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.