From Harvard to the Amazon to Prison: An Activist’s Tale

It started just after I took my first trip to Ecuador in 1993 after graduating from Harvard Law School, where I witnessed one of the worst environmental catastrophes on the planet. Chevron’s predecessor company, Texaco, had dumped billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste into the streams and rivers that local Indigenous and farmer communities for millennia had used for their drinking water, bathing, and fishing. Cancer was everywhere. Doctors were nowhere. People were dying.

This catastrophe was not the result of an accident like the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. It was part of Texaco’s deliberate engineering design. Built into the design was a plan to systematically discharge oil waste into the pristine Amazon ecosystem to keep production costs as low as possible. Chevron saved about $3 per barrel by discharging the waste instead of re-injecting it deep into the ground, as was the accepted industry standard. 

 Local residents described severe health and economic damages owing to the pollution, but, unaware of their legal rights, none had been inside the one courthouse that existed in the small jungle town of Lago Agrio, and most had never even met a lawyer. They could not imagine a scenario that would allow them to challenge the oil company.   

The case against Chevron, with seventy-five named plaintiffs, was filed in federal court in New York in 1993. We believed we could establish jurisdiction in New York because that was where the company was headquartered and where its key decisions to pollute in Ecuador had been made. Chevron, which had bought Texaco in 2001, insisted the case be moved to Ecuador’s courts, believing it could engineer a political dismissal in a country where it had not faced a single lawsuit for its toxic dumping. Company lawyers promised to abide by any adverse judgment in Ecuador and to accept jurisdiction there. We spent ten years fighting the jurisdiction issue before Chevron won that initial battle. 

We started the trial in Ecuador in 2003 with our clients represented by a capable team of young Ecuadorian lawyers, backed by me along with other attorneys from the United States. After years of intense litigation in Ecuador that generated thousands of chemical sampling results and roughly 200,000 pages of evidence, the affected communities in 2011 won the largest environmental judgment in history. It was an extraordinary victory. The court awarded the affected communities roughly $19 billion in damages, an amount that was later cut in half during an appeal that affirmed the underlying finding of liability. It was an empowering time for the Amazon communities. The foreign company that had destroyed their lands was being held accountable. 

But Chevron refused to pay the judgment. Chevron warned the local communities that company lawyers would fight the case “until hell freezes over, and then fight it out on the ice.” That is when the company began to target my colleagues and me personally with one of the most vicious and well-financed corporate retaliation campaigns ever—one involving sixty different law firms and roughly 2,000 lawyers.  

Chevron could not accept the fact that Indigenous peoples and humble farming communities had the intelligence and resourcefulness to win such a case. They began to attribute much of our team’s success to the “gringo” from the North. As part of its strategy to evade the landmark court judgment and distract from their own criminality, Chevron targeted me for personal and professional destruction.  

Even though our case had been affirmed by six different appellate courts, including the Supreme Courts of Ecuador and Canada, Chevron sued me for $60 billion, claiming the case in Ecuador was sham litigation. I was suddenly facing the largest financial liability of any individual in US history. There’s not a bank, oil company, or insurance company on Earth that has ever been sued for so much.  

Chevron’s lawsuit was an attempt to weaponize the legal system by threatening my livelihood and freedom. We filed another lawsuit in Canada to enforce the Ecuador judgment. That case resulted in a unanimous Supreme Court decision in 2015 in favor of the communities, allowing them to try to seize the company’s assets in Canada.  

Chevron’s intimidation did not stop. They convinced a US judge to order me to turn over my confidential case file to their lawyers. This was an unprecedented order that clearly violated attorney-client privilege. When I appealed that order, the judge charged me with criminal contempt of court. When the federal prosecutor refused to pursue Chevron’s charge, the judge appointed Chevron’s own lawyers to prosecute me directly. This is how I became the first person in US history criminally prosecuted by a corporation. 

On the preposterous theory I would flee the country, I was then placed under house arrest for over two years awaiting a trial. At the trial, I was denied a jury and was refused my rights to mount a defense. Following my “conviction,” the judge sentenced me to the maximum term of six months in prison on top of the two-plus years I had been detained at home. In all, I spent 993 days detained on a low-level case with a maximum term under the law of 180 days.

I want to zoom out for a second to try to understand what happened.  

It is clear to me that the United States—a country that spent decades, however imperfectly, presenting itself as a defender of democracy and human rights—has become something else. It has gone from a nation that at least claimed to respect the rule of law to a pariah state actively undermining the global order it once built and actively financing a livestreamed genocide before our eyes.   

This process of corporate capture of government began decades ago with the Louis Powell memo, as documented beautifully in the book The Scheme by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Trump is just the latest outcome of a process that has been in the works for decades. A corporation jailing a lawyer must be seen in this context.  

And none of this is happening quietly.  

In Gaza, we are watching war crimes carried out by perpetrators who act as though accountability no longer applies to them—because, increasingly, it doesn’t. The rule of law, the norms of human rights, and the basic architecture of international accountability are being violated in plain sight by the powerful, and nothing happens.  

The climate crisis is actively destroying the conditions for sustained life on this planet, right now. The legal system—with the case against Chevron as an example—seems largely incapable of stopping the destruction of the planet. Trump is actively promoting fossil fuels. The oil industry is drilling more than ever with its profits higher than ever.  Indigenous peoples are being attacked even more ferociously because they hold 80% of the world’s oil, mineral, and gas reserves. They are the frontline defenders of the planet. And they stand between oil industry profits and the survival of our ecosystem.  

Corporations like Chevron have more unchecked power than at any point in history—power that is actively hollowing out our democracy from the inside. As corporate power grows, repression of progressive activists grows with it. And as popular movements grow stronger in response, the tools built to repress them grow stronger too. The need of the ultra-elites to preserve this system of inequality at all costs has led to massive repression of progressive activism. It drives the fossil fuel industry, war, and genocide—and the targeting of people like me. The technique is classic: Criminalize those who speak out. Call them “terrorists.” Shrink the civic space by scaring the hell out of people so they stop speaking out. 

In the Prairieland case in the state of Texas, which involved a protest at an ICE detention facility, eight defendants this year were handed exorbitant prison sentences ranging from thirty to one hundred years after they were cast as “terrorists.” One man who was not even at the protest was given thirty years for moving a box of literature related to the protest from one location to another. Under the Trump Administration, ICE, in my opinion, has become a domestic terrorist organization. Its main purpose is to frighten immigrant communities of color, so they either leave the country or are forced into hiding.  

Oddly, activists increasingly are unwittingly being turned into listening devices for those managing the power structure. This happens through app and terms-of-service agreements that we sign without even reading them. It happens through the cameras on our phones we pay for ourselves. The Israeli company NSO Group developed spyware called Pegasus that can be downloaded into your phone remotely without your knowledge. Once embedded in a phone, it can access all of your data, all of your messages, and all of your calls. It can even activate the camera and microphone when the phone is turned off, listening to your conversations. Some governments and corporations buy this service to spy on journalists and their political opponents.

Are there any lessons from a corporation caging a human-rights lawyer in the United States? One critical lesson is the paramount importance of solidarity. The support we received was immense. Sixty-eight Nobel laureates signed a letter on my behalf, while thirty-four members of Congress urged President Biden to pardon me. Tens of thousands of people around the world signed up to join the “Free Donziger” movement. It had an enormous impact. Not only did it lift our spirits, I believe it scared Chevron and helped protect me from further legal attacks.   

The oligarchs and corporatists are trying to induce fear and despair. Our job is not to give it to them. We need to build our power in response so we can create the kind of just world where the Chevrons of the world can’t wreck the rainforest and decimate Indigenous peoples with impunity—and where despots cannot kidnap people off our streets as part of a cruel anti-immigrant and racialized deportation campaign. 

 None of us can carry activist work alone. Nor are we the first to face these monumental challenges. People have stood exactly where we are standing, facing forces that looked exactly this immovable, and moved them anyway. Not because the system corrected itself. But because they refused to disappear and they never stopped fighting to build the positive vision of the world they wanted
to create.