Chiquita Republic

Features » January 7, 2013

Chiquita Republic

United Fruit’s heir has again been linked to paramilitary abuses in Colombia.
BY James Bargent

In the late 1990s, in one of many chapters in the Colombian government’s decades-old dirty war with leftist guerrillas, more than 15,000 people in the northern region of Curvaradó were forced from their land. First came the army, they recall. And they told us to leave. ‘Don’t be afraid of us,’ the soldiers said. ‘Be afraid of those that follow us.’

Those that followed were las mocha cabezas—the beheaders—paramilitary death squads fighting as the military’s proxies. Thousands fled their massacres, bombardments and executions.

Behind the beheaders came the agribusinesses, which converted the territory into African palm plantations and cattle ranches under paramilitary protection. The cozy relationship between the corporations and paramilitaries became known as the para-economy.

Fifteen years later, the displaced people who have returned to Curvaradó say they are again engaged in a land struggle with a para-economy. But the businesses encroaching on their land are no longer palm and cattle ranchers, but rather plaintain farms run through proxy growers, mostly at the direction of a Colombia-based, multi-national banana company called Banacol. However, the returnees refer to the company by a more familiar name: “We call it Chiquita Brands,” says Germán, a leader of the restitution fight.

More:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/14294/chiquita_republic/