Chiquita Banana Actually Held Liable For Funding Colombian Death Squads
This, truly, is a first.
On Monday, a Florida court found Chiquita Banana liable for financing a right wing paramilitary death squad and ordered it to pay out $38.3 million to the families of eight people the squad killed.
While Chiquita said its payments to the United Self-defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), were done under duress to keep its workers and property safe, the $1.7 million the company paid the group allowed them to kill, torture, kidnap and disappear thousands of people the group thought just might be sympathetic to left-wing guerrillas, politicians or activists. This group of eight is just the first in what may be a long line of heartbroken families demanding compensation.
This is a huge deal. As EarthRights International, the legal group representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement, this “marks the first time that an American jury has held a major U.S. corporation liable for complicity in serious human rights abuses in another country.”
“This verdict sends a powerful message to corporations everywhere: profiting from human rights abuses will not go unpunished. These families, victimized by armed groups and corporations, asserted their power and prevailed in the judicial process,” said Marco Simons, EarthRights International general counsel.
The UAC is the the same paramilitary group that Coca-Cola bottling partners allegedly hired to kill several Sinaltrainal (National Union of Food Workers) union organizers in the late 1990s, and many of the several hundred union organizers killed in Colombia throughout the 2000s). For more information, check out this documentary.). Sinaltrainal tried to hold Coca-Cola responsible for the murders, but the case was dismissed in 2009 by the 11th Circuit Court “for lack of subject matter jurisdiction” and pretty much the only thing that happened to Coca-Cola was that some colleges banned their products for a while.
Chiquita had previously admitted to paying off the UAC and was convicted of doing so in 2007. At that time, it was fined $25 million. In the years since, even more has come to light in Colombia’s “Peace Court,” including allegations that the company assisted the UAC in delivering gasoline and weapons it was well aware were going to be used to kill people.
But hey — we did get our bananas! And what would our smoothies be without them?
According to Colombia’s own estimates, 5,733 people associated with the left-wing Patriotic Union (UP) party were killed or disappeared by paramilitary groups (with military backing from the state) from 1984 to 2016.
While you will notice that several outlets will note that the UAC was designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, it is just a little bit important to know that we created them in the first place.
Without getting too in the weeds on this, the paramilitary groups that would later comprise the UAC were our idea and our tax dollars, very often, went to train them in torture, terrorism, assassinations, etc., at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia (now known as WHINSEC in Fort Moore, Georgia) and elsewhere. Why? Well, for the same reason we supported a military coup in Chile to replace fairly the elected Democratic Socialist Salvador Allende with Augusto Pinochet, a far-right lunatic fond of human rights atrocities. For the same reason we supported far-right military coups and dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela: we simply had to stop the communists and the socialists from taking over and potentially hurting US business interests.
But hey! It’s a good thing we did put our very important capitalism interests ahead of any silly human rights priorities like “not throwing people from helicopters” or torturing them, because if we didn’t, I bet you a lot of these countries would be having so much trouble now that many those who live there would end up running away to the US to claim asylum.
Now that the precedent has been set — now that a corporation has actually been held liable, by a jury, for human rights abuses in another country — there are a whole lot of other corporations that might start worrying a little bit themselves.
PREVIOUSLY:
This is why it kind of niggles me when US politicians start decrying their country becoming a banana republic. It manages to acknowledge such a thing is bad, without actually seeming aware of why they are called that and how they came to be in the first place.
Leave us also remember that Chiquita Brands is simply the renaming of our old friend, United Fruit. [Chiquita was modeled on Carmen Miranda -- who was Brazilian, born nowhere near Central America -- and was so adorable and popular in the 30s and 40s that she just *had* to be co-opted].
United Fruit, as you may recall. was the reason we fought the Banana Wars from 1898 to 1938, and sent the Marines in to protect its profits and engender hatred of US imperialism.
For extra credit, read Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler's short book, 'War Is a Racket," who calls it out. And he knew something about it, since he fought for *years* in Central America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler