Justice for Ecuador, a group of activists, has launched a campaign #BradDoTheRightThing on change.org requesting actor and activist Brad Pitt to not produce a movie based on Law of the Jungle, a book written by US journalist Paul Barrett, as it will inadvertently help cover up environmental damage caused by oil giant Chevron in the Amazon. According to Fortune magazine, Pitt’s production company, Plan B, has edged out George Clooney to buy the screen rights to the book. 
Law of the Jungle describes the multi-billion-dollar legal case between Texaco, which Chevron bought in 2001, and Ecuador. The indigenous communities from the Ecuadorian Amazon initially won a succession of court cases against Chevron for spilling 16.9 million gallons of crude in forest areas between 1964 and 1992, polluting the soil and local water supplies.
In 2011, Ecuador’s highest court ordered the oil giant to pay the affected people $9.5 billion in damages, but the company refused to pay up and then went on to win the case in New York in 2014. The judge ruled that Steven Donziger, a US lawyer who represented the Ecuadorean indigenous communities, won the case against Chevron in Ecuador’s courts through corrupt means including bribery, extortion and submitting false evidence.
Law of the Jungle is described on its cover as “the $19bn legal battle over oil in the rainforest and the lawyer who’d stop at nothing to win”. Donziger is described as a “self-styled” social activist and a “larger-than-life, loud-mouthed showman, who “cajoled and coerced Ecuadorian judges”.
The activists call the book a biased account of Ecuador’s battle with Chevron and therefore they are worried that a movie based on Barrett’s book would “spread lies and misinformation about the destruction caused by Chevron-Texaco in Ecuador and undermine the efforts of the Ecuadorian people for justice”.
“A movie based on this book will support the strategy of Chevron-Texaco to evade its responsibility for the devastation it has caused in Ecuador and set a precedent for this kind of lack of responsibility for corporations globally,” the petition reads.
The petition comes a week after Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa announced on TV the launch of a “worldwide campaign of tweets to Brad Pitt” using the hashtag #BradDoTheRightThing, to tell the Hollywood star “how he is being used”. Correa claimed the book was published with financial assistance from Chevron as part of an international campaign by the company to “cover up the truth”.
“Now they’ve brought out a book, Law of the Jungle, all paid for by Chevron, in which we look like savages in a country without any separation of powers. If he has any doubts, we invite him to come to Ecuador and scoop up with his hands the oil which still lies in pools 30 years later and which was left by that corrupt oil company Chevron-Texaco, continuing to pollute our forest. Given the clarity of the facts, anybody who signs up to or collaborates with Chevron is an accomplice to that company’s corruption,” Correa said on TeleSUR.
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