From an entry in The Chevron Pit blog, by Carmen Cartuche, President, Frente de Defensa de la Amazonia (which translates to “Defense of the Amazon”) it looks like Roger Waters was rumored to have been on the monetary gravy train set up by now disgraced lawyer Steven Donziger as part of his elaborate and illegal RICO scheme to defraud Chevron in 2009 by tossing out bribes all over Ecaudor, including court judges.
If you don’t recall, Steven Donziger bribed and also illegally obtained the signatures of Ecaudorians harmed by the oil spills caused by Petroecuador, the state-run oil company of Ecuador. Chevron, which was never in Ecuador to start with, bought Texaco in 2005, and with it, contracts and documents that showed that Texaco had left its partnership and oil fields owned with Petroecuador, in 1992, and then did $40 million worth of environmental cleanup work in 1998.
But Donziger used Texaco’s presence and his work in establishing a relationship with leftists in Ecuador, as the basis for a scheme where he used litigation financing money to do everything from pay bribes to judges to buy falsified consultant reports, all to make it look like Texaco did the environmental damage that Petroecuador was not only truly responsible for, but continued doing by way of a giant number of oil spills through 2011. One of the largest oil spills, in the Yasimi Region of the Amazon, was passed off as the fault of Chevron in the local press, even though Chevron was never there. Petroecuador’s pollution of the Amazon continued through to 2022, when 6,300 barrels of crude in the Amazon were spilled over 300 km, or over 600 miles.
Through all of this, Roger Waters was a continued supporter of Steven Donziger, as Carmen Cartuche’s message reveals here Posted on Friday, November 23, 2018 at The Chevron Pit:
The following is a statement regarding Roger Waters released today from Carmen Cartuche, the President of the Front for Defense of the Amazon (FDA), the grass roots organization in Ecuador that is the beneficiary of the historic environmental judgment against Chevron:
– The Chevron Pit
Rumors that Roger Waters received money to come to Ecuador or that he might profit from the historic litigation are based on lies propagated by Chevron. Roger has generously supported the local Ecuadorian communities in their legal battle with donations just as he has many other social justice movements around the world. Roger has never expected to profit from the affected communities should they collect on their judgment against Chevron.
The document being circulated by Chevron to supposedly show Roger was entitled to a minuscule percentage of the Ecuador judgment should there be a collection is wholly misleading. The Chevron document reflects what the affected communities aspired to give Roger in exchange for his donation. Roger never asked to be an investor, is not an investor, and will never be an investor.
To be clear, the use by the affected Indigenous and farmer communities in Ecuador of third-party investor funds to finance their lawsuit against Chevron has allowed us to achieve great success. Many of our supporters around the world have participated in this funding model, which is entirely proper and laudable even though Chevron obviously would much prefer that its victims rely only on “charity” to press their legal claims. The funding model is also a paradigm-shifting breakthrough for the human rights movement. Outside funds in relatively modest amounts have allowed the Ecuadorians to win their case and sustain their campaign against Chevron for 25 years. Without funds provided by investors and donors, Chevron’s victims would never stand a chance against the estimated $2 billion the company has spent on its army of 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers.
The funding model used by the affected communities in Ecuador has enabled a historically unprecedented level of accountability for corporate criminality and fraud committed by a major oil company, Chevron. The model is one of many that human rights advocates can use to increase accountability for corporate wrongdoers. We also believe the model we use can enhance access to the justice system for all who are victimized by private companies that perpetrate human rights abuses.
We again thank Roger Waters and all donors and investors for their continued support of our campaign in the face of Chevron’s unethical and illegal attacks on our right to seek just compensation for the company’s environmental pollution.
Carmen Cartuche
President, Frente de Defensa de la Amazonia (Front for the Defense of the Amazon)
November 23, 2018
And as Roger was doing that in 2018, Waters was also doing anti-jewish work in 2017. As the Anti-Defamation League put it “His activism has increasingly been characterized as playing into antisemitic tropes, including those about Jewish or “Zionist” power; comparing Israel to Nazi Germany; and disparaging anyone who conveys even tangential support for Israel’s existence.” https://www.adl.org/resources/fact-sheet/roger-waters-his-own-words
And here’s Waters with Donziger in a four year old video which has Roger visiting Ecuador and meeting Ecuadorians with Steven Donziger doing the introductions:
Influence Watch reports that:
Roger Waters had been critical of the state of Israel since at least 2009, when he criticized Israel’s wall around the West Bank, which was constructed after the Palestine Liberation Organization declared the Second Intifada in 2006.7
In 2011, Waters joined the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and advocated for “people around the world support the Palestinians in their civil, nonviolent resistance.”8 The BDS movement is largely criticized in the U.S. for possible anti-Semitism; the BDS movement demands behavior from Israel that it does not ask from any other democratic nation.9
In 2015, BDS movement supporters issued a call for an “International BDS wave of solidarity with Palestinian Popular Resistance” that coincided with the beginning of a wave of stabbing attacks against Israelis by Palestinian extremists.10
Waters has asked fellow musicians to skip performing in Israel, writing that whoever does is giving “succor to the Israeli government’s apartheid policies.”11 Roger Waters also compared Israeli policy to “what went on in the ‘30s in Germany” and used an inflatable pig with a Star of David to equate Israel with totalitarian regimes.12 Waters has been criticized by Abraham Foxman, the former national director of the left-of-center anti-Semitism watchdog Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who found his fervent anti-Israel sentiments to be riddled with “anti-Semitic intent.”13
In November 2018, Waters participated in a BDS event held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a day before holding a concern in the city. He told event participants, “We must insist to our local governments to pressure Israel, in favor of the human rights of the Palestinians.” In response, the Argentina Zionist Organization, a Jewish group, called Waters “one of the great anti-Semitest of our time” in protest to what it labeled Waters’s “hate speech.” The Wiesenthal Center, an American Jewish group, also demanded Waters’s Argentinian hosts denounce his “abuse of their hospitality and his message of hate” and called on his concert sponsors to withdraw financial support.14
Influence Watch
That was then, but now here’s the United States State Department, of all organizations, coming out blasting Waters: The State Department said Tuesday June 6th 2023 that Waters has “a long track record of using antisemitic tropes” and a concert he gave late last month in Germany “contained imagery that is deeply offensive to Jewish people and minimized the Holocaust.”
Did Steven Donziger, Who’s Jewish, Miss That His Friend Roger Waters Was An Anti-Semite?
The question is why would Steven Donziger, who’s Jewish, completely miss the signs that Roger Waters was anti-semite? The speculation here is that it was not brought to Steven’s attention, and Waters celebrity (and his involvement in what Chevron claims to be an Ecuadorian profit-sharing scheme) was too important for Donziger to even think of separating from.