WASHINGTON, 20 November 2007 — Victims of Colombia’s bloody civil conflict have filed an almost $8 billion lawsuit against the US banana importer Chiquita Brands International Inc. for making payments to a violent paramilitary group there.
The suit, filed in US District Court in Manhattan last Wednesday, accuses the company of complicity in hundreds of deaths by financially helping the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia.
The civil lawsuit is on behalf of 393 victims and their relatives who accuse Chiquita of conspiring with a guerilla group, known United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia — a right-wing paramilitary group known by its Spanish acronym AUC — to control Columbia’s banana growing regions.
This is the largest US lawsuit to date filed against Chiquita. Victims of the bloody paramilitary conflict in Colombia say Chiquita funded and armed guerrilla groups that tortured and killed thousands of banana growers.
“It was about acquiring every aspect of banana distribution and sale through a reign of terror,” the plaintiffs’ lawyer Jonathan Reiter said.
The company has admitted paying violent guerilla groups, including the AUC, who are accused of carrying out massacres during Colombia’s long-running guerilla war before they began disarming in 2003.
The lawsuit is the latest of several complaints filed by Columbian victims against Chiquita this year.
In May 2007, the French NGO “Peuples Solidaires” publicly accused the Compañia Bananera Atlántica Limitada (COBAL), a Chiquita subsidiary, of knowingly violating its workers’ basic rights and endangering their families health and their own. Allegedly, the banana firm has carelessly exposed laborers at the Coyol plantation in Costa Rica to highly toxic pesticides on multiple occasions.
Chiquita has been entangled in controversy for more than a century with claims over the aggressive tactics that it has used to influence the politics of the Central American countries in which it operates.
The company had dominated Central America since 1899 and changed its name to Chiquita Brands International in 1989.
In 1975, a US investigation revealed that it bribed the government of the Honduran president — and military dictator — Oswaldo López Arellano to get banana export taxes reduced.
The company even spawned the term “Banana Republic”, first coined by the American humorist O. Henry in 1904, in reference to the American conglomerate United Fruit and its actions in Honduras.
Chiquita has acknowledged that its former subsidiary, Banadex, had paid $1.7 million to the A.U.C. from 1997 to 2004. The company has also admitted that the payments were illegal; it pleaded guilty this year to violating counterterrorism laws and agreed to pay a $25 million fine.
But Chiquita has repeatedly insisted that it had no choice but to pay protection money to groups that had threatened to turn death squads loose on its banana plantations and employees.
Michael Mitchell, a spokesman for the company, said that the lawsuit “grossly mischaracterized the payments made by Chiquita in Colombia”.
The company sold its Colombian subsidiary in 2004 but continues to buy Colombian bananas from independent suppliers.
Mitchell said Chiquita, which is based in Cincinnati, would fight the civil lawsuit, one of several filed recently by Colombian citizens and human rights groups.
Also developing are reports that Chiquita allegedly has been courting Monica Goodling, the disgraced, former United States Justice of Department lawyer and political appointee in the Bush administration who came to prominence in 2007 in the midst of a political controversy surrounding the firings of several US attorneys.
A company spokesperson for Chiquita would not offer details of their discussions.
