Six years ago, three union leaders were kidnapped and slain in northern Colombia. Now, 2,000 miles away, a federal jury here is being asked to decide whether an Alabama-based coal company, Drummond Ltd., aided in the killings and took sides in Colombia?s decades-old civil war. The civil case promises to test a new use of a 218-year-old law and to open a window into corporate endeavors in a developing country where factional violence has often supplanted the rule of law. Lawyers from the United Steelworkers Union and the International Labor Rights Fund are suing Drummond on behalf of the families of three Colombian union leaders who were killed by a right-wing paramilitary group in 2001.
See "Suit in U.S. Over Murders in Colombia", Kyle Whitmore, The New York Times, July 12, 2007