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y Chevron alleging collusion between the RICO Defendants and Cabrera, Fajardo again denied
any wrongdoing, claiming that Cabrera had worked independently. When asked about the
involvement of Stratus, Fajardo told the media, "They are our technical advisers in the United
States, and they have worked with us for some years, but they have never interfered in the trial."
Yet the day before he made that statement, he had written a review of Chevron's filing for his
co-conspirators in which he conceded that it was "true" that "plaintiffs (that is, us) have worked
in collusion with expert Cabrera." The RICO Defendants and their co-conspirators still continue
to use the Cabrera Report as a jumping off point for their most recent claim for $113 billion in
damages.
236. The RICO Defendants' and their co-conspirators' far-reaching campaign to
portray the fraudulent Cabrera Report as that of an independent court expert has been largely
successful, and numerous unsuspecting media outlets have repeated uncritically the RICO
Defendants' false refrain about Cabrera's independence. An April 3, 2008 Reuters article, for
example, stated: "An independent environmental expert told a court in Ecuador that the oil
company Chevron should pay $7 billion to $16 billion in compensation for environmental
damage in the country." And in a May 2009 broadcast, the television show 60 Minutes reported
on the Lago Agrio Litigation, discussing the Cabrera report in detail, but never suggesting that
the RICO Defendants had actually secured Cabrera's appointment and written his report. This
was undoubtedly because the RICO Defendants had never disclosed this to 60 Minutes. To this
day, the RICO Defendants and their co-conspirators maintain a link to the 60 Minutes broadcast
of this misleading report on one of their websites. As the conspirators had hoped, then, the
mainstream media has bought the propaganda and played the role the conspirators hoped and
intended in the scheme to extort a payment from Chevron. And in fact, their hoodwinking of the
mainstream press benefits the conspirators doubly in that it allows them to republish-without
correction-the media outlet's false statements about the Cabrera Report, as they did with the
Reuters story described above.
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