Caso Chevron

Media Censorship Reaches Live Theater

Amazon Watch can’t handle the truth about Chevron’s good works.

Frontpage - Matthew Vadum 29/06/2018

Photo: Frontpage

Photo: Frontpage

A far-left activist group called Amazon Watch helped to kill an honest review of a play that shows how radical environmentalists performed a major hatchet-job on oil giant Chevron, according to the play’s co-author.

The play, called The $18-Billion Prize, was written by Phelim McAleer and Jonathan Leaf. This example of “documentary theater” recounts aspects of the company’s famous battle with radical environmentalists over alleged pollution in the Amazon region of Ecuador. It is based on actual trial testimony from a six-week corruption trial centering on the activities of one lawyer-gangster known as Steven Donziger. In that trial the court found that an $18 billion judgment obtained against Chevron was based on bribery and blackmail of judges in Ecuador.

This wasn’t McAleer’s first attempt at documentary theater. Last year his stage work, Ferguson, about the August 2014 shooting of black teenager Michael Brown who was killed as he tried to slaughter white police officer Darren Wilson with his own gun in Ferguson, Missouri, was performed in New York City. An earlier version was performed in 2015 in California.

Ferguson may have been a play but it wasn’t fiction. The script was put together from grand jury testimony from the investigation into Brown’s death. Wilson was ultimately exonerated but not until his name was blackened by then-Attorney General Eric Holder’s minions and the mainstream media which lied about the facts of the case at nearly every turn. The fabrications live on in the “hands up, don’t shoot” meme, which was based on a now-proven lie that Brown was shot without provocation. The meme also helped the violent, racist Black Lives Matter cult expand beyond its organizers’ wildest dreams.

The decision to quash the favorable review of The $18-Billion Prize “was a response to a campaign organized in opposition to the play by an environmental front group connected to the left-wing lawyer [i.e. Donziger] found by U.S. federal courts (district, appellate and Supreme) to have directed the criminal conspiracy against Chevron,” Leaf told FrontPage Magazine in an emailed statement.

To accomplish its goal, Amazon Watch “phoned editors, disrupted at least one performance of the play and harassed patrons,” Leaf said. Paul Paz y Mino of Amazon Watch even took to Twitter to falsely claim the play was underwritten by Chevron and to call a former Chevron attorney a “criminal,” Leaf added.

Amazon Watch has been generously funded over the years by the leftist philanthropic establishment, including the Tides Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Rainforest Action Network, and Wallace Global Fund II.

A quick recap of the lawsuit that forms the basis of the play is in order.

Chevron’s involvement in oil exploration in Ecuador began in 1972 when a corporate predecessor, Texaco Petroleum, began drilling operations. Texaco gave away management of the project to government-run concern Petroecuador by 1993. Before shutting down, Texaco spent $40 million on remediating any environmental damage that took place. Audits determined the remediation was done responsibly but two decades later U.S.-based enviro-attorneys sued deep-pocketed Chevron, hoping to make a quick buck while hurting their enemies in the U.S. energy industry.

The bad guys of the Left won but the victory was short-lived.

In 2011 a court in Ecuador found Chevron liable for $18 billion in damages for contamination allegedly caused decades earlier by crude oil production. The judgment was subsequently reduced to $9.5 billion. In 2014 the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that the judgment was the product of fraud and racketeering activity and found it unenforceable.

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