Chiquita Brands International admits that it funded Columbian terrorists in protection racket
According to MSNBC, Chiquita Brands International will admit in a plea deal announced today that it paid millions of dollars in protection money from 1997 to 2004 to the Columbia-terrorist organization, "United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known as AUC for its Spanish initials."
The AUC has been responsible for some of the worst massacres in Colombia’s civil conflict and for a sizable percentage of the country’s cocaine exports. The right-wing group was designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization in September 2001.
Prosecutors said the company made the payments in exchange for protection for its workers. The company also made similar payments to the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, according to prosecutors.
Colombia’s banana-growing region is a zone over which leftist rebels and far-right paramilitaries have fought viciously. Most companies have extensive security operations to protect employees in the area.
“The information filed today is part of a plea agreement, which we view as a reasoned solution to the dilemma the company faced several years ago,” Chiquita’s chief executive, Fernando Aguirre, said in a statement. “The payments made by the company were always motivated by our good faith concern for the safety of our employees.”
Colombia has one of the highest kidnappings rates in the world. Arrangements between companies and either guerrillas or paramilitaries are not uncommon but it is impossible to know how much money is paid each year.
Chiquita sold its Colombian banana operations in June 2004.
Details of the settlement were not included in court documents but Aguirre said Chiquita would pay $25 million in fines, which it set aside this year. The company reported the deal to the Securities and Exchange Commission. A plea hearing was scheduled for Monday.
The payments were approved by senior executives at Chiquita, prosecutors wrote in court documents. Prosecutors said Chiquita began paying the right-wing AUC after a meeting in 1997 and disguised the payments in company books.
“No later than in or about September 2000, defendant Chiquita’s senior executives knew that the corporation was paying AUC and that the AUC was a violent paramilitary organization,” prosecutors wrote in Wednesday’s court filing.
Company attorneys made it clear the payments were improper, prosecutors said.
“Bottom line: CANNOT MAKE THE PAYMENT,” the company’s outside counsel advised in February 2003, according to an excerpt of a memo included in court documents.
In April 2003, company officials and lawyers approached the Justice Department and told prosecutors they had been making the payments. According to court documents, the payments continued for months.
Today's news recalls a controversial series of investigative articles in 1998 that were published in the Cincinnati Enquirer, only to be retracted when one of the reporters admitted that it had obtained some of the information for the story by illegally "hacking" into the company's voice mail system. That series of stories (which, in fact, were published the same day in order to get them all published before the company could get an injunction to stop their publication) alleged "that Chiquita bribed foreign officials, used dangerous pesticides that threatened workers and local residents in Central America, and is callous and insensitive to its workers. It also accused Chiquita of lax security in preventing its fruit-transport ships from ferrying cocaine to the United States and said the company set up a complicated ownership structure that ultimately allowed Chiquita to control banana plantations in host countries that don't allow or sharply limit foreign ownership." (Source: American Journalism Review, "Bitter Fruit" (Sept. 1998))
All this raises the spectre that the Cincinnati Enquirer series did, in fact, get the story right even if they obtained their information wrongfully. In fact, it suggests that the series, which has long been disclaimed by the paper in a settlement it reached with the company at the time for over $10 million, understated the company's activities by missing that not only were they allegedly bribing government officials, but were, in fact, funding paramilitary terrorist organizations in protection money. In fact the Cincinnati Enquirer piece reportedly triggered a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation which may explain why the MSNBC piece from today stated the company would be reporting the deal to the SEC.
And will Ohio House Republicans Josh Mandel and Shannon Jones amend their legislation to ban Ohio from investing in to any of mega-bipartisan political patron Carl Lindner's companies who have admitted that they are "willing to do business with terrorists?"
"rather than criticizing the paramilitarization of Colombian politics, the Bush administration has requested $586 million in aid for next year, more than 75 percent of it earmarked for Colombia’s state security forces."
March 5, 2007
Bush Continues to Support Colombia’s Para-State
by Garry Leech
As the Colombian government becomes increasingly engulfed by the rapidly evolving "para-politics" scandal, the Bush administration refuses to question the legitimacy of democracy in Colombia. The US government continues to stand firmly behind Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, Washington’s closest ally in Latin America, despite the fact that dozens of pro-Uribe legislators, the president’s former campaign advisor and head of Colombia’s secret police, the family of his foreign minister, and several top military officials have all been implicated in the scandal linking government representatives to right-wing paramilitary death squads.... http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia252.htmDesignation of the AUC As a Foreign Terrorist Organization
Secretary Colin L. Powell
Washington, DC
September 10, 2001
http://www.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2001/4852.htm
"I have decided to designate the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, commonly known as the AUC, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization under U.S. law. This designation, published today in the Federal Register, makes it illegal for persons in the United States or subject to U.S. jurisdiction to provide material support to the AUC..."
I see little wrong with what Chiquita did. In fact there are many more American Corporations that do the same and much more.
It's a global market, our leader says over and over. How else will you protect your investment in these fragile countries. Maybe hire Blackwater or private contractors as we like to call them.
This is a Neocon problem and we should allow them to do what ever they wish to do.
"...Questions have also been raised about the Bush administration’s role in the company’s payments to the AUC. Court documents revealed that Chiquita told the US Justice Department about the payments in 2003 and then continued to fund the paramilitary group for another ten months with the full knowledge of the Bush administration. Colombian Senator Jorge Robledo of the opposition Polo Democratico has asked, “How much more does the US government know about payments to the paramilitaries?” ...
"Indeed, this case appears to set a legal precedent for other US corporations and their executives that are funding, or that decide in the future to fund, terrorist groups. If corporate executives determine that the profits earned sufficiently exceed the likely fine, then it makes good business sense to fund terrorism. In Chiquita’s case, the $25 million fine amounts to a relatively small portion of the more than $200 million in profits that the company has earned since the AUC was designated a terrorist organization in 2001. Chiquita’s fine also amounts to less than half of the $51.5 million that the company pocketed from the 2004 sale of its Colombian subsidiary, Banadex...."
http://www.colombiajournal.org/
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Transnational_corps/BananasBullets_Chiquita.html
(the original 1998 Enquirer article)
~~~ What does it say about the American press or the condition of First Amendment law at the turn of the century that the Gannett Co. has paid Chiquita Brands more than $10 million and “renounced” a lengthy investigative report, substantial parts of which may have been true?
http://www.asne.org/index.cfm?ID=1947
March 19, 2007
Slap on the Wrist for Corporate Sponsors of Terrorism
by Garry Leech
Less than two weeks after 9/11, President George W. Bush and Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill held a joint press conference to announce that the war on terror would not only target terrorist groups, but also those who fund terrorism. Bush declared, “If you do business with terrorists, if you support or sponsor them, you will not do business with the United States of America.” O’Neill followed Bush to the podium and announced, “We will succeed in starving the terrorists of funding and shutting down the institutions that support or facilitate terrorism.” And yet, despite these grandiose declarations, Cincinnati-based Chiquita Brands International evidently will not be shut down and will continue to do business in the United States despite pleading guilty last week to providing more than $1.7 million in funding over seven years to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing group on the US State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.
Chiquita pleaded guilty to one count of doing business with a terrorist group and agreed to pay a fine of $25 million. Under the agreement, none of the company’s executives will face criminal charges. Between 1997 and February 2004, Chiquita made more than 100 payments to the AUC, including over 50 payments totaling more than $850,000 after the State Department designated the paramilitary group a terrorist organization in September 2001. Prior to 1997, Chiquita had made payments to Colombia’s largest leftist guerrilla group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), but that was before it was labeled a terrorist organization by the State Department.
Company officials met with AUC leader Carlos Castaño in 1997 and the paramilitary leader told them that he intended to drive the FARC from the Urabá region of Colombia and requested payments from Chiquita to fund his operations. Initially, the company made the payments by check, but following the AUC’s inclusion on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations Chiquita switched to paying the paramilitaries in cash. According to court documents, the payments to the AUC were reviewed and approved by eight top executives at the company. Furthermore, the executives continued to authorize the payments even after outside legal counsel had told them that the funding was illegal and should be stopped immediately. ... http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia253.htm
With a $25 Million Fine, Chiquita Washes its Hands in Death Squad Case
By Sean Donahue,
Posted on Sat Mar 17th, 2007 at 11:16:47 PM EST
"...In 1996, Riosucio became the first community in the region to gain legal title to its land under provisions of Colombia's 1991 Constitution that granted Afro-Colombian communities collective rights to the land their ancestors settled. In a 2002 article, Cordoba described what happened next:
Seven days later, at 5:00 AM on Dec. 13, 1996, paramilitary groups arrived in my town, Riosucio, intent on murdering the leaders and their families. Many were taken from their beds and paraded naked through the streets. Anyone who resisted was killed. The shouts woke me up. I ran to take refuge in the swamp along with many others. . . .At 8:00 AM, army helicopters started patrolling. The paramilitaries radioed the pilots to attack the swamp, claiming the people were guerrillas. The army attacked us with bombs and rifles, killing many people. Those who survived stayed in the water for three days until hunger and desperation forced us out. Some of us sneaked through the town and reached a rural community across the river. I recuperated there, then fled to Bogota...
I thought of Marino Cordoba and the other survivors of the Riosucio massacre the other day when I read that Chiquita (the former United Fruit Company)had plead guilty to charges of financing a terrorist group in federal court after admitting to paying $1.7 million to the AUC over a ten year period. Their punishment a $25 million fine – less than half the money the company made by selling its Colombian subsidiary, a company that could never have grown as big as it did were it not for the role the paramilitaries played in preventing union organizing on the banana plantations and forcing communities off prime farming land. Chiquita Colombia made a lot of its money in Uraba.
None of the survivors of the AUC's crimes will ever see a penny of that money...."
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2007/3/17/231647/347
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/03/17/colombia.chiquita/index.html
BOGOTA, Colombia (CNN) -- Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said Saturday he favored the extradition to his country of executives of U.S. banana producer Chiquita after the company's admission that it paid Colombian right-wing death squads more than $1.7 million.
"That would be normal. Extradition should be from here to there and from there to here," Uribe said. ...
~~~
I'm not comparing the AUC terrorist organiztaion with the Bush loyalists that they are trying to install within our country's justice and political system, but it's hard to miss the similarities in goals~ the AUC trying to solidify control within thier country's political infrastucture before they are "demobilized", and the attempt by Bush's allies to do the exact same thing here. The difference is just a matter of degree~
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/03/20/america/LA-GEN-Colombia-Paramilitaries.php
Colombia orders investigation into 20 politicians for secret pact with paramilitaries
March 20, 2007
"The so-called Pact of Ralito was signed in 2001 by paramilitaries and elected officials, including former governors and congressmen, from the Caribbean coast. One of the signatories, pro-government Sen. Miguel de la Espriella, revealed its existence during a November newspaper interview.
"The curtly worded covenant, named for the northern town of Santa Fe de Ralito near the ranch where it was signed, contains a list of innocuous-sounding goals like "rebuilding the motherland" on the basis of respect for property rights, national independence and the Constitution....
"But the fact its existence was kept secret for so long has led many Colombians to conclude that the true aim of the pact was to pledge loyalty to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a paramilitary umbrella group, and their scheme to take over the country's institutions ahead of their eventual demobilization."
http://pittsburgh.dbusinessnews.com/shownews.php?newsid=112358&type_news=latest
News From USW:
USW Applauds Colombia Government’s Decision To Investigate Drummond for Paramilitary Links
PITTSBURGH -- News From USW: The USW lauded an announcement by the chief law enforcement officer in Colombia that the government there is investigating allegations that Drummond paid right-wing paramilitaries to murder three trade union leaders working at its coal mining operations in Colombia.
A report of the investigation appeared in today’s El Espectador, a major daily newspaper in Bogota, Columbia (www.elesectador.com). The news comes on the heels of the recent guilty plea by Chiquita Banana of making illegal payments to paramilitaries in Colombia.
On behalf of the families of the murdered Colombian coal miners and their union, the USW, along with the International Labor Rights Fund, filed a civil case in federal court in Birmingham, Alabama, five years ago alleging that that Drummond was responsible for the killings of the top union leaders at its La Loma Mines – Victor Orcasita, Valmore Locarno and Gustavo Soler. ...
“Our union has been decrying anti-union violence in Colombia for many years now,” said USW President Leo W. Gerard. “Finally our voice is beginning to be heard, both in the U.S. and in Colombia.” ...