On Monday 14th February, after 17 years of legal battle, the second-largest oil company in the US, Chevron, was found guilty by Ecuadorian courts for massive environmental contamination of the Amazon. Chevron was ordered to pay a fine of $9 billion in damages. This is the largest judgement ever made against a US company for environmental contamination and is the first time that indigenous and farming communities have won judgement in foreign courts against a US company for environmental crimes abroad.

From 1964 to 1990, Chevron made billions of USD in profits through oil extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In the long-running trial in US and Ecuadorian courts, Chevron admitted to deliberately discharging around 18 billion gallons of toxic waste-water into the water systems of the Amazon. The company committed a series of serious environmental crimes, such as spilling 17 million of gallons of pure crude oil from ruptured pipelines and abandoning more than 900 unlined waster pits which leeched toxins, contaminating the air, soil and water. Chevron ordered workers to destroy records of these crimes and never carried out any environmental impact studies.

Indigenous groups (the six indigenous tribes, the: Cofan, Siona, Secoya, Quichua, Huaorani, and Tetete) living in the Ecuadorian Amazon continue to suffer from the pollution today, with children born with tumours, people dying of cancer and other diseases and more than 9,000 people now at a significant risk of getting cancer in the coming decades. In the courts is was proven that all 378 of Chevron's well and production sites, which were mostly built in the 1970s, are extensively contaminated.

Chevron has vowed to appeal the precedent-setting verdict and continues its scorched-earth legal and public relations strategy, which is designed to exhaust all the plaintiffs' resources and ultimately evade the enforcement of the verdict. In 2010, Chevron spent the most lobbying dollars of any oil company. Oil analysts have said the ruling shows that times are changing: companies have to take environmental concerns seriously. However, Chevron's PR strategy is designed to establish methods for evading the enforcement of legal judgements and to ensure a secure future for the global extractives industry. Examples of tactics Chevron has used include: fake remediation of its waste pits, testing methods designed to deliberately undercount toxins, and its latest tactic - it went back to the court it successfully removed the original lawsuit from almost ten years ago and filed a lawsuit against the victims of its contamination in Ecuador. Not only has Chevron destroyed peoples' lives, it is now accusing them of extortion. Chevron is desperately trying to demonstrate to communities around the world that the pursuit of justice against multinational corporations is futile, but communities continue to resist the devastation of the extractives industry globally.