It is old news that multi-national companies do not put human rights nor any kind of social welfare at the top of their list of priorities. However, the case of Chiquita struck me as one of the most blatant and undeniable cases of a company taking advantage of a situation, making a lot of money, and not seeming to register the horrible impact their actions had on Colombia.
Chiquita has had subsidiaries in Colombia since the 80´s, operating in the parts of the country most affected by paramilitarism, guerillas and drug trafficking. In 2007, a federal court in DC found Chiquita Brands guilty of making payuments to a federally recognized foriegn terrorist organization, the AUC (Aoutdefensas Unidas de Colombia--the umbrella paramilitary organization that was formed in 1997 and is responsible for collaborating with the Military on countless massacres around Colombia, including 2 that occurred in the Community, one in 2001 and the other in 2005)
Chiquita admitted to making payments to the AUC and was fined $25 million. However, Chiquita also made it clear that these payments were extortionary and did not result in any benfits to the company, aside from not being attacked for not making the payment.
In April 2010, the National Security Archive, a research institute at GWU, collaborated with the GWU Law school to collect and publish the newly declassified internal documents from the case. This group argues that these people show beyond a doubt that the payments were not simple exhtorition payments, but rather were mutually beneficial transactions and that Chiquita was actually hiring the AUC to run the company´s security.
The papers do paint a pretty bad picture for Chiquita, including hand written comments about the need for secrecy, the accounting tricks and even the direct comment that the Convivires were paid to provide security to a few of the banana plantations. (Convivires are the government-sanctioned security communities that were run by the AUC. Side note, former president Alaro Uribe, when he was govenor of Antioquia, fully supported these Convivires which are now known to have been involved directly in the Durg trade, arms trade and massacres)
It does bother me that the company seems to have been doing business with the AUC. But what might bothers me more is how the Chiquita managers talked about, and interacted with, the AUC as if they were just the Neighborhod Crime Watchers.
Anyway, read about it all in more detail and better writing here
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB340/index.htm
