June 2, 2011

Cute, huh? You might want to think twice, though, the next time you consider peeling a sexy little Chiquita banana.

If a lawsuit currently filed in a south Florida Federal court comes to trial, or if Chiquita Brands International opts to politely reach an out-of-court settlement that could cost them hundreds of millions of dollars rather than the possible billions that could land on their heads after a successful suit, it may soon become apparent that that banana was grown, packed, and shipped partly via the killing of innocent people. And Chiquita looked the other way while the killings took place.

That isn’t a particularly far-fetched accusation, either, since the company paid a $25-million fine in 2007 for basically doing exactly that. That’s right, my fellow Americans— Chiquita was fined by the Justice Department of God’s very most favorite, freedom-spreading country for the minor misstep of supporting a deadly paramilitary operation so they could more readily sell bananas.

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Hold on to your hats. I’d like to be able to say you won’t believe what you’re about to read, but the sad fact of the matter is that nothing American corporations try to get away with is surprising anymore. Money trumps mere human beings every single time, as a matter of course, regardless of whether the cash is generated by un-repayable housing loans or unfettered access to banana splits. This is, after all, a capitalistic society. And desperately impoverished foreigners aren’t really people anyway.

According to a recent AP report that so far isn’t getting anywhere near the attention it deserves, a class-action lawsuit has been filed by lawyers representing some 4,000 Columbian citizens, claiming that Chiquita made cash payments and even supplied assault weapons and ammunition to right-wing paramilitary groups in that strife-torn country. The suit is being brought via a 222-year-old law that allows foreigners to sue in Federal courts if their claims involve violations of U.S. treaties.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are relatives of Colombian citizens who were variously tortured and-or executed by a group called the AUC (a Spanish acronym for United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), which was created in 1997 and serves as the glue that holds together far-right militias throughout the country.

Large groups of people wielding guns to get their way is a relatively common practice in Colombia, as anyone who’s watched the news in the past several decades has undoubtedly heard, so that part is pretty much old hat. A trusted American company feeding the groups cash, guns, and ammo, on the other hand, is…um…a tad newsworthy. Or at least it should be.

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First, some background.

A variety of right-wing militias were started some 30 years ago by Colombian ranchers and drug traffickers as protection against extortion and kidnappings being committed by FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) a far-left organization that was receiving between $20,000 and $100,000 a month from Chiquita, as insurance against the group attacking Chiquita’s employees and factories. FARC was so powerful at the time, even Colombia’s military couldn’t keep them in check. They were, in effect, in the driver’s seat of a highly unstable country.

FARC, as you might imagine, is not to be trifled with - the group slaughtered 17 banana workers in the middle of a soccer field in 1995, and later that same year forced 26 more captured workers to lie down in a ditch, then shot them each in the head - but the AUC set about trying to do away with FARC, partly to get their hands into Chiquita’s extremely deep American-style suit pockets.

After all, if Chiquita is willing to fork over major dough to keep doing business within the context of a bloody terrorist free-for-all, then terrorists on both the right and the left will show no compunction at all in trying to be first in line for a handout. And people will get killed, one way or the other, because that’s what terrorists do. Otherwise, such organizations would create memorable cartoon characters and kids would sing their jaunty theme songs at the breakfast table.

AUC leader Carlos Castano, the lawsuit states, actually met with Chiquita executives at one point and told them the money he was squeezing out of their coffers would be used to rid the area of non-Chiquita-funded guerillas, and would thus protect the company throughout the region.

The lawsuit also contains a list of downright nasty attacks perpetrated by the AUC, including a little July 1997 escapade that ended with 49 people tortured, dismembered, and decapitated. Also, in February of 2000, AUC forces tortured dozens more people and wound up killing 36 of them.

According to over 5,500 pages of internal Chiquita documents that were uncovered by the Justice Department, the company made roughly 100 payments totaling over $1.7-million to the AUC over the course of 7 years. Pivotally, from a legal rather than the more old-fashioned moral standpoint, about half of that money was distributed after Sept. 10, 2001, when the U.S. government finally and officially deemed the AUC to be a terrorist organization, which is exactly what they had done to FARC years earlier, at the time Chiquita was hit with its original fine.

Whoops. That meant that it was a crime for any American company to do business with either the AUC or FARC, so Chiquita was once again breaking the law by handing money over to that bunch of terrorists known as the AUC.

Oh, but that’s not all, folks. According to the filing, there are invoices and other documents revealing Chiquita to have been on the receiving end of a Nicaraguan shipment of 3,000 AK-47 assault rifles - just like the one that lucky AUC member in the above photo is holding - and no less than 5-million rounds of ammunition!

It would be encouraging to report that Chiquita has one kick-ass motherfucker of a shooting range set up outside an employee lounge down Colombia way. But in reality, the guns and ammunition were unloaded by Chiquita employees and stored in Chiquita warehouses, before being carted off, special delivery, to the AUC. And this sort of thing also happened four other times, which was easy enough to uncover because Castano himself actually bragged about it, in print, in a Colombian newspaper!

Chiquita, for its part, now claims a company lawyer didn’t find out about the AUC’s newfangled terrorist designation until late February of 2003, some 18 months after it was widely reported in national publications in both the United States and Colombia. Hell, it even made the papers in Cincinnati, where Chiquita has its national headquarters. This oversight may have occurred because every single Chiquita executive’s cable suddenly went kerplooey and all their paper boys came down with the flu on that particular day. But I’m just guessing.

Chiquita insists, though, that this whole mess is just a matter of doing business in an especially unruly part of the world. They’re hoping to have the claims thrown out of court because, they say, they’re being improperly held responsible “for every murder these terrorist groups committed during the several decades in which they held sway in the lawless, remote regions of Colombia where Chiquita’s subsidiary operated.” Chiquita sold its Colombian banana operation in 2004, but that, of course, is too little too fucking late, assholes.

I wonder if they’d be willing to go through with the court case if it got knocked down to, say, just a handful of dead people that they’re responsible for, instead of “every” murder. It doesn’t seem fair that they should get all the credit.

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I’ve been eating Chiquita bananas since I was three years old; that iconic little blue sticker they put on them is truly one of my first memories. I vividly recall that my mom would let me take the stickers off and play with them when she was unloading groceries. But I’ve now eaten my last Chiquita banana - I bought one from a vendor on the street just two days ago - and I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I seriously, seriously hope you’ll be done with them, too, and that you’ll tell your friends what the score is with these bastards.

With any luck, a combined mass lifetime boycott and a scared-shitless settlement of several hundred million dollars will hit the company where it hurts the most— if they’re willing to hand out AK-47’s like candy to murderers just to insure the bucks are raked in, not making as many bucks as humanly possible will likely be a major drag. It might also be nice if some key executives’ kids got to read about it for a while, just so they know exactly how their loving Dad paid for that boat and fancy house.

Allow me to introduce you to Dole bananas.

Paul Tatara