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Fruit of Chiquita's labor: terror $$
United States
Thursday 22 May 2008
No matter how much its interrogators age, “60 Minutes” remains a forum where no sane CEO wants to be. During a recent grilling, Chiquita Brands International chief Fernando Aguirre initially comes across as a sympathetic character. He was forced to defend his company’s payment of protection money to armed thugs controlling Colombia’s banana plantations - crimes committed long before he took the hot seat. “These were extortion payments. Either you pay or your people get killed,” Aguirre told CBS correspondent Steve Kroft.
The “do-whatever-it-takes-to-protect-the-workers” line sounds pragmatic and heroic. Quietly going along with blackmail as the path of least resistance - the option with the fewest bullet holes in your briefcase - doesn’t even sound unreasonable. Except when you take a moment to digest the meaning of Colombian acronyms. According to the U.S. Justice Department, Chiquita paid US$1.7 million in “taxes” to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) between 1997 and 2004. The company admits making similar payments over the previous decade to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). All three terrorist groups profited off the banana crop like terrorists in Sierra Leone and Angola have used so-called “blood diamonds” to purchase weapons. Blood bananas? You bet. Gloria Cuartas, the former mayor of Apartado, Colombia, has testified of entire villages being murdered by AUC guerrillas - including one beheading of a 12-year-old boy while he was in school. The message: “Their language was death . . . if they could do this to children, they could do it to me.” Since the fruit was introduced to the American diet in the late 1800s, the banana industry has had its share of dirty streaks. Plantation owners have been instrumental in the overthrow of various Latin American governments over the years. In 1961, United Fruit (the precursor to Chiquita) let the CIA and its Cuban surrogate fighters use banana boats in the botched Bay of Pigs invasion.
The “do-whatever-it-takes-to-protect-the-workers” line sounds pragmatic and heroic. Quietly going along with blackmail as the path of least resistance - the option with the fewest bullet holes in your briefcase - doesn’t even sound unreasonable. Except when you take a moment to digest the meaning of Colombian acronyms. According to the U.S. Justice Department, Chiquita paid US$1.7 million in “taxes” to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) between 1997 and 2004. The company admits making similar payments over the previous decade to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). All three terrorist groups profited off the banana crop like terrorists in Sierra Leone and Angola have used so-called “blood diamonds” to purchase weapons. Blood bananas? You bet. Gloria Cuartas, the former mayor of Apartado, Colombia, has testified of entire villages being murdered by AUC guerrillas - including one beheading of a 12-year-old boy while he was in school. The message: “Their language was death . . . if they could do this to children, they could do it to me.” Since the fruit was introduced to the American diet in the late 1800s, the banana industry has had its share of dirty streaks. Plantation owners have been instrumental in the overthrow of various Latin American governments over the years. In 1961, United Fruit (the precursor to Chiquita) let the CIA and its Cuban surrogate fighters use banana boats in the botched Bay of Pigs invasion.
