09-03-09 by dugan
Maybe it’s just my cynical nature, but Chevron’s "smoking gun" video alleging corruption in Ecuador has its fishy points. Chevron has gotten some media on a charge that a video it obtained implicates the judge in a big civil case against Chevron in a bribery scandal, but even the Wall Street Journal story was restrained to the point of doubt. My first question: Why did the contractors who provided the video risk wearing a camera, when exposure would have queered a genuine bribery plot then and there?
And there’s the point that Chevron last year hired a former CNN reporter, Gene Randall, to do the company’s deceitful fake of an ABC 20/20 show on the oil pollution that generated the Ecuador lawsuit.
The two hours of grainy (lapel-based?) video add up, said Chevron, to a political plot to extract $3 million from a contractor who might get cleanup work if the judge found that Chevron/Texaco had illegally polluted the Ecuadorian Amazon. Chevron says it got the video from a former local contractor for Chevron, who was present at the discussions, but gave no explanation of why there was a video on the first place. Chevron says it didn’t pay for the video, but in the same breath says it has been paying its former contractor’s expenses. (the videos are viewable on the Chevron website)
Since Chevron won’t let reporters talk to either of the contractors who made the video and won’t say how much they have been paid, we have only the shaky videos themselves to look at. Only one of four meetings involves the judge, Juan Núñez. He spends most of the time fending off the words that the contractors keep trying to put in his mouth, telling the pair over and over that the government, not he, decides who might get any environmental remediation contracts. If they were trying to bribe him in person, it was a pretty flat failure. Any veteran U.S. crime-movie watcher would think "sting/entrapment."
An analysis by the Amazon Defense Coalition also notes the odd timing of the videos’ release:
The timing of the videotapes is also suspicious, given that the tapes had been
in Chevron`s possession for several weeks but were released on the eve of a
final judgment at the trial and the theatrical opening in New York on September
9 of an acclaimed documentary film, Crude. The film casts Chevron`s behavior in
Ecuador in a highly unflattering light….
It would be no huge shock to find corruption in Ecuador’s government. There was plenty of corruption there when Texaco was extracting oil there and leaving the pollution, with winks and nods from the former government as it grew rich on oil money. But the case is now being heard in Ecuador because, in 2002, Chevron demanded that it be moved there from U.S. courts. Three presidents later, Ecuador now has a populist and less U.S.-sympathetic government–something Chevron might have seen coming if it hadn’t been so afraid of a fair trial in the U.S.
Whether this peculiar video will change anything, I don’t know. But it sure doesn’t make me more trusting of Chevron. If I was trying to cook up a bribery plot with a foreign government, I sure wouldn’t go to the meetings wearing a hidden camera and pretending to know nothing about how Ecuador’s legal system works.