Chiquita Board Members: Total Identification

Chiquita headquarters in Cincinnati
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Protection payments to paramilitary groups

See also: Colombian armed conflict and Doe v. Chiquita Brands International

On March 14, 2007, Chiquita Brands was fined $25 million as part of a settlement with the United States Justice Department for having ties to Colombian paramilitary groups. According to court documents, between 1997 and 2004, high ranking corporate officers paid approximately $1.7 million to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the AUC, in exchange for employee protection in Colombia's volatile banana harvesting zone. Similar payments were also made to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), as well as the National Liberation Army (ELN) from 1989 to 1997 <1><2>. All three of these groups are on the U.S. State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

On March 19, 2007, Chiquita Brands admitted in federal court that the company paid Colombian terrorists to protect employees at its most profitable banana-growing operation. As part of a deal with prosecutors, the company pleaded guilty to one count of doing business with a terrorist organization. In exchange, the company will pay a $25-million fine and court documents will not reveal the identities of the several senior executives who approved the illegal protection payments <2>.

Chiquita currently faces serious charges in a lawsuit issued in June 2007. According to the attorney of 173 family members of victims of the AUC militia this could be the biggest terrorist case in history and may put Chiquita out of business. "Terry Collingsworth, a lawyer with International Rights Advocates who is leading the multi-million dollar litigation, said: "This is a landmark case, maybe the biggest terrorism case in history. In terms of casualties, it's the size of three World Trade Center attacks. <3>"


Ongoing workers' rights violations
In May 2007, the French NGO "Peuples Solidaires" publicly accused the Compañia Bananera Atlántica Limitada (COBAL), a Chiquita subsidiary, of knowingly violating its workers' basic rights and endangering their families health and their own. Allegedly, the banana firm has carelessly exposed laborers at the Coyol plantation in Costa Rica to highly toxic pesticides on multiple occasions. Additionally, the human rights group accuses the company of using a private militia to intimidate workers. Finally, Peuples Solidaires claims that Chiquita, despite a regional agreement between the company and local unions requiring prompt investigation of grievances, has ignored certain union complaints for more than a year <4>.


Use in fiction
Several authors have used the operations of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) as inspiration for fiction works. The most important ones are One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Green Pope by Miguel Angel Asturias, La Casa Grande by Alvaro Cepeda Samudio, and the poem "United Fruit Company" by Pablo Neruda included in his epic work Canto General. Garcia Marquez, Asturias, and Neruda were awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature. According to some studies, the work Nostromo by Joseph Conrad was also inspired on the United Fruit Company.

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....according to Semana magazine, “the killings by ’Jorge 40’ have occurred in territories where there are major businesses and enterprises. The part of the country with the most common graves, after Putumayo, is the area of Ciénaga and Fundación. There, the Attorney General’s Office has detected more than 300 clandestine graves, surrounded by what was a prosperous banana industry, which included the participation of the controversial multinational Chiquita Brands.” (See: El Verdugo. Semana magazine, June 30, 2007, http://www.semana.com/wf_InfoArticulo.aspx?idArt=104755).