A South Florida jury found the Chiquita brand responsible for eight murders committed by right-wing paramilitary groups it funded in Colombia’s fertile banana-growing region during a decades-long civil war.
A jury on Monday ordered the multinational banana producer to pay $38.3 million to the families of farmers and 16 other civilians killed in separate incidents by Colombia’s United Self-Defense Forces. 2004.
The company has faced hundreds of similar lawsuits filed in U.S. courts by families of other victims of violence by Colombian paramilitary groups, but this is the first time Chiquita has been found negligent.
The decision, which the company said it plans to appeal, could affect the outcome of other lawsuits, legal experts said.
The ruling in favor of the victims is a rare example of a private company being held accountable for operating in an area where violence or social unrest was rampant, legal experts said.
“We are very pleased with the jury’s verdict, but we cannot avoid the fact that we are talking about horrific abuses,” said Marco Simons, a lawyer for the environmental and human rights group EarthRights International who represented one of the families. Legal Claims.
Agnieszka Fritzman, another lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said, “This ruling does not bring back the murdered husband and son. “This sets the record straight and places responsibility for terrorist financing at Chiquita’s doorstep.”
The jury reached its decision after two days of deliberations and a six-week trial in U.S. District Court in West Palm Beach. In this court, lawyers argued over the motivations for payments Chiquita executives admitted they made to paramilitary groups.
The U.S. State Department designated the Colombian Self-Defense Forces, known as AUC, as a foreign terrorist organization in 2001.
The investigation found that Chiquita admitted to paying $1.7 million to a paramilitary group in 2007 as part of a plea deal with the Justice Department to resolve charges of doing business with the terrorist group.
The United States Self-Defense Forces are a product of the Colombian Civil War that broke out in the 1960s and killed at least 220,000 people.
They were formed in 1997 as a coalition of heavily armed far-right groups that drug traffickers and businessmen rely on for protection from left-wing guerrilla groups.
The war ended in 2016 when a peace agreement was signed between the government and the main leftist forces responsible for massacres of civilians.
Attorneys representing the family in the South Florida trial said Chiquita’s operations benefited from the company’s ties to paramilitary groups, which controlled 7,000 square miles of fertile agricultural land between Panama and Colombia until its disbandment in 2006. He claimed to have sowed fear in the area.
They said the group killed or drove out farmers, allowing Chiquita to expand its operations by buying land at depressed prices and converting plantain plantations to more profitable banana plantations.
Chiquita’s lawyers questioned whether the victims were killed by paramilitaries or other armed groups, and said company employees had also been threatened by paramilitaries. The defense team said that executives and employees were extorted of money by the Self-Defense Forces and were paid money to guarantee their safety.
“The situation in Colombia has been tragic for many people,” Chiquita officials said in a statement. “However, this does not change our belief that there is no legal basis for these claims.”
Lawyers representing the family declined to provide many details about their clients’ stories outside court, citing concerns for their safety. But EarthRights International’s Simons cited other cases filed in U.S. courts against Chiquita that showed similar patterns of violence, including murdering family members in front of his relatives.
In one case, an unidentified girl was stopped by gunmen as she rode a taxi to a farm with her mother and stepfather, he said. The men executed her stepfather, then shot and killed her mother as she tried to flee. They then gave the girl the equivalent of 65 cents to ride her bus back to her village.
Chiquita, formerly known as United Fruit Company, is also a defendant in the lawsuit filed in Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city. It is alleged that payments made by Chiquita to the United States Self-Defense Forces involved criminal activity.
“The name Chiquita resonates in the country’s recent history,” said Sebastián Escobar Uribe, one of the lawyers in the Medellin lawsuit. “When you investigate companies with enormous financial power in countries like Colombia, the judicial system runs the risk of being co-opted by those companies.”
In the United States, it is unusual to hold corporations financially responsible for human rights violations that cross national borders, said James Anaya, who teaches international human rights at the University of Colorado Law School.
The lawsuit that led to the South Florida ruling has been through the court system since it was filed in 2007 and has endured several legal challenges before reaching trial.
“It is not impossible for such an incident to occur,” Mr. Anaya said. “They definitely have a way.”
But he added, “It’s not a common occurrence.” “Everything has to fall into place.”
Human rights defenders in Colombia praised the jury’s verdict.
Gerardo Vega, former director of Colombia’s National Land Agency, which is responsible for returning land to people displaced by force, said in a video statement that the ruling demonstrated the fight against impunity in the United States.
“The Colombian justice system must also act,” Mr. Vega said. “We need Colombian judges to convict businessmen who pay paramilitary groups like Chiquita.”
Raquel Sena, the widow of a farm worker killed in a banana production area, told a Colombian radio station that the United States Self-Defense Forces killed him after he refused to sell his farmland.
“I will never get over his death,” she said in a video posted on X. “We want the Chiquita brand to recognize us because we are the ones who paid for people to die here.”
