It took decades, but the first group of human rights abuse victims to sue Chiquita Brands, one of the world’s biggest banana producers, has finally won justice. In June, a Florida judge found the multinational responsible for funding the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). Support went on for years, even after the US government designated the bloodthirsty far-right paramilitary group a terrorist organisation. According to the victims’ lawyers, this is the first time a US jury has held a major US corporation responsible for complicity in serious human rights abuses abroad.

A long history of complicity

Founded in 1899 as the United Fruit Company, Chiquita quickly took over virtually all land available for growing crops in Costa Rica, along with large tracts of land in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama. It effectively monopolised the banana business, making it impossible for Caribbean countries to compete.

The company’s power extended to helping to install and remove governments, including through involvement in coups, starting with Honduras in 1912, when it funded an exiled former president to return to the presidency by force. He repaid the favour, granting Chiquita 10,000 hectares of land.

Its most notorious intervention was in Guatemala in 1954, when it pressured the US government to take action against the country’s president, claiming he was a communist and therefore a threat to US interests. What was really at stake was a land reform project that threatened the interests of the banana company. A US-orchestrated coup followed.

Chiquita has also long been accused of being involved in massacres, starting with a banana workers’ strike in Colombia in 1928. In the 1980s, the company was allegedly linked to paramilitary massacres in Colombia and Honduras.

A pact with the devil

In the 1990s, as Chiquita sought to expand its operations in areas of Colombia where armed conflict was taking place, it found an ally in the paramilitaries deployed against guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The company paid large bribes to the government of President Ernesto Samper in return for the creation of a special duty-free zone. Arms shipments destined for the AUC entered Colombia through the company’s private port in this zone, and the paramilitary group used them to take over illegal goldmining and coca paste production. These weapons were traced to killings that took place almost everywhere in Colombia.

Between 1997 and 2004, Chiquita provided more than US$1.7 million in regular monthly payments to the AUC, helping to strengthen its presence and fuel violence. The paramilitaries were on the company’s payroll as banana workers, but instead of picking and packing bananas, they committed human rights abuses, including extortion, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, kidnappings and torture.

Paramilitary operations enabled Chiquita to buy land at very low prices and expand its operations. Paramilitaries helped clear land, and they were also mobilised to prevent strikes. Many of their victims were trade unionists.

At the trial, the defence portrayed the company as a victim of extortion, forced to pay paramilitaries to protect its staff and facilities, and tried to convince the jury it had acted as a ‘responsible businessperson’ in very complex circumstances. But the company was forced to admit it continued to pay the AUC even after the US government declared it a terrorist organisation in 2001. During the seven years the arrangement lasted, the company made a profit of US$49.4 million from its Colombian operations. During those same seven years, paramilitary groups were responsible for the killing or disappearance of more than 100,000 people.

The road to justice

When EarthRights International filed its lawsuit against Chiquita in 2007, the company’s involvement with the paramilitaries had already been proven. The US Department of Justice had prosecuted the company under the Anti-Terrorism Act, because the AUC’s designation as a terrorist group made funding it a federal crime. At that trial, Chiquita pleaded guilty and paid a fine of US$25 million.

Because it was a criminal case, there was no compensation for victims, but the verdict paved the way for them to seek civil compensation. It also provided vital evidence for the civil case that wouldn’t otherwise have been readily available.

In addition to EarthRights, several law firms representing groups of victims filed lawsuits in various US states. The plaintiffs were family members of banana workers, political organisers, social activists, trade unionists and others tortured and murdered by paramilitaries between 1997 and 2004.

Legal procedures went on for almost two decades, with Chiquita repeatedly delaying them with motions to dismiss and countless appeals and trying to move them to Colombia. Only in 2016 did a federal judge rule that the case could be tried in the USA. In 2012, the plaintiffs also sued several Chiquita executives involved in the illegal funding scheme.

There were several setbacks. In 2014, the plaintiffs added claims against individual defendants under the Torture Victim Protection Act, but these were dismissed, and when their petition for review was denied and they appealed to the US Supreme Court, the court declined to take the case. From then on, only claims under Colombian law continued in the Federal District Court in Florida. In 2019, EarthRights moved to certify the case as a class action, but the court denied the motion.

But the plaintiffs also scored legal victories along the way. In 2018, the Partners in Justice International legal team filed an expert declaration clarifying the practice, common in human rights cases, of taking voluntary depositions abroad. The court then rejected Chiquita’s efforts to dismiss the claims of plaintiffs who couldn’t travel because they were denied visas, and ruled they could be deposed in Colombia. It also issued a protective order to protect their identities.

Chiquita produced over two million pages of documents but tried to conceal some of the content, arguing it was protected by attorney-client privilege. The court ruled that privilege no longer applied because the same documents had been handed to the Department of Justice during the criminal investigation.

Following the denial of class action certification, EarthRights filed new complaints in several states on behalf of individual plaintiffs who would have been members of the class action. It also moved forward in Florida with nine selected plaintiffs it felt had a particularly strong case. But just as the proceedings seemed about to pick up speed, they were put on hold by the pandemic. Several appeals, amendments and judicial decisions later, in 2022 the Florida case was finally allowed to proceed to a jury trial. It was postponed again before the trial eventually started in April 2024.

On 10 June, the court found Chiquita liable for eight of the nine deaths included in the case. It also ordered the company to pay US$38.3 million in compensation to victims’ families.

Next steps

This is just the beginning. The lawsuit the nine cases were selected from involved over a hundred victims, and the multiple lawsuits filed involve thousands of people. Chiquita continues to face numerous lawsuits, and many more are expected to follow, to be resolved in subsequent trials or through an eventual settlement.

Because Chiquita has appealed, the families of the victims won’t receive compensation any time soon. But the verdict has sent a warning to companies around the world that profit at the expense of human rights: they will be held accountable.

The all-powerful Chiquita has been held to account after decades of abuse of power. This opens the door for other companies accused of funding paramilitaries in Colombia – such as the Drummond mining company and Coca-Cola – to face justice. Many more companies complicit in human rights abuses, in Colombia and throughout Central America and the Caribbean, should be warned that other legal cases will follow. Civil society groups will keep doing everything they can to hold them to account.

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