Why banana brand Chiquita was found liable for deaths in the Colombia's Civil War

[Judi Lynn]

JUNE 15, 20248:03 AM ET
HEARD ON WEEKEND EDITION SATURDAY

Danielle Kurtzleben - square 2015

DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, HOST:

This week, a federal jury in Florida found fruit giant Chiquita Brands liable for deaths during Colombia's civil war. They ordered the company to pay the families of eight men over $38 million. The company admitted to paying a far-right paramilitary group that committed the killings. But they said they had to pay the group, known by its Spanish acronym AUC, in order to protect workers. Chiquita has faced other lawsuits related to their actions in Colombia, but this is the first time they've been found culpable. Jorge Valencia is a freelance journalist based in Colombia who's been following the case from Cartagena. Jorge, thank you so much for joining us.

JORGE VALENCIA: Hi, good morning. Thank you.

KURTZLEBEN: So first, let's start with some background. Colombia had a decadeslong civil war. What part did this group, the AUC, play in it?

VALENCIA: They were a conglomeration of various self-defense groups that were organized by some legal actors, like farm owners or like cattle ranchers and some illegal actors, drug traffickers. And so they were groups that were created to protect themselves from armed military guerrillas who would attack them, would kidnap their family members. And so they became a lot more violent and a lot more gruesome than the groups that they were created to protect, supposedly, people from.

KURTZLEBEN: Those groups that they were protecting against, those are groups like FARC that people might have heard of, right?

VALENCIA: Correct.

KURTZLEBEN: Yeah.

VALENCIA: FARC, which demobilized in 2016, and the ELN, which is currently in peace negotiations with the Colombian government.

KURTZLEBEN: How did Chiquita get involved with this paramilitary group?

VALENCIA: Well, Chiquita made payments of at least $1.7 million over the course of seven years to the AUCs. This is something that they have admitted to the U.S. Department of Justice, and it was something that they had to pay a fine to the U.S. government in 2007. They paid $25 million. And so the question in this trial was about the motivation behind these payments. The family members said that the AUCs would intimidate any type of workers unions in the region, and also would displace people, which would allow Chiquita Brands to expand their operations by buying lands at depressed values. Now, Chiquita's lawyers say that Chiquita was actually another victim in this wide conflict in Colombia, that the AUCs were extorting their executives in Colombia and that these payments were simply a form of guaranteeing the safety of their employees in the region.

KURTZLEBEN: Well, that brings us to this case that we're talking about today. How did these victims' families say that Chiquita's relationship with the AUC resulted in the deaths of these men? What happened here?

VALENCIA: Well, they say that they were bankrolling this group and that this group murdered their family members. None of the lawyers who were involved in the case would go into the details of those cases because they said that just by coming forward in this trial, these family members were taking great risk because some of these armed actors who were involved in these cases are still at large and may go after the families if they hear their cases in mediate reports, and also, because this is a very large sum of money that they were awarded. And so they're concerned that they're going to become targets. However, these eight cases are only eight out of thousands that were perpetrated by the paramiltaries in Colombia.

More::
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/15/nx-s1-5003904/why-banana-brand-chiquita-was-found-liable-for-deaths-in-the-colombias-civil-war

[Tanuki]

1. Chiquita has a long, dirty history

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Massacre

"The Banana Massacre (Spanish: Matanza/Masacre de las bananeras[1]) was a massacre of workers of the United Fruit Company, now Chiquita, that occurred between December 5 and 6, 1928, in the town of Ciénaga near Santa Marta, Colombia. A strike began on November 12, 1928, when the workers ceased to work until the company would reach an agreement with them to grant them dignified working conditions.[2] After several weeks with no agreement, in which the United Fruit Company refused to negotiate with the workers, the conservative government of Miguel Abadía Méndez assigned Cortés Vargas as military chief in Magdalena department and sent 700 from the Colombian Army in against the strikers, resulting in the massacre of 47 to 2,000 people.
U.S. officials in Colombia and United Fruit representatives portrayed the workers' strike as "communist" with a "subversive tendency" in telegrams to Frank B. Kellogg, the United States Secretary of State.[3] The Colombian government was also compelled to work for the interests of the company, considering they could cut off trade of Colombian bananas with significant markets such as the United States and Europe.[4]

Gabriel García Márquez depicted a fictional version of the massacre in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, as did Álvaro Cepeda Samudio in his La Casa Grande. Although García Márquez references the number of dead as around three thousand, the actual number of dead workers is unknown."....(more)