Chiquita Bananas Allowed to Fund Terrorists because it is a US company

Colombian families whose relatives were massacred by paramilitaries cannot sue the Chiquita Brands fruit company in federal court, the 11th Circuit United States Court of Appeals ruled last week. The victims charged that Chiquita was responsible for the deaths by funding a right-wing paramilitary group.

A panel of judges decided the victims did not have standing in U.S. court, even though the North Carolina-based banana giant pled guilty to U.S. criminal charges in 2007. The victims were claiming potentially billions of dollars in damages from the company.

The ruling was a big victory for the banana giant — and for the rights of American companies to finance international terrorism.

In a general statement sent to ThinkProgress, a Chiquita spokesman said, “Chiquita has long maintained that these cases do not belong in the U.S. courts and that the claims should be dismissed. We are gratified that the U.S. Court of Appeals has now agreed with us.”

As for the families whose loved ones were murdered, Chiquita says it has “great sympathy for the Colombians who suffered at the hands of these Colombian armed groups” but asserts “the responsibility for the violent crimes committed in that country belongs to the perpetrators, not the innocent people and companies they extorted.”

The perpetrators, in this case, are the United Auto-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the paramilitary umbrella group responsible for the most heinous human rights atrocities committed over the course of Colombia’s 50-year armed conflict.

By its own account, Chiquita made at least 100 payments — $1.7 million in total — to the AUC between 1997 and 2004. In the decade prior to that, the company had maintained a similar arrangement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the nominally leftist rebel group chased out of the region by the combined (and coordinated) efforts of the AUC and Colombian military.

During that period, Colombia’s banana-growing region became the key battleground in the armed conflict, which had already degenerated into “by far the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of the Western Hemisphere,” in the words of then-UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland. Civilian populations throughout the Uraba region– and journalists, labor organizers, human rights advocates, community leaders, and left-leaning politicians, in particular — were targeted as part of a crude but effective paramilitary total war.

Sup.Ct. wrote:A casual presence of a corporation or its agent in a state in single or isolated incidents is not enough to establish jurisdiction. Acts of agents of the corporation, because of the nature, quality, and circumstances of their commission, may be deemed sufficient. Consent may be implied from the corporation’s presence and activities in the state through the acts of authorized agents.

Original Quill wrote:No, but the Reagan administration was a real booster.  And do you know who his CIA Director was?

I've got some great (legal) "war stories" to tell about Nicaragua and the drug trade across the Papago Reservation, south of Tucson.