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By the mid-1990s, paramilitary chiefs had secured their autonomy through the production and trafficking of cocaine, and combined their private armies to form the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).[viii] The umbrella group ruthlessly attacked any civilians suspected of harboring guerrilla sympathies. They quartered victims with chainsaws, cut off their tongues and testicles, and poured battery acid down their throats.[ix] Hardline AUC commander Carlos Castaño defended the sanguine strategy as “draining the water to catch the fish.”[x]
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Bananas, Guns, and Cocaine
Even worse, the corporation appears to have helped smuggle AUC weapons into the Colombian war zone. In 2001, Chiquita facilitated the diversion of three thousand Nicaraguan AK-47 assault rifles and five million rounds of ammunition from Panama to Antioquia, where Banadex controlled the port of Turbo.[xxii] The crates remained at Chiquita’s private facilities for several days before their transfer to fourteen AUC vehicles.[xxiii] While paperwork claimed that the Panamanian ship carried plastic and rubber balls, the Banadex employees used heavy-lifting machinery unnecessary to move the declared cargo.[xxiv] Two years later, the Organization of American States (OAS) found Banadex guilty of the illegal arms deal and probable bribery of port authorities, but somehow failed to mention Chiquita’s ownership of the subsidiary.[xxv]
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Chiquita’s assistance to the AUC extended even beyond illicit arms shipments, to tacit participation in the drug trafficking. The produce behemoth allegedly gave the right-wing umbrella group “uncontrolled access to its port facilities and ships” and Colombian prosecutors accuse the AUC of using Chiquita vessels bound for Europe to smuggle narcotics, particularly cocaine.[xxix] Éver Veloza García, former commander of the paramilitary Turbo Front in Northern Urabá, explained how paramilitaries evaded the control points of security agencies by tying narcotic shipments to the hulls of banana vessels at high sea.[xxx] Indeed, authorities have seized over one and a half tons of cocaine, valued at USD 33 million, from Chiquita ships.[xxxi]
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Terry Collingsworth, a lead prosecutor for the civil lawsuits brought against Chiquita, has traveled to Colombian prisons on a number of occasions to meet with Raúl Hasbún and José Gregorio Mangones Lugo, alias “Carlos Tijeras.” Tijeras, who previously controlled the banana zone of Magdalena where Chiquita held parallel operations, provided the most damning confession. Tijeras likewise incriminated Dole Food Company, claiming, “We would also get calls from the Chiquita and Dole plantations identifying specific people as ‘security problems’ or just ‘problems.’ Everyone knew that this meant we were to execute the identified person,” usually union leaders or peasants trying to reclaim the land.[lvi]
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http://www.coha.org/para-business-gone-bananas-chiquita-brands-in-colombia/These crimes weren't just limited to Colombia. There are plenty of former banana workers walking around here with no testicles. So much for our regard for "human rights" which we just use as a political weapon against governments we don't like. For governments we don't like, we churn out terrorists as School of the Americas (the new name is meaningless cosmetics) and complain they don't have the right kind of "freedom of the press" so we can destabilize their governments for profit.
Chiquita, Dole, Coca Cola, etc, all of them. String em up. String up those criminals responsible for the death of millions.
The joke's not just on defenseless brown peasants, it's also on Americans because these corporations subvert our democracy. How is it that the U.S. government under Clinton launched a trade war over bananas at the expense of small American businesses, especially since the U.S. does not export bananas and Chiquita employs no American production workers?
What was Chiquita Lindner doing spending nights in the Lincoln bedroom after giving the Democratic Party a measly $95,000 donation. That's how cheaply workers around the world, including US workers, are sold out to the advantage of a corporation that pays very little, if anything in US taxes since
Note 11 – Income Taxes
The company’s effective tax rate varies from period to period due to the level and mix of income generated in its various domestic and foreign jurisdictions. The company currently does not generate U.S. federal taxable income. The company’s taxable earnings are substantially from foreign operations being taxed in jurisdictions at a net effective rate lower than the U.S. statutory rate. No U.S. taxes have been accrued on foreign earnings because such earnings have been or are expected to be permanently invested in foreign operating assets.
http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/EFX_dll/EDGARpro.dll?FetchFilingHTML1?SessionID=HhhlC2bI2E1w4Uo&ID=4573994
After the EU failed to comply with two GATT rulings against its banana regime, the U.S., Mexico, Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras filed complaints to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Within 24 hours of the U.S. announcement that it would challenge the regime to the WTO, Lindner made a $500,000 donation to Democratic parties in Southern States.[11]
http://www.stanford.edu/class/e297c/trade_environment/wheeling/hbanana.html
The COHA research paper deserves to be read in full.
Extra reading recommended here, starting with the paragraph
Opponents of Chiquita's actions in Washington, D.C. say Chiquita has bought White House support for a cause that will hurt U.S. allies
only to help the bottom line of the Cincinnati company.
"It's a clear issue of buying trade favors," said Randall Robinson, the head of TransAfrica Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying
group for African and developing world issues. "The President ought to be ashamed of himself."
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http://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/conspiracy/Chiquita_SECRETS_Revealed.txt
And if you have time, Democracy Now has an excellent report called "From Arbenz to Zelaya: Chiquita in Latin America"
"When the Honduran military overthrew the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya two weeks ago there might have been a sigh of relief in the corporate board rooms of Chiquita banana," writes journalist Nikolas Kozloff. "Earlier this year the Cincinnati-based fruit company joined Dole in criticizing the government in Tegucigalpa which had raised the minimum wage by 60%." Kozloff goes on to trace Chiquita’s "long and sordid" political history in Central America. (includes rush transcript)
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NIKOLAS KOZLOFF: ... prior to the coup d’état in Honduras, Chiquita was very unhappy about President Zelaya’s minimum wage decrees, because they said that this would cut into their profits and make it more expensive for them to export bananas and pineapple. And we know that they appealed to the Honduran Business Association, which was also opposed to Zelaya’s minimum wage provisions. (...) Chiquita is allied to a Washington law firm called Covington, which advises multinational corporations. And who is the vice chairman of Covington? None other than John Negroponte, who your previous guest mentioned in regards to the rampant human rights abuses that went on in Honduras throughout the 1980s. So I think that’s a really interesting connection.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the money and the support, Chiquita, then and now. It’s interesting, this is so reminiscent of the coup against the Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He wasn’t in office but a year, 1990, 1991, when he was ousted, and one of his first acts when he became president was to increase the minimum wage, as Zelaya has done.
NIKOLAS KOZLOFF: Well, right, and this is nothing new, as I point out in a recent article. Throughout the twentieth century, Chiquita, formerly known as United Fruit, was associated with some of the most backward, retrograde political and economic forces in Central America and indeed outside of Central America in such countries as Colombia. And we know that United Fruit Company played a very prominent role in the coup d’état against democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. And, you know, after that, that ushered in a very turbulent period in Guatemalan history, rampant human rights abuses, genocide against the indigenous people of Guatemala. And so, Guatemala is only now recovering from that.
But, you know, Chiquita has played a role in such countries as Guatemala and also Colombia, and now it maintains these ties to Covington, this law firm in Washington, to this day. And there is this revolving door, as I say before, of these Washington insiders. Covington, in turn, is tied to McLarty and Kissinger Associates, McLarty being President Clinton’s former Chief of Staff and envoy to Latin America, who was pushing the free trade agenda in Latin America, and Kissinger, who doesn’t even need an introduction. His ties to the coup in Chile in 1973 are well known. And so, it’s disturbing that there is this history of abuses in Central America throughout the twentieth century with Chiquita and the fruit companies, which continues to this day.
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http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/21/from_arbenz_to_zelaya_chiquita_in
The US version of democracy, human rights, free press.... At the end of a gun, diplomatic sanctions, demonization, isolation, coups, murder, Pffffft. That's some nerve.
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