Chiquita case puts big firms on notice

Revelations of details about Chiquita's payments to the AUC has coincided with a widening political scandal in Colombia as ties between the paramilitaries and some of the country's top politicians and government officials come to light. Eight lawmakers and a governor are currently in jail on charges they colluded with the militias. Last week, arrest warrants were issued for six mayors.

Today, workers on what used to be one of Chiquita's farms lower their voices to talk about the case and are curious about why the company felt compelled to admit to making the payments. "Don't they all do it?" asked one supervisor at the packing plant that still supplies Chiquita.

'No secret' that firms paid militias

"It was no secret that the multinationals, especially in Urabá, paid that money," said Freddy Rendón, alias "the German," the head of a paramilitary bloc that operated in the banana region. Mr. Rendón is one of 57 paramilitary leaders who demobilized along with some 30,000 fighters as part of a deal with the government.

Chiquita did not just pay the AUC. It also admitted to – but was not prosecuted by the Justice Department for – paying the FARC and ELN rebel armies before the paramilitaries took control of the region.

Despite the nature of the AUC – blamed by human rights groups for some of Colombia's most gruesome crimes – Chiquita is only accused of breaking US law beginning in October 2001 when the AUC was officially named a "foreign terrorist organization" by the US State Department.Mr.

Mitchell said in a telephone interview from the company's US headquarters in Cincinnati that the motive behind the payments was to protect its employees. "We believe they saved people's lives," he said.

However, during the time Chiquita was paying the paramilitaries, thousands of people across Colombia died at the hands of the right-wing militias, which expanded from Urabá. In the banana belt alone between 1997 and 2004, paramilitary forces are blamed for 22 massacres in which 137 people were killed, according to government figures.

On one particularly bloody day in January 1999, 14 people were murdered in a killing spree that spread throughout the banana belt's four municipalities, after then AUC chief Carlos Castaño called off a Christmas-time truce. Hundreds more died in individual killings.

Alberto is a tall, self-assured man in his early 40s. But his voice drops to a whisper when he says he personally witnessed at least 10 murders on one of Chiquita's 26 plantations where he worked for 11 years.

He vividly remembers the last murder he saw on the Banafinca farm in 1999. When Alberto and his coworkers arrived on the plantation they saw two men known to be paramilitary henchmen standing menacingly near the packing plant. The thugs waited until everyone took up their workstations and then went into the field where one of Alberto's coworkers was climbing a ladder to bag a banana stem. "No one knew who they had come for that day," Alberto says.

The thugs waited until everyone took up their workstations then went into the field where one of Alberto's coworkers was climbing a ladder to bag a banana stem. "They cut off his head with a machete, dumped the weapon, then calmly walked to their motorcycle and drove off, without saying a word," says Alberto, who asked that his real name not be used.

Alberto cannot say whether the murder had anything to do with Chiquita's payments. But he says that the company's contributions to the paramilitary groups helped strengthen them and allowed them to expand throughout the country. "The money Chiquita paid helped finance the paramilitaries. Their coffers grew, and they were able to buy more weapons.

José Benítez, a leader of the banana workers' trade union, said Chiquita and the other firms that have paid paramilitaries must be held accountable.

"It's like they are trying to erase all those deaths with money that the victims here will never see. If there is justice, the Chiquita executives will see the inside of a Colombian prison," says Mr. Benítez.

Yolanda Rúa, a member of a women's peace organization in Urabá, says however that it serves little purpose to lock up company executives. Instead, she says, the $25 million that Chiquita will pay to settle the Justice Department's investigation should go to the victims of the paramilitaries that Chiquita supported. "We don't need a long prison sentence for them. We need to see some sort of reparation."

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