Badge + Evil Corporation = Bananaguns

Man, I really like bananas. They're yummy, nutritious, convenient and sexy. They go great with peanut butter and chocolate and they're perfect for sweetening and thickening up a a smoothie. There's no plastic packaging to deal with (except in this insane marketing gimmick) and they match my blog's color scheme. Just fucking awesome all around.

So awesome that some people will kill for them. See, Back in 2007 Chiquita Brands International, Inc., they of the singing and dancing bananas, were indicted by the US Justice Dept. for doing business with the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC. The AUC was in fact a terrorist organization, designated as such by the US Govt., who engaged in the repression and murder of poor indigenous farmers and peasants in Colombia, largely in order to control cocaine production. Chiquita managed to skip away from the charges with a plea agreement that saw them pay a $25 million fine, but having to admit no responsibility for anything. They didn't have to admit that they received any goods or services for the over $1.7 million in payments they made to the AUC, claiming the money was extorted from them, thereby (Chiquita hoped) heading off any questions that would result from an admission that they did get something in return after all.

But things are starting to look a bit more grim for the singing banana. As part of the sentencing agreement, along with the fine Chiquita had to turn over thousands of confidential internal memos. And these tell a different story than than the one we've heard. According to Micheal Evans, from the National Security Archives:

The documents provide evidence of mutually-beneficial "transactions" between Chiquita's Colombian subsidiaries and several illegal armed groups in Colombia and shed light on more than a decade of security-related payments to guerrillas, paramilitaries, Colombian security forces, and government-sponsored Convivir militia groups. The collection also details the company's efforts to conceal the so-called "sensitive payments" in the expense accounts of company managers and through other dirty tricks.

(By the way, Chiquita used to be known as The United Fruit Company, a textbook study of corporate power, racism, exploitation and violence)

At the same time as the criminal charges were brought, Chiquita was sued by its victims (currently the suit is waiting the desicion on a motion of dismissal by Chiquita). From Democracy Now:

The American fruit giant Chiquita has been hit with a new lawsuit on behalf of victims of Colombian paramilitaries. Earlier this year Chiquita admitted to paying one point seven million dollars to a right-wing Colombian paramilitary group on the U.S. terrorist watch list. On Wednesday, nearly four hundred Colombian plaintiffs filed a civil suit seeking almost eight billion dollars in damages. Plaintiff attorney Jonathan Reiter said Chiquita should be held accountable for the killings it helped fund.

Chiquita says it fell victim to an extortion attempt and made the payments only to protect its employees. But a private investigator hired by the plaintiffs disputed Chiquita’s denials. The investigator, William Acosta, says his findings leave no doubt over Chiquita’s complicity.

Chiquita is already facing another lawsuit from relatives of one-hundred forty-four people killed by Colombian paramilitaries. The company has paid a twenty-five million dollar fine to the U.S. government but none of the money has gone to the victims’ families.

So here we have a corporation who's operations in Colombia rely on co-operation with paramilitary groups to protect their assets. Coincidentally, Colombia is at the center of the US' s misnamed war on drugs, with billions flowing into that country to supposedly combat cocaine production. A cursory glance at the correlation between the rising cost of the drug war and the rising use of cocaine in the US indicates the futility of the program (unless, of course, the purpose isn't to stop the drug trade but to control it, then it makes morbid sense).

Do you think that maybe one of the main reasons that there are paramilitaries in the first place is because of the war on drugs?

The real results of the drug war and corporate agribusiness are the marginalization and exploitation of the local populations, pitting them against each other using manufactured and artificial crises as part of a program of control and domination.