Chiquita Brands was ordered Monday by a Florida jury to pay $38.3 million to the families of eight people killed by a right-wing paramilitary group in Colombia, which the banana grower had funded for years during that country’s violent civil war.
Chiquita had previously acknowledged funding the paramilitary group, pleading guilty in 2007 after the U.S. Department of Justice charged the company with providing payments to what the agency labeled a “terrorist organization.” The group, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC, received payments from Chiquita from about 1997 through 2004, which the company had described as “security payments” during the country’s internal conflict.
Nice to know that if you work for a company that can afford to pay the fine, you can literally just straight up kill people(*) and pay the money and it’s all good
(*) certain types of people at least
That’s been a thing for a while.
When the military sees a problem that can only be solved by war crimes they literally just hire contractors to do them.
But you don’t have to be the US government to hire private companies to do war crimes for you. Any citizen* can hire private military contractors to go out and do war crimes for them.
*A citizen is anyone with a net worth of greater than 500 million dollars.
Every time it caused a coup that we know about.
So… Some executives are going to jail, right? Right?
By jail do you mean getting fat bonuses?
Nobody will actually be punished and they get a tiny fine.
I’m very confused that this is happening now. I thought it happened a long time ago (them being found liable I mean). It’s crazy to me that it’s taken this long for such a pitiful punishment. It is good though that people are being reminded once again how shitty they are. Maybe we can impact their bottom line somehow (doubtful)
This is about Chiquita’s activities in the late 1990s and early 2000s, not about the 1928 coup in Honduras which was funded by Chiquita, then called United Fruit Company.
I see a hot new name drop coming in.
Un-ited Fru-eet Comp-any? Noone at Chiquita has ever heart of this thing before.
True…but that was still decades ago
You know how every once in a while there’s an article going “man, check out all this illegal fucked up shit the CIA was doing 20 years ago, sure is great they stopped and don’t do anything illegal and fucked up anymore”, and the date they stopped doing the illegal shit is always “20 years ago”, regardless of when the article is published?
Well, that.
You bring up an excellent point that I hate very much
I thought it happened a long time ago
