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Attending the roadshow were black-suited representatives from oil companies including China Petrochemical and China National Offshore Oil. "Ecuador is willing to establish a relationship of mutual benefit – a win-win relationship," said Ecuador's ambassador to China in opening remarks.

Critics say national debt may be a large part of the Ecuadorean government's calculations. Ecuador owed China more than £4.6bn ($7bn) as of last summer, more than a tenth of its GDP. China began loaning billions of dollars to Ecuador in 2009 in exchange for oil shipments. More recently China helped fund two of its biggest hydroelectric infrastructure projects. Ecuador may soon build a $12.5bn oil refinery with Chinese financing

In February 2011, Donziger and his clients won the judgment after an eight-year trial in Ecuador marred by Chevron’s attempts to intimidate judges, offer bribes to Ecuador's government, fabricate scientific evidence, and sabotage the proceedings by filing dozens of frivolous motions and drowning the court in paper.  See here.

Chevron's legal team at Gibson Dunn openly markets a “template” to corporate defendants like Chevron facing large liabilities for environmental and human rights abuses.  The template, which the firm calls a “rescue operation” for clients in trouble, assumes that the wholesale intimidation of lawyers will allow clients to win via subterfuge what they can’t win on the merits. The Gibson Dunn “rescue” team – led by New York attorney Randy Mastro, Ted Boutrous, Andrea Neumann, Scott Edelman, and William Thomson – has used over 60 lawyers and billed Chevron hundreds of millions of dollars.  All their hard work has brought a fair amount of disrepute to their law firm as Chevron has suffered multiple courtroom setbacks around the world, dramatically increasing its liability and creating a shareholder rebellion against CEO Watson.  See here.

The Donziger suit explains that once Chevron realized it would lose the Ecuador trial based on the scientific evidence, the company turned to Gibson Dunn to try to render the Amazonian communities defenseless.

In the latter arbitration, Chevron claims that Ecuador had violated the Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) by letting the case advance.     Since that time, the BIT claimed jurisdiction over the case, and both parties are currently gathering evidence for proceedings on whether Chevron received a fair shake in Ecuador.

Under U.S. law, federal courts can issue discovery orders forcing parties involved in "foreign or international tribunals" to turn over information that would be useful in those proceedings.     The 5th Circuit, a New Orleans-based federal appeals court, found that Chevron cagily straddled this language to get Ecuador to cough up documents while protecting its own.

A federal judge quashed the subpoenas, deferring to Chevron's arguments that the BIT did not qualify as a "tribunal" - when Ecuador wanted evidence for it.

The case stems from oil pollution in the Ecuadorean rain forest, but Chevron does not operate there and has no significant assets in the country. It was Texaco, which Chevron acquired in a merger in 2001, that was accused of widespread environmental damage before pulling out of Ecuador in the early 1990s.

Chevron has much larger operations elsewhere in Latin America, and the plaintiffs’ strategy of pursuing the company across the region could open a contentious new phase in the case — one that would test Ecuador’s political ties with its neighbors and involve some of Washington’s most prominent lobbyists and lawyers.

Advisers to the plaintiffs said Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela would be obvious candidates to pursue Chevron assets, but they acknowledged it would not be easy. Venezuela, for instance, is a close Ecuadorean ally and its president, Hugo Chávez, is a frequent critic of the United States. But Chevron has extensive operations in Venezuela and enjoys warmer ties with Mr. Chávez’s government than just about any other American company.

Chevron filed a proposed amended complaint on Thursday that removes attorney Steven Donziger as a party to one of the counts. Donziger, however, is not too happy about the change, as it could prevent him from participating in a trial to determine whether the judgment he secured is enforceable.

Hinton, the Ecuadoreans' spokeswoman, says that Chevron is "petrified" to face off against Donziger's lawyer, Keker, who recently won a sex-discrimination jury trial against Chevron in California.

"To prevent Donziger from defending himself, Chevron is engaging in un-American behavior to deny due process to a litigant just like the company has tried to deny due process to thousands of its victims in Ecuador," Hinton said in a statement.

Unlike BP's Gulf spill that was the result of a single cataclysmic event, Texaco's oil extraction system in Ecuador was designed, built, and operated on the cheap using substandard technology from the outset. This led to systematic pollution from multiple sources on a daily basis for almost three decades.

"The Chinese government is courting disaster with this round," said Adam Zuckerman of environmental and human rights organization Amazon Watch. "These blocks are the most controversial in Ecuador and there's already a list of companies who have tried to drill there and have failed. Drilling in some of the most pristine regions of the Amazon would not only violate the rights of local communities, it would break China's own laws."

Just in case you missed that last line: groundwater contamination was under pretty much every pit that they looked at.      So much for Chevron’s claim that plaintiff's consultants agree with Chevron that there was no groundwater contamination in Ecuador.

Yesterday, a Magistrate Judge in San Francisco granted oil giant Chevron access to many years of private email account information from nearly 40 email accounts belonging to human rights and environmental activists, lawyers, and their allies.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins of the Northern District of California ordered Google and Yahoo! to turn over years of private email account information from dozens of other Yahoo! and Gmail accounts to Chevron.

Even if Chevron isn't sweeping up data randomly from millions of people like the NSA, it is indisputable that it is using its vast oil riches to spy on and demand email data from its critics. But if you support the communities in Ecuador who have fought for decades to hold Chevron accountable for its widespread environmental devastation and human rights abuses, you may find yourself on the wrong side of a subpoena.

The initiative for not extracting the oil was originally proposed 20 years ago by Fundación Natura, the largest environmental organisation in Ecuador, and has since been supported by a number of environmental and indigenous groups defending the Yasuní National Park and its buffer zone, where the oilfields are located.

But there are strong supporters for drilling, like the deputy minister of non-renewable natural resources and former manager of the state oil firm Petroecuador, Carlos Pareja, and President Correa himself has talked extensively about "Plan B".

Meanwhile, the German government said it will not support the Yasuní-ITT initiative, because the precedent might be imitated by other countries. The announcement came as very bad news for the initiative.

The battle for oil in the Amazon has often been overlooked recently due to the fight to keep oil companies out of the Arctic. But the threat remains and is set to get much worse

It is over twenty years since Judith Kimerling’s ground-breaking booklet Amazon Crude was published into the devastation of oil in Ecuador by Texaco. If you have never read Joe Kane’s stunning book Savages on the shocking cultural impact of Amazonian oil, you should add it to your reading list.

The latest warning about oil’s lethal legacy has come from neighbouring Peru.  On Monday, the country’s government declared an environmental state of emergency in a remote region of the rainforest near the Ecuadorian border, inhabited by the Quichua and Ashuar indigenous groups

The Bowoto case is the legal reaction to Chevron’s role in a 1998 protest by Nigerian community activists in the Niger Delta. The unarmed demonstrators boarded an oil platform and adjacent barge, property of subsidiary Chevron Nigeria Ltd, in protest over the environmental and economic damage caused by oil production in the region. The activists were attacked on 28 May by Nigerian authorities ferried to the floating protest by the oil corporation. Two men were killed and several more protestors injured. Three others claim detention and torture.

After nearly 10 years of pre-trial motions wherein many claims were dropped by a pre-trial judge, the case finally debuted in trial in October 2008 and a decision was handed down on 1 December the same year. The nine-bench jury decided in favour of Chevron, clearing the corporation of any liability under the various claims. It was a defendant’s victory, but civil society groups and legal experts still label the case a milestone in advancing corporate accountability.

The Bowoto case is the first time the multinational magnate Chevron USA Inc. has been successfully taken to a US court for the actions of an overseas subsidiary. ‘Chevron has a very intricate structure, used in part to try and shield itself from liability,’ Simons said. The case has effectively scrapped this corporate strategy.

The desire to capture more oil reserves is driving exploration and development of oil and gas fields in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somaliland, Puntland, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, the Comoros, Seychelles and the coast of Durban in South Africa.

The National oil spill detection and response agency (NOSDRA), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have identified over 2,000 spill sites that need to be remediated. Some of these spills happened over 40 years ago. The Ebubu spill that occurred in 1970, has not been cleaned up and Shell, the company implicated in the disaster, is vigorously appealing a judgement of a federal high court which ordered it to pay US$40 million compensation as at 2001.[3]

Even though Ikiogha is the government bureaucrat in charge of penalising Shell for the spill and signing off on the cleanup, he is also the contractor hired by Shell to do the cleanup… His cleanup operation consists of four shirtless men scooping oil from the surface of the polluted river with Frisbees… he claims that most of the oil had earlier been removed with absorbent foam and blankets.’[5]

Ever since BP’s disastrous oil spill, there have been no new drilling permits in the Gulf. Well, that’s changed and the first company to get a permit…drum roll please… Chevron. Never mind that they have destroyed the Ecuadorian Amazon. Never mind that they have been sued by indigenous tribes for the death and disease they have caused. Never mind that they refuse to take responsibility for their actions. They now get to try the same thing in the Gulf. Because the environment and livelihood of the region haven’t already taken enough of a hit.