A court debacle labelled the ‘biggest environmental case in the world’ just sided with Big Oil. A New York Federal Appeals Court has ruled that Ecuadoreans who were concerned over the health of their rainforest after a 23-year battle with the Chevron subsidiary, Texaco, for polluting vast swaths of Lago Agrio in the Ecuadorian jungle, cannot hold the company financially culpable.
Texaco is accused of dumping contaminated water into pits used by locals in the area while operating there for over a decade. Sadly, the US Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s finding, which determined that the Ecuadorean court judgment was obtained by corrupt means, according to the Associated Press. A $9 billion-dollar judgment for the plaintiffs was at stake, but the US court has ruled that Big Oil is not responsible for polluting the area, and their assets cannot be seized.
Chevron (Texaco) says that the plaintiffs’ lawyers who obtained the original judgment were corrupt, and that they are “happy to see justice prevail.”
Other environmental activists have pointed out Chevron’s egregious acts in the Amazon, calling it Chevron’s Chernobyl of the rainforest. Streams and rivers have been contaminated with crude oil for decades in a devastating disregard for the forest and its ecosystems.
Despite years of activists calling attention to this travesty, the corrupt media and mafia-owned justice system has sided with Big Oil yet again. Incidentally, Reuters, who reported on this story originally, isowned by the Rothschild family.
Chevron attests that a 1998 agreement between Texaco and the Ecuadorian government absolves it of liability. A US spokeswoman for the Ecuadorians, Karen Hinton, told Associated Press that the plaintiffs were shocked by the ruling and called it a “sad day for the US justice system.”
“As disappointed as we are, this ruling will not deter the Ecuadoreans, their lawyers and their supporters from aggressively seeking justice in Canada and in other countries where litigation is under way to seize Chevron assets,” Hinton said.
Hinton, once the press secretary for NYC Mayor, Bill de Blasio, and a former employee of Governor, Andrew Cuomo when he was a cabinet-level official in the Clinton administration, left her position to fight for indigenous farmers and communities in Ecuador. She gave more than seven years of her career to try to right the wrongs of Chevron/Texaco, but it seems the political pay-off was bigger for those supporting the rigged Big Oil market.
As Michael Eisner, once CEO of Walt Disney has said, “We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.”