The award-winning documentary Crude, which chronicles the compelling 16-year struggle of indigenous groups in Ecuador's Amazon rainforest to hold Chevron accountable for the world's largest oil-related contamination, has opened in Washington, DC at a time of intense scrutiny of a trial where the oil giant faces a USD27 billion liability that could eat up one-fifth of its market value.
The movie – praised by The New York Times as "intelligently and artfully made" – is being released at a time that Chevron is the subject of three official investigations by prosecutorial authorities into whether it violated laws related to its conduct in Ecuador. The lawsuit alleges that Texaco (bought by Chevron in 2001) deliberately dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon from 1964 to 1990, decimating indigenous groups and poisoning an area the size of Rhode Island.
Award-winning filmmaker Joe Berlinger's film focuses on the complexities of the legal controversy as well as the devastating destruction of both human and environmental life in the rainforest stemming from almost three decades of oil exploration.
Chevron maintains that Texaco cleaned up the pits and that a remediation agreement exempts them from liability. However, court evidence has shown that the pits Texaco said it cleaned remain polluted with lethal levels of toxins. Also, the remediation agreement that Texaco signed with Ecuador relates only to government claims, not individual claims, such as the plaintiffs'.
Experts for the plaintiffs have concluded the disaster is at least 30 times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill, and that any clean-up would dwarf the largest decontamination effort ever undertaken. The trial has been featured recently on 60 Minutes and in several major newspapers, including The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.
Rep. James McGovern (D-MA), who visited the affected area last year wrote a letter to Obama where he described the situation in Ecuador as a "terrible humanitarian and environmental crisis". McGovern said in the letter: "As an American citizen, the degradation and contamination left behind by this U.S. company in a poor part of the world made me angry and ashamed."
Obama has also become a bit player in the long-running conflict, which began when the lawsuit was filed in U.S. federal court in 1993. In 2006, after the legal case had been shifted to Ecuador at Chevron's request, Sens. Obama and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt) signed a letter to the United States Trade Ambassador opposing a lobbying effort by Chevron to cancel Ecuador's trade preferences in retaliation for letting the lawsuit proceed in its courts. In that letter, Obama and Leahy said: "While we are not prejudging the outcome of the case, we do believe 30,000 indigenous residents of Ecuador deserve their day in court."
In late August, as part of its campaign to discredit Ecuador's courts, Chevron posted secretly-recorded videotapes on YouTube that purport to show a bribery scheme involving a trial judge who has since been removed from the case. Since then, a number of inaccuracies and discrepancies in Chevron's account of the tapes have been uncovered by journalists, and the company has refused to make the witnesses or full tapes available.
Ecuador's government has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Chevron's legal team for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act on the theory the company created the tapes to undermine Ecuador's judicial system so it could evade a liability. Chevron is currently under investigation by Ecuador's Attorney General for its role in the bribery scandal.
