Attorney Steven Donziger Details "Systematic" Poisoning of Indigenous People by Chevron
Joy Marie Mann interviews Steven Donziger
Attorney Steven Donziger stumbled upon a huge case right out of law school when he was tabbed to investigate environmental catastrophe in the Amazon. Once there representing thousands of indigenous villagers in the Amazon of Ecuador, Donziger and his colleagues found evidence of a deliberate mass poisoning by corporate oil giant Texaco (now called Chevron).
“We went down there a week, looked at it, talked to people, documented chemical sampling results, oil spills and the like, and really came to the conclusion that what Texaco, now Chevron, had done in Ecuador was probably the world’s worst oil-related disaster. Even worse, the environmental damage had been done deliberately,” Donziger tells Deconstructing Consent writer Joy Marie Mann on her show “The Unruly Hour” (below).
“Texaco systematically dumped millions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste onto indigenous ancestral lands, onto waterways, over a 25-year period…The net result is that the indigenous peoples have been decimated.”
While other oil behemoths like BP have paid out money to Americans for doing damage through accidental oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, Chevron has yet to shell out any money to the indigenous people in Latin America that Donziger says the company intentionally poisoned, en masse, for decades. What’s more, Donziger himself has been persecuted and prosecuted for his advocacy.
“This happened every day for 25 years,” he details.
“Four million gallons of benzine-laden, cancer-causing oil waste water was run from these big, industrial pipes into rivers and streams without telling the people what it was. And, it was scalding-hot, and it was poisonous, but if you looked at it physically, it was clear…it didn’t look dirty. It would go into the rivers and streams, and there was no warning, and the people didn’t know that their water sources were being poisoned.”
Watch the full episode, above.