HAVANA TIMES – The judgement against the banana multinational Chiquita Brands, ordering it to pay $38.3 million to the families of peasants murdered by the paramilitary group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), is already seen as an international milestone in favor of human rights.
The verdict of a court in southeastern Florida “sends a strong message to companies around the world that profit at the expense of human rights: their actions will not go unpunished,” said Marco Simons, a lawyer for the environmental organization EarthRights International, which acted in the case.
After a process that lasted 17 years, the jury ruled that Chiquita Brands is responsible for eight murders carried out by the AUC, which the company financed with regular payments of at least $1.7 million in the fertile banana-growing region of northern Colombia between 1997 and 2004.
Agnieszka Fryszman, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said that “the verdict does not bring back the husbands and children who were murdered, but it sets things straight and places the responsibility for financing terrorism where it belongs: at Chiquita’s doorstep.”
Chiquita Brands is the successor of the United Fruit Company, which settled in Colombia and Central America after its founding in 1899. The corporation announced that it will appeal the ruling ordering it to compensate 16 relatives of farmers and other civilians murdered in separate incidents by the AUC.
The Florida ruling could influence hundreds of similar lawsuits in US courts filed by relatives of other victims of AUC violence against leftist guerrillas in the context of the internal armed conflict that ravaged Colombia for more than six dec
