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'Defeat for Justice': Ecuador to Pay Amazon-Polluting Chevron $220 Million
"A debt is not owed to Chevron. A debt is owed to the Amazonian families still waiting for truth, justice, and full reparation."
Dec 09, 2025
A US advocacy group, American human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, and the group in Ecuador behind a historic legal battle against Chevron over its dumping of toxic waste in the Amazon rainforest are condemning the Ecuadorian government's plans to pay the oil giant hundreds of millions of dollars due to an arbitration ruling.
In response to the legal fight in Ecuador that led to a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron—which bought Texaco—the fossil fuel company turned to the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, suing the South American country in the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration. As part of the latter case, Ecuadorian Attorney General Diana Salazar Méndez's office announced Monday that the government would pay the US company only around $220 million, rather than the over $3 billion Chevron sought.
While Chevron said in a statement that it was "pleased with the resolution of this matter" and claimed the decision "strengthened the rule of law globally," and Salazar Méndez's office celebrated the dramatically lower figure, and the Union of Peoples Affected by Chevron-Texaco (UDAPT)—the group that began the case against oil company in 1993—pushed back against the government's framing of the reduction "as if it was a success and an economic achievement."
"The reality is it is a defeat for justice," UDAPT argued in a Tuesday statement. "For 32 years, UDAPT has documented pollution, environmental crime, and lives broken by Chevron, proving what should be obvious: Communities have not recovered, health has not been restored, clean water has not returned, and the territories that sustain life remain contaminated. A debt is not owed to Chevron. A debt is owed to the Amazonian families still waiting for truth, justice, and full reparation."
Amazon Watch deputy director Paul Paz y Miño similarly said Tuesday that "this illegitimate arbitration process is nothing more than Chevron abusing the law to escape accountability for one of the worst oil disasters in history."
"Ecuador's courts ruled correctly and based largely on Chevron's own evidence, that Chevron deliberately poisoned Indigenous and rural communities, leaving behind a mass cancer zone in the Amazon," the campaigner continued. "Adding insult to injury, the idea that Ecuador's people should now pay a US oil company that admitted to deliberate pollution is the epitome of environmental racism."
Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa "must not honor this ISDS award, and the international community must stand behind the victims of Chevron's crimes and demand that the company clean up Ecuador once and for all," Paz y Miño added. "Amazon Watch stands with the affected Indigenous peoples and communities of the Ecuadorian Amazon. We urge President Noboa to reject this illegitimate award, disclose any negotiations with Chevron, and enforce Ecuadorian law by ensuring Chevron pays its debt to those it poisoned."
Donziger—who was detained in the United States for nearly 1,000 days after Chevron went after him in the American legal system for representing Big Oil's victims in Ecuador—was also sharply critical, saying Tuesday that "the decision by a so-called private corporate arbitration panel that claims to absolve Chevron of its massive pollution liability in Ecuador has no legitimacy and does not affect the historic $9.5 billion damages judgment won by Amazonian communities."
"That judgment still stands as the definitive public court ruling in the case," he said. "The private arbitral panel has no authority over the six public appellate courts, including the Supreme Courts of Ecuador and Canada, that issued unanimous decisions against Chevron and confirmed the extensive evidence that the company devastated local communities by deliberately dumping billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste into rivers and streams used by thousands of people for drinking, bathing, and fishing."
"I also strongly condemn President Daniel Noboa for his plans to betray his own people by agreeing to send $220 million from the public treasury to Chevron, a company that owes Ecuador billions under multiple court orders for poisoning vulnerable Indigenous peoples with toxic oil waste," Donziger added. "Noboa would effectively grant Chevron a taxpayer-funded bailout financed by the same citizens who remain victims of the company's pollution. This would be an outrageous dereliction of duty and a violation of his oath of office, warranting removal."
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The People of Ecuador Are Right: US Force Won't Stop Narco-Traffickers
The US military is not a responsible partner in addressing “bad behavior” precisely because it is engaging in seriously bad behavior itself.
Nov 20, 2025
Ecuador, once one of the most peaceful countries in Latin America, is now one of its most dangerous. The murder rate in 2020 was 7.7 homicides per 100,000 people. That was roughly comparable to the United States where it was 6.4 that year. In nearby Brazil, on the other hand, it was 22.3.
By 2023, Ecuador’s homicide rate had leapfrogged over its neighbors to an astounding 46 per 100,000. In a mere three years, the number of murders had increased six-fold.
The reason: narco-traffickers. Ecuador had become a convenient transshipment hub, and various gangs were warring over territory, particularly in coastal cities.
In 2023, in a presidential election that featured the assassination of one of the candidates, Ecuadorians voted in Daniel Noboa, an undistinguished but telegenic conservative politician who promised an iron-fist approach to fighting drug kingpins. His tactics boiled down to unleashing the military to attack specific gangs. However, as Tiziano Breda points out in a report for ACLED, “The same measures that contributed to reining in violence in the first months of 2024—increased military pressure in prisons and on the streets—had the unintended consequence of further fostering intra-gang power struggles and fragmentation.”
Even in a country where people are dying left and right, voters overwhelmingly opposed any outside military intervention to address the problem of narco-traffickers.
As a result, homicides in Ecuador have superseded even the totals for 2023, with the expected rate rising to 50 per 100,000 in 2025.
All of which makes the result of the recent referendum all the more remarkable.
Last week, Ecuadorians rejected all four of the proposals coming from the Noboa government. In addition to preserving the “rights of nature” provision of their constitution—by rejecting a constitutional overhaul—Ecuadorians said no to foreign military bases. The Trump administration was practically salivating at the prospect of returning to a US base in Ecuador that the military had been kicked out of in 2009 when then-president Rafael Correa let the lease expire.
Even in a country where people are dying left and right, voters overwhelmingly opposed any outside military intervention to address the problem of narco-traffickers. The national government’s own militarized response has failed. Voters reasoned that US intervention would only make things worse.
It’s a powerful statement of popular sovereignty at a time of executive overreach (by Noboa) and an expanded war on drugs (by President Donald Trump). “We respect the will of the Ecuadorian people,” Noboa commented on X when the results had come in.
Trump, however, has shown no interest in respecting the will of any people.
Plan Mexico
The Trump push for regime change in Venezuela is only part of a larger effort to expand the US military footprint in the Western hemisphere. With Venezuela, Washington is moving against an adversary of 25 years.
With Mexico, however, Washington is confronting an ally of even longer standing. In the past, the United States has assisted Mexican army and police in their battle with drug lords. Direct intervention is something different. Given opposition from the Mexican government, Trump is planning to operate independently in the country.
According to administration sources:
Under the new mission being planned, US troops in Mexico would mainly use drone strikes to hit drug labs and cartel members and leaders, the two current US officials and two former US officials said. Some of the drones that special forces would use require operators to be on the ground to use them effectively and safely…
It seems likely that the administration will wait to see how the operation in Venezuela proceeds before initiating something in Mexico.
Meanwhile, Mexico has agreed to conduct its own interdiction of suspected drug shipments at sea. It’s a marriage of convenience: Mexico wants to prevent the Trump administration from indiscriminately attacking ships in the waters off the country, and Trump wants countries in the region to shoulder more of the burden of this “drug war.”
This is how Trump’s former secretary of defense Mark Esper applies lipstick to this particular pig:
The United States is sending a clear signal that it will not tolerate bad behavior in its hemisphere. While some measures are controversial, if not legally dubious, they are part of a broader truth: Regional security demands not only American strength and focus, but also shared action and responsibility by our partners.
Certainly, countries in the region could do a better job dealing with narco-traffickers. But this is a question of law enforcement, not lawbreaking. The US military is not a responsible partner in addressing “bad behavior” precisely because it is engaging in seriously bad behavior itself. The strikes against boats around Venezuela amount to extrajudicial murder, and those executing the policy might one day face indictment by the International Criminal Court. Any intervention in Mexico, against that government’s expressed wishes, would be a violation of sovereignty no different (in kind) from Russia’s “self-defense” rationale for invading Ukraine.
Trump’s Larger Strategy
Trump wants complete freedom of movement in this hemisphere. It’s not exactly a sphere-of-influences approach, since he frankly wants access, minerals, and privileged trade relations everywhere.
But Latin America is close, and the United States has a rich and noxious history of intervention in the region on which Trump can build. His administration has been beefing up its military presence in Puerto Rico as a staging area. In Panama, it established over the summer a new jungle warfare school at a US military base abandoned 25 years ago. According to ABC News:
By August, the military had set up the “Combined Jungle Operations Training Course” with Marines and Panamanian forces training as part of a pilot program. A military spokesperson said there have since been 46 graduates of the three-week course: 18 Marines, one Army soldier and 27 personnel from Panama’s National Aeronaval Service, National Border Service and National Police.
Last month, the United States began stationing combat aircraft in El Salvador. Because of Trump’s immigration policies, the Honduran government threatened to close down the US military base that hosts the Southern Command. But that hasn’t stopped US forces from creating a new Combined Joint Operation Center at the base to coordinate with the Honduran military and other entities.
The military is only a means to an end—of transforming the politics of the hemisphere. Trump has lavished $20 million to support his buddy Javier Milei, the far-right leader in Argentina, a cash infusion that gave his party a boost in the midterm elections last month. Trumps has tried to use additional tariffs to keep his Brazilian buddy Jair Bolsonaro out of jail for his attempted coup, presumably so that he could return to power just the way Trump has. He hosted Daniel Noboa at Mar-a-Lago before the Ecuadorian election last spring to convey the message that the conservative politician had the ear of the American president. Trump wants Xiomara Castro’s successor to lose the elections in Honduras at the end of the month, the far-right Jose Antonio Kast to dislodge the left in Chile’s presidential runoff next month, and a comparable rightist to replace Gustavo Petro in Colombia next year.
If Trump hates having a democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani, in his backyard of New York, it’s even worse to have them leading countries in America’s backyard of Latin America. The “drug war”—on top of the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Hondurans, and Ecuadorians—is a lever that the United States can use to impose MAGA throughout Latin America. More money and power for militaries in the region increase the likelihood that generals there will revive the “good old days” when coups were commonplace.
The United States has an addiction problem—opioids, cocaine, meth—that has been driving supply. Having slashed addiction treatment funding and contributed to worsening the economic conditions that fuel addiction, Trump is now entirely focused on the quixotic mission of suppressing this supply.
The president, too, has addictions far more dangerous than fast-food burgers. He is addicted to the expansion of US power and the consolidation of his own. He won’t voluntarily seek treatment. Only the voters can force him into rehab.
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Ecuador Voters Crush Right-Wing Push to Allow Return of US Military Bases
"It is, to date, the Noboa government’s biggest electoral defeat."
Nov 17, 2025
Ecuador's voters on Sunday delivered a major blow to right-wing President Daniel Noboa by decisively rejecting the proposed return of foreign military bases to the South American country's soil—including installations run by the United States.
Around two-thirds of voters opposed the measure with most ballots tallied, a result that was widely seen as a surprise. Voters also rejected a separate effort to rewrite the country's progressive 2008 constitution, which enshrined strong labor and environmental rights.
The stinging defeat for Noboa, an ally of US President Donald Trump, comes as the United States carries out an aggressive military buildup and deadly airstrike campaign in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific—and weighs a direct attack on Venezuela. The BBC reported that the Trump administration "had hoped the referendum would pave the way to opening a military base in Ecuador, 16 years after it was made to close a site on its Pacific coast."
"The former US military base on Ecuador's Pacific coast was closed after left-wing President Rafael Correa decided not to renew its lease and pushed for the constitutional ban," the outlet noted.
Correa celebrated Sunday's results in a social media post, expressing hope that the vote would mark "the beginning of a definitive constitutional stability for the country."
"Our constitution is one of the best in the world; we just need to comply with it," he wrote.
The American people are grateful to the people of Ecuador for blocking the attempt by @SecRubio @SecWar to install US military bases in Ecuador!
Unlike DC elites, working class Americans want to bring our troops home, not send more abroad.
Thank you to the people of Ecuador! https://t.co/Emt4OBsHdt pic.twitter.com/J35z77iaSJ
— Just Foreign Policy (@justfp) November 17, 2025
The vote followed a recent trip to Ecuador by US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, a prominent figure in the Trump administration's lawless assault in immigrants in the United States. The Trump administration and Noboa's government have ramped up cooperation efforts in recent months, and both governments have unleashed military forces on their own citizens, illegally repressed protests, and carried out enforced disappearances and other grave human rights violations.
During her visit to Ecuador earlier this month, Noem toured the site of what Noboa's office described as a potential US military base in the port city of Manta.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) said in a statement late Sunday that "by inviting direct US military involvement and permanent presence in military bases—framed as a partnership to combat drug trafficking and organized crime—Noboa has tied the country’s safety and sovereignty to Washington’s regional ambitions."
"Today’s 'no' vote therefore underscores widespread public unease with that approach and reflects the Ecuadorian people’s skepticism toward the government’s heavy reliance on the Trump administration’s support," CEPR continued. "More generally, this vote raises questions about the effects and popularity of the last few years of security rapprochement and cooperation between Ecuador and the United States, which include, among other agreements, a Statute of Forces Agreement signed in 2023 that enables the presence of—and grants immunity to—US forces in Ecuador."
"It is, to date, the Noboa government’s biggest electoral defeat," the group added.
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