Dramatic development in U.S. courts might prove decisive in the Chevron, Ecuador legal action.

The legal action against Chevron-Texaco in Ecuador has taken yet another dramatic turn, when the United States District Court, New York, issued a subpoena-seeking discovery from lawyer Steven Donziger, a main adviser of the plaintiffs in the case. As the legal action against Chevron nears a possible decision in Ecuadorian courts, events bearing on the case have taken place in a rapid manner. The damages sought by the plaintiffs have been elevated to the astronomical amount of $127 billion. In parallel, Chevron-Texaco obtained an uncut version of the documentary film “Crude” that shows quite convincingly how the plaintiffs and the so-called neutral expert met to discuss and plan cooperative action and how the expert’s “neutral” document to the court ended up being partly or wholly written by…. the plaintiffs!

In the documentary lawyer Donziger can be seen and heard making comments that show him as a political strategist seeking to influence the decision in Ecuador courts and to promote Rafael Correa’s government intervention in their favor. On the basis of these new findings the U.S. New York District court has issued an order for Donziger to testify, in spite of his, predictable, vigorous objections.

This development seems to represent another major victory for Chevron-Texaco in this case. For a long time the plaintiffs have had the initiative, as they conducted intense lobbying before Ecuadorian authorities and a very passionate and effective international campaign in which the oil company was presented as the main responsible for the environmental damages that have occurred in the Ecuadorian portion of the Amazon basin as a result of oil production. Even in the U.S. Chevron-Texaco has been generally pictured by the press in a bad light. This is understandable as big oil corporations are the villains of the modern world. In a planet afflicted by global warming, a by product of fossil fuel production, oil companies are automatically assigned the role of bad guys since the historical record has shown frequent examples of improper production practices by these companies in many countries of the world.

However, this time around the villains seem to be the plaintiffs, self-defined as “poor and defenseless” against the oil monster. By playing up the bad image oil companies have acquired in the past the plaintiffs have conducted a fraudulent case from the very start. They have been in collusion with the “neutral expert” and have obtained improper public and strong support from the Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa. Correa has got to the point of threatening the judicial with retaliation if “justice’ is not served.

In what has become a tropical version of a 1930 style Mississippi court action against blacks, under the umbrella of Jim Crow laws, the Ecuadorian litigation against Chevron has been largely influenced, if not controlled, by the plaintiffs and its political supporters, with the help of politically aligned environmental groups, venal members of the judiciary, corrupt lawyers and members of the Ecuadorian executive branch acting on the orders of Rafael Correa. However, the momentum seems to have shifted, strongly helped by the evidence obtained from the uncut version of the documentary “Crude”. Donziger testimony in court promises to extract more vital information on this case from a very smart lawyer who probably should have concentrated in his orthodox practice of law rather than engaging in unscrupulous political manipulation.