......... on who's defining terror. Corporate America's history has a lot in
common with Osama as it turns out.
Chiquita, formerly United Fruit Company, can't seem to break it's old
corporate, fascist ways. Odd isn't it? new name, same old techniques.
What's interesting in this article is how they've managed to diversify into
the wider commodities markets. Not entirely surprising...................
I've often wondered where this private corporately contracted army thing
might wind up.
Chiquita's Slipping Appeal
By Amy Goodman
What do Osama bin Laden and Chiquita bananas have in common? Both have used
their millions to finance terrorism.
The Justice Department has just fined Chiquita Brands International $25
million for funding a terrorist organization ... for years. Chiquita must
also cooperate fully with ongoing investigations into its payments to the
ultra-right-wing Colombian paramilitary group Autodefensas Unidas de
Colombia. Chiquita made almost monthly payments to the AUC from 1997 to
2004, totaling at least $1.7 million.
The AUC is a brutal paramilitary umbrella group, with an estimated 15,000 to
20,000 armed troops. It was named a terrorist organization by the United
States on Sept. 10, 2001. Among its standard tactics are kidnapping,
torture, disappearance, rape, murder, beatings, extortion and drug
trafficking.
Chiquita claims it had to make the payments under threat from the AUC in
order to protect its employees and property. Chiquita's outside lawyers
implored them to stop the illegal payments, to no avail. The payments were
made by check through Chiquita's Colombian subsidiary, Banadex. When
Chiquita executives figured out how illegal the payments were, they started
delivering them in cash. Chiquita sold Banadex in June 2004 when the heat
got too intense.
While the AUC was collecting U.S. dinero from Chiquita, it was butchering
thousands of innocent people in rural Colombia. Chengue (pronounced
CHEN-gay) was a small farming village in the state of Sucre. About 80 AUC
paramilitary members went into the town in the early hours of Jan. 17, 2001.
They rounded up the men and smashed their skulls with stones and a
sledgehammer, killing 24 of them. One 19-year-old perpetrator confessed,
naming the organizers of the mass murder, including police and navy
officials. To date, he is the only one who has been punished. This is just
one of hundreds of massacres carried out by AUC.
Chiquita has had a long history of criminal behavior. It was the subject of
an extraordinary exposé in its hometown paper, The Cincinnati Enquirer, in
1998. The paper found that Chiquita exposed entire communities to dangerous
U.S.-banned pesticides, forced the eviction of an entire Honduran village at
gunpoint and its subsequent bulldozing, suppressed unions, unwittingly
allowed the use of Chiquita transport ships to move cocaine internationally,
and paid a fortune to U.S. politicians to influence trade policy. The lead
reporter, Mike Gallagher, illegally accessed more than 2,000 Chiquita voice
mails. The voice mails backed up his story, but his methods got him fired.
The Enquirer issued a front-page apology and paid Chiquita a reported $14
million. The voice-mail scandal rocked the Enquirer, burying the important
exposé.
Chiquita was formerly called the United Fruit Co., which with the help of
its former lawyer, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and his brother
Allen Dulles' Central Intelligence Agency overthrew the democratically
elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, in 1954. And you can
go back further. Colombian Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez wrote in
his classic "One Hundred Years of Solitude" about the 1928 Santa Marta
massacre of striking United Fruit banana workers: "When the banana company
arrived ... the old policemen were replaced by hired assassins."
While the U.S. is seeking extradition of Colombia-based Chiquita executives,
the administration of President Alvaro Uribe in Colombia, with its own
officials now linked to the right-wing paramilitaries, has countered that
Colombia would seek the extradition of U.S.-based Chiquita executives.
Colombian prosecutors are also seeking information in Chiquita's role in
smuggling 3,000 AK-47 rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition to
paramilitaries in November 2001.
A $25-million fine to a multibillion-dollar corporation like Chiquita is a
mere slap on the wrist, the cost of doing business. Presidents like George
W. Bush and Uribe, businessmen first, while squabbling over extraditions,
would never lose track of their overarching shared goal of a stridently
pro-corporate, military-supported so-called free-trade regime. As long as
that remains the same, union organizers and hard-working farmers, like the
men of Chengue, will continue to be killed on behalf of Chiquita or some
other multinational company.
That next organic, fair-trade banana you buy just might save a life.
Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio
news hour airing on 500 stations in North America.
http://democracynow.org/
© 2007 Amy Goodman; distributed by King Features Syndicate
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