Chiquita named in Colombian murder suit

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

Posted on Thu, Jun. 07, 2007

Chiquita named in Colombian murder suit

WASHINGTON -- Family members of people killed by militant
groups in Colombia sued Chiquita Brands International on
Thursday, accusing the banana company of sponsoring terrorism.

The lawsuit, filed anonymously by family members of 144 victims,
follows the company's admission in March that for years it paid
Colombian terrorists to protect its most profitable banana-growing
operation.

The lawsuit filed in a Washington federal court Thursday argues
that the defendants "knowingly engaged in an ongoing campaign of
terror" against those murdered by paramilitaries they funded.

The suit says 10 unnamed employees of Chiquita and its Colombian
subsidiary "knowingly aides and abetted the paramilitary forces"
responsible for 144 murders "by providing financial support, arms
and other substantial assistance."

-snip-


Read more: http://www.charlotte.com/463/story/151302.html

[EST]

1. This is wonderful and stunning news!

Could it possibly be that a new wave of responsibility and justice is sweeping the world?

[Kagemusha]

2. Isn't this why hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees are banned from the US?

They paid ransom for loved ones and therefore are financiers and supporters of terror.

I mean, come on. Isn't there anything more um specific against Chiquita and its people here?

[struggle4progress]

7. No, the banana companies have been arming paramilitary thugs as union-busters

Mmmm! Bloody bananas! Tasty!

... Recent scandals have proven governmental links to paramilitary violence. Eight members of Colombian President Uribe’s government – including the army chief & his domestic spy chief - have been arrested for their ties to paramilitaries. Democratic leaders in the U.S. Congress are finally beginning to question what the U.S. is funding in Colombia. Now is a key time to raise our voices!

The government is not the only one colluding with paramilitaries. Corporations – including Drummond Coal, BP Amoco, Occidental, & Nestlé – all have a history of using paramilitaries to kill union organizers & to intimidate workers to keep them from joining unions. Coca-Cola has been subject to an international boycott for its collusion with paramilitaries who have killed 8 union organizers & intimidate, threaten, and kidnap workers and their family members.

In March, banana giant Chiquita plead guilty in Washington to doing business with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia or AUC, a right-wing paramilitary organization that is responsible for some of the worst massacres in Colombia’s civil war. The State Department listed the AUC as a terrorist organization in 1997. Despite this, the top 8 Chiquita executives paid the AUC 1.7 million from 1997-2004. In addition, in 2001 Chiquita used one of their ships to deliver 3,000 AK-47 rifles & more than 2.5 million bullets for the AUC ...

http://www.colombiasolidarity.org/node/131

[Judi Lynn]

3. Chiquita's hundred year history in Colombia

08/06/2007 02:39 Bogotá
Chiquita's hundred year history in Colombia

"Chiquita's victims are living in dire poverty," said Paul Wolf, co-counsel in the case. Wolf spent the month of May speaking to victims' groups in shanty towns where families seek refuge from the death squads, which continue to murder anyone perceived as an enemy. "Reparations can't bring back the dead, but there are a lot of widows and orphans with no means of support. Most of them have fled their homes, and don't know where their next meal will come from," observed Wolf.

{Washington, D.C.}

Advocates for the families of 173 people murdered inthe banana-growing regions of Colombia filed suit today against Chiquita Brands International, in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. The families allege that Chiquita paid millions of dollars, and tried to ship thousands of machine guns to the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC. The AUC is a violent, right-wing paramilitary organization supported by the Colombian army. In 2001, the Bush Administration classified the AUC as a "Foreign Terrorist Organization." Its units are often described as "death squads."

According to family representatives, the AUC was used to assassinate their husbands, wives and children, who were apparently interfering with Chiquita's financial interests. In the last ten years, more than ten thousand people have been murdered by the AUC, many of them in the banana zones where Chiquita financed the AUC's operations.

"This is a landmark case, maybe the biggest terrorism case in history," said Terry Collingsworth, who directs the litigation. "In terms of casualties, it's the size of three World Trade Center attacks." Collingsworth is already known in Colombia for his lawsuits against Coca Cola, Drummond, and Nestle for the targeted killings of union leaders by the AUC.

The case began with an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, which filed criminal charges in March of this year. Chiquita not only admitted the truth of the charges, but agreed to cooperate in the DOJ's ongoing investigation. Although Chiquita got off with a slap on the wrist
- a $25 million dollar fine and no jail time for executives – their admissions set the stage for a multi-billion dollar lawsuit. It could be the biggest wrongful death case in U.S. history, eventually involving thousands of victims.

http://www.anncol.org/uk/site/doc.php?id=288

[EFerrari]

4. K&R

[Judi Lynn]

5. Death squad links with politics and business

Death squad links with politics and business
Colombia: the dead bear witness
Colombia has been shaken by a series of revelations that have linked leading politicians and businessmen to death squads run by the rightwing United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia. The opposition has now accused President Alvaro Uribe of contacts with the paramilitaries.

By Laurence Mazure

~snip~
In Colombia, unlike other Latin American countries, exhumations are conducted amid ongoing hostilities. Most of the gravesites with bodies awaiting identification are right in the middle of war zones. The extreme rightwing paramilitaries of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), who were demobilised under the over-lenient provisions of the “justice and peace” law of July 2005, were responsible for 70% of the mass graves. Most exhumations are a race against the clock. The bodies must be dug up quickly before the paramilitaries reopen the graves and burn the bones or throw them in a river in an attempt to escape prosecution for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Some paramilitary groups have formed spurious NGOs and unsuccessfully attempted to secure funding from foreign embassies to lend the appearance of legitimacy to their attempts to destroy evidence. That is why only Fiscalía technicians, investigators and magistrates are authorised to carry out exhumations. Human rights unit teams have often come under fire. Last year, during the exhumation of 30 victims of a massacre at Mapiripán, dismembered with chainsaws in July 1997 by paramilitaries led by Carlos Castaño, a team had to work amid exchanges of fire between paramilitaries and soldiers from the special unit charged with their protection.
(snip)

A human rights unit veteran pointed to the other end of the hamlet. “Over there, at the beginning of March 2004, there was an attack on a human rights commission. Several magistrates and prosecutors were caught in it and a policeman died. They were investigating an atrocious murder: the week before, paramilitaries had killed one of the leaders of the San José de Apartadó peace community and his family.” Silence.

“I helped retrieve body parts from the holes in the ground where they had been piled up. All I found of the wife was a fragment of her tibia. From the blood, I would say that she had been hacked to pieces with an axe while she was still alive.” Another silence.

“The worst thing is that none of our superiors are really interested in what we’re doing. Nobody talks about it. We dig up the bodies and go to the funerals – sometimes we just can’t do any more. If we do manage to carry on, it’s because we really believe in what we’re doing.”

More:
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:b9Yhj1kgSLwJ:mondediplo.com/2007/06/06colombia+Colombia+has+been+shaken+by+a+series+of+revelations+that+have+linked+leading+politicians+and+businessmen+to+death+squads+run+by+the+rightwing+United+Self-Defence+Forces+of+Colombia.+The+opposition+has+now+accused+President+Alvaro+Uribe+of+contacts+with+the+paramilitaries.&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

[Peace Patriot]

6. Finally, we get at the real culprits--the U.S.-based global corporate predators

who are BEHIND U.S. policy in Colombia and South America--the entities whose ungodly profits the Bush Junta has been protecting, with their $4 billion in military lard on the rightwing Colombian government and its death squads.

And it appears that the lawyers for the victims are pretty savvy--filing this suit as Bush's bud Uribe comes begging for more filthy lucre from OUR pockets, and more "free trade" in slave labor and environmental destruction. Uribe is much too tainted to be forgiven. In what I've read about these scandals, he has tried to distance himself from them--and may also have balked at the rightwing paramilitary plot to assassinate Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and destabilize the Andean democracies (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador)--but his military chief, his former chief of intelligence, and many Uribe office holders--have been implicated, and I don't think he deserves to survive this scandal. He put up with their horrors for a great long time. I don't know all the details of his involvement--nobody does, at this point--but I don't see how he can claim innocence. It's too like the Bushites and their mantra, in answer to every question, 'I don't know. I wasn't aware. It was not my responsibility. I can't recall."

I SUSPECT he was up to his neck in it. Colombia is a mirror image of the Bush Junta. The criminality starts at the top.

I hope this lawsuit filing is not lost on our Democratic Congress--which is deciding whether or not to go along with Bush's plan to send many more guns and bullets and helicopters and tanks to Colombia, to kill union organizers, peasants and leftists, and to rip open "free markets" for yet more economic devastation. Colombia should be required to hold a fair and open and highly monitored election, before they get another dime. Interestingly, Uribe is popular in Colombia (if we can trust any polls in such a country--which I think is quite doubtful). He might win. But a truly honest election would at least produce a decent watchdog national assembly. Also, a big chunk of any aid money should go to the courageous prosecutors and judges who are investigating the rightwing paramilitaries. They need financial as well as moral support. And any aid money should also be carefully allotted to produce real change--given to NGOs, for instance, instead of the corrupt Uribe government. The current Democratic proposal tries to scale down the military aid and increase the poverty aid, but not nearly enough. And any trade agreement MUST including significant protection for Colombian workers and the environment.

The "war on drugs" ought to be completely abandoned. It is a colossal failure--and has furthermore been used as an excuse to slaughter innocent people and take their land. Tremendous injustice has been committed in the name of the "war on drugs" (just as it has been committed in the name of the "war on terror). Congress should take its cue from countries like Bolivia and Ecuador, who are rejecting the U.S. "war on drugs" for what it is--a war on the poor--and are seeking saner and more just solutions to this problem. Use of the land is a major issue that PROPER U.S. aid and trade deals should address. The small farmers--the food growers--have been greatly harmed. The big landowners like Chiquita, and the big drug traffickers, like the rightwing paramilitaries, have been abusing both land and people, and I understand that their plan now is to convert to biofuel production, which will further destroy the land, and further impoverish the peasants and the poorest of the poor--to feed OUR insatiable desire for energy. Biofuel production--of the kind they have in mind (soy, corn--at the expense of forests)--is extremely destructive, and counter-productive. It won't even solve global warming. It is ruinous in every way. And Bush's support for it should be enough of a red flag.

I hope our Democrats come through, with some truly democratic thinking about South America. I hope the victims of the Uribe/Bush regime can get justice in our courts--and have some alleviation of their suffering. And I hope that Colombia will go the way of the rest of South America--toward leftist (majorityist) government--as it has in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. The Democratic Party needs to STOP buying into the Bush Junta's "divide and conquer" tactic in South America, recognize the democratic sea change that has occcurred, and START cooperating with REAL democracies, instead of giving more billions to the fascists in Colombia.