In Terrorism-Law Case, Chiquita Points to U.S.: Firm Says It Awaited Justice Dept. Advice

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Washington Post

In Terrorism-Law Case, Chiquita Points to U.S.
Firm Says It Awaited Justice Dept. Advice

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 2, 2007; Page A01

On April 24, 2003, a board member of Chiquita International Brands disclosed to a top official at the Justice Department that the king of the banana trade was evidently breaking the nation's anti-terrorism laws.

Roderick M. Hills, who had sought the meeting with former law firm colleague Michael Chertoff, explained that Chiquita was paying "protection money" to a Colombian paramilitary group on the U.S. government's list of terrorist organizations. Hills said he knew that such payments were illegal, according to sources and court records, but said that he needed Chertoff's advice.

Chiquita, Hills said, would have to pull out of the country if it could not continue to pay the violent right-wing group to secure its Colombian banana plantations. Chertoff, then assistant attorney general and now secretary of homeland security, affirmed that the payments were illegal but said to wait for more feedback, according to five sources familiar with the meeting.

Justice officials have acknowledged in court papers that an official at the meeting said they understood Chiquita's situation was "complicated," and three of the sources identified that official as Chertoff. They said he promised to get back to the company after conferring with national security advisers and the State Department about the larger ramifications for U.S. interests if the corporate giant pulled out overnight.





Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/01/AR2007080102601.html?hpid=topnews

[truthisfreedom]

1. I don't even like bananas.

Now I like them even less.

[stillcool]

2. wow...I'm impressed...

that is one well-written article...I wonder why Chiquita couldn't do the usual thing and just pay their way out? Perhaps they didn't contribute enough to someone's campaign.

---------------------
What transpired at the Justice Department meeting is now a central issue in a criminal probe. According to these sources' account, the Bush administration was pulled in competing directions, perhaps because its desire to avoid undermining a newly elected, friendly Colombian government conflicted with its frequent public assertions that supporting a terrorist group anywhere constitutes a criminal offense and a foreign policy mistake.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
But legal sources on both sides say there was a genuine debate within the Justice Department about the seriousness of the crime of paying AUC. For some high-level administration officials, Chiquita's payments were not aiding an obvious terrorism threat such as al-Qaeda; instead, the cash was going to a violent South American group helping a major U.S. company maintain a stabilizing presence in Colombia.
----------------------------------------------------------
After Chiquita officials got no answer from Chertoff, they met with Thompson, who praised them for "doing the right thing" in disclosing the payments, and said he, too, would try to get back to them on how to proceed, defense sources said. Thompson, now general counsel for PepsiCo, did not respond yesterday to a request to comment.
---------------------------------------------
The attorney general of Colombia, Mario Iguaran, and other Colombian officials have dismissed Chiquita's assertions that it was a victim of extortion and paid AUC to protect its workers. An Organization of American States report in 2003 said that Chiquita participated in smuggling thousands of arms for paramilitaries into the Northern Uraba region, using docks operated by the company to unload thousands of Central American assault rifles and ammunition.

Iguaran, whose office has been investigating Chiquita's operations, said the company knew AUC was using payoffs and arms to fund operations against peasants, union workers and rivals. At the time of the payments, AUC was growing into a powerful army and was expanding across much of Colombia and, according to the Colombian government, its soldiers killed thousands before it began demobilizing.

[stillcool]

4. wow..am I ignorant...

I had no idea Chiquita was United Fruit. Now I'm really confused. How could the U.S. Government possibly have problems with them?

[Judi Lynn]

5. When I get some time later, overnight, I'll find some info. about the fact

one of the _Bushes bought into the company either when it was United Fruit, or Chiquita, or whatever.

Some DU'ers discussed it here not long ago, with links.

Damned creepy. I'll get the info. and post it.

[stillcool]

6. Thanks...

it is confusing to me already, that this corporation with it's historical entrenchment in the U.S. government, would have a problem with it's illegal actions in South/Central America.

[Judi Lynn]

8. Article's deceptive: it started hitting me the moment I got into that article: it is written,

being a product of the post-Watergate, Reagan/_Bush-loving Washington Post, that they are trying to manage an "official" explanation of what transpired between what was said between the Chiquita officials, and the _Bush administration. Cover-up. Lies. They are attempting a bogus explanation for the benefit of the public.

They aspire to cling to their image while using the U.S. government surreptitiously to assist them in pounding the "brown" poor into the dirt who dare to ask for one crumb more for their daily diet of brutal starvation:

Chiquita has a long history of counting on American might to get its way in international affairs. The United Fruit Company, Chiquita's corporate predecessor, relied on U.S. military aid to virtually colonize Central America during the early 20th century. More recently, a 1998 investigation by the Cincinnati Enquirer uncovered internal company records detailing Chiquita's elaborate efforts to circumvent government restrictions and monopolize farmland in Central America. "Using more than one bank in Honduras and more than one country to establish offshore trusts further obfuscates the ownership of the farms," a Chiquita executive noted in one internal memorandum. In a recorded voice mail, a company lawyer described "wink, wink" strategies for denying ownership of a front company in Guatemala.

Mike Gallagher, the lead reporter on the investigation, later pleaded guilty to stealing the company's voice mail messages for use in his stories. The Enquirer renounced the stories as "false and misleading," fired Gallagher, and paid Chiquita more than $10 million in damages. But many of Gallagher's central charges remain uncontested. "No one has disputed the authenticity of the voice mail and internal Chiquita records that formed the basis of the most sensational allegations," notes the New York Times.

Chiquita has also been criticized for endangering the lives of farmworkers with its pesticides, an allegation the company denies. In addition, the firm has been accused of covering up a bribery scheme in Columbia; three employees linked to the scandal have been forced to resign.

Back in Cincinnati, Carl Lindner remains an advocate of a clean, ethical life. A practicing Baptist, he does not swear, smoke, or drink. In 1990, he lobbied to shut down a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit that contained sexually explicit photographs. He has been known to hand out cards that read, "only in america. gee, am I lucky."
(snip/)

http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/mojo_400/6_lindner.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Look how close _Bushes are to the CURRENT Chiquita company:

Wednesday, May 10, 2000
Chiquita's Hagin joins Bush staff

He'll be deputy campaign manager

By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Cincinnatian Joe Hagin has been named deputy campaign manager of George W. Bush's presidential campaign, putting him in the inner circle of Bush campaign operatives.

Mr. Hagin is taking a leave of absence from his job as vice president of corporate affairs at Chiquita Brands In ternational Inc. to be in charge of scheduling for the Texas governor, deciding where the GOP presidential nominee will spend his time in what is expected to be a close and hard-fought presidential campaign.
(snip)

Mr. Hagin's job puts him just outside the so-called “Iron Triangle” of Bush campaign operatives that includes chief strategist Karl Rove, communications director Karen Hughes and campaign manager Joe Allbaugh. Mr. Hagin will report to Mr. Allbaugh.

The 44-year-old Cincinnatian has long and deep ties to the Bush family since working for the Texas governor's father in his unsuccessful bid for the 1980 GOP presidential nomination.
(snip/...)

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2000/05/10/loc_chiquitas_hagin2.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Human Rights report on child labor on banana plantations, some of them Chiquita:

~snip~The use of harmful child labor is widespread in Ecuador’s banana sector. Researchers for the Human Rights Watch report, Tainted Harvest: Child Labor and Obstacles to Organizing on Ecuador’s Banana Plantations, spoke with forty-five child laborers during their three-week long fact-finding mission in Ecuador. Forty-one of the children began working between the ages of eight and thirteen, most starting at ages ten or eleven. Their average workday lasted twelve hours, and fewer than 40 percent of the children were still in school by the time they turned fourteen.

In the course of their work, they were exposed to toxic pesticides, used sharp knives and machetes, hauled heavy loads of bananas, drank unsanitary water, and some were sexually harassed. Roughly 90 percent of the children told Human Rights Watch that they continued working while toxic fungicides were sprayed from airplanes flying overhead. For their efforts, the children earned an average of $3.50 per day, approximately 60 percent of the legal minimum wage for banana workers.
(snip)

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2002/04/25/ecuado3876.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lastly, to conclude, here's another reason the _Bush administration will NEVER be at odds with Chiquita management. His dad used to have controlling interest in the company through his own Zapata.

Corporate raider Eli M. Black bought 733,000 shares of United Fruit in 1968, becoming the company’s largest shareholder. In 1969 Zapata Corporation, a company in which George H. W. Bush held significant interest, acquired a controlling interest in United Fruit. Robert’s father, Ralph Gow, was on United Fruit’s board of directors.
(snip/...)

http://www.newsfinder.org/site/more/chiquita/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When it was still United Fruit, too many people were aware of its total ties to John Dulles, CIA, Eisenhower Administration:

"It began with enviable connections to the Eisenhower administration. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his former New York law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, had long represented the company. Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, had served on UFCO's board of trustees. Ed Whitman, the company's top public relations officer, was the husband of Ann Whitman, President Eisenhower's private secretary. (Ed Whitman produced a film, "Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas," that pictured UFCO fighting in the front trenches of the cold war.) The fruit firm's success in linking the taking of its lands to the evil of international communism was later described by one UFCO official as "the Disney version of the episode." But the company's efforts paid off. It picked up the expenses of journalists who traveled to Guatemala to learn United Fruit's side of the crisis, and some of the most respected North American publications - including the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and New Leader - ran stories that pleased the company. A UFCO public relations official later observed that his firm helped condition North American readers to accept the State Department's version of the Arbenz regime as Communist-controlled and the U.S.-planned invasion as wholly Guatemalan." (Quoted from Inevitable Revolutions - The United States in Central America by Walter La Feber, 2nd ed. 1993, pp. 120-121.

The campaign succeeded and in 1954 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency orchestrated a coup, code-named "Operation PBSUCCESS". The invading force numbered only 150 men under the command of Castillo Armas but the CIA convinced the Guatemalan public and President Arbenz that a major invasion was underway. The CIA set up a clandestine radio station to carry propaganda, jammed all Guatemalan stations, and hired skilled American pilots to bomb strategic points in Guatemala City. The U.S. replaced the freely elected government of Guatemala with another right-wing dictatorship that would again bend to UFCO's will.

The history of Guatemala since the Spanish conquest is one of continuous domination and repression. For a brief ten years from 1944 to 1954, Guatemala experienced the fresh air of democracy. However, with a right-wing dictatorship back in power, Guatemala was thrown back into the dark ages and the stage was set for the next 30 years of repression and killing. As part of their efforts in the coup, the CIA made a list of 70,000 "questionable individuals". During Guatemala's 36 year civil war that just came to an end this year (1996), the government often referred to this list originally put together by the CIA.
(snip/...)

http://www.mayaparadise.com/ufc1e.htm

[stillcool]

9. Thanks...I can see clearly now...

I don't know how many times it has to smack me upside the head, before I realize government investigations are tools to de-criminalize, de-fuse, and obscure criminal behavior.

[Judi Lynn]

10. That's the way it seems to work whenever a Repub. tricks/steals his way into the White House. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

3. Chiquita's Slipping Appeal

Chiquita's Slipping Appeal

By Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate. Posted March 21, 2007.
Want to help finance terrorism? Buy a Chiquita banana.

What do Osama bin Laden and Chiquita bananas have in common? Both have used their millions to finance terrorism.

The Justice Department has just fined Chiquita Brands International $25 million for funding a terrorist organization ... for years. Chiquita must also cooperate fully with ongoing investigations into its payments to the ultra-right-wing Colombian paramilitary group Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia. Chiquita made almost monthly payments to the AUC from 1997 to 2004, totaling at least $1.7 million.

The AUC is a brutal paramilitary umbrella group, with an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 armed troops. It was named a terrorist organization by the United States on Sept. 10, 2001. Among its standard tactics are kidnapping, torture, disappearance, rape, murder, beatings, extortion and drug trafficking.
(snip)

While the AUC was collecting U.S. dinero from Chiquita, it was butchering thousands of innocent people in rural Colombia. Chengue (pronounced CHEN-gay) was a small farming village in the state of Sucre. About 80 AUC paramilitary members went into the town in the early hours of Jan. 17, 2001. They rounded up the men and smashed their skulls with stones and a sledgehammer, killing 24 of them. One 19-year-old perpetrator confessed, naming the organizers of the mass murder, including police and navy officials. To date, he is the only one who has been punished. This is just one of hundreds of massacres carried out by AUC.

Chiquita has had a long history of criminal behavior. It was the subject of an extraordinary exposé in its hometown paper, The Cincinnati Enquirer, in 1998. The paper found that Chiquita exposed entire communities to dangerous U.S.-banned pesticides, forced the eviction of an entire Honduran village at gunpoint and its subsequent bulldozing, suppressed unions, unwittingly allowed the use of Chiquita transport ships to move cocaine internationally, and paid a fortune to U.S. politicians to influence trade policy. The lead reporter, Mike Gallagher, illegally accessed more than 2,000 Chiquita voice mails. The voice mails backed up his story, but his methods got him fired. The Enquirer issued a front-page apology and paid Chiquita a reported $14 million. The voice-mail scandal rocked the Enquirer, burying the important exposé.

More:
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/49588/

[Judi Lynn]

7. Need to post this article from the Houston Chronicle for anyone who's interested.

This should give you a clear look at how these businesses operate when they are lucky enough to seize a country's population and keep it from getting unioninzed:

Jan. 19, 2004, 1:41PM
Ruled by fear, banana workers resist unions

By JOHN OTIS
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle South America Bureau

~ snip ~
The farm, owned by an Ecuadorean, is non-union, and Porras must bring her own tools and work clothes. She suffers from headaches and sometimes gashes her hands on the job. But she has no health insurance, and her only job security is to stay on her boss's good side.

"I need the paycheck," Porras says, "even if it's tiny."

With her $160-a-month earnings, Porras, 42, can't afford a place of her own in her hometown of San Agustin. So, she lives with her father, who labors on another plantation.

Nearly everyone in the village of 500 works in bananas. No one has a telephone. Some families are so destitute that they live in huts made of sugarcane stalks. To supplement meager family incomes, many teens drop out of school to look for low-paying field jobs.

"My 8-year-old would like to be a teacher," says Gisela Cortes, who works with Porras. "But there is no money for him to study. He will probably go into bananas."

Where there are unions, labor leaders insist, workers are much better off.

In Panama, for instance, most banana workers belong to labor syndicates and earn up to $23 a day -- almost four times the amount earned by the average Ecuadorean.

In Colombia and Costa Rica, union pay runs about $13 a day. The rate is lower in Guatemala and Honduras, about $8. But workers there, like union members elsewhere, also receive overtime pay, health insurance, tools, uniforms and subsidized housing -- benefits that can bring their total compensation to three times the value of their paychecks.

Most Ecuadoreans, by contrast, get no perks beyond their $6-a-day wages.

Industry leaders seem unmoved. Jorge Illingworth, director of the Ecuadorean Banana Exporters Association, argues that plantation workers here must be doing OK because they have money to get drunk on weekends. "Every Friday night, in the towns around the banana farms, the bars are full," he says.

But according to government estimates, a banana worker would have to nearly double his earnings to buy basic necessities, such as food and clothing, for a family.

On paper, banana workers here are free to form unions and bargain collectively with their bosses. Yet according to Human Rights Watch, legal loopholes and brass-knuckle tactics by farm owners have rendered the right to organize largely a fiction.
(snip/...)

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/04/leftbehind/2095828.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is a good time to remember that a leftist, Rafael Correa, won the Ecuadorian Presidential election last year, against the wealthiest man in Ecuador, the owner of huge banana plantations, who was _Bush's choice.

[Peace Patriot]

11. the "larger ramifications for U.S. interests if the corporate giant pulled out overnight."

What do you suppose THAT means? U.S. "interests" in...? ...cheap unprotected labor, rightwing government, suppression of leftist (majorityist) movements, prevention of social justice, murder of anyone on the left who successfully organizes the people, appropriation of the best land and richest resources by successions of U.S. corporations and financiers, recruitment of low wage Blackwater mercenaries for Iraq (people used to torturing and killing civilians), profits from major drug trafficking, and, last but not least, creation of military forces and launching pads for assassinations and destabilizing actions against neighboring democracies like Venezuela?

U.S. interests in South America are ALL BAD, without exception.

And you gotta wonder about this Chiquita Banana execs' story. They approached the Bushites to ask about the legality of crimes that the Bushites are committing every day in Iraq (torture, death, 'disappearances,' forced labor, mercenary death squads, terror--invading, bombing, shooting up neighborhoods, etc.), and that the Bush Cartel has been committing for decades? In fact, Chiquita Banana IS the Bush Cartel, in many ways.

Guesses: The Bush Junta hadn't gotten full control of the FBI/DoJ as yet. (This was a month after the invasion of Iraq. They didn't have the CIA fully under their boot as yet.) There may have been rogue HONEST professionals in the FBI/DoJ/CIA still doing their jobs, and it is THEY who designated AUC as a terrorist group, and got lucky with a whistleblower on the Chiquita connection, or found out about the payments by some other investigative means. They were about to expose it or prosecute it. Chiquita goes to Chertoff, cuz they know some honest insiders are on to them, and they need protection. (Karl Rove's specific political purges of the DoJ are still to come, and seem to have been put in train later, to protect top Bushites from their own heinous crimes.)

OR, this is what Chiquita wanted--non-action. They got exactly what they wanted. And now they're trying to use it to say it wasn't their fault. The Bushites wouldn't "clarify" their legal position.

OR, the entire story is made up, or at least spun from flimsy webs.

The thing is very fishy. The Bush-run "war on drugs" US military forces in Colombia work hand-in-glove with the Uribe government and thus with rightwing paramilitaries who have VERY CLOSE TIES to Uribe (chief of the military, former chief of intelligence, many Uribe office holders including relatives.) Bush was larding these people with billions of dollars in military aid. So, for Chiquita to become all concerned about their legality, and go to Chertoff and the Bushites for assurances, is like a mafia-connected street thug going to the mafia bosses and asking, 'was that hit I did for you okay? you're going to protect me, right?'

The whole thing is so appalling, it's hard to even think about. Union leaders shredded with chainsaws, bit by bit-- legs, arms, slowly--then their parts thrown into mass graves. Thousands of people tortured, slaughtered.

That's what Chiquita was seeking protection about, and it's not as if the Bushites would give a crap. Maybe the deal was, 'we'll protect you, we'll do nothing, if you show us the snuff videos.'

Am I going too far? The horrible thing is, I don't think I am.

[Judi Lynn]

12. No, it doesn't look as if you're going too far by any means. HRW appeared to know the score

a very long time ago, although we surely haven't heard much about it. Either these things get pushed aside here and never acknowledged, or they, themselves, don't go to any trouble to make sure people find out what they have learned.

The ones of us who are finding out anything at all about these treacherous machinations are having to do it ON OUR OWN. This surely doesn't get handed to us, does it? We have to dig for everything we learn. Things may be picking up, with any luck, now that a Democratic Congress is getting stern about Colombia, at least, to some slight degree. Sure wish they'd make it their business to publicize what is actually known already. Note that this Military Group was formed in _Bush Senior's pResidency:

U.S. Involvement in guerilla policy
In 1990, the United States formed a team that included representatives of the U.S. Embassy's Military Group, U.S. Southern Command, the DIA, and the CIA in order to give advice on the reshaping of several of the Colombian military's local intelligence networks. The official reason for this restructuring was to aid the Colombian military in their counter-narcotics efforts.<2>

Advice on the same subject had also been solicited from the British and Israeli military intelligence, but the U.S. proposal was eventually selected by the Colombian military.<3> The result of these meetings was Order 200-05/91, issued by the Colombian Defense Ministry in May 1991.<4>

Human Rights Watch (HRW) obtained a copy of the Colombian Armed Forces Directive No. 200-05/91.<5> The order itself made no mention of drugs at all. The document stated that the Colombian military, "based on the recommendations made by a commission of advisors from the U.S. Armed Forces, "presented a plan to better combat what they called "escalating terrorism by armed subversion."

The document called for setting up intelligence networks made up of military personnel and "civilians or retired non-commissioned officers with sufficient experience and status" as agents and informants under the control of active-duty officers, with the goals of gathering intelligence for military commanders and coordinating with local military units . Order 200-05/91 also stated that the entire intelligence chain of command as well as the networks themselves must remain secret. Once the reorganisation was complete, all "written material was to be removed", with "open contacts and interaction with military installations" to be avoided by all active members of the intelligence networks.
(snip)

In 1996, Human Rights Watch referred to US advice and Order 200-05/91 by stating that "{United States} recommendations were given despite the fact that some of the U.S. officials who collaborated with the {intelligence restructuring} team knew of the Colombian military's record of human rights abuses and its ongoing relations with paramilitaries". Although "not all paramilitaries are intimate partners with the military," HRW added that the existing partnership between paramilitaries and the Colombian military was "a sophisticated mechanism, in part supported by years of advice, training, weaponry, and official silence by the United States, that allows the Colombian military to fight a dirty war and Colombian officialdom to deny it."

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramilitarism_in_Colombia

[Judi Lynn]

13. The truth hurts! Great remarks from the Atlantic Free Press:

~snip~
Banana Republic: Chertoff, Chiquita and Right-Wing Death Squads
Written by Chris Floyd
Thursday, 02 August 2007
by Chris Floyd

As Jonathan Schwarz recently noted, there is a deeply discouraging sameness about the outrages that dissenting writers must address — and a new front-page story in the Washington Post is a perfect example. In fact, it's a piece that could have been written any time in the last 100 years or more: "Feds Look the Other Way While United Fruit Company Peddles Death and Corruption in Latin America."

Today of course, the infamous United Fruit of yore (whose machinations in Guatemala led to a CIA coup that set off decades of mass-murdering chaos) is known by the more perky name of Chiquita, and conjures up cheery pictures of childhood banana-munching around the family table. But while corporations may change their spots (or their peels) and their personnel over the years, the nature of the beast remains much the same, because its raison d'etre remains the same: maximizing profit. And United Fruit/Chiquita has traditionally been willing to push the banana boat way out when it comes to ensuring that its exploitation of cheap labor remains undisturbed.

In the case of Colombia, this meant paying an officially designated terrorist gang — the vicious killers of the rightwing United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) — to keep Chiquita's operations running smoothly in the war-torn nation. A whole sordid history could be written about the extensive intertwining of American government and corporate interests with AUC and the other rightwing Colombian militias, but for our purposes here it is enough to note that Chiquita not only paid AUC for protection from leftwing militias, it also took an active and direct role in "in smuggling thousands of arms for paramilitaries into the Northern Uraba region, using docks operated by the company to unload thousands of Central American assault rifles and ammunition," as the Post reports. In turn, the paramilitaries used these weapons "to fund operations against peasants, union workers and rivals."
(snip)

But as we all know, terrorism is in the eye of the beholder. And there were many in the Bush Regime who did not regard AUC as real terrorists; after all, they weren't Muslims, and they were only killing a bunch of piss-poor Latinos — along with political opponents of Washington's much-favored Uribe administration in Bogata. What's not to like? As the Post reports:


But legal sources on both sides say there was a genuine debate within the Justice Department about the seriousness of the crime of paying AUC. For some high-level administration officials, Chiquita's payments were not aiding an obvious terrorism threat such as al-Qaeda; instead, the cash was going to a violent South American group helping a major U.S. company maintain a stabilizing presence in Colombia.

As long as a "violent group" supports American policy or corporate interests, they can let rip. We see this dynamic in operation all over the world at the moment. It is part of a long-standing — and open — policy of the Bush Administration to arm and fund violent militias to do its dirty work.....
(snip)

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/2090/81/