A South Florida jury ruled that Chiquita Brands is responsible for eight murders carried out by a right-wing paramilitary group that the company helped finance in a fertile Colombian banana region during the country’s decades-long internal conflict.
The jury on Monday ordered the multinational banana producer to pay $38.3 million to 16 relatives of farmers and other civilians who were murdered in separate episodes by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a right-wing paramilitary group that Chiquita financed from 1997 to 2004.
The company has faced hundreds of similar lawsuits in U.S. courts brought by relatives of other victims of the paramilitary group’s violence in Colombia, but the verdict in Florida represents the first time Chiquita has been found guilty.
The decision, which the company said it planned to appeal, could influence the outcome of other lawsuits, legal experts said.
The verdict in favor of the victims is a rare case (in Colombia and elsewhere) in which a private corporation is held accountable to victims for its operation in regions with widespread violence or social unrest, legal experts said.
“We are very happy with the jury’s verdict, but it cannot be ignored that we are talking about horrible abuses,” said Marco Simons, a lawyer with EarthRights International, an environmental and human rights group, who represented one family in the legal claim.
Agnieszka Fryszman, another lawyer who represented the plaintiffs, said: “The verdict does not return the husbands and sons who were murdered, but rather sets the record straight and places responsibility for terrorist financing where it belongs: at Chiquita’s doors.”
Jurors reached their decision after two days of deliberation and six weeks of trial in U.S. District Court in West Palm Beach, in which attorneys argued over the motivation for payments Chiquita executives admitted to making. to the paramilitary group.
The State Department designated the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known as AUC, as a foreign terrorist organization in 2001.
Chiquita, as part of a deal with the Justice Department to resolve charges of doing business with a terrorist group, admitted in 2007 to paying paramilitaries $1.7 million, an investigation revealed.
The United Self-Defense Forces were a product of Colombia’s brutal civil war, which 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 to which drug traffickers and businessmen turned for protection against leftist guerrilla groups.
The war ended in 2016 when the government and the main leftist group, which was also responsible for killing civilians, signed a peace agreement.
Lawyers representing the families in the South Florida trial argued that Chiquita’s operations benefited from the company’s relationship with the paramilitary group, which spread fear in a fertile 7,000-square-mile agricultural region that connected Panama and Colombia. until it was dissolved in 2006.
They said the group killed or expelled farmers, allowing Chiquita to buy land at depressed values and expand its operations by converting banana farms into more profitable banana farms.
Lawyers representing Chiquita questioned whether the victims had been killed by paramilitaries or other armed groups and said company employees had also been threatened by paramilitaries. Defense lawyers said executives and employees were being extorted by the self-defense forces and made payments to ensure their safety.
“The situation in Colombia was tragic for many,” Chiquita officials said in a statement. “However, that does not change our belief that there is no legal basis for these claims.”
Lawyers representing the families declined to provide many details about their clients’ stories outside of court, citing concerns for their safety. But EarthRights International’s Simons cited other cases brought in US courts against Chiquita that he said showed similar patterns of violence, including the murder of family members in front of her relatives.
In one case, an unidentified girl was traveling to a farm by taxi with her mother and stepfather when they were stopped by armed men, he said. The men executed her stepfather and then shot her mother to death when she tried to flee from them. They then gave the girl the equivalent of 65 cents to take a bus back to the city.
Chiquita, which was formerly known as United Fruit Company, is also a defendant in a lawsuit filed in Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, claiming that payments Chiquita made to the United Self-Defense Forces amounted to participation in criminal activities.
“The name Chiquita resonates in the recent history of the country,” said Sebastián Escobar Uribe, one of the lawyers in the Medellín lawsuit. “When a corporation with significant financial power is investigated in a country like Colombia, the judicial system is vulnerable to being co-opted by that company.”
In the United States, it is unusual to hold a corporation financially responsible for human rights violations beyond the country’s borders, said James Anaya, a professor of international human rights at the University of Colorado School of Law.
The lawsuit that resulted in the South Florida verdict had been working its way through the court system since it was filed in 2007 and withstood several legal challenges to reach trial.
“It is not impossible for these cases to occur,” Anaya said. “There is certainly a path for them.”
But he added: “It’s not common. “Everything has to fit.”
Human rights advocates in Colombia praised the jury’s verdict.
Gerardo Vega, former director of Colombia’s National Land Agency, responsible for returning land to people who were forcibly displaced, said in a video declaration that the ruling was a vindication of the fight against impunity in the United States.
“The Colombian justice system should also act,” Vega said. “We need Colombian judges to condemn the businessmen who, like Chiquita, were paying” the paramilitary groups.
Raquel Sena, widow of a farmer murdered in the banana region, said in an interview with a Colombian radio station that the United Self-Defense Forces had murdered him after he refused to sell them his farmland.
“I will never get over his death,” he said in a video published in X. “We want Chiquita Brands to recognize us because they are the ones who paid to have people killed here.”