Missionaries' widows sue Chiquita

This week the widows of five Florida missionaries who were kidnapped and murdered by the Colombian terrorist group known as “FARC” filed a lawsuit against Chiquita Brands alleging the banana company provided guns and large quantities of cash to FARC before and during the time their husbands were abducted and murdered.
 
The first three missionaries – Mark Rich, Dave Mankins and Rick Tenenoff – were abducted on January 31, 1993 from the village of Púcuro, on the Panamanian-Colombian border. FARC struck again on January 16, 1994 when it raided a New Tribes Mission school near Villavicencio, Colombia, abducting Steve Welsh and Timothy Van Dyke, who were bound in front of their families and taken off into the jungle, according to the complaint. The families witnessed the horrendous attacks, and all five men were later discovered to have been murdered by FARC, the complaint alleges.
 
Tania Julin, the widow of Mark Rich, said, “We spent years of our lives trying to find out what happened to our husbands and trying to get them home safely, and then all these years later we found out that an American company was paying the terrorists and we knew we had to do something.”
 
In March 2007, Chiquita pled guilty to violating U.S. anti-terrorism laws by funding another Colombian terrorist organization, a violent right-wing paramilitary group named Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense of Colombia) or the “AUC.”   In the U.S. Justice Department’s Factual Proffer to the Court in conjunction with Chiquita’s plea agreement, the Justice Department stated that it could prove Chiquita made similar payments to FARC from 1989 through 1997. Both FARC and the AUC have been officially designated by the U.S. State Department as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” (“FTOs”) in accordance with section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.   Chiquita ultimately agreed to pay a $25 million fine to the U.S. Government as part of its guilty plea.
 
Gary M. Osen of Osen LLC, “In a very small way, we’re helping the families in their search for answers and hopefully shedding light on how Chiquita conducted itself in Colombia.”