Chevron's Human Rights Hitmen - Diego Borja

Chevron's Human Rights Hitmen - Diego Borja

Diego Borja

Chevron contractor and kept man

a.k.a. Chevron’s “dirty tricks guy”

Diego Borja Quotes

“Crime does pay.”

“I have correspondence that talks about things you cannot even imagine... there're things that can make the [plaintiffs] win this just like that."

– Both quotes from a secretly recorded phone conversation released by Borja's friend, Santiago Escobar.
As a Chevron contractor, Diego Borja was responsible for perpetrating all kinds of dirty tricks for Chevron. Borja was paid by Chevron to create four dummy companies to hide the fact that he was on Chevron’s payroll, and helped “cook” evidence of Chevron’s environmental contamination in Ecuador. When Chevron set up a fake “independent” laboratory to process soil and water samples from the contaminated regions of the Ecuadorean Amazon, Borja rented the house it was located in.

Even while Borja was collecting samples from contaminated sites on behalf of Chevron, he and his wife, Sara Portilla, also a Chevron employee, were representing Severn Trent Labs (STL), the US laboratory that Chevron described as an "independent" lab contracted to test its contamination samples. Meanwhile, Borja and another Chevron employee, described by Borja as his “Florida-based boss,” snuck into the laboratory processing samples for the Ecuadorean plaintiffs.

Corrupting the Judicial Process in Ecuador

Perhaps Borja’s most notorious dirty trick, however, was when he and an American “businessman” by the name of Wayne Hansen met with and secretly videotaped the judge who was then presiding over the case in Ecuador, Juan Nuñez. Borja attempted to entrap Nuñez by offering him a bribe. Borja admits that there never was a bribe at all, but the heavily edited videotape led to the dismissal of Nuñez all the same. Afterward, Borja bragged that he’d accomplished in “two days” what Chevron had been trying to do for two years.

What is Borja hiding?

Borja once claimed to have evidence that would cause the plaintiffs to win “just like that,” which he’s keeping as insurance to make sure Chevron pays him the money he feels he’s owed. But when the legal team for the Ecuadorean government attempted to subpoena Borja to find out what he knows, Borja fled Califoria — and the $6,000-a-month condo Chevron was renting for him — to evade service of the subpoena. Chevron’s and Borja’s lawyers were desperate to prevent Borja from having to testify, but a judge in San Francisco recently ordered the self-described "dirty tricks operative" to come clean.

Additional Resources

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