As you know, my Friend, dis- and mis-information are tradecraft. And when it comes to self-funding operations, there's self-funding and then there's self-funding.
On the origins of The Octopus, more food for thought -- literally and figuratively:
The Octopus in the Cathedral of SaltPhillip Robertson
Colombia, June–August 2007When the trumpet sounded,
everything was prepared on earth,
and Jehovah divided the world
among Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other corporations:
The United Fruit Company Inc.
reserved for itself the juiciest piece,
the central coast of my own land,
the sweet waist of America.
—Pablo Neruda, “The United Fruit Co.” SNIP...
Americans did not always eat bananas. In fact, the tropical staple only came to the nation’s table through an act of desperation by a Brooklyn railroad speculator named Minor Keith. In 1871, Keith went into business with his uncle, Henry Meiggs, to build a railway from the Costa Rican capital, San José, to the port city of Limón. It was, by all accounts, a miserable undertaking. Italian workers mutinied over the conditions, and inmates from Louisiana prisons were brought in when no one else would do the job. Most of them died—as many as five thousand—trying to complete Meiggs and Keith’s project, an enterprise that was already unpopular and strangled by debt when it finally reached completion in 1890.
Not longer after the railway began operations, it quickly demonstrated itself to be a losing proposition for passenger transport, but Keith wasn’t ready to give up. During the construction of the railway he had started planting banana groves—to feed his workers—on government-ceded land near the tracks, so he decided to try his hand at the export business. He moved his trackside bananas to the port at Limón for free—he already owned the train—and freighters sailed with the fruit to the United States, where Keith sold it for a hefty profit. Soon, his banana gamble was worth more than the railroad. In 1899, on the eve of the twentieth century, Minor Keith merged his United Fruit with Boston Fruit, famous for its giant fleet of white ships, and “the octopus”—as the company is known among Latin American journalists—was born.
Soon its tentacles reached into the governments of Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and Costa Rica, and manipulated the political establishment whenever its interests were threatened. And the company, with its acquisitive genius, kept branching out into new enterprises whenever the need arose. In 1901, United Fruit took over the postal system in Guatemala, and in a number of other countries it controlled the railway systems and the telegraph lines. A CIA-engineered coup codenamed Operation PBSUCCESS overthrew Guatemala’s elected president in 1954, when United Fruit’s business interests were threatened by new land-reform laws. The company wielded unprecedented power in Latin America, growing into a transnational entity whose appetite for resources drove the politics of the entire region.
SNIP...
In 1963, United Fruit found what it was looking for in Urabá, a long-neglected but well-watered Caribbean region of Antioquia, Colombia, closer to Panama than Santa Marta. It was perfect. In the nearby fishing village of Turbo, United Fruit then repeated its well-worn and successful pattern. The company found an underdeveloped stretch of coastline, offered to build a port and bring in jobs in exchange for export concessions, then hung on as long as possible in the face of violent uprisings and popular discontent. What they tried desperately to avoid was the labor unrest that set them back in Santa Marta in the early part of the century. To get around it, United Fruit created an entirely new system of production. It was brilliant; they would create a virtual banana operation.
The big innovation was simple—the company wouldn’t own land at all. If United Fruit owned land, the workers would agitate against them. Instead, Colombian growers would own it and sell their entire crops to the company as contractors. United Fruit put ads in the paper looking for investors and got people who had never worked on a farm in their lives. Dentists and doctors suddenly became ranchers in Urabá. It was a gold rush for cheap land and the promise of big profits with the octopus. To get the growers started in business, the company handed out big development loans to the new arrivals from Medellín who proved they could cultivate bananas. With the loans and the contracts, the company locked the growers into an exclusive arrangement, and for the next five years, 100 percent of everything grown in Urabá went out on United Fruit freighters at the price the company set. Meanwhile, another conservative government in Bogotá promised to hunt down leftist dissenters and hold back the tide of Communism in the hemisphere, a crackdown that would have terrible consequences for the country. In 1966, three years after United Fruit arrived in Urabá, a group of liberal intellectuals that the government had been chasing across the country founded the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and Colombia plunged headlong into forty years of civil war.
SNIP...
The crew of the Nelson had gathered by the railing to watch Garcia, all of them wearing the same grease-stained blue coveralls. They did not wave or make any gesture of greeting. If we could have yelled out questions over the water, they could have explained that they were carrying fruit in refrigerated holds like all the other freighters in the Gulf of Urabá. A longtime member of her crew might have also told us that the Nelson had not always been the Nelson, but had changed her name from the Chiquita Jean when, in 2003, Chiquita Brands sold her back to a Norwegian shipping company along with the rest of its entire fleet. In fact, from the moment of her birth in the Norwegian yards in 1992 until 2003, the ship was a Chiquita freighter, designed to keep the fruit in perfect condition on its long voyage over the oceans. The captain said, “Sometimes they put the drugs on the banana boats.” I was stunned. I had been under the impression that drug traffickers only used small fast boats to move cocaine from place to place, but this isn’t true. The freighters are difficult to search and blend into normal shipping traffic—because that is exactly what they are. They can also haul a ton at a time if the kilo bricks are well hidden.
* * * *
In the late eighties, the ancestor of the AUC began as an extreme right-wing confederation of armed bands—largely funded by cocaine trafficking—that fought the FARC across large regions of Colombia. Naturally, their political interests were allied with the Colombian government, which also wanted to destroy the FARC—but, unlike the army, the AUC could operate without restrictions. In the space of a few short years, the AUC would be responsible for the vast majority of political killings in the country, and the group’s leaders would boast that a significant percentage of the nation’s legislators were under their direct control. From 2000 to the end of 2002, there were at least 11,500 political killings in Colombia, most of which the AUC committed. It was a long-running human rights nightmare.
In 1997, shortly after the AUC arrived in Urabá, it began to consolidate power through a series of massacres and assassinations intended to drive out the FARC, which had organized in the banana fields. Swept up in the paramilitary net were civilians who had no connection to any armed groups. A large number of villagers and workers were summarily executed after being tortured or fingered as sympathetic to the FARC. Many of the killings took place around river towns. AUC gunmen would arrive, assemble the villagers in a central place and begin to interrogate them. Often, they were killed regardless of their answers. Establishing guilt in this system is just a pretext for widespread murder. It was a tremendous success. Eventually, the AUC controlled the entire banana-growing region of Urabá, any leftist agitators were in hiding, and the AUC had access to the Chiquita port. They controlled it, but the commanders were still engaged in a brutal fight for control of the banana and coca fields. They faced a serious logistics problem. The paramilitary group was winning, but it badly needed war material to expand its influence.
On November 5, 2001, four years after the AUC arrived in Urabá, a mysterious shipment of thousands of AK-47 assault rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition arrived at the Chiquita docks, a lethal cargo that went directly to the AUC commanders. Aside from an Organization of American States (OAS) report that focused on the two Israeli arms dealers who arranged the deal from Guatemala and Panama, there have been few details to emerge about how the weapons were handled on the Colombian side. It is also true that people directly associated with the shipment have had a tendency to disappear. The Mexican captain of the Otterloo, Jesús Iturrios Maciél, sailed with the ship on November 9 to Barranquilla and then vanished. The shipping company that owned the Otterloo closed its offices in Panama a few days after news of the weapons broke in a Colombian newspaper. The information in the OAS report suggests that someone formed the company just to deliver the weapons to the AUC.
In a front-page deal reached with the US government this year, Chiquita pleaded guilty to making millions of dollars in payments to a group on the State Department list of foreign terrorist organizations: the AUC. Lawyers for the company argued that they were forced into the making payments out of fear for the safety of its workers. Chiquita also admitted that they had a similar arrangement with the FARC. The result of the plea deal was a $25 million fine for a business that earned $3.9 billion in revenue in 2006, and there were no charges filed over the weapons shipment. It is not surprising that Chiquita Brands was forced to make protection payments to armed groups operating around their plantations, but that is not the entire story.
In March 2007, Chiquita told CNN that the weapons shipment and the protection payments to the paramilitaries were unrelated. This may well be true—the weapons shipments to the AUC were connected to a dark series of events at the company’s port. The Colombian government cast doubt on the company’s claims of being the victim of extortion by the AUC. Mario Iguarán, the Colombian attorney general, said, “It was a criminal relationship: money and arms for the bloody pacification of Urabá.”
CONTINUED...
http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2007/fall/robertson-octopus-cathedral-salt/ Carcass is right. Gen. Smedley D. Butler made us acutely aware of exactly how United Fruit was one of the Dulles Brothers' old haunts. Heh heh.
Here's something that's true, no matter the spin: Your country really appreciates you standing up to these interests, formercia.
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