Florida jury orders Chiquita to pay millions to victims of paramilitary gangs in Colombia
A federal jury in West Palm Beach has ordered Chiquita Brands International to pay $38.3 million in damages to the families of eight men killed by a paramilitary group in Colombia, in a landmark resolution that could make the U.S. fruit company liable for hundreds of millions of dollars more in compensation to the family members of other victims.
United Self-Defenders of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym AUC, a far-right drug-trafficking group designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, was active during the 1990s and early 2000s and was accused of torturing and killing thousands of people in the South American country.
According to the lawsuit, Chiquita made payments to the paramilitary group for almost a decade. The company argued during the case that it had no choice but to pay the AUC to protect its own workers from falling victim to the group’s violence. Members of the AUC would kidnap civilians in the middle of the night and leave their mutilated corpses nearby for their families to find. The organization disbanded in early 2006.
Lawyers for the victims’ families said that the federal verdict, reached Monday afternoon, will have far-reaching implications.
“This is wonderful news for all the victims in Colombia. This is going to, in effect, set a precedent that is going to positively affect all of the other cases,” said lawyer Jonathan Reiter. “It is a landmark verdict in the sense that I don’t believe that there has ever been a verdict rendered by a jury in this country against a United States corporation for human-rights violations that took place overseas.”
The jury said that Chiquita had not acted in a reasonable business manner and that it had engaged in a hazardous activity. It also rejected the company’s arguments that it had acted under duress when it paid off the AUC because the company had been a victim of extortion.
Chiquita was been accused of making almost $2 million in payments to the paramilitary organization between 1997 and 2007.
The company has not issued a statement about the jury verdict.
Family members are set to receive as much as $2.3 million for each victim, but there are many more of them in Colombia that have filed similar lawsuits. “There will be additional trials and this will be a positive thing for many that were affected,” Reiter said.
In 2007, in a deal with reached with New York federal prosecutors that spared company executives from facing criminal charges, Chiquita admitted to having paid the AUC and agreed to a $25 million fine.
That deal, however, did not include any type of reparations for the victims’ families. Their lawyers told the West Palm Beach jury last week to keep this in mind before they began their deliberations.
The AUC, which at its peak had almost 20,000 members, the AUC was heavily engaged in combating the leftist FARC and ELN guerrilla groups during the late ‘90’s and early 2000’s, but was also involved in brutal attacks against civilians suspected of having ties to the leftist groups.
In one of the most infamous episodes, members of the paramilitary group arrived near a small village in the Meta Department in 1997 and used machetes and chainsaws to kill and dismember civilians, in what was later became known as the “Mapiripán Massacre”. While it is not known exactly how many people were killed the U.S. State Department said they were at least 30.
