Why a Journalist Rejects $20,000 to Turn Corporate Spy
A down-on-her-luck young woman gets offered a cool $20,000 for a six-week jaunt through an exotic Latin American country. If this were a movie, my kid cousin could predict her tale wasn't going anywhere good.
In Mary Cuddehe's real-life case, the story luckily stopped there. She chose instead to expose the shady offer and has put one more black mark on Chevron's dirty dealings in the Amazon rainforest. You see, Chevron is in pretty desperate straits, having gotten itself involved in the mother of all environmental lawsuits, the biggest against a multinational corporation in history. And in their 10-year court battle so far, Chevron operatives in Ecuador are making their BP counterparts look like the Mother Teresas of the Gulf. In that light, this latest outrage is actually understandable. What more does Chevron have to lose in the blatant recruitment of a legitimate journalist to spy on the plaintiffs, who are 30,000 Ecuadorians suffering in the worst way?
"Amazon's Chernobyl" all began back in 1964. Between then and 1992, Texaco, a U.S. company, extracted oil in a remote corner of Ecuador using environmental practices that were subpar (even by industry standards) and illegal. The company deliberately dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste water, spilled some 17 million gallons of crude oil, and left behind 1,000 open pits of waste. Today, as documented in the movie Crude, local indigenous populations commonly suffer painful cancers, birth defects, and spontaneous miscarriages as they eke out an existence in an enormous waste dump that still exists to this day. Chevron knowingly purchased liability for Texaco's troubles when the companies merged in 2001, and has spent the remaining years doing everything within its power to sabotage the trial.
The battle recently came to a head when an independent court-appointed expert deemed Chevron responsible for $27 billion in damages -- a recommendation which will surely influence the Ecuadorian court's final, upcoming decision. In a last ditch effort to pull victory from the jaws of defeat, Chevron is now trying to discredit a 2007 health study that became part of the plaintiffs' case.
So what does Mary Cuddehe, a freelance writer in Mexico City and a recent Columbia University journalism school grad, have to do with any of this?
Enter Kroll, Inc., the world's leading risk consulting company with a "global network of employees, vast resources, and powerful connections," as Cuddehe puts it. Through a contact, she was put in touch with a slick recruiter named Sam, who whisked her off to Bogota to say what couldn't be said over the phone. After wining and dining, he revealed to her that Chevron had hired his company to dredge up signs of "fraud" in the 2007 health study. He was looking for smear evidence, and she was just the person to gather it.
In The Atlantic Cuddehe wrote, "With one Google search, anyone could see that I was, in fact, a journalist. If I went to Lago Agrio as myself and pretended to write a story, no one would suspect that the starry-eyed young American poking around was actually shilling for Chevron."
Thankfully Cuddehe had the integrity to turn down the offer. But the fact that Chevron has hired a contractor willing to go to such lengths, in such a blatant fashion with an unknown journalist, says a lot about its modus operandi in this battle. In fact, activists in Ecuador contend that Kroll, Inc., is just one more on a long list of Chevron's hired guns working to discredit human suffering, obfuscate the truth, conjure up legal tricks, and corrupt the legal process.
Haven't we had enough of this? As a nation that has recently experienced the horrors of oil spills, we should stand in solidarity with the people of the Amazon, who have had their basic right to their health and clean water so grossly violated. If this story from Cuddehe makes you mad, please sign this petition from Amnesty International to demand Chevron cleanup its mess in the Amazon.
Photo credit: ChevronToxico, The Campaign for Justice in Ecuador
Jess Leber
is a Change.org editor. She most recently covered climate and energy issues as a reporter in Washington, D.C
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