"Their Lives Were Ruined by Oil Pollution, and a Court Awarded Them $9.5 Billion. But Ecuadorians Have Yet to See a Penny From Chevron", 18 December 2022

...Donziger is a crusading lawyer who led a team that won one of the world’s largest pollution judgments against Chevron on behalf of Indigenous peoples and other residents of the Ecuadorian Amazon in 2011...

The $9.5 billion award he helped secure from an Ecuadorian court covered horrific pollution from oil production by Texaco (acquired by Chevron in 2001) that poisoned the rainforest with oil spills and billions of gallons of toxic wastewater.

But none of Donziger’s original 30,000 Ecuadorian clients—suffering and dying from cancers and other diseases that many believe are related to the oil contamination—have received a penny since the original lawsuit was filed in 1993. Nothing...

Three years after the Ecuadorian court ruled on their behalf, a U.S. federal district judge in New York found in a countersuit brought by Chevron that Donziger’s team had obtained the Ecuadorian judgment through fraud, bribery and extortion. 

Among other things, Donziger was accused in the countersuit of forging an expert’s signature, blackmailing a judge, facilitating the ghostwriting of a key piece of evidence and bribing other Ecuadorian judges—acts that Donziger either denies or says were not illegal in Ecuador...

The Indigenous Cofán are known as water people, and the canoe is their signature vessel. Criollo maneuvers the canoe in an eddy and hops out barefoot, walking about 100 yards through a forested area to his two-room wooden aqua-blue home, where five of his grandchildren are playing inside...