Dole Foods and Chiquita may be on the verge of facing justice for "pacifying" their work force, suppressing labor unions and terrorizing peasant squatters in Colombia.
February 16, 2010 |
A federal judge recently refused to dismiss a civil suit filed against Chiquita which charges that the company paid leftist (FARC) guerrillas operating near its plantations in Columbia -- during a period when the FARC killed four American missionaries, according to CNN.
The company's position -- which it has held consistently since it voluntarily disclosed the payments to the Department of Justice -- has been that both left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries forced the company in an extortionate manner to make the payments "to protect the lives of its employees."
But that's become an increasingly untenable position -- especially since some of the same paramilitaries who took the payments have come in from the cold, disarming and submitting to Columbia's "Justice and Peace" process -- which allows them to receive reduced jail time for confessing to all of their terrorist crimes. The problem for Chiquita -- and now for Dole (and potentially for Del Monte) -- is that the confessions reveal a much different story.
One of the ex-paramilitaries -- Jose Gregorio Mangones Lugo (aka "Carlos Tijeras") -- was the former commander of the William Rivas Front of the United Defense Forces ("AUC") -- the group that operated in northern Columbia, in the zone where the companies and their suppliers grew bananas. In a sworn statement Tijeras described the AUC's relationship with the multinational banana companies as "an open public relationship" involving everything from "security services" to the kidnapping and extrajudicial assassination of labor leaders fingered by the companies as "security problems."
More at link:
http://www.alternet.org/story/145696/hiring_death_squads_is_coming_back_to_haunt_u.s._companies
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