Thanks, @pulvdiggity, and I’m sorry for the trouble. I think I understood your tweet, and I more or less agree with it: you may want to see this post. Basically, I think that Judge Guerra has little credibility and that the finder of fact might well choose to disbelieve him, and thus that corroboration is highly important; and that at least some of the supposedly corroborating evidence is of questionable admissibility.

But I now have tons of Ecuadorians tweeting at me.

Thanks for responding, Doug! I had a feeling this post would be like a bat signal for you. I guess I am now looking at this through the perspective of trial. If it were important for Chevron to show not just that Guerra was corrupt, but that he was corrupt in the way you say he was corrupt instead of the way I say he was corrupt, has (or will) Chevron met that burden? Based on the Guerra declaration, I would say, “not yet.” I presume that if anyone applied any political pressure to Judge Guerra, it would have been reflected in the declaration, no?

Now it may be that it is not important for Chevron to make this kind of showing, since no one but me and the occasional commenter at Letters Blogatory seems particularly concerned about whether Chevron should be estopped to argue against recognition of the judgment. If there’s no question of estoppel, then demonstrating a change in country conditions as a way to get out from an estoppel isn’t important, I guess. Still, though, I wonder whether we will see any evidence of political interference in the case at the level of the Provincial Court. I agree with you that Chevron may have different arguments about the appellate judges.

This was no mere graft. Without being exhaustive, you might recall from my earlier writings that when representatives of the Lago Agrio plaintiffs first met with President Correa shortly after his inauguration in 2007, their own internal messages indicate that he offered whatever help he could, including his offer to speak to the judge in the case for them. When the fraudulent judgment came down, President Correa called it the most important judgment in Ecuadorian history. His top lawyer publicly praised Judge Zambrano (who, as you recently noted, was later removed from the bench by judicial authorities for apparent collusion with a drug trafficker). As for the various appeals since the judgment was rendered, any appeals court judge who hopes to keep his job will have heard the message loud and clear: President Correa will not tolerate any deviation from the party line on this case.

I could cite more examples, but the bottom line is that this was not merely garden variety graft by two corrupt judges (Guerra and Zambrano); it was and is a judicial proceeding harnessed, at all levels necessary, to the political purposes of President Correa. Once Correa became interested in the case, there was no way that Chevron could win, no matter what the evidence might show.