‘Life of a Colombian’ Insulted by Chiquita’s $1,300 Payout

The families of a group of victims murdered by a Chiquita-funded paramilitary group will receive a little more than $1,000 per victim—while their lawyer stands to collect more than $4 million in fees from the settlement he inked.

Though the lawyer responsible for the deal, Paul Wolf, says he’s proud of it, the payout is low when held up against a landmark verdict that came just days earlier awarding other plaintiffs each millions of dollars.

“The life of a Colombian is not worth $1,300,” the country’s President Gustavo Petro said in Spanish on X Wednesday of the settlement, which affects the families of roughly 2,500 victims murdered by paramilitary groups funded by Chiquita during regional unrest in the 1990s and 2000s.

The deal between the fruit giant and solo practitioner Wolf represented nearly half of the plaintiffs in a sprawling case before the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The Friday settlement paying $1,300 per victim was reached after a jury’s landmark verdict in that court awarded $38.3 million to 16 of the victims’ family members on June 10.

The settlement is meant to compensate victims for the actions of Chiquita and other international corporations, which paid paramilitary groups like Self-Defense Forces of Colombia to quell unrest in produce-rich Colombia—a key zone in their global supply chains. Chiquita’s claims that these payments to the guerilla groups were made under duress were rejected by the jury.

Salvatore Mancuso (C), a demobilized boss of the paramilitaries United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, arrives to testify in Medellin on May 15, 2007. In a recent interview he said Chiquita and other banana producers “paid us one cent on the dollar for every crate that went out of the country.”

Photographer: LUIS BENAVIDES/AFP via Getty Images

The lowest jury award was $2 million in the June 10 verdict, roughly 1,538 times the amount that the lowest paid plaintiffs in the settlement would receive—and they’d have to split it between fellow family members of the dead. In contrast, Wolf stands to collect more than $4 million from the deal, whether or not most of his clients utilize the remaining $8.6 million of the settlement funds and individually accept the deal.

The terms struck a chord beyond Colombia, driving a flurry of court filings in West Palm Beach, Fla., where other plaintiffs lawyers are working to launch more trials in the sweeping multidistrict litigation and craft a global settlement over claims that Chiquita supported groups killing Colombians to maintain its banana operations. At the crux of the conflict lies an issue Senior District Judge Kenneth A. Marra must decide in the coming weeks: will there be a cap on payments to families for these murders?

“That $1,300 value is incomprehensible, especially when you look at the suffering,” Marissa Vahlsing, Director of Transnational Legal Strategy at EarthRights and one of the lawyers in the case, told Bloomberg Law. “Chiquita thought they could buy their way out of their problems in Colombia by paying off people there, and now they think they can buy themselves out of justice by paying off Paul Wolf.”

Price of Life

In court, lawyers fight endlessly over the value of a single life. From insurance company projections and actuarial life expectancy tables, to the lost wages of a victim and the pain and suffering of family members—countless briefs, motions, and hours are spent haggling over this thorny question.

Marra is stuck with a different quandary: which rules apply to that gruesome question in an international dispute using another country’s law.

Chiquita, which declined to comment, filed a brief last year arguing that Colombian law limits two types of damages—pain and suffering, as well as loss of consortium—to 72 million and 140 million Colombian pesos per victim respectively, which translates to roughly $52,000 total. The plaintiff lawyers other than Wolf responded with a brief saying the country’s highest court has decried the imposition of caps, ruling that a limit doesn’t make sense because over time any amount “loses its purchasing value and therefore makes a sum fixed in pesos derisory, by way of compensation.”

Wolf told Bloomberg Law in an email that he’s proud of the deal, and that he and his two expert witnesses came down on the side of Chiquita: that Colombian courts place caps on damages close to what families would receive in his settlement. Therefore, he needed to make a judgment call between working to get his clients something, or risking getting them little or nothing.

“The settlement was agreed with a handshake a long time ago,” he said. “I don’t believe the $2 million-plus verdicts have changed the dynamics of that.”

‘5,000 Chances to Get it Right’

The settlement places further wrinkles into efforts to ink a global deal for all of the victims’ families.

Earlier this week Chiquita scored a significant procedural victory as Marra canceled a second bellwether trial set for July, giving the produce titan an estimated two years reprieve while it appeals the verdict and other trial issues.

The terms of the deal are unlike anything Jack Scarola, one of the lead plaintiff lawyers, has ever seen, because in the document Wolf agrees that the jury verdict is likely to be reversed. Chiquita is already using the agreement as support in court.

“It’s extraordinary,” Scarola, a partner at Searcy Denney Scarola Barnhart & Shipley PA, told Bloomberg Law. “Think about what happens if a person formerly represented by Mr. Wolf says ‘I don’t want this settlement agreement,’ rejects the offer to take the case to trial. Mr. Wolf has to take the case to trial having alleged that every significant legal issued decided against Chiquita was incorrectly decided against Chiquita. How do they proceed?”

The other plaintiffs’ attorneys say they won’t let his settlement, or the any potential appeal, interfere with their ultimate goal of getting more funds for victims after more than a decade of litigation.

“The worst scenario is we go back to the drawing board for this group of plaintiffs and if there are any mistakes the appellate court finds we can do this again,” Vahlsing said, referring to conducting another trial.

“We have 5,000 chances to get this right, and we will keep fighting.”

The case is In Re: Chiquita Brands Int’l, Inc., Alien Tort Statute and S’holder Derivative Litig., S.D. Fla., No. 0:08-md-01916, settlement filed 6/21/24.