BOGOTA (Reuters) – Chiquita Brands International must pay $38.3 million in damages to the families of eight Colombian men killed in that country by a paramilitary group, a jury in Florida said on Monday.
Chiquita was ordered by a US court in 2007 to pay a $25 million fine to settle criminal charges of doing business with the paramilitary group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).
Chiquita pleaded guilty in that case to paying protection money between 2001 and 2004, which it said it did to protect employees.
The jury in the civil case in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, said in its verdict Monday that Chiquita knowingly provided substantial support to the AUC in the form of cash payments or other forms of support, to an extent that sufficient to create a foreseeable situation. risk of damage.
The men were killed by the AUC, the jury said, and Chiquita has not proven that its support of the AUC was due to threatened harm to the company or its employees.
“The verdict does not bring back the husbands and sons who were murdered, but sets the record straight and places responsibility for the financing of terrorism where it belongs: on Chiquita,” said Agnieszka Fryszman, a lawyer at law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll. , who represented the plantiffs, said in a statement.
Chiquita did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb; Editing by Stephen Coates)
