The world’s largest banana company admitted to supplying payoffs to United Self Defense of Colombia, a U.S State Departments designated terrorist group that Forbes magazine descried as being responsible for “kidnapping, torture, disappearance, rape, murder, beatings, extortion, and drug trafficking.”
The payments, which totalled $1.4 million, occurred between 1997 and 2004. In 2007, Chiquita confessed to the bribes, which CEO Fernando Aguirre described as “protection payments to safeguard our workforce.” Finally, Aguirre added, the company found a “business solution,” and sold its Colombian assets.
Chiquita has a bloody history in Colombia…
…In 1929 it was responsible for quashing a banana worker’s strike; in a single bloody morning, 1,000 workers were killed by banana-company backed forces (the incident is retold in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “100 Years of Solitude”). Chiquita also continues to do business in Colombia – no longer directly, but through independent contractors who face the same situation working for Chiquita as they did when they were Chiquita.
On November 14, 2007, 400 Colombian families filed an $8 billion suit against the banana giant, accusing it of abetting “torture and murder.” An attorney for the families said that the damages would be compensation for “terrorism, war crimes and wrongful death.”
CNN story on the suit.
Chiquita CEO Fernando Aguirre’s statement on Colombia, made to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Chiquita’s history in Colombia is told in Chapter 15 of “Banana.”
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman 
