Unlocked: Will Talks to Steven Donziger About Taking on Chevron

Chapo Trap House

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4.6 • 9.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2021

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From episode 503, Will catches up with Steven Donziger, the human rights attorney who has been under house arrest for over 500 days as a result of his work suing oil giant Chevron for their reckless polluting of Ecuador. Since we last talked to Steven there’s been some movement in his case, so we’re getting an update and continuing to discuss the fairly obvious collusion between Chevron, private prosecutors, and the New York Judge involved. Catch up on Steven’s first appearance here: https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/418-the-cool-zone-feat-steven-donziger-41119 For more information, go to www.makechevroncleanup.com. To learn more about or get involved with Steven’s case, or even dial in and listen to his hearing on March 10, go to https://www.freedonziger.org. You can follow him on Twitter: @SDonziger.

Transcript

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0:00.0	All right, hey everybody. You may remember a while back. I did a bonus interview with the
0:06.5	lawyer, Steven Donzinger, about the circumstances that led to his quite lengthy house arrest
0:14.2	and his ongoing persecution by a law firm prosecuting him and their relationship with the
0:23.2	very people that he won a lawsuit against. So his trials coming up and we decided that we should
0:29.3	check in again with Steven Donzinger. So I'm joined again once again by the lawyer, Steven Donzinger.
0:34.8	Steven, how's it going? Good, thanks for having me, Will. It's good to be here. All right, so maybe
0:38.9	for the people who haven't listened to the first episode or unaware of this story, could you give
0:43.9	or are listeners just like a brief background regarding your case and the rather extraordinary
0:49.5	way in which you've been confined to your home for like well over a year and a half now? Sure,
0:54.9	so you know, it's a it's a 27-year story, but I'm going to sort of reduce it to about a minute.
1:01.2	I'm a lawyer living in New York. Right when I got out of law school in the early 90s, I went down
1:07.2	to Echro, the group of lawyers and investigators to look at what really was
1:13.4	called the world's worst or related catastrophe. And it involves Chevron and its predecessor
1:19.2	company, Texaco, over 25 or so years in the Ecuador and Amazon. They deliberately
1:24.8	dumped billions of gallons of cancer causing oil waste onto indigenous ancestral lands in about
1:30.5	a 1500 square mile area. Correct the region completely poison the the water, the the fresh water
1:38.4	sources, the rivers, the streams, the groundwater. And over time hundreds thousands of and even
1:44.9	thousands of people have died of cancer or been stricken with oil-related diseases. Indigenous
1:51.0	cultures have been decimated and it's really the world's worst oil-related catastrophe. It was done
1:58.1	as a matter of planning and engineering. It wasn't an accident. You know, Chevron decided to just
2:03.6	dump the stuff rather than pay for a proper disposal. I got involved in Tsu Chevron, Texaco
2:11.5	and then Chevron in New York in the early 90s. They insisted the trial be held in Ecuador.
	...

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