The trial lasted seventeen years. On Monday, June 10, a federal court in the Southern District of Florida, in the United States, ordered the American company Chiquita Brands to pay $38.3 million to the families of eight Colombians murdered in their country by extreme paramilitaries. RIGHT. Based in the Uraba region in northern Colombia, the banana company financed the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) militias which, in 2001, were included on Washington’s list of terrorist organizations. The Florida jurors considered that the banana multinational was responsible for the deaths of these eight victims. This is only a first judgment. More than six thousand other victims await compensation.
For human rights defenders, the decision of the Palm Beach jurors is historic. “This is the first time that a jury in the United States has found a major American company responsible for complicity in human rights abuses committed in another country”notes the press release from EarthRights International, one of the organizations which provided representation for the plaintiffs. “This judgment sends a strong message to private companies around the world”underlines lawyer Marissa Vahlsing, director of international strategy at EarthRights International.
The symbolic value of the decision is all the stronger as Chiquita Brands is the heir of the United Fruit Company, the infamous American company which has weighed so heavily in the economy and politics of certain countries in the region as those -these have earned the nickname “banana republics”. In 1928, the United Fruit Company called on the Colombian army to quell a strike on its plantations. “The banana plantation massacre” remains engraved in memories.
“Security” section
The first suspicions against the modern Chiquita Brands date back to the end of the 1990s. The Colombian armed conflict then reached the height of horror. Under the pretext of fighting against Marxist guerrillas, the AUC massacres, tortures, sequesters, threatens. Hundreds of trade unionists were murdered, thousands of peasants were forced to abandon their land. In 2007, the American justice system opened an investigation into the company’s actions.
Chiquita then pleaded guilty and admitted having paid $1.7 million to the AUC between 1997 and 2004 to, it says, ensure the safety of its employees and its facilities. The company is ordered to pay a fine of $25 million for financing a terrorist organization. The money goes into the coffers of the American state, and not to the Colombian victims. Supported by local human rights organizations, several thousand of them then decided to take legal action in the United States. “Unlike other companies which preferred to negotiate an agreement with their victims before a possible judgment, Chiquita went all the way, using all possible procedural means to try to avoid a conviction”explains Mme Vahlsing.
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