Karen Hinton, representing the Ecuadorians suing Chevron, responds to Jon Entine’s December column

Jon Entine’s column [Chevron and Ecuador: How to win the argument but lose in court, December] includes faulty conclusions and erroneous statements about the Chevron lawsuit filed by Ecuadorian indigenous groups for massive oil contamination in the Amazonian rainforest.

Recent charges levelled by Chevron against the Ecuadorians and their lawyers are nothing more than attempts to divert attention away from its intentional dumping of 18bn gallons of oil and toxic water into the rainforest, its fraudulent remediation of a small percentage of oil sites and evidence tampering in the case.

None of the accusations change the underlying facts of the case: Chevron left behind massive contamination that continues to pollute the rainforest today and, as the sole operator of the oil sites from 1964 until 1990, is liable for damage cleanup and compensation.
PetroEcuador took over operations in 1990 and, while its practices have not been perfect, the oil company has made important improvements over Chevron’s.

1) Unlike Chevron, PetroEcuador began re-injecting toxic water and oil deep into the ground shortly after taking over operations – the standard oil industry practice then and now.

2) PetroEcuador began storing temporarily toxic waste left over from drilling into lined containers near the oil sites, as opposed to simply digging a hole for the waste and leaving it there for eternity, as Chevron did.

3) PetroEcuador has a spill report system in place. Chevron didn’t report a single spill in Ecuador in 16 years of operation.

Also Entine inaccurately reported that only Chevron officials had been indicted for the fraudulent remediation. In fact, 12 former Ecuadorian government officials have been indicted, along with two Chevron lawyers.

Some of the Ecuadorian officials were in office when the Ecuadorian comptroller-general (the equivalent of the US Government Accountability Office) urged the government in 2001 to investigate the so-called remediation based on his findings that over 85% of the oil sites that Texaco said it had cleaned were in fact as contaminated as those that had not been cleaned.
It is important to remember that Chevron asked a US court to move the litigation to Ecuador. Now that overwhelming evidence has proven Chevron’s culpability, Chevron cried foul play, when in fact, justice is being served.

Karen Hinton, spokeswoman for the Ecuadorians suing Chevron
Hinton Communications
Washington, DC
USA

See here for the second part of Jon Entine's investigation.