Amazon.com Free delivery, $24 for 3 pounds; price may go up.
by Mary W Maxwell, LLB
A major injustice of the past — the strong versus the weak, the rich versus poor — has just been sorted out by a jury, in the Chiquita Banana lawsuit. This is truly a new phenomenon. The only similar case I can think of was Britain’s settling a lawsuit, in 2013, by some Kenyan men whom it admittedly mistreated in 1953. (They were part of the Mau Mau resistance). In this new case, we have United Fruit Company being held liable, in 2024, for the torture and/or murder of labor leaders in Latin America, particularly in Colombia, in the 1990s.
Before reporting on that, I want to explain the title of this article — Nothing Succeeds Like Success. I mean we should do more to celebrate, and “precedent-ize,” such court victories. They shouldn’t be viewed as pertinent only to the plaintiffs, or limited to the particulars. Rather, they are stunning events in the history of justice. The bad guys were in the dock and they couldn’t squirm out of it.
Typically, the powerful squirm out of lawsuits by paying a private settlement, or by getting the judge to dismiss the case. In the Mau Mau case, an English judge, Sir Richard McCombe (born 1952) could have catered to the defendants’ plea that the matter was too old to adjudicate, but he insisted on doing the right thing.
In the Chiquita banana case, announced this week, everyone would have thought “No way can the plaintiffs win; the Big, Fat Exporters are just too big and fat.” (I’d have said so myself.) But the plaintiffs won.
How is it that the memory of victories fades away? It must be that we don’t have a good system for “solidifying” these happy memories of justice. Of course, it’s also that the powerful control the media and the media is just as equipped to “block” as it is to “flood.”
(Let me give a homely example, a tiny example, of media-blockage. In 2020, I was a candidate on the ballot in New Hampshire’s Republican presidential primary. Trump won, Gov Weld Came second, I came third. Another 7 wannabees followed. This was announced on the night, by New York Times, Wikipedia, etc. But later, Wikipedia dropped me off the page. There is no “Mary Maxwell” listed today as a runner in the 2020 race. The guy who came fourth is shown as third (Joe Walsh). Does it matter? Yes, because I write dissident books. In them, I mention my little 2020 victory. The book reader probably looks me up on Wiki, and sees that I am “lying” about my success. Oh dear.)
The slogan “Nothing succeeds like success” should probably be modified to “A significant win can lead exponentially to many more wins, provided there is a way to communicate the win.”
Bananas
Here, briefly, is the Chiquita case. There is a rough-gang type of organization called the AUC, Spanish for “United Self-Defense forces of Colombia.” According to the BBC:
“The paramilitary group more often acted as a death squad for drug traffickers. At its height, it had an estimated 30,000 members who engaged in intimidation, drug trafficking, extortion, forced displacement and killings. It also launched brutal attacks on villagers they suspected of supporting left-wing rebels.”
The recent judgment is from a federal district court in Miami, and may not prevail against appeal, but we can nevertheless view it as a landmark ruling. The civil case was brought by families whose loved one was killed by the AUC. I suppose those families could have tried to sue the AUC in a Colombian court. But instead they have sued “the banana giant,” Chiquita, claiming that that company paid the AUC to do this violent work, and therefore can be held liable. (I don’t mean liable for the crime of murder, just civilly liable for damages.)
It is difficult to get such a case going, but it sems that, back in 2007, Chiquita was prosecuted by the US government, for the crime of giving money to a terrorist organization. The big banana company, whose business base is in Florida, admitted that it had made some payment to the AUC, alleging it was “protection money.” They pled guilty 17 years ago! So there you have it — Chiquita made that confession in the 2007 case, and paid a fine of $25 million to the US for the crime of dealing with a US-listed terrorist organization. But oh, what a tangled web they weaved!
I won’t go further into that case as I lack sufficient background. But I hold to my statement that nothing succeeds like success, and so if you want this sort of justice to succeed, you have to keep talking about it. No doubt millions of South Americans have suffered at the hands of United Fruit. I think the 1954 coup in Guatemala is an example of that, and that President Eisenhower abetted it.
Castration, Anyone?
My coverage of the Mau Mau case here will also be brief. Britain had many colonies in Africa up until the 1950s. Did they treat people well or horribly? Apparently, you don’t need to guess. They kept records of the efforts to squelch popular movements violently.
Those records were discovered more or less accidentally, thanks to the fact that a history student at Harvard — Caroline Elkins — a summa cum laude grad of Princeton, got interested in oppression in Africa. In 2007 she published Imperial Reckoning (a whistleblower-type item, which did not prevent her getting tenure as a Harvard professor in 2009. Oh for those halcyon days!).
From reading her book, some survivors of the 1953 Mau Mau uprising in Kenya were able to track down proof of what had happened to them. One of the plaintiffs could show personal evidence that he had been castrated with pliers. I don’t know if that was also corroborated by the trove of documents found at Hanslope Park, UK. However, by the time the plaintiffs sued the British government, several academic historians had examined this huge collection of files. Professor Caroline Elkins notes that many more such files were destroyed after the word got out.
I am not sure why those files have not resulted in many more ex-colonials coming to court. In the 2013 case, millions of pounds were paid to the families, and the government issued an apology. There are umpteen technical, and diplomatic means of preventing civil cases from getting heard. And as for prosecutions, well,…dream on!
Dream On
Actually, “dreaming on” is what I am arguing for. Just this month there is a call for public submissions to the Australian Parliament on a bill, proposed by Senator Lidia Thorpe, to criminalize genocide. Although Australia signed the international Genocide Convention in 1948, on the very day it was offered, there is no corresponding domestic legislation. If enacted now, such a law would cover only future crimes of genocide, not the past persecution of Aboriginals.
So do I think it will result in a win for a future case, let’s say a 2025 prosecution? No. A statute is not the same as a jury verdict. In order for a jury to come into existence, someone — e.g., the attorney general — has to start a prosecution, has to “bring charges,” as it were. Therein lies the Catch-22: governments do not want to prosecute themselves.
I hear you say “Elementary, my dear Watson.” True, it’s about as elementary as you can get. Something should be done about it. As recently stated in my article about 9-11, the US Attorney for New York’s Southern District has even got away — judicially — with refusing to pass vital information to a grand jury. The Lawyers’ Committee or 9-11 Inquiry met a brick wall — an unconstitutional brick wall — when that US Attorney said, and an appeals court agreed, that he did not have to relay allegations of crimes inside the Twin Towers to a jury foreman. Outrageous!
Article Omnia praesumuntur,
I suggested that we apply the law maxim Omnia praesumuntur, contra spoliatorem — “Against the suppressor of evidence the crime, guilt can be presumed.” And how about that famous maxim “Nemo judex in causa sua”? No man can be the judge in a case in which he has an interest.
Hey Mister Tallyman, Tally Me Banana
What is law? French thinker Claude-Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) said “Law is justice.” I agree. The purpose of any society making laws for itself is to have a way of sorting out the injustices which arise all the time. People take advantage. Or, as Thucydides put it: “The strong exact what they can and the weak grant what they must.”
Everybody knows Harry Belafonte’s song about the banana laborers. Everybody knows the system was brutal. Everybody knows somebody should have done something about it. (Even if it made bananas more expensive). Everybody knows Americans should not have abetted the 1954 Guatemala coup. Everybody knows we shouldn’t have conducted syphilis experiments in Guatemala (Bill Clinton apologized for it, as president).
Everybody knows all that stuff.
So now we have a jury verdict. What to do?
Talk about it.
The post Nothing Succeeds Like Success: The Chiquita Banana Verdict? appeared first on Gumshoe News.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Dee McLachlan
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://gumshoenews.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.