Background: A man on a bicycle rides by a banana trailer in La Lima, Honduras Thursday Nov. 29, 2001. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix). Inset: CBS 60 Minutes footage of Colombian paramilitary soldiers circa 2010 (via YouTube).
A landmark case that started 17 years ago reached a pivotal moment this week when a jury in Florida found global banana producer Chiquita Brands liable for eight killings done by members of a designated terrorist paramilitary group the company was accused of paying off during Colombia’s civil war.
For their funding of the now-defunct paramilitary network known as Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC, Chiquita must pay $38.3 million to 16 family members of eight deceased victims. The U.S. designated AUC a terrorist organization in September 2001, according to the State Department. The AUC started to demobilize in 2003 and completed disbanding by 2006, according to Colombia Reports.
The trial began this April.
Through their attorney at Earth Rights International, one of the unnamed victims released a statement calling the end to their protracted and painful legal battle a “triumph.”
“We’re not in this process because we want to be; it was Chiquita, with its actions, that dragged us into it. We have a responsibility to our families, and we must fight for them,” one victim said.
Litigation began in 2007 with a class action lawsuit filed in New Jersey alleging Chiquita bankrolled torture and other war crimes. The case was eventually moved to Florida and Chiquita tried multiple times to dismiss the lawsuit outright. In 2016, when it was argued by Chiquita’s attorneys that the case should be tried in Colombia instead of the U.S., a federal judge disagreed. As the years ticked on, the victims’ families kept fighting. A comprehensive timeline of the litigation is available here via Earth Rights International.
The ruling from the federal court in South Florida this week marks the first time that an American jury has held a major U.S. company liable for its complicity in human rights abuses in another country, Earth Rights International attorneys said Monday.
Records show Chiquita pleaded guilty in 2007 to paying AUC off on a hundreds of separate occasions, eventually forking over close to $2 million to the terrorist paramilitary network while categorizing the records as payments for security services in regions where territory to grow bananas was hotly contested.
There were never any actual security services rendered however, according to the Justice Department. At the time, Chiquita was forced to pay a $25 million fine.
In a report by the National Security Archive detailing the cases’ many complexities, the outlet noted how testimony from key witnesses expertly guided jurors through details about the payments Chiquita made. There were other internal financial records scrutinized too that the victims’ attorneys said demonstrated how the company funneled cash to other groups acting as legal fronts for the paramilitaries.
A lead attorney for Earth Rights International, Marco Simons, reportedly left an indelible image in jurors’ minds as the trial in West Palm Beach came to a close. Simons showed the jury a handwritten memo where a former in-house attorney for Chiquita described payments to the paramilitary front companies. Essentially, the memo lamented it that it was the cost of doing business because the Chiquita simply couldn’t “get the same level of support from the military” to protect their interests.
At least one unnamed Chiquita executive claimed the payments were coerced and at trial, the conglomerate’s attorneys argued the company had been extorted.
But jurors were unconvinced and attorneys for the victims urged that Chiquita knew from the start that by paying off paramilitary members, they could better control, defend and manage fertile banana farming land shared across Colombia and Panama.
With farmers chased off by paramilitary members, who also killed those who would not leave, Chiquita was able to swoop in and cut itself a lucrative deal, the families claimed.
But Chiquita knowingly provided substantial assistance to the AUC and created a foreseeable risk of harm to others, the jury found.
The company also altogether failed to prove that it was threatened or that there simply was no possible alternative to paying off the paramilitaries.
In a statement after the verdict this week Chiquita told the New York Times that the “situation in Colombia was tragic for so many.”
A year ago, The Guardian reported that a onetime leader of the terrorist AUC network, Salvatore Mancuso, told Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction of Peace that state institutions, businesses and the political elite often worked hand-in-hand with paramilitary squads during the civil war.
The war began in the 1960s and raged for decades, displacing millions and killing at least 450,000.
Mancuso told the peace tribunal that banana companies and other multinational corporations like Coca-Cola and Drummond — a coal mining company — had blood on their hands for years and had directly influenced the rise of paramilitary networks that wreaked havoc on civilians. Coca-Cola and Drummond have historically denied the accusations of wrongdoing.
Chiquita took a similar approach despite its loss in the courts this week telling the Times that “there is no legal basis for these claims.”
The company also told the outlet it plans to appeal.
Meanwhile, after the verdict, Simons said the jury sent a “powerful message to corporations everywhere.”
“Profiting from human rights abuses will not go unpunished. These families, victimized by armed groups and corporations, asserted their power and prevailed in the judicial process,” he said.
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