Lawsuit Alleges Chiquita contributed to Deaths

New York, NYThe relatives of missionaries killed in Columbia filed a lawsuit against Chiquita Brands International Inc., alleging that the company contributed to their deaths by financing FARC, a leftist rebel group. This lawsuit is one of the latest challenges faced by the company due to its operations in Columbia.

The lawsuit was filed Wednesday March 13, 2008 in U.S. District Court and is seeking damages that have been unspecified for the families of five missionaries based out of Sanford, Florida. The missionaries have been identified as David Mankins, Mark Rich, Stephen Welsh, Richard lee Teneoff, and Timothy Van Dyke. The group worked with New Tribes Mission and was kidnapped out of two small towns by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia or FARC in the 1990s. One city was in Columbia and the other was on the Panama border where they were doing missionary work with their families in 1993 and 1994. Once kidnapped, they were held hostage for long periods of time and would then be killed by the leftist group. It is believed that they were killed when the missionary group was not able to come up with a ransom of millions of dollars that was requested by FARC.

Chiquita, which is based in Cincinnati, Ohio and is one of the largest banana suppliers, has been accused of providing FARC with a number of hidden payments that were quite substantial. The lawsuit also accuses Chiquita of supplying them with weapons and other supplies. It is also alleged that those payments played a large role in the deaths of the missionaries because the families of the missionaries contend that the company helped support terrorism. The families feel that if the funds had not been made available to FARC, they would not have had the means to kidnap their loved ones.

Ed Loyd, a spokesman for Chiquita said that the company has suffered extortion from the right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of Columbia, or their Spanish Acronym AUC, and had also suffered extortion from FARC. He has further stated that any actions by Chiquita that provided the groups with money or supplies were to protect the lives of those employees working for the company and their families.

There have been approximately four other lawsuits filed in the United States that accuses Chiquita of playing a part in the deaths of hundreds or possibly thousands of Columbians at the hands of both AUC and FARC. One lawsuit was filed in November in New York federal court that accused Chiquita of funding right-wing death squads. The damages that they seek are in the amount of 7.86 billion. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the families of 393 victims and was just one of several of the complaints filed by Columbian victims against Chiquita just last year. The remaining cases have recently been transferred to Miami's federal court.

Previously, Chiquita has pleaded guilty to one count of having business dealings with a terrorist organization and has agreed to pay $25 million in an agreement that they met with the Justice Department. It is known that a former subsidiary for the company made payments to AUC between 1997 and 2004 in the amount of $1.7 million.

Chiquita was once known as the United Fruit Company and they have a long history in Laton America. Many have said that the company has had too much influence on the areas where it has operated. In the 1950s, Chiquita lobbied the United States government against the democratically elected president for Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. He was later overthrown in a military coup that was backed by the CIA.

By Ginger Gillenwater