Chiquita poured US$1.7 million between 1997 and 2004 into the outlawed far-right paramilitary group AUC, which operated as a death squad in Colombia.
Families of victims murdered by Colombian paramilitaries are one step closer to achieving justice for their loved ones as a United States judge gave the green light for a federal lawsuit against former executives of the U.S. fruit company Chiquita, the organization Earth Rights International announced on Thursday.
The ruling in favor of moving forward with the case comes as a victory in the fight for corporate accountability for human rights abuses, giving rights defenders and the families of victims a chance to see justice served against the backers of death squad violence in Colombia.
“Corporations do not act without individuals,” ERI General Counsel Marco Simons said in a statement Thursday. “The court’s decision ensures that these individuals, whose alleged conduct helped enable a reign of terror, cannot hide from their wrongdoing.”
The lawsuit, launched in 2007 on behalf of the families of victims, seeks charges against Chiquita for supporting the now-defunct far-right paramilitary group United Self Defence Forces of Colombia, better known as AUC. Despite the banana giant’s arguments that the case should be thrown out of U.S. courts on arguments that it doesn’t belong in the U.S. justice system and should be dismissed, the court has ruled in plaintiffs’ favor.
A South Florida district judge ruled on Wednesday that Chiquita executives’ decision to back the AUC showed that “profits took priority over basic human welfare.” The judge also rejected the company’s claims that the issue should be resolved in Colombian courts, given that victims’ families have argued that such a course of action would put them at risk of violence.
By Chiquita’s own account, the company made at least 100 payments totaling US$1.7 million to the AUC between 1997 and 2004.
After the company pled guilty to charges for backing the designated terrorist group, ERI launched the class-action lawsuit against Chiquita executives on behalf of victims and families of victims of paramilitary violence backed by the banana company despite executives’ knowledge of its murderous activities.
The judge’s ruling this week is a key move toward seeing a verdict in the case nearly a decade after plaintiffs brought the suit.
Chiquita is far from the only corporate sponsor of death squad terror in Colombia, which has proved to be a hotbed for corporate abuses. Between 1990 and 2002, Coca-Cola allegedly hired hitmen from the AUC to murder at least 10 labor union leaders linked to organizing the company’s plants. Similarly, a Colombian union leader who survived kidnapping and torture at the hands of paramilitaries in 2002 claims U.K. oil giant BP ordered his capture and murder.
Amid widespread impunity for such human rights violations at the hands of multinational-backed paramilitary violence, the Chiquita case is an important and potentially precedent-setting step toward justice.
— source telesurtv.net