A South Florida jury has found Chiquita Brands responsible for eight murders committed by a right-wing paramilitary group the company helped fund in a fertile banana-growing region of Colombia during the country’s decade-long internal conflict.
A court on Monday ordered the multinational banana producer to pay $38.3 million to 16 family members of farmers and other civilians killed in separate incidents by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia — a right-wing paramilitary group that Chiquita funded from 1997 to 2004. .
The company has faced hundreds of similar lawsuits in US courts filed by families of other victims of violence by the paramilitary group in Colombia, but the Florida verdict represents the first time Chiquita has been found guilty.
The ruling, which the company said it planned to appeal, could affect the outcome of other lawsuits, legal experts said.
The verdict in favor of the victims is a rare instance — in Colombia and elsewhere — of a private company being held accountable to victims for operating in areas of widespread violence or social unrest, legal experts said.
“We’re very happy with the jury’s verdict, but you can’t get away from the fact that we’re talking about horrific abuses,” said Marco Simons, a lawyer for EarthRights International, an environmental and human rights group, who represented a family in the legal requirement.
Agnieszka Fryszman, another lawyer who represented the plaintiffs, said: “The verdict does not bring back the husbands and sons who were killed, but sets the record straight and places the responsibility for terrorist financing where it belongs: at Chiquita’s doorstep.”
Jurors reached their decision after two days of deliberations and six weeks of trial in US District Court in West Palm Beach, in which lawyers argued over the motivation for payments Chiquita executives admitted to making to the paramilitary group.
The State Department designated the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known as the AUC, as a foreign terrorist organization in 2001.
Chiquita, as part of a deal with the Justice Department to settle charges of dealing with a terrorist group, admitted in 2007 to paying paramilitaries $1.7 million, an investigation revealed.
The United Self-Defense Forces were a product of Colombia’s brutal civil war, which erupted in the 1960s and killed at least 220,000 people.
They were formed in 1997 as a coalition of heavily armed far-right groups that drug traffickers and businessmen turned to for protection from left-wing guerrilla groups.
The war ended in 2016 when the government and the main left-wing group, which was also responsible for killing civilians, signed a peace deal.
Attorneys representing the families in the South Florida lawsuit argued that Chiquita’s operations benefited from the company’s relationship with the paramilitary group, which sowed fear in a fertile 7,000-square-mile rural region that connected Panama and Colombia until disbanded in 2006.
They said the group killed or evicted farmers, allowing Chiquita to buy land at low prices and expand its operations by turning plantain farms into more profitable banana farms.
Lawyers representing Chiquita disputed whether the victims had been killed by paramilitaries or other armed groups and said company employees had also been threatened by the paramilitaries. Executives and employees, defense attorneys said, were blackmailed by the self-defense forces and made payments to ensure their safety.
“The situation in Colombia has been tragic for so many,” Chiquita officials said in a statement. “However, this does not change our belief that there is no legal basis for these allegations.”
Attorneys representing the families declined to provide many details about their clients’ stories outside court, citing concerns for their safety. But Mr. Simons of EarthRights International cited other cases filed in US courts against Chiquita, which he said showed similar patterns of violence, including killing family members in front of relatives.
In one case, an unidentified girl was traveling to a farm in a taxi with her mother and stepfather when they were stopped by armed men, he said. The men executed the stepfather and then fatally shot the mother as she tried to flee. They then gave the girl the equivalent of 65 minutes to take the bus back into town.
Chiquita, which was formerly known as the United Fruit Company, is also a defendant in a lawsuit filed in Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, alleging that payments Chiquita made to the United Self-Defense Forces amounted to involvement in criminal activity .
“The Chiquita name resonates in the country’s recent history,” said Sebastián Escobar Uribe, one of the lawyers in the Medellín suit. “When you’re investigating a company with significant financial power in a country like Colombia, the judicial system is vulnerable to being co-opted by that company.”
In the United States, it is unusual for a company to be held financially responsible for human rights abuses across the country’s borders, said James Anaya, who teaches international human rights at the University of Colorado School of Law.
The lawsuit that resulted in the South Florida verdict had been winding its way through the court system since it was filed in 2007 and withstood several legal challenges to reach trial.
“It’s not impossible for these cases to happen,” Mr. Anaya said. “There is definitely a way for them.”
But he added: “It’s not common. Everything has to fall into place.”
Human rights advocates in Colombia praised the jury’s verdict.
Gerardo Vega, former director of Colombia’s National Land Service, which is responsible for returning land to forcibly displaced people, said in a video statement that the decision was a vindication of the fight against impunity in the United States.
“The Colombian justice system should also act,” Mr. Vega said. “We need Colombian judges to convict businessmen who, like Chiquita, paid” paramilitary groups.
Raquel Sena, the widow of a farmer who was killed in the banana-producing area, told a Colombian radio station that the United Self-Defense Forces killed him after he refused to sell them his plot of land.
“I’m never going to get over his death,” she said in a video posted on X. “We want Chiquita Brands to recognize us because they’re the ones who paid for people to be killed here.”
