Chiquita case puts big firms on notice
The company's admission that it paid Colombian paramilitaries $1.7 million has sparked outrage in Colombia.
from the April 11, 2007 edition
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Iguarán also said his office has opened a criminal investigation against Drummond.
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.
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