U.S. Corporate Death Squad Scandals in Columbia:

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Banana Land and the Corporate Death Squad Scandals

"American based food companies are facing a spate of lawsuits charging that they have cooperated with and paid off groups officially designated as terrorists by the U.S. government.....

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....According to these and other witnesses, as well as investigators familiar with the bloody history of Colombia, the companies originally hired the AUC to drive the leftist FARC guerillas out of the banana-growing region and protect their plantations from, as Tijeras put it, "the gangs of common delinquents that robbed their supplies and equipment." Once the FARC was vanquished and order restored, the banana companies continued to pay the AUC to "pacify" their work forces, suppress the labor unions, and terrorize peasant squatters perusing competing land claims.

Tijeras:
After we restored order and became the local agents of law enforcement, managers for Chiquita and Dole plantations relied upon us to respond to their complaints. ...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. In most cases those executed were union leaders or members or individuals seeking to hold or reclaim land that Dole or Chiquita wanted for banana cultivation, and the Dole or Chiquita administrators would report to the AUC that these individuals were suspected guerillas or ....

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Pattern of Complicity with Terror

It has been almost 3 years since Rep. William Delahunt (D-MA), chair of the House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight, launched an investigation into U.S. multinationals' complicity with human rights violations in Colombia. At a June 2007 hearing, witnesses testified that there was a pattern of complicity between Colombian terrorists and multinational corporations -- including the Alabama-based Drummond Co. Inc., which allegedly paid members of a Colombian terrorist group to kill three union organizers. The Miami Herald reported just days before the hearing that paramilitaries had also come forward to talk in detail about payments Drummond made to the paramilitaries.

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That report may help deflect derivative lawsuits filed by the company's own shareholders, but is greeted with skepticism in Colombia, where Attorney General Mario Iguaran roundly rejected Chiquita's explanation, and reportedly threatened to extradite as many as eight Chiquita executives (including John Paul Olivo, Charles Dennis Keiser, and Dorn Robert Wenninger) who, he says, were responsible for approving the payments and maintaining a "criminal ....

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Another remarkable aspect of the Chiquita case is the fact that the lead attorney representing Chiquita Brands International is now the U.S. attorney general.

In August 2007, when he was still representing Chiquita, Eric Holder told the Washington Post that it would be unfair to treat "harshly" any company that voluntarily discloses payments to designated terrorists, and that even if the company was penalized, the individuals within the firm should not be. Yet just a few years before he first passed through the revolving door, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Holder authored the "Holder Memo," a famous corporate crime policy memo asserting that the "prosecution of a corporation is not a substitute for the prosecution of criminally culpable individuals within or without the corporation."

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http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15535