Here's one profile of Fajardo and detail on the case in Vanity Fair (2007):
"Given the resources that Chevron has brought to bear, it seemed for a while that this indeed would happen (dismissal of the case)—and for various reasons it may yet. But over the past two years there has been a change that, metaphorically, looks something like an inversion of Tiananmen Square, in which a lone man stands resolutely in front of a maneuvering tank, not to hold it off but to keep it from escaping. In Lago Agrio that lone man is a mestizo named Pablo Fajardo, aged 34, who was born into extreme poverty and toiled for years as a manual laborer in the forest and oil fields, yet managed by force of intellect to complete his secondary education in night school, and through a correspondence course to earn a degree in law. He became a lawyer only three years ago, in 2004, yet has assumed the lead in the suit against Chevron in this, his very first trial. Chevron is represented by lawyers from Ecuador's ruling class, an oligarchy whose women fondly sing "Y Viva España" at Quito garden parties. They may have assumed that they could run Fajardo over. No one makes that assumption now."http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/05/texaco200705Fajardo received the Goldman environmental prize in 2008. Here is their page on it...
http://www.goldmanprize.org/2008/centralsouthamerica-----------------------------------
I am so glad that Chevron/Texaco got hoist on their own petard, on this one. The suit was filed by other lawyers originally in the U.S. Chevron asked that it be moved to Ecuador, where they expected to be coddled by the then rightwing government and to be able to bully and bribe their way out of liability. Meanwhile, however, the Ecuadoran people elected a kickass leftist government on a platform of ending endemic political corruption and acting in the interests of the people of Ecuador. The new president, Rafael Correa, last year fulfilled one of his main campaign promises, by throwing the U.S. military base--long detested by a huge majority of Ecuadorns as a violation of their sovereignty--out of Ecuador.* The U.S. government and their tools in neighboring Colombia ($7 BILLION in U.S. military aid) have tried every trick in the book to slander and topple Correa, to no avail. So the atmosphere in Ecuador has radically altered toward the interest of the People and against the bullying and braying, and sometimes violent and brutal behavior, of the likes of Chevron in small third world countries.
Meanwhile, also, Pablo Fajardo grew up--a member of one of the poor communities whose fishing and hunting were decimated by Chevron-Texaco's massive toxic oil dumps, and whose brothers and sisters and he himself had to drink oily water and wash in oily water and eat food contaminated by oil and oil toxins. He got himself educated, by his own determined effort--while supporting those same brothers and sisters--got a law degree and stood virtually alone, in the initial years of the lawsuit, against one of the biggest transglobal corporations in the world, without a fax machine to his name, with nothing except amazing courage and a brilliant mind against batteries of the world's most highly paid law firms.
Chevron owes the Ecuadoran people, big time--for a mess so bad that many have described it as the "Rainforest Chernobyl." The toxic dumps cover an area the size of Rhode Island and stretch all the way to Peru, creating dead streams and forests all a long the way.
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*(When asked about throwing the U.S. military out of Ecuador, Correa replied that he would agree to a U.S. military base on Ecuadoran territory when the U.S. permits an Ecuadoran military base in Miami!)