The dancing woman with the fruit on her head isn't as innocent as you think. It turns out that Chiquita is a terrorist supporter, to the tune of $1.7 million dollars. Ok so it isn't her but the company has been found to have paid off U.S.-identified terror groups. The money went to the AUC in Colombia, a group that has committed terrible atrocities in the highly unstable region.
From the Huffington Post:
In court documents filed Wednesday, federal prosecutors said the Cincinnati-based company and several unnamed high-ranking corporate officers paid about $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004 to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known as AUC for its Spanish initials.
The AUC has been responsible for some of the worst massacres in Colombia's civil conflict and for a sizable percentage of the country's cocaine exports. The U.S. government designated the right-wing militia a terrorist organization in September 2001.
Prosecutors said the company made the payments in exchange for protection for its workers. In addition to paying the AUC, prosecutors said, Chiquita made payments to the National Liberation Army, or ELN, and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, as control of the company's banana-growing area shifted.
In a violent area like the banana-growing region of Colombia, paramilitary groups are constantly at war and corporate money is a sizeable income in order to pay for weapons. The protection money ended up costing the company a lot more than they thought. Their settlement with the Justice Department wound up at $25 million dollars. The company's attorneys advised corporate executives not to make those payments, yet they did so anyway according to court documents. Chiquita thought their problems had ended when they sold their Columbia division three years ago, but now it has come back to bite them and the taste does not come close to a ripe banana.
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