American banana company Chiquita must pay R700m for funding Colombian terrorists, jury finds
US banana brand Chiquita must pay the families of terrorist violence some R700 million, a US jury ruled.The jury accepted the argument that Chiquita knowingly paid money to a group that would use it in human rights abuses.
The jury awarded the surviving family members $38.3 million – the equivalent of some R700 million – in damages for the deaths of eight victims. Chiquita, headquartered in the US but domiciled in Switzerland, in 2007 confessed in a US court to having financed the AUC from 1997 to 2004, which was then designated as a foreign terrorist organisation in the United States.The company has said that it was a victim of extortion when it paid the money to the group.
The AUC wreaked terror on the country in the 1990s as part of a bitter war against Colombian far-left guerrillas, aided at times by members of the armed forces.Marco Simons, general counsel at EarthRights International, hailed the verdict as"a powerful message to corporations everywhere: profiting from human rights abuses will not go unpunished."
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