Hi everyone, it's Luke Savage from Jacobin and the Mike Lenos podcast here with an interview that we're keen to share.

In the following audio, you'll hear my conversation with human rights lawyer Stephen Donziger,

a man who's been under house arrest for nearly 20 months under circumstances which,

as well hear, are as sinister as they come,

originally stemming from his role in a landmark legal victory against oil and gas, behemoth Chevron, over its activities in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Now, our interviews are normally behind a paywall on our Patreon, but for obvious reasons we're sharing this, so that as many people will hear it as possible.

This case is one that I

think everyone needs to know about. It touches on a great many things that are of concern today

about the power of corporations to commit harm, to evade accountability, and to leverage

official legal mechanisms to persecute their critics. So please enjoy this interview and please, if you can, visit

free-Donsiger.org. That's free, D-O-N-Z-I-G-R-O-R-G to learn more about the case and about what you can do to help.

So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with human rights lawyer, Stephen Donziger.

I guess all of this began when when or because you were part of a legal team that took action. Successfully, I might add, against Chevron over its activities in Ecuador.

And before we get into what happened next, I'm wondering if you can tell us a bit about that lawsuit.

What exactly was Chevron doing in

Ecuador and how did you originally get involved in the case? Thank you. I got involved in the case

in April of 1993 when I was invited to join a delegation of lawyers and scientists to investigate

what we had been told was maybe the world's worst oil-related

catastrophe in an area of Ecuador, the Ecuadorian Amazon, just south of the Columbia border.

So we went there, and I discovered really an apocalyptic scene with, you know, huge Olympic-sized pools of oil that had been left in the jungle.

Hundreds and hundreds of these open-air toxic waste pits that Chevron had built to dispose of waste.

And in these pits, they would put pipes into the sides of them

...