The profitable corporation Chiquita Brands International has pled guilty to funding the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing terrorist group.
On Aug. 21, the corporation’s plea agreement will be heard in court. This scandal further exposes the U.S.
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Banadex, Chiquita’s banana-producing subsidiary until 2004, made Colombia the company’s leading regional profit source. Chiquita enlisted the AUC to “protect” its Colombian interests and attack the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the northwest region of Uraba.
Chiquita operates in 70 countries with 25,000 employees. Formerly United Fruit, the company has a long history of attempting to smash national and revolutionary movements and supporting coups against “unfriendly” leaders. The 1954 pro-U.S. coup in Guatemala is one example.
The Marxist FARC commands the largest guerilla army in the Western Hemisphere. Its goal is to end exploitation in Colombia.
The AUC, on the other hand, is known for killing 10,000 workers, peasants and political activists, and for drug trafficking. It is made up of current and former Colombian army soldiers and has received backing—sometimes overt, mostly covert—from the Colombian and U.S. governments.
AUC forces have killed at least 2,700 people in the four northern municipalities where Chiquita ran its operations. Many thousands of peasants were displaced.
In 2001, the U.S. government designated the AUC a terrorist group. It could no longer afford to publicly support the right-wing killers as it funded a counter-insurgency war against leftist guerillas long deemed “terrorists.”
In March 2007, Chiquita struck a plea deal with the U.S. Department of Justice for engaging in transactions with a terrorist group. Its punishment: acknowledging $1.7 million in payments to the AUC and paying a $25 million fine.
The fine is a drop in the bucket for a company that reported $4.5 billion in revenue in 2006. It shows how little the U.S. government thinks the lives of Colombian workers and peasants worth.
The judge overseeing the plea deal, Royce Lamberth, has until October to decide whether or not to approve it as prosecutors decide whether to indict Chiquita executives.
The investigation, if it continues, could put government officials in the spotlight for wrongdoing, including Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff.
In 2003, the U.S. government investigated Chiquita for paying off the AUC. Chertoff worked in the Justice Department’s criminal division. On April 24, 2003, he interviewed Chiquita officials, including his former law partner Roderick Hills, who admitted funding the AUC.
Chertoff was sympathetic to Chiquita’s plight. Hills claimed that punishing Chiquita potentially would harm U.S. interests in Colombia. Neither Chertoff nor his successor at the Justice Department discussed this issue with Chiquita again.
Chiquita continued funding the AUC until March 2004. Documents show that executives knew about the payments in September 2000 and about the AUC terrorist designation in 2002. Despite this, Chiquita likely will face little additional scrutiny at the hands of its friends in Washington.
Washington and Chiquita are working to prop up the same system with the same goals in mind: subjugation of Colombia’s resources and people, increasing market penetration and regional domination, and most importantly, destroying popular resistance to their imperialist aims.
Chiquita is only being punished because it stepped so far outside the bounds of acceptability by funding well-known death squad leaders. It is not because the U.S. government cares about justice—it doesn’t.
The United States showered Colombia with $800 million dollars in 2006—mostly military aid to combat the so-called war on drugs. Yet, government-backed paramilitaries, like the AUC, get 80 percent of their funds from drug trafficking.
Chiquita’s business policy of paying off the AUC was in line with U.S foreign policy. The “war on drugs” and “war on terror” are nothing but smokescreens for U.S. imperialism in Latin America.
