Para-Business Gone Bananas: Chiquita Brands in Columbia

[Judi Lynn]

Para-Business Gone Bananas: Chiquita Brands in Columbia
Monday 22 August 2011
by: William Moore, Council on Hemispheric Affairs | News Analysis

In March 2007 in a U.S. District Court, Chiquita Brands International pled guilty to one count of “Engaging in Transactions with a Specially-Designated Global Terrorist.” The banana giant confessed to paying the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the nation’s notoriously violent network of right-wing paramilitary groups, USD 1.7 million in over one hundred payments between 1997 and 2004. Yet the case was resolved by a cash settlement, thus failing to publicly expose both sides of their quid pro quo relationship. A 2011 declassification of Chiquita documents, confessions by former paramilitaries, and ongoing lawsuits lay bare the U.S. corporation’s ruthless profiteering and invite cautious hope of justice for the victims.

The Rise of Paramilitaries

The AUC paramilitaries have their roots in Colombia’s internal armed conflict. The violence began in 1948 in Bogotá as a bloody civil war between Liberals and Conservatives. The partisan warfare ended with the National Front, a political pact that snubbed dissident factions of Liberals, Communists, self-defense communities, and independent peasant organizations. By the 1960s and 1970s, the conflict had morphed into a guerrilla insurgency against the state, which sought to rectify a history of inequality and social exclusion. This phase of integration on the part of internal leftist forces gave rise to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which continues to call for greater land access, rural development, political participation, and an end to the extrajudicial murder of its supporters.

Colombia’s thriving drug exports of the 1980s profoundly altered the class-based conflict, generating the multipolar civil war that continues today. Narco-traffickers laundered their newfound wealth through the purchase of plantations in the traditional cattle and agricultural regions, which further exacerbated the land struggle and displacement of peasants. The emerging class of drug lords established death squads to protect their financial interests, often targeting guerrilla forces in the field. In tandem, the Colombian military organized paramilitary groups to combat leftist insurgents and safeguard the landed elite. However, the right-wing paramilitaries largely deviated from state control as they solidified essential links to cocaine kingpins, large landowners, industrialists, and bankers.

By the mid-1990s, paramilitary chiefs had secured their autonomy through the production and trafficking of cocaine, and combined their private armies to form the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). The umbrella group ruthlessly attacked any civilians suspected of harboring guerrilla sympathies. They quartered victims with chainsaws, cut off their tongues and testicles, and poured battery acid down their throats.Hardline AUC commander Carlos Castaño defended the sanguine strategy as “draining the water to catch the fish.”

More:
http://www.truth-out.org/para-business-gone-bananas-chiquita-brands-columbia/1314035320

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