Chiquita paid terrorists and the U.S. Justice Department didn’t really mind.
In Terrorism-Law Case, Chiquita Points to U.S.
On April 24, 2003, a board member of Chiquita International Brands disclosed to a top official at the Justice Department that the king of the banana trade was evidently breaking the nation’s anti-terrorism laws.
Roderick M. Hills, who had sought the meeting with former law firm colleague Michael Chertoff, explained that Chiquita was paying "protection money" to a Colombian paramilitary group on the U.S. government’s list of terrorist organizations. Hills said he knew that such payments were illegal, according to sources and court records, but said that he needed Chertoff’s advice.
The ‘voluntary disclosure’ by Chiquita only happened AFTER its subsidiary in Columbia, Banadex, was under local investigation. A Justice Department investigation only started AFTER the Columbian government intervened.
Chiquita, Hills said, would have to pull out of the country if it could not continue to pay the violent right-wing group to secure its Colombian banana plantations. Chertoff, then assistant attorney general and now secretary of homeland security, affirmed that the payments were illegal but said to wait for more feedback, according to five sources familiar with the meeting.
According to this Justice Department statement, Chiquita made 100 payments to the AUC, a rightwing terror gang, amounting to $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004 through Banadex. The U.S. government designated the AUC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization on Sept. 10, 2001. From Sept. 10, 2001 through Feb. 4, 2004, Chiquita made 50 payments to the AUC totaling over $825,000.
But Chertoff didn’t mind.
Justice officials have acknowledged in court papers that an official at the meeting said they understood Chiquita’s situation was "complicated," and three of the sources identified that official as Chertoff.
…
Sources close to Chiquita say that Chertoff never did get back to the company or its lawyers. Neither did Larry D. Thompson, the deputy attorney general, whom Chiquita officials sought out after Chertoff left his job for a federal judgeship in June 2003. And Chiquita kept making payments for nearly another year.
Chertoff, Mr. Complicated, doesn’t comment because there is an ‘ongoing investigation’.
[T]here was a genuine debate within the Justice Department about the seriousness of the crime of paying AUC. For some high-level administration officials, Chiquita’s payments were not aiding an obvious terrorism threat such as al-Qaeda; instead, the cash was going to a violent South American group helping a major U.S. company maintain a stabilizing presence in Colombia.
Chiquita had a ‘stabilizing presence’ in Columbia that required ‘genuine debate’. How did such ‘stabilizing’ look on the ground?
Description: Seven civilians from five different peasant areas of Concepcion Municipality were killed by United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitaries who accused them of collaborating with guerrillas.
Description: The United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) killed Carlos Jose Restrepo Rocha, a journalist from the Tolima Department, who they accused of being a blackmailer in the guerrillas’ service. Rocha was shot eleven times in the neck and chest. Note: Incident date is approximate.
Description: Octavio Sarmiento, an opposition congressman, was assassinated near his ranch. No group has claimed responsibility, but Colombian authorities suspect gunmen from the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) are responsible.
Here is a long list of the AUC’s crimes and this is how Chiquita helped:
An Organization of American States report in 2003 said that Chiquita participated in smuggling thousands of arms for paramilitaries into the Northern Uraba region, using docks operated by the company to unload thousands of Central American assault rifles and ammunition.
Iguaran, whose office has been investigating Chiquita’s operations, said the company knew AUC was using payoffs and arms to fund operations against peasants, union workers and rivals. At the time of the payments, AUC was growing into a powerful army and was expanding across much of Colombia and, according to the Colombian government, its soldiers killed thousands before it began demobilizing.
"What is not to like here?" Chertoff might have asked.
There are hundreds of U.S. companies who behave like Chiquita in South America, Africa and elsewhere. Maybe they disclose this to the Justice Department, maybe not – it doesn’t matter, it never did.
Some history via Amy Goodman:
Chiquita was formerly called the United Fruit Co., which with the help of its former lawyer, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and his brother Allen Dulles’ Central Intelligence Agency overthrew the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, in 1954. And you can go back further. Colombian Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez wrote in his classic “One Hundred Years of Solitude” about the 1928 Santa Marta massacre of striking United Fruit banana workers: “When the banana company arrived … the old policemen were replaced by hired assassins.”
This time Chiquita got caught when the OAS stepped in and local investigators published their findings. Still, Chertoff thought the case to be ‘complicated’.
How would Chertoff, now Secretary of the Department of Homeland
Security, decide if Chiquita paid an illegal and deadly rightwing
militia in the U.S.?
Would he tell them to stop, or to go on and ‘wait
for more feedback’?