud, as samples taken during the trial revealed that the "remediated" sites are just as contaminated as ones that were never treated.

Over the next few years, numerous judicial inspections of Texaco's former oil installations and waste pits were carried out to determine levels of contamination and their sources. The scientific record resulting from these inspections clearly shows soil and water contamination by Texaco far above legal limits, and Texaco had already admitted to dumping toxic waste in the area for decades. Even Chevron's own scientists – as well as independent" labs that the company allegedly set up and controlled – obtained significant data that supports the case against the company. This despite its constant attempts to rig the results of the inspections, including by selecting samples from locations that they had secretly visited beforehand in a fruitless attempt to find uncontaminated areas, as was revealed when a whistleblower within Chevron anonymously mailed a package of internal company videos to Amazon Watch.

In February of 2011, Chevron was found guilty and ordered to pay $9 billion to remediate the environmental damage and pay for clean water and healthcare facilities for the affected population, as well as an additional $9 billion in punitive damages. Chevron appealed all the way to the Ecuadorian supreme court, which issued its decison in November of 2013. In its 222-page opinion, the supreme court affirmed earlier decisions by a Lago Agrio court and the appellate court for $9 billion but rejected the additional $9 billion in punitive damages, given that this was not explicitly permitted in Ecuadorian law. It also lamented the plaintiffs waiting twenty years for justice and attributed this largely to delaying tactics by Chevron.