U.S. bending rules on Colombia terror?

Source: L.A. Times

U.S. bending rules on Colombia terror?
Several lawmakers say multinationals that aid violent groups in return for protection are not being prosecuted.
By Josh Meyer, Times Staff Writer
July 22, 2007


WASHINGTON — For more than a decade, leftist guerrilla and right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia have kidnapped or killed civilians, trade union leaders, police and soldiers by the hundreds and profited by shipping cocaine and heroin to the United States.

In that time, several American multinational corporations have been accused of essentially underwriting those criminal activities — in violation of U.S. law — by providing cash, vehicles and other financial assistance as insurance against attacks on their employees and facilities in the South American nation.
(snip)

The lawmakers say that, in the cases of U.S. corporations in Colombia, the Justice Department has failed to adequately enforce U.S. laws that make it a crime to knowingly provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization — and they have opened their own investigation.

Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.), who is leading the effort, has questioned whether the Bush administration is putting the interests of U.S. conglomerates ahead of its counter-terrorism agenda.


Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-chiquita22jul22,0,186594.story?coll=la-home-center

On those grounds a lot of otherwise good Iraqis are having the door slammed shut permanently with no hope of fleeing to the US because.. well, they support *terror*. Ugh.

But I may be wrong.

I have no confidence people writing about the US 'bending rules on Colombian terror' really have any idea which is which insofar as US corporations are concerned and so simply assume the worst. Or one could view the standard for corporations being so much more lenient than that for individuals. I'm not trying to equate the two at all. I'm pointing out the context of 'support for terror' laws.

Witnesses ranging from a former Colombian military officer to an American human rights expert testified before Congress today that paramilitary groups are murdering trade unionists in Colombia at a rate unparalleled in the world and on the dime of multinational corporations based in the United States.

Francisco Ramirez Cuellar, president of Sintraminercol, the Colombian mine workers union, and author of, "The Profits of Extermination, How U.S. Corporate Power is Destroying Colombia," told the Congressmen there is proof that Drummond Ltd., the Colombian subsidiary of Alabama-based Drummond Co., Inc., paid paramilitaries to kill three union officials at Drummond. And, he said, several other American companies, including Ohio-based Chiquita Brands International, have been involved in similar practices. ~snip~

Another witness, Edwin Guzman, formerly a sergeant in the Colombian Army whose assignment at one point included patrolling a mine owned by Drummond, told the Congressmen from four committees and subcommittees that conducted the hearing that one way to suppress the violence is to forbid multinational corporations operating in Colombia to pay illegal groups, such as the paramilitaries. ~snip~

Guzman, who had to flee Colombia because his life was threatened after he began testifying there about the connection among Drummond, the Colombian military and illegal paramilitaries, told the Congressmen that Drummond gave the paramilitaries vehicles to patrol the company's coal property. In addition, Guzman testified, part of his training in the army was to kill trade unionists "legally or illegally." ~snip~

http://unionreview.com/usw-links-colombian-assasins-american-companies-payrolls-testifies-congress

expressing your "gut feeling" that the real problem is simply that folk, who concerned about corporate funding for Colombian death squads, just can't distinguish between monies paid as ransom for kidnapped victims, monies paid to extortionists, and monies paid for assassinations.

Perhaps you should consider a career as a mob lawyer: "When my client gave his Uncle Vico millions of dollars, vehicles, and guns, he was just trying to get Vico to leave him and his dry-cleaning shop alone: he had no idea Vico would whack all the other dry-cleaners in town."

Seven posts? Christ.

Look, the simple problem is that these claims are a lot of allegations and very little proof. You're also totally mistaking what I said as claims. I'm not claiming anything. I said I don't have any confidence that this is anything but assuming the worst. Perhaps the worst is true, but it's an assumption, until people like that... warlord in reply #6 of yours, actually spell out what the payments were for. That's important information.

...Or is it?

If you want to take the point of view that it doesn't matter why, well, that's the same position as the US government takes when it says that using illegal narcotics funds Al Qaeda, and therefore hard drug addicts are sponsors of terror. If that's what you think and feel, go ahead. [Edited out a typo.)

I'm not trying to provide evidence for a court of law or public opinion. I stated my own opinion. It is no more than that. It is not fact, and I did not in any way claim that it was fact...

In other words, I came to talk, not to win a fight. You can have the 'victory'. That was never something I sought over you to begin with.

you continue to push a completely unsupported opinion that the companies are being unfairly accused, after paying "ransom," as in this earlier thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2873322&mesg_id=2873322

Surely if your opinion were based on fact, you could supply such facts.

Or perhaps you are simply not interested in facts: I suppose that might explain your yelping when someone else provides some facts

I see that's how you're reading it, but I did not say that the companies are being unfairly accused. Not at all. I'm saying that the US government paints "support for terror" with a very broad brush. And you know what? It does. That's fact. It in no way disproves the guilt of Chiquita and IN NO WAY DID I SUGGEST IT DID.

So here you sit waiting for me to supply facts to back up my accusation that the companies are being unfairly accused, an accusation I never made, never will make lacking compelling evidence to the contrary, and have no interest in making whatsoever. No wonder you're disappointed.

But with all due respect to the other poster on this thread citing a Colombian prosecutor and saying "I don't think he's just guessing," let me make my position crystal clear. ALLEGATION IS NOT PROOF. This is not a rule I bend for Chiquita, for Democratic politicians, for Republican politicians, for anyone. Allegation, to me, is not proof. For that matter, allegation is not fact. You're trying to make allegation into fact here. That's your right, but you have a lot of gall to be encouraging me to take the words of a prosecutor, unsupported by evidence submitted into a court of law, as proof.

My opinion that allegation is not proof is not based on facts. I'm sorry, it's not.

It's based on principle.

Sued for Arming, Funding Their Killers

The Cincinnati-based fruit company Chiquita was sued Thursday for funding, arming and supporting terrorist organizations in Colombia. The human rights groups EarthRights International filed the class action lawsuit on behalf of six Colombians whose relatives had allegedly been murdered by a Colombian paramilitary group that was partially funded by Chiquita.

The lawsuit alleges that the banana giant funneled money and guns to a rightwing death squad that murdered thousands of people and shipped untold amounts of cocaine to the United States. ~snip~

At the time Chiquita defended its actions saying it fell victim to an extortion racket that threatened its employees. ~snip~

But authorities in Colombia have taken a different view. Colombia's attorney general said in March that he will seek the extradition of eight Chiquita employees allegedly involved in making the payments. The attorney general, Mario Iguaran, said: “The relationship was not one of the extortionist and the extorted but a criminal relationship... When you pay a group like this you are conscious of what they are doing.” ~snip~

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/20/1420235

AP, BOGOTA
Tuesday, May 01, 2007, Page 7

The country's chief prosecutor stood between the white plastic-sheathed remains of two dismembered teenage sisters. On the rust-colored dirt around him lay remains of nearly 60 newly unearthed victims of paramilitary death squads.

Not just the executioners but those who bankrolled them must be brought to justice, Mario Iguaran told reporters last week at the mass grave in Colombia's eastern plains.

"You can clearly see that they didn't pay for security, but for blood," said Iguaran, who is in Washington this week seeking aid for his overburdened office and help obtaining evidence against US-based multinationals he's investigating for allegedly financing death squads. ~snip~

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2007/05/01/2003359035

From your article, a memorable line:

"You can clearly see that they didn't pay for security, but for blood"

He doesn't seem like a man who's just guessing.

Here's another comment he made, earlier in the year:

posted March 22, 2007 at 12:20 p.m. EDT

Colombia seeks eight in Chiquita terrorist scandal
The banana conglomorate has confessed to paying right-wing paramilitaries.

~snip~
Speaking in Bogotá, Mr. Iguaran denied Chiquita's claims that the payments were made under duress.

"The relationship was not one of the extortionist and the extorted but a criminal relationship," Iguaran told a handful of foreign correspondents in an interview.

"It's a much bigger, more macabre plan," he added. "Who wouldn't know what an illegal armed group like the AUC does . . . by exterminating and annihilating its enemies," Iguaran said. "When you pay a group like this you are conscious of what they are doing."
(snip/...)

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0322/p99s01-duts.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
They are flippig DEATH SQUADS, for chrissakes, who've killed over 10,000 Colombian citizens.
Funny that anyone taking the time to offer opinion can't also take the time to find out what he/she's commenting on!

He's got to have the most dangerous job in the whole country right now. Here's a photo of him sitting across from the death squad leader/enormo drug lord, Salvatore Mancuso:

Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent
Saturday May 19, 2007
The Guardian

A jailed warlord has accused the US multinationals Del Monte, Dole and Chiquita of funding rightwing death squads while sourcing bananas from war-torn regions of Colombia.

Salvatore Mancuso, a leader of illegal paramilitary groups, which massacred thousands of people, said each company paid his men one US cent for each box of bananas they exported. Mancuso did not explain why the payments were made but it was common practice for Colombian businesses to pay the paramilitaries a so-called "war tax" - a form of extortion as well as protection against attacks. ~snip~

In a deal with the US justice department, Chiquita recently acknowledged paying paramilitaries $1.7m (£860,000) over six years. It was fined $25m. Chiquita claimed the payments were to protect its workers but campaigners claim some money was used to finance the assassination of union leaders who lobbied for better pay and conditions. ~snip~

http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,,2083366,00.html

Colombian militia leader confesses to massacres


Sibylla Brodzinsky in Medellín
Thursday January 18, 2007
The Guardian



Salvatore Mancuso (left) with paramilitary soldiers near Turbo, Colombia. Photograph: Zoe Selsky/AP

A senior commander of Colombia's rightwing militias has admitted taking part in some of the country's most grisly crimes in the first of what could become a flood of confessions from demobilised paramilitary leaders.

Salvatore Mancuso told a prosecutor in Medellín this week that he was responsible for hundreds of kidnappings, murders and massacres during his 15-year career in the death squads that spread terror throughout Colombia in the name of fighting leftist rebels.

In two days of testimony, Mancuso admitted to directly participating in or ordering the murder of hundreds of people, among them mayors, union leaders and peasants. With presentations projected from his laptop computer, Mancuso listed in chronological order the massacres at El Aro, Mápiripan, El Salado and other towns, all of which he called "anti-subversive operations". He also named the victims.
(snip)

Mancuso recounted how, in each operation, the paramilitaries had direct or indirect collaboration with government forces. But he has implicated only military officers who are dead or already convicted for the crimes he described. He said he planned the El Aro massacre with General Alfonso Manosalva, commander of the army's 4th Brigade, who is now dead. In 2003, a Colombian court convicted Mancuso in absentia for the massacre.
(snip/...)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/colombia/story/0,,1992731,00.html

Mon Jul 9, 2007 6:50PM EDT

By Verna Gates

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama (Reuters) - U.S. coal company Drummond went on trial on Monday on charges it paid right-wing paramilitary gunmen to kill union leaders at a mine it operates in a war-torn corner of northern Colombia. ~snip~

The lawsuit was filed by the International Labor Rights Fund and Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers union in March 2002 and seeks unspecified damages on behalf of the dead union leaders' families. ~snip~

Masked gunmen forced Colombian union leaders Valmore Locarno, Victor Orcasita and Gustavo Soler off buses and killed them in 2001. The three Drummond employees had argued with the mining company over wage and safety issues.

Four witnesses have come forward claiming Drummond gave cash and cars to paramilitary fighters in exchange for killing the men. ~snip~

http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN7928491520070709

Colombian Free Trade Pact Shot Down
Monday, 23 July 2007, 1:52 pm

Colombian Free Trade Pact Shot Down: One Step Forward for the U.S., One Back for Canada


Recently, the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives staunchly denounced the previously initialed free trade agreement (FTA) with Colombia, while postponing (at least for several months) the ratification of a comparable trade measure with Peru and Panama. This is merely the latest devastating blow to the standing of Colombia’s hard-line right-wing president, Àlvaro Uribe, whose disapproval rating hit a high of 27 percent in a Gallup Poll published on July 14. Not only is this a heavy blow against Uribe delivered by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her senior colleagues, but it also is an embarrassing setback for the Bush administration, which had elevated Uribe into being Washington’s closest regional ally and made Colombia into the third largest recipient of U.S. assistance. Meanwhile, on July 16, the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited Uribe in pursuit of a Canada-Colombia FTA in what could not be considered a high water mark for exemplary diplomacy.

The advocacy of ending a FTA with Colombia is not a surprise to many, especially after Speaker Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY), and Trade Subcommittee Chairman Sander Levin (D-MI) issued an ominous statement on June 29: “We believe there must first be concrete evidence of sustained results on the ground in Colombia, and members of Congress will continue working with all interested parties to help achieve this end before consideration of any FTA. Consequently, we cannot support the Colombia (agreement) at this time.” The statement was made in reference to a series of events such as possible ties between the Uribe’s administration and the country’s notoriously brutal paramilitary groups, one of the highest counts of human rights abuses in the hemisphere, the woeful failure of Plan Colombia to derail drug-trafficking, his inability to apprehend or demobilize groups labeled as “terrorists” by the U.S. and an ending string of scandals and acts of corruption including, the misuse of U.S. funds, as well his imperious removal of Washington’s long-favored policy of being able to extradite Colombian felons upon request.

What Made the Democrats Walk Away?
In recent months, President Uribe, when he was not squandering money on U.S. public relations firms, made two unprecedented lobbying trips to Washington in hopes of swaying Congress in his favor. This is partly attributable, in short order, to the current investigations against twelve of Uribe’s congressional allies who are awaiting trial for possible connections to right-wing death squads and paramilitary groups—a claim he denies despite years of rampant rumors.
(snip)

Another leading factor motivating the punitive rhetoric from the House Democrats is that in 2006, Colombia led the world in the number of trade union officials assassinated, with more than 70 deaths confirmed. This is one of the particularly damaging statistics of human rights abuses that have plagued the country and have further whittled down Colombia’s supporters in Washington. Additionally, the appalling number of more than three million displaced Colombian civilians has kept Bogotá in the crossfire of criticism for its daily derelictions of such internally displaced persons, Uribe’s indifference to issues of social injustice and Colombian’s incredibly unequal distribution of wealth.

More:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0707/S00308.htm

‘Uncomfortable Coincidences’
The latest evidence that ties Colombia’s President to the paramilitaries
by Paul Haste
July 23, 2007

The presidential candidate and the ‘Comandante’

Colombia’s compliant editorialists refer to the revelations as ‘incómodas coincidencias’ - ‘uncomfortable coincidences.’ President Álvaro Uribe claims the accusations are ‘insinuaciones malévolas’ - ‘malevolent insinuations’ - and has, as usual, attacked the messenger, criticising American newspapers, Colombian opposition politicians and even México in an attempt to divert attention from the latest evidence that ties him to the paramilitaries.

The first is a video that shows Álvaro Uribe at a private meeting on 31st October 2001 to organise support for his 2002 presidential campaign. According to the Colombian political magazine Semana, five of the 13 people present were associated with the paramilitaries in the far right AUC militia, and one of them, Frenio Sánchez Carreño, was a notorious narco boss whose militia name was ‘Comandante Esteban.’

Comandante Esteban had been complicit in at least 80 assassinations and also the forced displacement of more than 3000 peasant workers, according to Colombia’s DAS intelligence service, whose agents were actively searching for him at this time. He had threatened local journalists as far back as December 2000, and just twelve days before meeting with Álvaro Uribe, he had signed an AUC ‘communiqué’ that declared union and worker organisers to be ‘military targets.’

The meeting pledged to support Uribe’s presidential campaign, and also other rightist candidates in the 2002 Senate and Congress elections, in the hope that legislation promoted by these politicians would ‘legitimise’ the paramilitaries. These militias succeeded in electing their candidates in 2002 - AUC national boss Salvatore Mancuso has since admitted that intimidation and bought votes, or threats and assassinations, allowed many rightist candidates to be ‘elected’ unopposed - and soon received a payback from the politicians in the form of virtual impunity for their crimes.

The DAS arrested Álvaro Uribe’s supporter, Comandante Esteban, just six weeks after the 31st October meeting, and charged him with aggravated homicide and attempted homicide, among other crimes. For ‘reasons that are still not clear’, according to Semana, and after Uribe became president, he was freed from jail in 2005. Now, as Frenio Sánchez Carreño, the authorities have offered a $5,000 reward for his arrest, accusing him of leading supposedly ‘demobilised’ paramilitaries reprised as criminal gangs.

More:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=9&ItemID=13357

This may be meaningful to you, taken from recent testimony by a member of Colombian death squads, concerning his personal involvement in election corruption during the last Presidential election:

Ochoa claimed that he took thousands of dollars in cash - paramilitaries’ narcotics profits - in suitcases to the capital, Bogotá, to finance rightist candidates in the 2002 elections. He claimed that the paramilitaries and Mancuso contributed $2 million to the president’s campaign, and that he also organised campaigns to intimidate voters in Medellín to ensure Álvaro Uribe was elected.

Mancuso said ‘that the paramilitaries should finance the (presidential) campaign because one of the promises is that there will be a law that should anyone be accused or suspected of being in the paramilitaries, they will be saved,’ Ochoa related, ‘so we made sure that all the votes had to be for Uribe.’ In Medellín’s barrios, people confirmed that the paramilitaries patrolled the streets that election day, demanding to see residents’ cedulas, (identification cards), and warning opposition supporters ‘not to show at the polls if you’re not going to vote for Uribe,’ as one barrio activist recalled.
(snip)

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=9&ItemID=13357

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Don't forget, Congressional Democrats are pulling away from Alvaro Uribe, while _{George W. Bush} remains deeply devoted to him, intending to give him as many billions as humanly possible, Congress willing.

Testimony of Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, Esq.
Principal Specialist on Colombia, Human Rights Watch
June 28, 2007 Hearing

United States House of Representatives

Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight, and Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere
Committee on Education and Labor, Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions, and Subcommittee on Workforce Protections

... Today Colombia continues to present the highest rate of violence against trade unionists in the world. According to the National Labor School, 72 trade unionists were killed in 2006, an increase from the 70 reported killed in 2005.

The government reports 25 trade unionist killings in 2006. However, it reaches this artificially low number by arbitrarily excluding unionized teachers and peasant unions from the category of trade unionists. Once unionized teachers are included, according to the government’s official numbers, last year 58 trade unionists were killed, a substantial increase over the 40 killed the previous year ...

The government’s exclusion of unionized teachers from the total of killed trade unionists introduces a serious distortion in its statistics on trade unionist killings, given that the teachers’ unions are the ones that have suffered the greatest violence. The National Labor School reports 825 killings of teachers’ union members since 1986. Other unions that have been especially targeted are those in the agricultural sector.

While it is true that the number of killings reported by the National Labor School has dropped from 197 in 2001 to 72 in 2006, the problem remains very serious, with more than 400 trade unionists killed during the Uribe administration ...

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/07/23/colomb16458.htm

Colombia has a long history of union organizing. It also has a long history of violence against trade unionists.

Perhaps the most well-known early case of anti-union violence was the massacre of striking United Fruit Company workers in 1928, which was famously memorialized by Gabriel García Márquez in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. While accounts of this case and estimates of the dead greatly vary, the general story that is reported by labor rights groups in Colombia today is that military troops were sent in to end the strike, and ended up opening fire indiscriminately on the crowd of workers, allegedly killing anywhere from a few dozen to three thousand workers.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s there were several reported instances of killings of unionists, often by government forces. However, it was with the rise of paramilitary groups in the 1980s that we started to see a dramatic increase in the killings of trade unionists.

Colombia’s paramilitary groups developed over two decades ago, as death squads formed by drug traffickers and wealthy landowners to defend their interests from guerrillas or other competing groups. During the 1990s, paramilitaries grew rapidly, taking control of large areas of the country, including valuable land and strategic corridors for illegal drug trafficking and arms movements.

Paramilitary groups have deliberately targeted trade unions, claiming they were allies of or fronts for guerrillas. When asked in 2001 about their apparent willingness to blindly attack civilians, Carlos Castaño, who was then the head of the AUC paramilitary coalition, responded: "Blind attacks? Us? Never! There’s always a reason. The trade unionists, for example. They keep people from working! That’s why we kill them.”
(snip)

Good ol' Crazy Carlos! He neither laughed last, nor laughed best. He was murdered by fellow death squaders, by the order of his own brother, another death squad/drug business gentleman, his body being found last year, I believe.







Bogotá—On May 3, 2001, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) named Colombian paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño to its annual list of the ten worst enemies of the press. Six weeks later, a reporter from the Paris daily Le Monde caught up with Castaño in northern Colombia and asked how he felt about the distinction.

"I would like to assure you that I have always respected the freedom and subjectivity of the press," said the leader of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), Colombia's leading right-wing paramilitary organization. "But I have never accepted that journalism can become an arm at the service of one of the actors of the conflict. Over the course of its existence the AUC has executed two local journalists who were in fact guerrillas." He no longer remembered their names.

Since 1999, in fact, forces under Castaño's command have been linked to the murders of at least four journalists, the abduction and rape of one reporter, and threats against many others, according to CPJ research. "Against the violent backdrop of Colombia's escalating civil war, in which all sides have targeted journalists, Carlos Castaño stands out as a ruthless enemy of the press," CPJ's citation noted.

This self-confessed murderer of journalists is now turning to the local press in an effort to rehabilitate his image in Colombia. To that end, Castaño has launched a uniquely Colombian public relations campaign, seemingly modeled after tactics employed by legendary drug lord Pablo Escobar. Not unlike Escobar, Castaño's strategy combines a charm offensive with forthright acknowledgements of the AUC's use of terror.
(snip/...)

http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2001/Colombia_sep01/Colombia_sep01.html

Source: Miami Herald/L. A. Times

CHIQUITA BRANDS INQUIRY
Details of Colombia payoffs, U.S. plea agreement sought
Congressional investigators want to know more about Chiquita's payments to violent groups and the handling of the subsequent federal investigation.
BY JOSH MEYER
Los Angeles Times Service

WASHINGTON -- As part of an inquiry into corporate payments to violent groups in Colombia, some members of Congress want more details about the U.S. Justice Department's handling of the Chiquita Brands International Inc. case, including whether the department was too lenient and why it took four years to file criminal charges after the banana company admitted to making payoffs.
(snip)

Current and former Justice officials said in interviews with the Los Angeles Times that the prosecutors handling the Chiquita case wanted to bring charges of material support of terrorism against the banana company and to pursue charges against some of its top executives by early 2004, if not sooner.

Instead, the company was charged three years later with one count of ''engaging in transactions with a specially designated global terrorist'' and levied a $25 million fine, payable over five years. No executives were charged.
(snip)

Chiquita's ''lawyers went all over DC to have meetings (with top officials at Justice, the Treasury Department and elsewhere, often without the front-line prosecutors knowing about it),'' one of the senior Justice Department officials said. ``They were trying to cause political pressure.''


Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/579/story/180117.html

If - as a banana company - you make deals with terrorists acting
within a banana republic, this cannot be named terrorism.
It's making a profit. You are only allowed to call this terrorism,
if it's directed against the interests of certain global business
groups.

</sarcasm off>

If you're making money by dealing with terrorists, it's good old free market capitalism.

That was in Sherrod Brown's 2004 book "Myths of Free Trade".

including this gem :

Eli Black

In 1966, AMK, originally a producer of milk-bottle caps, acquired the John Morrell Company, a meat producer. AMK's President, Eli Black, thus began his campaign to dominate the American food market. In 1969, Eli Black bought 733,000 shares of United Fruit in a single day, and became the largest shareholder. In 1970, Black effected the merger of AMK and United Fruit, and renamed the company "United Brands". The company, beset by unions, taxation and hurricanes in its Central American strongholds, suffered horrendous losses, and its share of the fruit market fell behind the Dole company for the first time.

In February, 1975, Eli Black committed suicide by jumping from his office window in the Pan-Am building in New York. Later that year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission exposed a scheme by United Brands to bribe Honduran President Osvaldo Lopez Arellano with $1.25 million, with the promise of another $1.25 million upon the reduction of certain export taxes. Trading in United Brands stock was halted and Lopez was ousted in a military coup.

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=United%20Fruit%20Company

Thanks for the link. Gotta go right now.

In 1969 Zapata Corporation acquired a controlling interest in United Fruit. The president of Zapata was Robert Gow, a friend of the Bush family. Robert's father, Ralph Gow, was on United Fruit's board of directors.

-snip



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company

In 1998 the Cincinnati Enquirer (usually a craven shill for local corporations) inexplicably grew a pair and did a devastating series on Chiquita's business practices. Bear in mind that Chiquita is a Cincinnati corporation, so this was pretty uncharacteristic behavior for them.

Turns out their reporter bent some rules in gathering information for the series, and the Enquirer paid Chiquita $10 million and agreed to a front page retraction of the entire thing -- bear in mind that the reporter's methods don't bear upon the veracity of the story. In fact, it was his underhanded methods (voicemails accessed with the help of a disgruntled employee) that pretty much ensures that what he wrote was 100% true.

Anywho, they pulled the story from their website, but not until others captured it and reposted it. It's a pretty disgusting tale -- and of course the owners of Chiquita are loyal Bushies and good Christians.

http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/chiquita/

Ta for that:toast:

surely won't be the last (unless we make some BIG changes... not the nibble around the edges crap).

Justice under fire for stance on corporations in Colombia
Tuesday, July 24, 2007 - By Josh Meyer, WASHINGTON, Los Angeles Times

~ snip ~
Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass., who is leading the effort, has questioned whether the Bush administration is putting the interests of U.S. conglomerates ahead of its counterterrorism agenda.

Even the plea agreement reached with Chiquita in March -- in which it acknowledged making the illegal payments -- has been criticized as far too lenient by many outside legal experts and some high-ranking Justice Department prosecutors.

"I think they've escaped any kind of appropriate sanctions," Delahunt said in an interview last week.

"We will take a good hard look at how American multinationals operate around the world, using Colombia as a model," said Delahunt, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight. "It really deserves an exhaustive effort to examine where we need legislation, and if there are gaps in our criminal code that allow U.S. corporations to aid or abet violence in other countries that erode our credibility and our moral standing in the world."

More:
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/international/2007/07/24/115897/Justice-under.htm