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Banana giant Chiquita held liable by US court for funding paramilitaries

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Re: Banana giant Chiquita held liable by US court for funding paramilitaries

#171

Post by raffraffraff »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #147
darby_nine wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a blatant abuse of the term person.

> seems like a blatant abuse of the term person Fictitious personhood is older than childhood personhood (or universal natural personhood, for that matter). To the degree we need a better term, it’s for natural persons. It’s a logical consequence of assembly, tracing back thousands of years to trade guilds and municipalities needing the ability to stand in court as a collective. Anyone who thinks we should end it sho…

Strangely enough, we've ignored that "find-and-replace across the body of law" in the past. Even the new gender laws ignore existing laws. I sometimes wish that we had written a compiler for law. And a statically typed language designed for compiling policy (think Rego + Rust). Politicians and Law makers would have to test their new proposals in code before wasting anyone else's time on it. Lawyers would have to learn the language and compiler tools as part of their study, but anyone in the country would have access to them so that they could run their own tests and even settle minor legal disputes without having to pay lawyers. New laws that cause compiler errors don't get through, unless you can first unblock them with a refactor (which must also compile without errors). I think it's obvious that an attempt to encode the current statue book would fail miserably. You might have to start off an extremely simplistic set of rules (kinda like RocoCop's prime directives or Moses' 10 commandments) because I think we can all generally agree that killing is wrong generally. Ok, add a law "thou shake not kill". Oh, but what if someone's trying to kill you or your child? "Killing is wrong unless X is true". At the very least it would be an interesting exercise.

Re: Banana giant Chiquita held liable by US court for funding paramilitaries

#172

Post by AngryData »

xvector wrote: post #125

It is clear that most HNers aren't reading the article. This has nothing to do with the UFC's "banana republic" atrocities, and seems to be a rather unjust situation: - Chiquita was forced to pay "protection money" to the AUC. Read: "pay us or we kill your employees and burn your plantations to the ground." - Chiquita makes the payment and alerts the Department of Justice that they were forced to pay under duress. -…

I read the article, and the fact that they continued sending payments even after that group was designated a terrorist organization by the US government seems pretty egregious to me, and gives me very little faith into their claim that they were forced into payment, rather than wanting to pay and fund them to combat Chiquita's political opposition. With their company's history they should be hyper-aware about what they are doing when they give money to paramilitary groups that run large drug trafficking operations.

Re: Banana giant Chiquita held liable by US court for funding paramilitaries

#174

Post by throwAGIway »

saghm wrote: post #163
rayiner wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because of this, it is in the sights of the conservative legal movement I suspect the problem is more that the statute gives U.S. courts jurisdiction over conduct that happens in foreign countries, and applies incomprehensibly vague standards such as “the law of nations.” It’s a statute that made sense in 1789 when it was enacted by a bunch of people that thought God made universal law applicable to the whole world…

> It’s a statute that made sense in 1789 when it was enacted by a bunch of people that thought God made universal law applicable to the whole world. Yet the same people who are likely to be responsible if this law does get thrown out are totally fine with plenty of other laws that make a lot less sense today than in 1789. Let's not pretend that the same court who ruled that all firearm regulations need to be interpre…

Spirit of the law should still apply even if it's an old law. You should change the law if you want a different outcome. Things get very arbitrary when judges can decide a law is too old to apply - that's how communists did their revolutionary courts in many European countries.

Re: Banana giant Chiquita held liable by US court for funding paramilitaries

#175

Post by xvector »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #138
xvector wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, punishing someone because they were extorted under threat to life and property makes no sense. If someone threatens to kill your employees and burn everything you own to the ground - and you know they will - you're gonna pay them. The government of Columbia should be held to account for allowing this evil to run rampant, not the victims of these cartels.

> If someone threatens to kill your employees and burn everything you own to the ground - and you know they will - you're gonna pay them No, you withdraw from the country. Maybe you bring in a hostage negotiator to exfiltrate your staff. But paying the bribe and then continuing to do business with a foreign terrorist organisation is not grey area stuff.

> No, you withdraw from the country.

And you watch your employees die? Great, you've saved your business and yourself from legal ramifications, and the people you worked for are dead, and your business is in ashes.

Chiquita did actually end up withdrawing from Columbia shortly after this.

> Maybe you bring in a hostage negotiator to exfiltrate your staff.

This is not how the real world works. If you try this stuff with the AUC in Columbia, they will torture and kill your people for fun, and post it on LiveLeak laughing about it.

Re: Banana giant Chiquita held liable by US court for funding paramilitaries

#176

Post by xvector »

AngryData wrote: post #172
xvector wrote: post #125

It is clear that most HNers aren't reading the article. This has nothing to do with the UFC's "banana republic" atrocities, and seems to be a rather unjust situation: - Chiquita was forced to pay "protection money" to the AUC. Read: "pay us or we kill your employees and burn your plantations to the ground." - Chiquita makes the payment and alerts the Department of Justice that they were forced to pay under duress. -…

I read the article, and the fact that they continued sending payments even after that group was designated a terrorist organization by the US government seems pretty egregious to me, and gives me very little faith into their claim that they were forced into payment, rather than wanting to pay and fund them to combat Chiquita's political opposition. With their company's history they should be hyper-aware about what th…

The DoJ actually acknowledges the payments were made under duress, but it is still technically a violation. The AUC absolutely threatened to kill their employees.

Re: Banana giant Chiquita held liable by US court for funding paramilitaries

#177

Post by pyrale »

dmix wrote: post #95
advisedwang wrote: post #45

The Alien Tort Statue [1], the reason this case [2] is in the US at all has sometimes been used for significant environmental and social justice global legal activism. Because of this, it is in the sights of the conservative legal movement. Sadly I suspect this case may end up at the supreme court and end up another victim of the removal of redress for the evil of the powerful. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/ali…

So basically every corporation operating in the US has to follow US law at all times, regardless of the economic/legal circumstances in other countries? I can see why that is controversial and almost certainly will be extremely selectively enforced.

Non-US corporations are held to the same standard. US court making frivolous jurisdiction claims is nothing new.

Re: Banana giant Chiquita held liable by US court for funding paramilitaries

#178

Post by coldtea »

dmix wrote: post #141
WesternWind wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the US government has a legitimate interest in making sure US corporations don't pay paramilitary death squads for drug traffickers, especially ones that the US had designated as terrorist organizations at the time. I don't think it's really that controversial to prevent US companies from doing this. But to be clear they had already pled guilty to doing that crime in 2007 (and they also prosecuted the AUC…

Yes I'm aware of the details > But to be clear they had already pled guilty to doing that crime in 2007 (and they also prosecuted the AUC, many AUC leaders were extradited to the US in 2008). That's exactly what I mean for extremely selective enforcement Say some hypothetically medium/small US business with some operations in Mexico has their employees stalked/intimidated and their equipment gets burned down and peop…

>So they pay money to some local cartel to make them go away

Traditionally it's more like "they pay money to some local armed group to get rid of union activists and unruly workers asking for more rights and better conditions and salaries".

Re: Banana giant Chiquita held liable by US court for funding paramilitaries

#179

Post by leetcrew »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #136
leetcrew wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

idk, I see it the other way around actually. if you kill someone in another country, that's still bad, but it's not clear why the US government should be the entity that holds you accountable for it. seems more appropriate to turn you over to that country's government upon request. whereas if you bribe public officials in other countries as normal business practice, that might give you an advantage over other compani…

Why stop there and not take it to the next step? Surely company A killing whistleblowers or rabble rousers overseas lets it outperform company B that isn’t doin that state-side? Doesn’t that encourage company B to do the same on red, white, and blue soil?

are A and B both operating in the US in your example? if yes, then USG has a legitimate interest in removing that perverse incentive. if not, then the US criminal justice system seems like the wrong place to solve the problem.

my point is that the jurisdiction of the US criminal justice system should be limited to the US. if people do things in another country that demonstrably harm US residents, that's fair game. otherwise, it seems like an overreach for the US to enforce laws that might not even exist in other countries. just my opinion, you don't have to agree.

Re: Banana giant Chiquita held liable by US court for funding paramilitaries

#180

Post by stavros »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #108
stavros wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell kind of corporate exec goes "well, I guess I have to get them murdered, there's shareholder value to protect"?

Are you aware of the history of labor organizing in the states...? Not meant as an attack, I'm genuinely wondering. Strike breakers routinely killed people, destroyed property, cars would have sticks of dynamite chucked into them, and famously the coal miners blew up a fucking bridge. I think people tend to think that modern politics is how all politics was done and... nah. Before we had more robust judicial, communi…

> Are you aware of the history of labor organizing in the states...?

No, I'm not. It sounds like a very interesting read, though. I don't think those things tended to happen over here, beyond mafia-style illegal dealings.

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