♠ Posted by Emmanuel in Latin America
at 5/27/2007 01:02:00 AM
The longstanding controversy over Central American workers who claim to have been affected by the use of the pesticide DBCP is coming to the United States. The companies involved have settled some cases abroad, although this is the first time the matter is being contested Stateside. One of the accusations is that the chemical has resulted in male impotence among field workers. From the LA Times:After years of toil in Central American fields where they say pesticide use made them sterile, they're suing Dow, Dole and other firms in L.A. — The people crammed into the stifling basketball gym. They filled the court, lined the walls and tumbled beyond the doors onto the sun-blistered streets.
They had gathered to hear a promise of justice.
Many had spent their lives toiling on banana plantations that U.S. companies operated in this region some 30 years ago. By day, the workers had harvested bunches of fruit to ship to North American tables. At night, some had sprayed pesticide into the warm, humid air to protect the trees from insects and rot.
As the decades passed, the workers came to believe that the pesticide, called DBCP, had cost them their health. Prodded by U.S. lawyers, thousands joined lawsuits in the U.S. and Nicaragua alleging that the pesticide made them sterile.
The U.S. firms that sold and used the pesticide have never faced a U.S. jury trial over its use abroad. Last month, a Los Angeles attorney named Juan J. Dominguez stood before a sea of nearly 800 dark, hard faces and predicted that the day of reckoning was at hand.
"We are fighting multinational corporations. They are giants. And they are going to fall!" Dominguez thundered.
The crowd exploded. They leapt to their feet, waved their hats, shook fists in the air. "Viva! Viva!" they chanted.
The scene last month foreshadowed a legal drama set to play out in a Los Angeles courtroom this summer, when a lawsuit filed by Dominguez and his partners could end a struggle that has sprawled across three decades and courtrooms on four continents.
For the first time, a U.S. jury will have the chance to weigh the accusation that Dole Food Co. knowingly used a pesticide manufactured by Dow Chemical Co. that sterilized workers in Latin America three decades ago.
The complexity, history and geographic spread of the case demonstrate how legal systems have failed to keep pace with the rapid movement of goods across international borders. Jurisdictional and procedural issues have repeatedly impeded attempts to sue U.S. companies in the United States. for alleged wrongdoing in other countries.
"The question is where do we litigate these issues," said Alejandro Garro, a Columbia University law professor and expert in international law. "The answer is that we don't have a global law. We are building it on a case-by-case basis."
Dole, the Westlake Village-based food giant, and Dow, of Midland, Mich., deny the allegations. Both companies acknowledge that the pesticide DBCP has been linked to sterility in men exposed to it while manufacturing it in factories. And both companies acknowledge that the product was used in Nicaragua's banana fields.
But the companies contend that there is no proof that DBCP (dibromochloropropane) sterilized any field worker. The quantities of DBCP used were too small, and the open-air conditions too diffuse, to cause harm, the companies say...
DBCP's toxicity first made news in 1977, when about three dozen factory workers at an Occidental Petroleum Corp. subsidiary in Lathrop, Calif., where pesticides were mixed, reported problems having children. Tests showed the factory workers had zero or below-normal sperm counts.
Within months, the EPA had suspended most uses of DBCP. Government hearings revealed that Dow and Shell Chemical Co., then a subsidiary of Shell Oil Co., the primary makers of DBCP, had long known about its dangers. Tests dating to the 1950s showed the chemical atrophied lab animals' testes.
Workers began filing lawsuits. In 1983, Duane Miller, a young Sacramento attorney, won a $4.9-million judgment against Dow on behalf of six Occidental workers. Two years later, the EPA permanently banned the use of DBCP in the United States.
It was the first skirmish in a legal war that soon spanned the globe.
U.S. law firms began suing in U.S. courts on behalf of workers in other countries — more than 50,000 plantation workers over 30 years in countries from the Philippines to Nicaragua to Costa Rica to Ivory Coast. The defendants have been the manufacturers of DBCP — Dow and Shell — and the fruit companies that used it: Dole, Del Monte and Chiquita.
