Jury to weigh Chiquita’s ties to terrorist group
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – The families of people killed by Colombian terrorists are finally facing off against the corporate giant accused of financing their loved ones’ murders: Chiquita Brands International.
The trial against Chiquita follows more than a decade of litigation over illegal payments the banana giant made to Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, a militant group known to kidnap civilians in the middle of the night and leave their mutilated corpses for their families to find.
Attorneys for Chiquita say the company had no choice but to pay the terrorists nearly $2 million in the late 1990s and early 2000s to protect its Colombian employees from further violence.
In a federal courtroom on April 30, lawyers for the victims’ families said the opposite is true; that Chiquita willingly partnered with the AUC in order to protect its profits – not its people – and to quell employee unrest.
This trial comes almost two decades after Chiquita executives pleaded guilty in a New York courtroom to financing the AUC. The company made a deal with federal prosecutors that cemented its conviction but spared it additional
This trial comes almost two decades after Chiquita executives pleaded guilty in a New York courtroom to financing the AUC.
criminal charges, allowing executives to move on in exchange for a $25 million fine.
No executive spent a day in jail for their crime, attorney Jack Scarola said Tuesday. No surviving victim saw a penny of the payout. Seventeen years
later, he said, it’s up to jurors to decide whether and how the victims of the Chiquita-funded terror will be compensated. Scarola wove a yearslong geopolitical history lesson into a 90-minute opening statement.
Each time it neared the cusp of becoming a lecture, a vehement reference to “savage slaughter,” mass execution, mutilation and torture yanked it back.
Militant groups vying for control over the drug market threw what Scarola called the “banana zone” into a bloody civil war.
When civilians fled, Chiquita saw opportunity, Scarola said, purchasing abandoned land at bargain prices and hiring thousands of Colombians to farm it, their profits ballooning even as the war worsened.
From the conflict, two diametrically opposed terrorist groups formed: the FARC, a radical left-wing band that Scarola said threatened Chiquita with its pro-labor guerrilla warfare; and the
AUC, the far-right group created in response to the FARC threat.
Rather than retreat from the violence, the attorney said, Chiquita invested in it.
Company executives met with AUC leader Carlos Castaño in 1997. Soon after, the first of more than 100 documented, disguised payments from Chiquita to the AUC began. Scarola said there’s evidence of undocumented payments, too.
Attorney Michael Cioffi told a different story.
He said that during that 1997 meeting with AUC leadership, Castaño sent a “clear but unspoken message” that Chiquita’s failure to pay up would result in harm to the company’s people and property.
“Chiquita was extorted over and over,” Cioffi said Tuesday.
He called the company as much a victim of the AUC as the plaintiffs who are suing it.
“Right from the get go, there was no question that Chiquita was extorted.” He told jurors that Chiquita was a force for good in an otherwise chaotic environment.