From: Steven Donziger [[email protected] Sent: Friday, November 03, 2006 7:04 PM To: David Kuhn Subject: Book Proposal attached Attachments: kuhn Itr1S.doc; Chapter Outline2.doc; Characters.doc

Let me know what you think ... I am certainly willing to do another draft, so do not hesitate to come back at me. Tks, SRD

Steven Danziger 212-570-4499 (land) 212-570-9944 (fax) 917-566-2526 (cell)

Steven R. Donziger Law Offices of Steven R. Donziger, P.C. 245 W. 104th St., #5 New York, New York 10025 Email: [email protected]

PLAINTIFF’S EXHIBIT 806# 11 Civ. 0691 (LAK)

DONZ00006706 Page 1 of 1

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 1 of 40 Amazon Awakening

American Oil, Rainforest Indians, and the Epic Legal Battle of Our Time

By Steven R. Donziger

Summary

I propose a book, Amazon Awakening, documenting one of the epic environmental battles of contemporary times -- one that traverses two continents, pits indigenous groups in a remote part of Ecuador's Amazon rainforest against a giant American oil company, spans four decades, has billions of dollars in play in a high-stakes trial, involves a team of highly dedicated American lawyers including myself, and could end up saving the lives of thousands of rainforest dwellers. The battle is over who is responsible for the $6 billion clean-up of what experts believe is the worst oil contamination on the planet, created deliberately by Texaco (now Chevron) in Ecuador's rainforest from 1964 to 1992 to save a few cents on the barrel. This contamination is thirty times larger than the spill produced by the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska. At the height of its operation, Texaco was dumping 4 million gallons of toxic waste daily into Ecuador's rainforest. The contamination threatens to wipe out a delicate ecosystem that has roughly 5% of all species of animal and plant life on the planet. Already, the toxic impact has extinguished one indigenous tribe, and it threatens to wipe out five more. It is as if a state in the U.S. had all of its air, rivers, lakes, streams, and soil contaminated by toxins and children started to die from cancer with no hospitals or doctors to treat them.

To build its oil production facilities in the rainforest, Texaco took over millions of acres of ancestral land from the Indians with no compensation or even acknowledgement that it happened. Hundreds of people, many children a few months old, have succumbed to leukemia because they are forced to drink water laden with toxins multiple times daily. If nothing is done, thousands more likely will perish in the coming decade - most III

DONZ00006707 Page 1 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 2 of 40 silence, because few have money to see a doctor or receive medical treatment. While the extent of the damage is likely unprecedented, much more is in play than mere monetary recovery. One is the principle that vulnerable people from the rainforest can hold accountable an incredibly powerful, arrogant, and wealthy American corporation for atrocities it knowingly committed and thought it could get away with. Another is the very survival of the remaining indigenous groups whose unique cultures might disappear forever as a result of avarice that directly benefited American shareholders - shareholders who likely would be as disgusted as I am today to see the reality of what was done in their name.

Against this horrific backdrop lies an inspirational story being woven by a courageous team of American and Ecuadorian lawyers, environmental activists, and indigenous rainforest leaders - allied with key politicians in Congress, Hollywood celebrities, world­ renowned scientists, pension-fund managers, and even Manhattan housewives. All are dedicated to saving the indigenous groups in Ecuador, restoring the rainforest to its former glory, and holding Chevron accountable for what locals call the "Rainforest Chernobyl". I know more about the details of this story than anybody. I am the lead lawyer in the class-action trial that seeks damages for a clean-up, Aguinda v. Chevron Texaco, currently being heard in the Superior Court of Nueva Loja in Ecuador before Judge German Yanez. I am the person primarily responsible for putting this team together and supervising it so we can forestall this impending disaster - at least to the extent disasters this large can be prevented by going to court. (Another alternative, discussed only half-facetiously on the legal team, is that the surviving Indians will impale oil company executives with spears just as they did certain American missionaries who invaded their territory in the 1950s.) My clients are 30,000 people - indigenous persons as well as farmers from 80 different villages - who struggle to survive in this once­ beautiful jungle rendered largely incontinent by oil contamination.

While the legal case has been covered episodically and superficially over the last several years (The New York Times, Nightline, Los Angeles Times, Economist, The Wall Street Journal, American Lawyer), the underlying story in its many layers and rich pool of

2

DONZ00006707 Page 2 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 3 of 40 characters has never been chronicled. Even though the legal case is historically unprecedented in that for the first time rainforest Indians have forced an American oil company to accept jurisdiction in their own courts, surprisingly few people in the U.S. are aware of the existence of this problem or efforts to solve it. This is largely because the area is remote and dangerous - the guerilla war in nearby Colombia often spills across the border - and most American news outlets do not care to devote the resources and assume the risk necessary to follow the story. Journalists who begin to inquire will often be discouraged by Chevron's corporate public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, which tries to "kill" stories that might tarnish the brand image of the company. And generally, Chevron has so succeeded in confusing the issues surrounding the trial that one American reporter recently saw a waste pit and concluded she was in no position to judge whether they were good or bad.

Amazon Awakening will document a larger story that involves several primary characters, ranging from powerful Amazon chieftans to multi-millionaire corporate executives at Chevron's lush global headquarters in the affluent town of San Ramon, near San Francisco. It will include scenes from the tiny jungle courthouse where Chevron's lawyers battle bare-breasted indigenous leaders in traditional dress; it will take the reader to the tiny law office of the brilliant 33-year-old Ecuadorian counsel, Pablo Fajardo, who secured his degree via an extension course and who makes in one month what Chevron's lawyers bill in one hour; to the opulent law offices of Winston & Strawn in Washington, D.C., where enormous canvases of contemporary art hang on the walls of the reception area while behind the scenes two dozen lawyers rack up millions of dollars in legal fees to help Ecuador's government avoid being socked with the clean-up bill. It will include scenes from Ecuador's Attorney General's office, the U. S. Department of Justice, and the corporate offices of Jones Day, Chevron's politically-connected corporate law firm.

The story involves indigenous tribal leaders traveling to Chevron's headquarters outside San Francisco in a desperate attempt to meet with CEO David O'Reilly, and later, an emotional confrontation between O'Reilly and tribal leaders at a public shareholder's meeting that prompted several people in attendance to break down and cry. The story

3

DONZ00006707 Page 3 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 4 of 40 will take us to the White House, where Chevron - after donating $250,000 to the inauguration fund of President Bush - convinced the US. Trade Representative to condition any trade agreement with Ecuador on a "resolution" (read: dismissal) of the Aguinda case. It involves the Congress, where important leaders in the Senate, such as Barack Obama and Patrick Leahy, have weighed in to help the Indians; to the presidential palace in Ecuador, where favors and corruption run rampant among the country's elite power brokers who benefit greatly from oil's riches and who generally care little for the rights of their fellow citizens in the Amazon. The story takes us to Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez is leveraging his country's oil power on behalf of the Ecuadorian tribes by threatening to deny Chevron investment opportunities in his country. We see the managers of leading pension funds firing off angry letters to the company, and complaints filed with the Department of Justice over possible violations of US. anti­ bribery statutes by Chevron employees in Ecuador. The story also involves efforts by persons such as Keanu Reeves. Bianca Jagger, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to call attention to the catastrophe.

This story will be told with me as the narrator, and it will be told accurately as I have experienced it. I have been working on the legal case behind these events almost since the day I graduated from Harvard Law School in the same 1991 class as Sen. Obama, who is a friend. As lead counsel on the lawsuit for the last three years, I have been at the epicenter of the legal, political, and media activity surrounding the case both in Ecuador and in the US. I have close ties with almost all of the important characters in the story, including Amazon indigenous leaders, high-ranking Ecuadorian government officials, the world's leading scientists who deal with oil remediation, environmental activists, and many of Chevron's key players. I understand Chevron's legal defenses and scientific theories in the case, and I will explain them faithfully using my journalistic background so that the story achieves a level of reportorial balance. That said, the book will not be the definitive account of the story by an "objective" observer - that is a job for somebody else. The book will be the definitive insider's account of what is probably one of the largest and contentious environmental legal conflicts of all time.

4

DONZ00006707 Page 4 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 5 of 40 I have all of the 120,000 pages that compnse the Aguinda trial record; COpIes of thousands of emails that document the history of the trial and the legal maneuvering on a daily basis since it began; almost one million pages of internal Chevron documents that have been made available in pre-trial discovery, which provide an insider's view of discussions within the company at the executive management and board level, including "smoking gun" memos that order the destruction of evidence of oil spills and other environmental problems; and extensive notes taken on a regular basis over the last two years, many of which document my personal battle to keep this case alive against almost insurmountable odds. These papers, my personal experience and observations, interviews, and historical research will allow me to recreate in detail each turn in the dramatic story of how these rainforest inhabitants and their lawyers are bringing a giant American oil company to justice in the Amazon for the first time in history.

Structure of the Book

Amazon Awakening will have roughly 12 main characters, 14 secondary characters, and about 20 tertiary characters as outlined in the attached appendix. It will be divided into a Prologue and three sections, with four chapters in each section as detailed in the attached outline. The sections are as follows:

• A Prologue: "Setting the Stage" (Oct. 21, 2003). This section will recount the opening day (October 21, 2003) of the historic trial in the jungle courthouse where all of the main characters representing four decades of history are gathered in one small room, with several hundred indigenous people protesting in the street below. The prologue will set the stage for the next three sections, and will include backgrounds and introductory descriptions of the key characters who will drive the narrative from beginning to end.

• Section One: "Collision of Worlds" (1964-1992). This section will recreate the two worlds - oil industry and indigenous groups -- that violently collided in the Amazon rainforest starting with the moment of first contact in the mid 1960s.

5

DONZ00006707 Page 5 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 6 of 40 Using internal Texaco documents and a variety of primary sources, the section will trace the fateful decision by company executives to dump billions of gallons of toxic waste into one of the most delicate ecosystems on earth. This section will include the perspective of the indigenous groups as their land and culture inexorably are ripped from their moorings. And it will follow the nascent Amazon awakening as conditions deteriorated, lives were lost, and a powerful consciousness with roots in the indigenous cosmovision began to rise and spread through the rainforest.

• Section Two: "The Battle Is Joined" (1993-2003). This section will capture the beginning of the historic and unprecedented legal battle organized by indigenous groups and their American lawyers to restore the rainforest and indigenous culture. This section begins with the initial filing of the lawsuit in U. S. federal court in 1993. It will document the machinations of Texaco to avoid a trial - including the implementation of a "remediation" in Ecuador that appears to be fraudulent. It will take us into the inner sanctum of legal decision making and high-stakes trial strategy with billions of dollars of potential liability and the survival of indigenous culture on the line. And it will include key trips taken by rainforest leaders to Chevron headquarters in California - a collision of two worlds in an entirely different venue.

• Section Three: "The Trial" (2003-present). The longest of the three sections, this part will describe the trial as it takes place in a jungle courthouse in Ecuador as the ticking time bomb of toxic contamination threatens to explode into thousands of deaths. It will describe the inspirational process through which the rainforest leaders take control of the legal case from their American lawyers and finally begin to shape their own destiny without interference from self-interested foreigners - and how I helped them in this process of empowerment. At the end, there will be a decision by the judge - one reflecting what could be one of the greatest legal and political triumphs of all time against Big Oil, or bitter disappointment. The trial is expected to end in 2007.

6

DONZ00006707 Page 6 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 7 of 40 My Role

As the narrator, my personal choice to engage in a struggle to bring justice to vulnerable people who had never even tasted the inside of a courthouse will be an animating theme throughout the story. My job in this case is a race against time. I feel responsible to ensure that the remaining five indigenous groups in the area where Chevron operated do not fall over the the cliff, to a place from which there is no return. Each of these groups has its own unique language, spoken by nobody else in the world. The last few Tetetes have disappeared from the area where Texaco operated, apparently as a result of toxic contamination brought on by a wave of oil exploration. Unlike say, dinosaurs, almost nobody remembers the Tetetes and no museum is dedicated to their legacy. Ifwe win, I plan to take some of my earnings and figure out a way to make sure they are not forgotten. The Cofan, another indigenous group whose leaders I have known since the early 1990s, are down to 400 people from 15,000 in the mid 1950s; the Secoya have about 800 people, down from thousands several decades ago. By the time my newborn son graduates from high school, they could be gone.

Both the Cofan and Secoya have lost approximately 98% of their ancestral land to Chevron and to squatters from other parts of Ecuador who followed the oil companies into the forest in search of better lives, much like the early homesteaders in the U.S. Where the indigenous groups once roamed the forest freely, they are now stuck in tiny village tracts surrounded by oil wells and settlers - tracts not unlike batustans in South Africa during apartheid. The indigenous survivors can't get out; there is no place to go unless they disperse and thereby abandon the essence of who they are. These indigenous people are considered "savages" by the oil company employees, who have constructed an entire worldview to rationalize the brutal impacts of their own behavior. May oil patch workers believe the Indians are capable of killing white people instantly for no apparent reason. Company employees from the U.S. always travel with heavy security in the rainforest, and they are shocked to learn I travel freely in the region with no bodyguard. I have friends in these indigenous nationalities who I have known for years. All are

7

DONZ00006707 Page 7 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 8 of 40 struggling with dignity to hold on to the last vestiges of their culture in light of a violent toxic assault launched by an oil company in search of ever greater supplies and profits - largely fed, truth be told, by our own consumptive lifestyle in the U.S. Most of Ecuador's oil flows to California, where it fills up the gas tanks of large American vehicles. Toribio Aguinda, one of the Cofanes who came with me on a visit to Chevron's headquarters in a small town outside San Francisco, was shocked at the number of large S.U.v.'s driving around with only one person inside. This was a complete waste to Aguinda. He quickly understood that his grave problems in the rainforest were at least in part related to the appetite of American citizens for large cars and cheap gasoline.

Scripting A Legal Case

My law degree is from Harvard, but I pretty much script it as I go along. The playbook for this type of case was not taught in law school because such a case had never existed. My professors - and I had some at the very top of their fields, with names like Dershowitz and Tribe - generally did not encourage students to tackle new frontiers in quite this manner. Ralph Nader went to Harvard Law School, and he probably had more impact on the development of the American economy in the 20th century than anybody; so did Supreme Court Justices, Governors, Senators, and a multitude of foreign leaders. (So did a whole variety of criminals, for that matter. A classmate recently renounced his citizenship to avoid arrest over an internet gambling enterprise he founded.) While I never have suffered from a shortage of self-confidence, I also have never seen myself pursuing a career of fame like Supreme Court Justices or political leaders. What gets my metabolism racing is the idea that the law can be used as a weapon to club injustice into submission and create a better world, on a case by case basis. If someone is wrongly accused of parking in an illegal spot, or selling drugs to an undercover officer, I can get excited about the opportunity to use the law to correct that injustice. Doing the same work on the world stage on behalf of thousands of people makes it all the more challenging, but the emotional underlay for me is the same. There are obviously personal reasons why this kind of work has become my passion, but the bottom line is that I enjoy the fight and I thoroughly enjoy the outcome when my side wins. And I like concrete

8

DONZ00006707 Page 8 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 9 of 40 benefits: already, those of us litigating Aguinda have accomplished an extraordinary feat just to force Chevron to stand trial. This has motivated many other oil companies in Ecuador and other countries to raise their environmental standards to avoid the same fate.

First Trip to Ecuador

Legal cases this novel don't get birthed without a significant amount of pain and labor. I first came to Ecuador's rainforest in 1993, three decades after Chevron first arrived but hundreds of years after the people who were soon to be my clients began to populate the isolated territory. I had been a lawyer for two years, handling dozens of cases as a public defender in the nation's capital while earning an extremely modest government salary. I arrived in the Amazon with a team of lawyers and scientists to talk to local residents, test soil and waters for toxins, and to determine whether the clearly troubling set of facts on the ground could translate into a winning lawsuit. We had been invited by Cristobal Bonifaz, then an Ecuadorian lawyer working in the U.S. who had been contacted by local residents complaining of the health impacts from the oil pollution. Bonifaz, a charismatic man in his 60s whose grandfather had been President of Ecuador for four days in the early part of the century, was a chemical engineer with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had taken up the law as a second career in his mid-40s. He practiced solo out of small office on his farm in the mountains of Western Massachusetts, largely helping Latino immigrants secure citizenship. Although I have now broken with Bonifaz and he is no longer a part of the legal team, he is a fascinating character with a "mad genius" vibe whose presence is still felt on a number of levels in the case. (The indigenous leaders fired Bonifaz earlier this year after learning he had threatened violence against Chevron's lawyers if they did not agree to settle Aguinda, among other problems.)

As a public defender, I worked mostly in juvenile court representing children. I loved the work, largely because there was always hope in working with young people. One of my clients was 11, and when he sat in court his feet did not touch the floor. Turf wars over the drug trade were fueling a level of desperation that I found utterly despairing. My

9

DONZ00006707 Page 9 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 10 of 40 most recent trial had been the defense ofa 13-year-old accused of first degree murder; the young man was convicted by a judge, and sent to upstate New York to a reform school. Another client - the only one in my entire career as a public defender whom I was convinced was 100% innocent - was shot and killed soon after I was able to get his case dismissed. I realized I could not continue in my job for long. Some of my colleagues called it "God's Work" but to me it was simply too limited a scale to effect the kind of broad-based change that I wanted to focus on. After editing and publishing a book on criminal justice policy in the U.S., I was looking for an outlet in Latin America. Before attending law school, I had lived in Nicaragua and worked as a journalist covering the various civil wars in Central America. My Spanish was fluent. I hastily accepted the invitation ofBonifaz, whose son John was a good friend from law school, to assist on the case.

Quito is the world's second-highest capital, sitting in a picturesque valley at 9,284 feet surrounded by snow-capped volcanoes. The natural beauty is astounding. To get to the jungle, we had to drive over the peak of the Andes, topping out at 13,000 feet - so high there was barely any vegetation, forcing us to put on winter jackets even though we were at the equator. The drive down from the Andes was a progression of deeper and deeper greenery, waterfalls, rivers, birds, and panoramic views. All of it was in such contrast to the pictures of contamination I had seen before departing that I truly hoped those images would be a mirage. There was no wayan oil company, even a bad oil company, could possibly do what I had heard Chevron did in this unusually glorious corner of the planet.

The Oil Pits

Yet it was worse to see it firsthand. I will never forget the moment when I encountered my first monster oil pit of the thousand or so gouged mercilessly out of the jungle floor by Texaco's engineers. The pit, which was used to dump toxic waste products generated by the perforation of the wells, was just outside a small town called Lago Agrio. (Lago Agrio means "Sour Lake" and was named by Texaco employees after a town in Texas where Texaco operated. It would become the main location of the Aguinda trial years

10

DONZ00006707 Page 10 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 11 of 40 later.) Texaco struck oil in 1967 in the middle of the ancestral territory of the Cofan, then thriving with a population of approximately 15,000 people. In the ensuing years, Lago Agrio had exploded as a booming frontier town on the land around that first oil well. By the time of my first visit, indigenous people were virtually nowhere to be seen around Lago. At the time, Lago had mostly dirt roads that turned into oily mosh pits when it rained because Texaco was skimming oil from its waste pits and spreading it over streets to keep the dust down. Since many residents could not afford shoes, they would walk thru these crude-slicked streets barefoot and then later, if they were lucky enough, wash the oil off with gasoline donated by the company.

To the side of the Lago well site was a pit dug out of the jungle floor about the size of an Olympic swimming pool, filled with oil sludge and debris. I saw the carcass of a cow that had wandered in, become trapped, and asphyxiated. I took a stick and inserted into the pond. When I pulled it out, the gooey oil sludge dripped slowly back into the pit. It had the same consistency of fudge mix being poured into a baking pan, but this was truly grotesque both in odor and texture. F or hours after I had a searing headache and could taste the stench in my mouth and sinuses. I later learned that the odors that fermented up from the pits and entered my respiratory canals were actually vapors that contain cancer­ causing dioxins. People living near these pits were ingesting them with each breath. They were poisoning themselves just by breathing.

Texaco's Arrival In Ecuador

The first section of the book will explore Texaco's arrival in Ecuador and how company executives made the fateful decision to forego the installation of technology - then widely available - that would have properly re-injected the toxic waste into the ground to avoid a negative environmental impact. In 1967, when Texaco entered the Amazon region, it found what it believed was a tabula rosa: few laws, no government regulators, no equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency, and best of all, what it thought was no people - or at least that is what company executives seemed to believe. The indigenous groups themselves had no contact with, and certainly little use for, Ecuador's

11

DONZ00006707 Page 11 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 12 of 40 national government (which claimed sovereignty over their ancestral territory). Given the option, the indigenous groups almost certainly would not have permitted oil development on their lands: their cosmovision, or world view, regarded the perforation of the earth as rape of their most sacred possession, a direct assault on the Gods that lived underneath the forest and safeguarded its riches. Yet no indigenous groups were even consulted about what was to come. Ecuador's army guaranteed Texaco that it would send in heavily-armed troops to take care of any resistance to company incursions into indigenous territory, a promise it makes to this day to most foreign oil investors. Army pilots also flew Texaco's engineers and executives in American-made helicopters to isolated areas of the rainforest to survey the land for exploration activity.

One of the indigenous groups, the Huaorani, was so fiercely independent that it had lived virtually uncontacted by outsiders until Texaco arrived. They (and other indigenous groups) were regarded as "savages" in the eyes of the Ecuadorian government and the Texaco executives. After the government in 1964 granted Texaco the right to explore for oil in the N apo Concession area (an enormous swath of territory in the Northern part of Ecuador's Amazon), Texaco engineers arrived by helicopter to clear the rainforest and conduct seismic explorations with blasts of dynamite. In some instances, they cleared the forest with Agent Orange. When Texaco hit its first gusher in Lago Agrio, the impassioned headlines of Ecuador's leading newspaper predicted great riches but made no mention of people already living in the area. At the time, Ecuador's Constitution did not recognize indigenous peoples as citizens of the nation. Today, Lago Agrio #1 (so named because it was the first well built in the Lago Agrio oil field) still operates while the last remaining Cofan, on whose territory the well sits, have fled deeper into the jungle in what has become an increasingly futile attempt to salvage what is left of their culture. In 1986, Chevron opened up another oil field in Gaunta, the last intact forest held by the Cofan, forcing the surviving tribesmen even further downriver. Several Cofan now support themselves by selling trinkets to tourists. Others have fled even deeper into the jungle in search of clean land and water.

12

DONZ00006707 Page 12 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 13 of 40 This case has become a personal mission to hold accountable an American company with a crime I consider at least as bad as, if not worse than, murder. Worse because the killers are not a bullet coming out of a gun, where the perpetrator can be removed from the streets and brought to justice as was the case with my 13-year-old client. In this case, the killers are billions of tiny toxic particles like benzene that lodge in the soil and float in the very groundwater that people drink many times a day - particles that are odorless and invisible, but so deadly that the Environmental Protection Agency does not allow them in drinking water in any community of the US. at levels greater than one part per billion. Without any warning to local residents, Texaco began to dump these silent killers into Ecuador's rainforest from the first day it started pumping oil and running the toxic "water of formation" from pipes into nearby streams and rivers. Texaco also negotiated an agreement with Ecuador's government that allowed these contaminants to remain in the soil at levels thousands of times higher than maximum amounts permitted under US. law at the same time in its home country.

The "Assassin"

The book will also explore some of the key characters involved in Chevron's defense. None are more vital to the story than Ricardo Reis Veiga, Texaco's chief in-house lawyer on the Aguinda case and my own personal nemesis since the case was filed in New York in 1993. Reis Veiga, who is 45, has an entirely different perspective on the Aguinda case than my own. Born in Rio de Janiero, he had a distinguished legal career in Texaco before the Aguinda case was launched - particularly for someone who did not speak English as his native language. After graduating from a Brazilian law school, Reis Veiga began as a marketing agent in Rio and over the next decade clawed his way up to Texaco's global headquarters near New York City, where he became a member of the senior legal team with responsibility for Latin America. When the Aguinda case hit New York federal court, Texaco hired former US. Attorney General Griffin Bell to organize its defense. A former federal judge who served in the Carter Administration, the chivalrous Bell had been retained by Exxon to study the cause of the Valdez disaster and assign responsibility for wrongdoing. He was a classic "fixer" for corporations in crisis.

13

DONZ00006707 Page 13 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 14 of 40 I took his hiring on our case as a sign that Texaco was taking us very seriously, as well they should have: the filing of the lawsuit was covered by the CBS Evening News, where video of the waste pits made Texaco look dreadful. The pictures don't lie, and there was really nothing they could say.

Part of Bell's strategy was to dispatch Reis Veiga to Ecuador to quietly work out a "clean-up" agreement directly with the government minister in charge of the energy sector, without consulting with the indigenous leaders who had sued the company. He would then use that agreement to secure a legal indemnity from the ministry that would absolve Texaco of any further responsibility for environmental damage in Ecuador. In Reis Veiga's eyes, this would effectively shift all further legal responsibility for damage to Ecuador's government and Texaco would free itself of any obligations. The particular government minister, Galo Abril, likely did not much care - he would be out of his job soon anyway, as the average shelf life of an energy minister in Ecuador was less than one year in the best of circumstances. That period was seen more as an opportunity for personal enrichment and career advancement with private companies than it was in advancing the public interest. In the meantime, Reis Veiga would produce the indemnity to the New York court and seek immediate dismissal of the Aguinda case, saymg we were going after the wrong defendant. Clever, to the say the least.

Put another way, Ecuador's government and Texaco would collude to make it appear the problem had been "solved" while cutting out the interests of the very Ecuadorian citizens who had the biggest dog in the fight. Since Ecuador's government ministers had never given the indigenous peoples any relief from their plight, and in fact had green-lighted Texaco's atrocious production practices at the expense of their own citizens, the lawsuit would basically die if Texaco could no longer be a defendant. That is what Reis Veiga wanted anyway - to smash us early with a knock-out punch and end it in the first round. This approach was also perfectly consistent with what I would find to be Reis Veiga's devious and over-the-line behavior through the years -- behavior that earned him the nickname the "assassin" in our camp. We never knew what Reis Veiga would come up with next, only that it was always something designed to distract or destroy us and that it

14

DONZ00006707 Page 14 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 15 of 40 usually took place behind closed doors, often with the backing of the U.S. embassy or somebody with influence in the U.S. government. While we battled in court, Chevron acted as if what happened before the judge was secondary to a deeper power game played elsewhere. This was a game whose rules and customs we would have to learn if we were to survive.

Of course, Chevron probably saw in Reis Veiga's approach nothing more than a passionate and entirely appropriate commitment to its cause. To the company's lawyers, we were nothing more than a team of extortionists trying to shake them down for a huge legal fee - a modern day Bonnie & Clyde racket operation looking for new opportunities in foreign lands. If it wasn't for Reis Veiga, I am convinced this case could have settled years ago and I could have spent the last decade devoting myself to other pursuits. Maybe I could have been a Renaissance Man instead of a single-minded lawyer who talks about little except which toxins cause cancer and which simply damage the nervous system, or some arcane legal doctrine like forum non conveniens or parens patrie. So I cannot help but react to Reis Veiga personally. The man is handsome, smart, obstructionist, hard-line, tenacious, and highly emotional. I have never seen him smile, and from what I can tell he fights every battle as if his own reputation and livelihood are on the line. He is a formidable adversary.

Reis Veiga's ploy to get rid of our case worked, to a point. Energy Minister Abril signed off on the initial phase of the plan in 1995. Acting on behalf of Ecuador's government, he accepted a paltry $40 million for clean-up in exchange for the legal release - again, without consulting the local indigenous groups and farmer communities, and pretty much giving full discretion to Texaco to determine the nature and scope of its own remedial work. The dollar amount was less than 1% of the price tag of a comprehensive remediation, estimated by experts in 2003 to be at least $6.14 billion. After various amounts were siphoned off to those involved, as is often the custom in Ecuador, it is unclear what part of the $40 million actually made it to the Amazon region. The New York judge sided with us and refused to dismiss the case based on this purported clean­ up, determining that the release Texaco obtained did not extinguish the claims of our

15

DONZ00006707 Page 15 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 16 of 40 clients who were not party to the negotiations. Our lawsuit could continue - an apparent victory. Watching this process unfold, I began to appreciate the deeper meaning ofReis Veiga's approach.

While we were winning motions and moving toward trial, slowly gaining confidence that we could pull off an unprecedented legal feat, Reis Veiga and his supervisors were taking the broad view. Chevron's strategy can best be understood through numbers. Given the $6 billion cost of a comprehensive clean-up, each year that the company could avoid paying a judgment would conservatively produce at least $300 million in income from an asset that otherwise would be turned over to our clients. Out of that amount, maybe $5 to $10 million per year would go to high-priced lawyers to keep us at bay and to force our legal team to spend more and more of our limited resources to sustain the case. While Texaco's lawyers made millions and charged for each hour of their work, we spent millions in expenses never knowing if we would get them reimbursed and we collected nothing for our time (contingency-fee lawyers only receive their fees if they win the case). If Reis Veiga could delay a resolution of the case for at least 15 years, from Texaco's perspective our lawsuit would actually pay for itself even if one day we "won" everything for which we were fighting. I realized that barring an outright dismissal, delay was actually the central feature of Texaco's entire defense strategy. It not only kept a huge asset firmly in the company's pocket for as long as possible, it increased the chances that our own commitment as risk-taking lawyers would bleed dry and we would give up. Surely if we were so motivated by money, as Reis Veiga seemed to believe, we would move on to greener pastures once we realized the company would never settle.

That doesn't mean Reis Veiga cares to let us off easy at the trial. Reis Veiga wants not only to win the trial, he wants to punish and humiliate us. After more than a decade of work, he wants our legal team to return home without even pennies to show for our efforts. He wants to squeeze us so bad that our spouses and law partners will question whether the case is a fool's errand. Texaco will stop at nothing to steamroll anything in its path: citing the earlier release signed by Energy Minister Abril, the company is now suing Ecuador's current government for the legal fees paid to defend itself since the

16

DONZ00006707 Page 16 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 17 of 40 Aguinda case began in Ecuador, which it plans to collect even if it wins. Reis Veiga's goal is to destroy the very idea that indigenous people can bring an environmental lawsuit against an oil company. He wants to be sure no lawyer in the U.S. ever thinks again about funding such a case. And, he wants to frighten every Third World country on earth into thinking it will have hell to pay if it lets its citizens sue a foreign oil company the way our clients had the nerve to do in Ecuador. And he has enlisted the Bush Administration in the latter task, getting the U. S. government to threaten to terminate bilateral trade preferences for Ecuador as punishment for letting the Aguinda case go forward.

To pull off Reis Veiga's strategy of total victory via overwhelming force, Texaco's legal team has constructed a sophisticated legal and scientific strategy that has multiple layers of defenses. First, Texaco argues that the 1995 indemnity signed by Abril absolves then of any claims, and that we are still suing the wrong party (this indemnity specifically excluded third party claims, but Texaco uses a complicated legal theory to argue that private claims for collective environmental clean-up are illegal in Ecuador). Second, the company argues that the contamination in Ecuador's Amazon is actually harmless and that if we just leave it alone it will be biodegrade naturally. Third, to the extent the court finds contamination in Texaco's former concession, the company argues it is impossible to scientifically determine who left the contamination given that Ecuador's national oil company has been operating the same fields since 1992. Finally, Texaco touts the many macro-economic benefits that oil development has brought to Ecuador since it invested in the country, including an increase in per capita income and better educational and health opportunities. While our side tarnishes Texaco's reputation, Reis Veiga acts like he represents Mother Theresa and that all Ecuadorians should thank the company for investing in their country and planting trees along Gonzalez Suarez, Quito's glitziest residential street. Frankly, that is the only lasting benefit I see from Texaco's involvement in the country.

The irony, of course, is that the hundreds of open-air waste pits left by Texaco in Ecuador's Amazon had been illegal in Texas (Texaco's home state) in the early part of

17

DONZ00006707 Page 17 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 18 of 40 the last century, decades before Texaco arrived in Ecuador. This does not matter to Texaco's line of thinking - Ecuadorians value life differently than Americans, so of course they would allow practices in their country that would be outlawed in the US. If these earthen pits were found anywhere in the US. today, the EPA could impose a significant fine on the company responsible and order it to pay for a remediation to a level of 100 parts per million (ppm) of Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons (TPHs) in the soil. TPHs are a group of chemical compounds considered a benchmark measurement of hydrocarbon contamination, and they include several known human carcinogens. In the agreement signed by Minister Abril, Ecuador permitted Texaco to "remediate" the pits to a level of 5,000 ppm of TPH, or 50 times higher than the maximum tolerance level in the US. (pure petroleum is 1 million parts per million). In the current trial, we have found that several of the waste pits that Texaco certified as remediated in 1995 to the level of 5,000 ppm actually have levels of TPHs above 300,000 ppm. This amount is more than 3,000 times higher than maximum tolerances permitted under US. law and 60 times higher than that permitted by Abril's agreement. Abril, either through neglect or design, allowed Texaco to get off scot-free for leaving what essentially are death pits throughout an area the size of the state of Rhode Island. Current Ecuadorian government officials are now accusing Texaco of fraud to secure its indemnity, and Reis Veiga is under investigation by Ecuador's lead national prosecutor. Criminal charges are a possibility.

I have long felt a bizarre connection to Reis Veiga - sort of how a Vietnam War veteran might feel about the Viet Cong soldier he had tried to pummel in a foxhole decades ago. But this war is still on, so there is little time for a softening of feelings. Reis Veiga clearly believes deeply in the righteousness of what he is doing, and he acts as if he is personally victimized by our greed-driven legal team. It is clear Reis Veiga has built tremendous influence inside Chevron's management team, as he is the only company official with the institutional knowledge of the entire litigation. Only he personally knows Ecuador's key government officials, and only he knows the details of the so-called clean-up and how the possible fraud was perpetrated. At the recent annual shareholder's meeting in Houston, Reis Veiga - the Brazilian lawyer who began his career at the outer edge of the oil industry's planetary system -- was sitting at a table with the CEO and

18

DONZ00006707 Page 18 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 19 of 40 Board of Directors of the third largest energy company on earth. His job was to respond to environmental activists and Ecuadorian indigenous leaders who had been invited to the meeting by sympathetic stockholders. Reis Veiga had never seemed more triumphant; he had parlayed his defense of this case into a job virtually at the center of the oil industry UnIverse.

Some days, I fantasize about putting my strong hands around Reis Veiga's neck and squeezing until he begs for mercy. I want him to know how it feels to suffer the way our clients have due to Texaco's negligence and his own manipulation of the legal process. I want him to understand how painful cancer feels, and how doubly painful it feels when you have no money to see a doctor. I often wonder how many additional people have died because of delays Reis Veiga and Chevron's legal team have orchestrated. I imagine Reis Veiga laughing in quiet satisfaction about these delays while sipping exotic cocktails at hotel bars throughout Latin America as he searches for new opportunities to invest the $6 billion his company owes our clients. During the first day of the judicial inspections in August of 2004, Reis Veiga and I had an amicable chat about a new house he had just bought in Miami. He explained he was worried that a hurricane then bearing down on the city might destroy his new kitchen appliances. We have not talked since.

My Classmates

It intrigues me to see how my classmates build outstanding careers while I work largely on this one case. Since the Aguinda lawsuit was filed in 1993, Obama has became a U.S. Senator and a likely Presidential contender, gracing the cover of Time and now a best friend of Oprah. Another Harvard Law classmate, Hill Harper, is an accomplished actor and a star on CSI New York. Mike Froman, who served on the prestigious Harvard Law Review with Obama, is an executive with Citigroup and former deputy treasury secretary in the Clinton Administration. And so on. In contrast to most of my classmates, I actually pay for the privilege of doing my job. The vast majority of expenses for the Aguinda case, including my own, are paid by a Philadelphia-based law firm, Kohn Swift & Graf. But I have lost a tremendous amount of income and future income potential by

19

DONZ00006707 Page 19 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 20 of 40 focusing my professional life so narrowly in the last few years. The Kohn firm is liberal, and it likes to make money suing corporations or entities that wrong ordinary citizens. It recovered hundreds of millions of dollars from the estate of former Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos for having tortured and abused his nation's citizens. If a case wins, the firm takes a percentage of the settlement. If the cases lose, the Kohn firm is out 100% of its expenses and time. Ecuador is one of the Kohn firm's flagship cases. My small practice has an agreement with the Kohn firm to litigate the Ecuador case as a team - my role is to be the lawyer and manage the Ecuadorian legal team, while Kohn provides overall guidance and money. Ifwe win, we will divide legal fees between ourselves and the other lawyers.

Bringing a lawsuit against an oil company is inordinately expensive. One needs millions of dollars and years of staying power to do this kind of case. I own no car, and almost all of my equity has gone to keeping this single case alive. My guess is that last year I probably made less money than 95% of my law school classmates who are employed. I know that the harder I work on this case, the less money I will have, as I cannot tend to other cases that produce immediate income. This is also a high-risk proposition: if we win, I stand to collect an exorbitant amount in fees - probably enough to set up my family for life, with plenty left over to fund other cases and possibly start a foundation. If we lose, I can imagine roaming barefoot with my clients through the rainforest to hunt the last dying monkeys. My personal struggle has taken on an odd parallel to the survival game in which the clients are desperately engaged. The fact I recently married and have a baby only adds another layer of stress in the quest to reach some sort of endpoint before it is too late. My wife is supportive - to a point. Ifwe reach that point, she will want me to sell my skills to the highest bidder. Chevron knows its best defense in a multi-billon dollar case is to prevent it from ending, just like Exxon has done with the Valdez disaster. Exxon's appeal is still pending 17 years after the accident that spoiled Prince William Sound.

My graduation from law school in 1991 was the pinnacle for my family in terms of academic achievement. My grandfather was an elected District Attorney in Brooklyn and

20

DONZ00006707 Page 20 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 21 of 40 a judge on New York's Supreme Court. I was supposed to follow his lead and have a distinguished career in the law. Now my parents, neither of whom are lawyers, have trouble providing a coherent explanation for my career path. They believe the Ecuador case sidetracked me from more productive, revenue-producing pursuits. They don't want to believe I have gone astray, but they talk about it among themselves while showing support for the "Ecuador case" in my presence. They wonder why I don't work for a Wall Street firm and pull down a big salary, or help my friend Obama become President, or work on regular cases that don't take years to finish. To avoid alarming them further, I do not talk about how in the rainforest I sneak around to avoid shadowy characters from Ecuador's armed forces intent on either killing or intimidating our legal team into silence.

The Ecuador Legal Team

The book will intimately acquaint the reader with some of the main characters on our team, while using the opening day of the trial to set the stage for the story. The third section will be about the trial itself - the culmination of years of struggle and the embodiment of all the hope Amazon residents have about achieving justice. As an American, I am not licensed to practice law in Ecuador but I play in integral role is designing the trial strategy and working closely with the local team of lawyers. The lead lawyer in Ecuador, Pablo Fajardo Mendoza, is the only person I know who was born in Ecuador's Amazon region who was able to obtain a college degree. (My closest friend in Ecuador and the coordinator of the case for the affected communities, Luis Yanza, is a brilliant man who could not afford college. Born into another milieu, I have no doubt he could have excelled at a top university anywhere in the world.)

Fajardo is short and thin with a bushy head of hair that overpowers his face, but his real firepower is his brain: the man is a speed thinker, articulate, and full of extraordinary wit. As a teenager in the Amazon town of Shushufindi, Fajardo began working in the local church sweeping floors and doing menial chores. A Jesuit priest from Spain paid the $400 annual tuition so he could attend college and law school via an extension program. Each semester, Fajardo would spend a week in Quito taking his exams and then return to

21

DONZ00006707 Page 21 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 22 of 40 the jungle to work in the church and teach adult education at a local high school. After six years of studies, Fajardo graduated near the top of his class at the extension university and became licensed as a lawyer, a minor miracle for a man of his origins but one that would payoff greatly for us down the road.

Just before the trial started, Fajardo was working for the Front for the Defense of the Amazon, the local organization that represents the indigenous groups and farmers in the various villages. Since it was formed in 1994, the Frente (as it is called) has slowly become a powerhouse engine behind the case and it enjoys wide influence in Ecuador. Its leaders are able to command meetings with government ministers and even the President. As the group's lawyer, Fajardo was trying to help residents of the Amazon oil region with their discrete property claims against the oil companies: things like dead cows from the pits, oil run-off onto farms, and the like. Most claims, if the oil companies would even acknowledge them, settled for $200 or less. Any claim about health problems, especially cancer, was rejected outright. The idea of Fajardo being the lead lawyer on what was shaping up to be a multi-billion dollar environmental case with global implications - one that was even attracting the ire of the Bush Administration -­ was not something that anyone in Ecuador had considered even a remote possibility.

The first Ecuadorian lawyer on the case was Alberto Wray, the crown jewel of the Quito bar, a former Supreme Court Justice, and the Clarence Darrow of his generation in Ecuador. Wray had advised various Presidents, and as a renowned professor he seemed to have taught an entire generation of young and hip lawyers in Quito. I had known Alberto since the early 1990s, when he prepared an affidavit during the U.S.-phase of the litigation explaining the various procedural limitations of the Ecuadorian civil justice process as part of our effort to have the trial in U. S. federal court. Of aquiline build with a perfectly co iffed mustache and impeccable dress and manners, Wray delivered an opening argument in the trial that astounded me in its power and breadth. He came to court that day in his white guayavera, without any of the basic artillery of a trial lawyer: no notes, no papers, no pen, no law books. Wray slumped in his chair, seemingly half­ asleep as the Chevron lawyers robotically read their response to our lawsuit for four

22

DONZ00006707 Page 22 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 23 of 40 hours while the packed courtroom suffered in the stifling heat. The goal of Chevron's lawyers was to use boredom to suck the energy out of the courtroom, which was packed with international media and indigenous people in colorful dress who had traveled days and waited for hours in anticipation of these first historic moments.

While Chevron's lawyers droned on, hundreds of indigenous people had gathered outside where they had blocked the street and were shouting anti-Texaco slogans that could be heard in muted form in the 4th-floor courtroom. The courtroom itself was packed with rainforest residents and several tense-looking former Israeli commandos guarding Chevron's legal team. Perspiration soaked through the baby blue shirt of Reis Veiga, the Chevron vice-president who for years I had despised from afar. It was Reis Veiga who designed and supervised the "remediation" that was now finally under attack in a court of law - a remediation we considered fraudulent, earning him the moniker "Architect of the Fraud" by members of our team. Reis Veiga surely had been ordered by his superiors to come to Ecuador to defend his handiwork in a trial that he expected never to happen, and he looked none too pleased to be on the hot seat. He and I sat at our respective tables facing each other across the courtroom. I took great personal satisfaction in his inconvenience, and I interpreted the perspiration soaking through his shirt as a sign of his nervousness and guilt even though he probably felt neither.

I kept asking Alberto in a whisper if the procedural rules would enable him to make an opening argument (this was not a given because Ecuador's trial system relies largely on written documents). Alberto seemed not to care. He acted as if the whole exercise, for which we had waited with great anticipation for ten years, was barely worth his time. Yet when the Chevron lawyers finished, Wray rose from his slumber like a raptor and simply took over the courtroom. With a thunderous but controlled voice, he lowered the boom and seemed to destroy in minutes the basis for Chevron's entire defense. It was a bravura performance; Reis Veiga, who always wore his feelings on his sleeve, looked stunned. Onlookers and the judge were visibly delighted, and the opening was the lead story in every major newspaper the following morning with color photos of the clients in the courtroom - itself a historical breakthrough, as most had never before entered a

23

DONZ00006707 Page 23 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 24 of 40 courthouse. As time wore on, I realized the nonchalance that so worried me was part of Wray's practiced advocacy. He appeared half-asleep as a way of signaling to the judge and to the reporters that Chevron's defense was wholly ridiculous.

Wray's association with the Amazon residents was a significant coup for us. It bestowed instant national credibility on the Amazon residents in the most elite legal circles in Ecuador, and it also signaled to Chevron that at least part of Ecuador's upper -class was backing the Indians - something that had never happened in so high-profile a manner in Ecuador's SOO-year history since the Spanish Conquest. A few days after opening arguments, Chevron posted two lawyers to stand guard in the halls outside the office of the judge, a dapper and conscientious man named Alberto Guerra. They stayed there every hour of every day that the court was open, in an obvious effort to ingratiate themselves with the secretaries and court personnel. This type of presence would become controversial, and they pulled back from their watch strategy after several months of complaints. As the case progressed, however, Wray's taste for this intensely litigated, bare-knuckles battle where both sides fight constantly over every inch of physical and psychic territory began to wane. This was not a case for gentleman lawyers or academics. In a highly charged macho culture, this had become a flat-out street brawl, extreme fighting through litigation. Sometimes, it seemed we were only a short step away from smashing the faces of our counterparts with a closed fist, or taking out guns and challenging each other to a duel with the loser's body being thrown in one of the toxic waste pits. As the case moved to the field inspections in the hot jungle sun, it would take a load of money to convince a statesman like Wray to hike thru the polluted oil fields, breathe the fumes, dirty his clothes with oil waste, withstand all type of airborne toxins, and listen to the personal and non-stop verbal assaults of the Texaco lawyers. Wray was unwilling to adopt the intense American litigation style that both I and Chevron's U.S.-based lawyers were demanding of their local counsel, and I can't say I blame him. In a trial whose outcome would be based largely on political brawn rather than professorial brilliance, Wray was simply out of his element.

24

DONZ00006707 Page 24 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 25 of 40 Wray handed over the daily trial responsibilities to Monica Pareja Montesinos, another Quito-based lawyer and former star student of the professor. Wray wanted to step back to the role of elder statesman, plotting overall strategy but removed from the daily tug. Pareja, whose father had been a prominent attorney and judge, had the verbal bite of a tiger and all the charm of an octopus. When Pareja met Fajardo in the jungle, she treated him like a messenger boy even though he knew far more about the region, the people, and even the law than she did. She seemed impressed to be litigating a high-profile case and overly concerned with establishing her bona fides with the socially-connected Chevron lawyers. For some reason, she continually tried to marginalize my role in the case and ordered me not to speak to the Ecuadorian media lest they believe Ecuadorians were not in charge. Increasingly, her testiness was deployed against me and the Ecuadorians when we would question her judgments and strategic decisions. Fajardo and the leaders of the lawsuit had been so conditioned to believe that Wray, Pareja and the Quito-based lawyers who graduated from the best schools were superior in skill that they accepted this shoddy advocacy - to a point. They finally recoiled openly when Pareja would not call local residents as witnesses because she thought they were too confused and stupid, a level of arrogance that Amazon residents had long associated with Chevron. The leaders of the local communities went to Wray and demanded she be fired.

As we surveyed our options, it was decided that Fajardo was the best bet to replace Pareja even though he had never run a trial in his life and (as the graduate of an extension school) was not considered a "real" lawyer by Chevron's legal team. At the time, Fajardo did not own a suit or a tie, nor did he possess a passport or laptop computer. His tiny office consisted of a plastic chair and a small desk. He had never been out of the country. That Fajardo would be going pretty much alone against some of the best advocates in Ecuador, backed by a team of American lawyers at some of the most powerful and well-connected law firms in the world, could have been seen as an unacceptable level of risk. But I trusted Fajardo's intelligence, integrity, and instincts; he was from the area, and never seemed daunted by the obstacles that stymied the Quito lawyers who often complained about the heat and whether we had enough Gatorade in the cooler. Fajardo not only relished the hot weather, he seemed to come even more alive

25

DONZ00006707 Page 25 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 26 of 40 as the temperature rose. He treated everybody with respect while pressing issues with firmness. I thought the local populace would get re-energized by his leadership, and would turn on to the fact one of their own was now in charge. Fajardo also had a clever sense of humor with Texaco's lawyers; on many occasions, I saw them teasing each other. I thought the entire package would work on a number of levels.

I knew we were moving in the right direction when I saw the reaction of the Chevron lawyers to Fajardo's appointment. Long used to the deferential Pareja, Chevron's lawyers were utterly bewildered that Wray would sign off on such a move. It ran counter to their stereotype of Amazon residents, who never seemed to have sufficient intelligence to run their own affairs. On the day Fajardo's new role became public, I received an international call in Quito from an agitated Sylvia Garrigo, a savvy Miami-based Chevron lawyer with whom I had developed a warm working relationship in the lead-up to the trial. Garrigo worked down the hall from Reis Veiga, and she would not call me unless he put her up to it because they needed something. (Reis Veiga would never call me directly.) Now that Pareja was out and Alberto was not attending the inspections, Garrigo had assumed that I was taking over day to day management of the case. She asked me for a two-month continuance to re-negotiate the trial schedule because the sister of Chevron's lead local lawyer had passed away. I told her I had no authority to agree to a continuance (Chevron had eight fulltime lawyers on the case), even under the circumstances. I reminded her that our clients had waited more than ten years for the trial. I suggested she call Fajardo, who I explained was now our lead lawyer and the decision maker on trial matters.

The silence on the line spoke volumes; I believe Garrigo in that moment was aghast, as I doubt she had entertained the possibility that Pareja's assistant who had never been allowed to speak in court could play the leading role. The very idea was completely at odds with the company's entire worldview. Fajardo of course refused Garrigo's request and went directly to the judge to motion for the immediate continuation of the field inspections, a motion that was quickly granted. From that moment forward, the dynamic changed. A real jungle lawyer was in charge, and he had the backing of the elegant and

26

DONZ00006707 Page 26 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 27 of 40 elite Wray. This coupling of elite and savage provide to be a jarring combination for Chevron as the case was to enter a decisive phase.

Elements of the Lawsuit

The trial section of the book will also take the reader into inner sanctum of the decision making process for the legal team- the intense and often conflicted discussions of strategy, how to prove the case with a limited budget, how best to attack the enemy through the media, and how to frame the scientific proof so it made sense to a judge. After my first visit to Lago, I learned that the magnitude of the contamination in Ecuador's rainforest has no known parallel in the history of the oil industry. The lawsuit alleges that Texaco intentionally committed three separate acts of "negligence" that together constitute a crime against humanity. First, the company decided to build hundreds of large, unlined pits around each well site like the one I saw on my first visit to Lago Agrio. Into these pits Texaco dumped all of the muds, sludge, and chemical solvents that came out of the ground when a well thousands of feet deep is gouged out of the earth. The practice of dumping into open-air pits had been outlawed in 1939 in Texas, the state where Texaco was founded. Second, Texaco designed a waste disposal system that each day discharged approximately 4 million gallons of toxic waste water into creeks, swamps, man-made pits, and rivers - or a total of 18.5 billion gallons of toxic waste in total over the life of the company's operations in Ecuador. Finally, Chevron burned gas into the environment without any controls - creating a "black rain" phenomenon and thereby contaminating the last clean water people could access, via barrels that would keep on the side of their ramshackle houses to capture rainwater draining off their roofs. There was simply no clean water, period. The entire substandard production method imposed a form of slow biological torture on the rainforest and it inhabitants.

There are certain basic principles that apply to oil production that help explain Texaco's motivation in setting up this system. When a well pumps oil from deep underground, it produces two fundamental parts in roughly equal amounts. One is the commercially

27

DONZ00006707 Page 27 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 28 of 40 marketable crude. The other is the "water of formation" which includes some of the most dangerous toxins known to man - heavy metals, volatile organics, chemicals such as xilene, toluene, and benzene that if ingested in small amounts can kill people, particularly children whose immune systems are underdeveloped. Some of these substances are so dangerous that the EPA does not allow them to exist at any level in drinking water. According to the Department of Health and Human Services of the US. government, exposure can lead to cancer and damage the brain, central nervous system, the female reproductive system, and cause dizziness and vomiting. In the US. and throughout the world, the oil industry almost always re-injects the water of formation into well cavities thousands of feet underground. This is to ensure that it does not poison fresh water sources that communities rely on for drinking water. Dumping "water of formation" in the US. in ways that could contaminate the water supply would likely result in criminal prosecutions, and even prison sentences.

In its concession area, Texaco built 350 wells which fed through a spider-like network of small pipes to 18 separation stations which were strategically built on high ground. At each station, the water of formation was separated out from the oil. The oil was sent via pipeline over the Andes down to the Pacific port of Esmeraldas, where it was refined and then loaded onto tankers and transported to the US. The toxic "water of formation" had a far different fate: without any treatment, it was sent through a series of pipes and open­ air pits into nearby streams, rivers, and swamps that crisscross the Amazon basis much as arteries and veins pump blood through the human body. For villages downriver, people would drink the toxic-laden water for lack of any alternative. To this day, they continue to consume fish from these rivers, fish that have themselves ingested the toxins from the water. The people breathe volatile vapors that ferment and then rise from the earthen pits. And they hunt forest animals, themselves ingestors and carriers of the same toxins. Because most residents lack money to relocate, they must poison themselves several times daily to survive. And the threat is still there, as the toxins lodged in the environment continue to contaminate even though Chevron theoretically left Ecuador in 1992.

28

DONZ00006707 Page 28 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 29 of 40 This waste disposal system was the product of a fair degree of ingenuity by Texaco engineers. To this day a the Sacha separation station - built by Texaco in the early 1970s -- one sees the waste water and crude being dumped into a series of unlined earthen pits, all of which were drained by pipes into a series of other pits downgradient before discharging into a narrow creek which runs into the San Carlos River. A few kilometers upstream was the village of San Carlos, which now has some of the highest cancer rates in Ecuador and which used the river as its sole water source. Texaco never posted a warning to the people of San Carlos that it was dumping toxic waste into its primary water supply. In San Carlos, young children up to the age of four are three times as likely to contract leukemia than children in other parts of Ecuador - and this disturbing fact is based on the results of cancer data that is under-reported because people cannot afford treatment. A large sign in front of the entrance to Sacha Central proclaims: "We Protect The Beautiful Environment."

Health Impacts

The immediate health impacts of the contamination are akin to being seared by a blowtorch a little bit each day until the damage becomes to great for the immune system to bear, and the body just falls apart. In San Carlos, several people have perished from cancer, including infants no more than a few months old. Rosa Moreno Chalaco, the local nurse, keeps a running list of those victims: name, age, diagnosis, year of death. The list keeps growing - 27 people as of March 2006, from a village of only a few hundred. The list includes her father and an uncle. There are also the dozens of miscarriages, the skin rashes on children, genetic defects, and a host of other health problems that locals say never manifested themselves in this part of Ecuador until oil started to be produced by Texaco. Rosa's list does not include several people who moved away from San Carlos because of their illnesses, and were never heard from again. Rosa herself says, "Our well that we dug for drinking water was not clean because of the petroleum they were dumping ... we drank water from that well. This was one of our errors, for lack of knowledge of the impacts of petroleum. People did not imagine it could be fatal. We washed ourselves with that same water. We used that water for

29

DONZ00006707 Page 29 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 30 of 40 everything ... my father was diagnosed with liver cancer in 1988, and battled it for several years, until he finally succumbed in 1993, the first of March."

Although Chevron's lawyers deny these cancers are caused by oil pollution - they blame it on the presence of human and animal feces in the water, and they blame skin infections on a mysterious disease they call swimmer's itch - the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence suggests that the oil pollution has killed hundreds, and maybe thousands, of innocent people in this part of Ecuador. The book will explain in detail how Chevron's scientists use sophisticated methods to sow doubt about established science in this area to deflect blame from the company. It will show how Hill & Knowlton is using the same test-tested public relations strategy that it claimed smoking did not cause cancer while representing the tobacco industry. Most who have died in Ecuador's Amazon from the oil contamination have done so in silence, no doubt perplexed silence, because they could not afford to visit a doctor and thus never knew the nature of their affliction. Many die young, but their deaths are not recorded by the national cancer database in Quito, artificially depressing the total number of cancers in the region. For all the billions Texaco profited in Ecuador, the company has never funded a single health clinic in the country nor bought diagnostic equipment for the Amazon region.

Most victims cannot afford the cost of the lO-hour bus trip over the Andes to visit SOLCA, Ecuador's high-tech hospital for research and treatment of cancer in Quito. One man from San Carlos spent his last dollars getting to Quito and then begged the hospital to admit him; he ended up dying on the sidewalk in front of the Ministry of the Environment, which has the charge of regulating oil companies, a baseball-sized tumor protruding from his arm pit and a bottle of aspirin in his pocket. Luis Yanza had asked me to try to get the man to the emergency room while several villagers were upstairs squatting in protest in the office of Yvonne Baki, a government minister who had secretly been meeting with Chevron executives to try to settle the Aguinda case for pennies on the dollar. By the time I went to down to investigate, the man's pulse had stopped and he was being carried away. Given the 10-30 year latency period of typical cancers, the number of people likely to die will soon start to kick in with greater ferocity. Thousands more

30

DONZ00006707 Page 30 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 31 of 40 likely will be wiped out in the coming decades if there is no clean-up. Watching this story unfold makes me feel stupid, hopeless and angry - not only at the Texaco executives such as Reis Veiga, but also at all the judges who have let this drag on for so long.

The Dark Side

The book will explore a darker dimension to the litigation - the consequences of taking on a wealthy foreign corporation whose allies and local employees are willing to stop at nothing to win the power game. The brother of our Ecuadorian lawyer, Pablo Fajardo, was murdered recently with a bullet to the head. When Pablo started pressing the local police to investigate, he became a target himself and had to go underground for several weeks. He stayed each night in a different house to evade those hunting him, while we frantically tried to keep abreast of his whereabouts. An elderly woman living next to a Chevron waste pit that was to be examined by the judge was found shot to death in her house just days before she was to testify - someone said it was done by members of a Colombian cocaine cartel that wanted revenge when she would not let them on her property to steal white gas, an effluent from oil wells that is used to manufacture cocaine. Pablo said he could not discard the possibility that she might have been a victim of a counter-intelligence group operated by the army and Chevron's agents (many of whom are retired army officers). The reality is that we will never know and no police officer will have the guts to investigate this crime.

The law office of one of our local lawyers in Quito was robbed recently; the files from the case were taken, while everything else, including cash, was left untouched. Our press spokeswoman, Lupita de Heredia, was assaulted in front of her house, and then a S.Uv. with tinted windows tried to run her off the road in a mountainous pass. Fourteen such suspicious incidents have taken place in the last year, all of which have involved members of our legal team. Many suspect that a right-wing cabal in the Ecuadorian armed forces, called the White Legion, carried out the robberies and a slew of disappearances in Ecuador that targeted progressive activists and politicians. Nineteen

31

DONZ00006707 Page 31 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 32 of 40 people have been taken in Ecuador and never found agam m the last three years, apparently because of political revenge, according to an independent human rights organization in Ecuador. Our legal team is under the official protection of the Inter­ American Human Rights Commission, and we have the right to 24-hour government protection for our own safety.

It drives me crazy that I cannot know if Pablo's brother, or the woman living near the well site, were killed because of this case. I consulted with an American DEA agent who works in Latin America, and he told me it was highly likely all of our movements, communications, and whereabouts were being monitored. When I asked by whom, he said the "intelligence services" of Ecuador - services likely trained by the CIA or the Mossad. The stress is intense, and there are nights when I sit up in my hotel and stare at the door, wondering what our enemies might be plotting and whether I might become a victim. I notified the security chief at the Hotel Quito, where I stay, that I felt I might be a target. He took it seriously, as the staff at the hotel had seen me on Ecuadorian television making accusations against Texaco.

We have contracted with a private security company to place uniformed bodyguards in front of our office, but I never know if I can trust them. They make the minimum wage of $180 per month, so $20 could easily convince them to provide basic information about our comings and goings. Murders in Ecuador almost never get solved. The local police have simply lost control of certain areas of the Amazon, like Shushufindi where Pablo lives; most refuse to leave their barracks, and some might even be the masterminds behind the crime waves and killings. Pablo has told me that paid assassins in Sacha, the area where Texaco had one its largest oil fields, will kill somebody for as little as $60.

The Indigenous Groups

A major theme to animate the book will be the struggles of the Cofan and Secoya indigenous groups from the moment Texaco began its exploration activities, right through the Aguinda trial. When the oil started to flow in Lago Agrio and the nearby streams

32

DONZ00006707 Page 32 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 33 of 40 turned black, the Cofan leaders began to ask questions. Some spoke Spanish, having been taught by American missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a CIA­ supported outfit that had succeeded in converting some members of the tribe to Christianity by writing a Bible in Cofan. When the questions were asked, the first of what would become a long string of lies began. "Oil is like vitamins," the Texaco workers used to tell the Cofan. "It is the same as milk, even better," they were told. But to the Cofan, it didn't make sense: the earth is where the bones of the sacred ancestors reside. Penetrating the earth to extract oil was the worst type of sacrilege.

I first visited what was left of the Cofan territory in 1998, to give an update on the case to residents crowded into a small village from what was once a thriving nation. The village, Dureno, represented less than 1% of the size of the tribe's ancestral territory. Some Cofan had died, but most had scattered to other parts of Ecuador as the rainforest could no longer sustain the population. One small group fled deeper into the rainforest, a three­ day trip by canoe down the Aguarico River, where they were reportedly struggling. Some were hired by the company to "clean" the waste pits. It was not unusual to see Indians with bare chests wading through oil pits up to their nipples - a practice somewhat akin to entering the Chernobyl reactor after the meltdown with no protective gear. For this they were paid the equivalent of about $2 per day It is difficult to know the true level of suffering because the Cofan have no Western-educated doctors in their community. (The Cofan have shamans, who are respected elders with vast knowledge of the medicinal value of jungle plants but they have no experience with diseases like cancer.) When I arrived in the village, I could see the desperation and hope that was being projected onto my presence, and I had serious doubts as to whether I could deliver any tangible benefit either then or ever. I hated the desperation in the eyes of the children, and the hollow resignation in the eyes of their parents. I felt utterly unequal to the magnitude of the responsibility being thrust upon me. All of the children of the village performed a special song and dance, created and choreographed for my arrival, where they dipped their hands in oil to illustrate the nightmare scenario that had befallen their culture.

33

DONZ00006707 Page 33 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 34 of 40 I have visited the villages of both the Cofan and Secoya on several occasions, and I know their leaders. One of the main leaders of the Cofan is an American, Randy Borman. Borman, now in his early 50s, was born into the community of Dureno when his missionary parents were trying to convert the tribe to Christianity - all in the time before Texaco's arrival. Borman speaks fluent Cofan and remains a highly controversial figure in the community, and I plan to interview him extensively. Toribio Aguinda, a soft­ spoken soul with a stocky body hardened by years of hunting in the forest, is a Cofan leader who likely will appear throughout the book. His life in many ways tracks Texaco's activities in Ecuador. When Aguinda was a young child, Texaco began its exploration activities on his land and he has a specific memory of seeing the first oil running through a creek in front of his house in the early 1970s. At the invitation of the San Francisco-based environmental group Amazon Watch, Aguinda recently trekked out of the forest to go to Chevron headquarters in San Ramon. To get to the US., he spent several days traveling by foot, canoe, bus, and plane. His luggage consisted of a single briefcase into which he has stuffed a spare set of clothes and papers.

The US. embassy initially was skeptical about giving Aguinda a visa, citing the fact he had no bank account and thus nothing to induce him to return to Ecuador even though his tribe collectively claimed a large swath of the Amazon and from his own perspective that was more wealth than Warren Buffet's entire investment portfolio. The embassy assumed Aguinda would overstay his visa and join the hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians who had illegally immigrated to the US. In fact, Aguinda hated being in the US. He was bewildered as to how he had spent several days in San Ramon (the site of Chevron's global headquarters) and did not see anybody walking.

An American environmentalist from Amazon Watch escorted Aguinda into the 2005 Chevron annual shareholder's meeting, which was held in a large auditorium inside Chevron's headquarters. He wore a colorful crown with bird feathers sitting on his head. His arrival caused all sorts of commotion among the Chevron executives and public relations specialists, as several media outlets wanted to take his picture going in even though they were barred from the meeting. Amazingly, a blanket had been draped over

34

DONZ00006707 Page 34 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 35 of 40 the "Chevron" logo on a lawn in front of the building in an apparent effort to prevent a picture from being taken with Aguinda in front of it. Before the meeting, Aguinda was visibly nervous; he actually believed he could convince O'Reilly, via a heartfelt talk, to restore the rainforest. He believed the future of his tribe was riding on what he would say. At the end of a question and answer session about Chevron's ongoing responsibility in Ecuador, Aguinda stood up and confronted O'Reilly in front of several hundred shareholders. He spoke in what sounded like a whisper. "If you do not come back and clean up the oil pollution you made, my people could well disappear within ten years," he said. O'Reilly had a stoic expression; it was hard to decipher what he was thinking, or if he was even concerned. Several shareholders seemed to fight to hold back tears as Aguinda described the impact on the Cofan of Chevron's operations. Finally, O'Reilly blurted out: "You should talk to your government. We no longer have legal responsibility in Ecuador for clean-up." Since that meeting, Chevron began to publicly attack me and my partners in full-page advertisements in the leading Ecuadorian newspapers, claiming the lawsuit is nothing more than a scheme by American trial lawyers to use indigenous people to extort huge legal fees from a reputable oil company.

Chevron's Cost-Benefit

Chevron reported $194 billion in revenues last year -- an amount 17 times greater than the gross national product of Ecuador, a country with 14 million inhabitants. CEO David O'Reilly took home $38.5 million in stock options and another $7 million in salary. On its website, Chevron pledges to "conduct business in a socially responsible and ethical manner" and "to respect the communities" where it operates. The company claims that its goal "is to be recognized and admired everywhere for having a record of environmental excellence" and that its "values, business strategies, and field operations reflect the highest possible environmental standards."

What Chevron did in Ecuador is the large-scale equivalent of a homeowner dumping the family's garbage in the neighborhood for 28 years without putting it in trash bags for proper disposal, simply because he did not want to spend the $20 per month for pick-up.

35

DONZ00006707 Page 35 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 36 of 40 Chevron's motive in dumping toxic waste was to save a few cents on each barrel of production, and it is clear that the impact of this decision on people living in the region did not even enter the company's cost-benefit analysis. Throughout the 1970s, tens of millions of dollars was budgeted for well perforation, heavy equipment, and road construction; zero was budgeted for environmental protection, health clinics, and re­ injection wells to properly dispose of the toxic discharges. What drives me crazy is that Chevron could have made billions of dollars in profits and used proper technology to dispose of the toxic waste so it would not hurt anybody. Whether they were aware of it or not, Chevron's executives played the role of God over thousands of vulnerable people.

Last year, Chevron CEO O'Reilly easily was awarded more compensation personally than the 30,000 Ecuadorians combined who comprise the class of persons bringing the Aguinda lawsuit. Each re-injection well needed to properly dispose of the toxic waste at the time would have cost about $200,000; today, they cost about $1.5 million, or about $30 million total, or less than O'Reilly's annual compensation. The construction of these re-injection wells and their operation over 28 years could have cost at most $4.5 billion, or about 15% of the estimated $30 billion in profits Texaco made from its Ecuador operations. Texaco easily could have extracted exorbitant profits from Ecuador while still observing customary industry practices of waste disposal then in effect in the U.S.

The Aguinda case is expected to end in 2007.

#

36

DONZ00006707 Page 36 of 36

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 37 of 40 Amazon Awakening

Chapter Sketch

Prologue: First day of historic trial (Oct 21, 2003)

Section One: Collision of Two Worlds (1964-1992)

IITexaco enters Ecuador and begins operating. 2/Indigenous groups hit hard, begin to organize. 3/Ecuador's government green lights pollution, becomes rich at expense of its citizens. 4IProbiems point toward necessity of historic legal action.

Section Two: The Battle Is Joined (1993-2003)

II Aguinda v. Texaco lawsuit filed in 1993 - first such lawsuit ever. 21 Texaco engages in controversial "clean up" to avoid trial. 31 Indigenous groups get stronger, Ec government reacts. 41 Trial in New York resolved, case moves to Ecuador.

Section Three: The Trial (2003 - present) l/Aguinda case filed in Ecuador - first such lawsuit ever; first phase of trial. 2IFieid inspections - second stage of trial; exit ofPareja, entrance of Pablo Fajardo. 3/Chevron sues Ecuador's government in New York; Bonifaz dismissed. 4/Creating a real solution, final arguments, verdict, and resolution.

DONZ00006708 Page 1 of 1

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 38 of 40 Amazon Awakening

List of Characters

Primary Characters (12)

Steven Donziger - Narrator/lawyer Toribio Aguinda - Cofan leader Humberto Piaguaje - Secoya leader Pablo Fajardo - Lawyer for affected communities Alberto Wray - Lawyer for affected communities Ricardo Reis Veiga - Supervising lawyer for Chevron, Miami Adolfo Callejas - Lead trial lawyer for Chevron, Quito Thomas Cullen, Chevron lawyer, Jones Day Raul Herrera - American lawyer for Ecuador government, Winston & Strawn Rosa Moreno - Nurse, town of San Carlos Luis Yanza - Elected leader of villages for Aguinda case Dr. Ann Maest -- American chemist and remediation expert German Yanez - Judge in Ecuador court

Secondary Characters (11)

Mariana Sanchez - Community leader, Lago Agrio Joseph C. Kohn - American lawyer, financial backer of case Cristobal Bonifaz, American lawyer, founder of case who ends up turning against us William Powers - American petroleum engineer/remediation expert for plaintiffs Dr. Charles Champs - Remediation expert, plaintiffs Rene Vargos Pazos - Ecuador general, former Oil Minister and witness Neil C. Mitchell- Lawyer for Ecuador government, New York litigation Galo Abril- Former Oil Minister of Ecuador, witness Rosania Giovanni - Former Environment Minister, Ecuador, and witness Atossa Soltani - Executive Director, Amazon Watch environmental group Aaron Page - American law school grad on Aguinda team Alejandro Ponce - Ecuadorian human rights lawyer in Quito Manuel Pallares - Ecuador biologist who lived with indigenous groups Laura Miller - Wife ofDonziger Lupita de Heredia - Spokesperson, Aguinda legal team, victim of attacks

Tertiary Characters (19)

Dr. Miguel San Sebastian - Spanish doctor, researcher of health studies, witness Sara McMillen - Chevron scientist Gino Bianchi - Chevron environmental consultant Fausto Penafiel - Scientific advisor, affected communities Edison Camino - Former science advisor, affected communities

DONZ00006709 Page 1 of 2

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 39 of 40 Monica Pareja - Former lawyer, affected communities Judith Kimerling - American law professor, lawyer on competing case Stephanie Garrigo - Chevron lawyer, Miami David Russell- Former technical advisor, Aguinda case Jose Robalino - Court apptd technical expert for plaintiffs Julio Prieto - Young lawyer, affected communities Juan Pablo Sanchez - Young lawyer, affected communities Luis Villacrecis - Court appt technical expert, plaintiffs Leila Salazar - Campaign organizer, Amazon Watch Sen. Barack Obama - friend ofDonziger Christopher Lehane - former White House lawyer, communications strategist for lawyers Esperanza Martinez - Executive Director, Accion Ecologica (environmental group) Mauricio Montalvo - Harvard Law grad, Ecuador ambassador, friend ofDonziger Juan Aulestia - Mayor of Ecuador town, friend ofDonziger

DONZ00006709 Page 2 of 2

Plaintiff's Exhibit 806# p. 40 of 40