Reply #2: More background from Salon:

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A "false and misleading picture"? The Enquirer's lawyers may have found it necessary to bend over fast and far. But in fact the "Chiquita Secrets Revealed" series presents a damning, carefully documented array of charges, most of them "untainted" by those purloined executive voice mails. Gallagher's and McWhirter's allegations are largely based on old-fashioned reportorial legwork: land records in Central America, interviews with environmental scientists and trade unions, lawsuit records, leaked corporate memoranda and the reporters' own visits to workers' villages and camps.

Consider:

In Honduras, Guatemala and Colombia, Chiquita "secretly controls dozens of supposedly independent banana companies," the articles charge, evading laws limiting foreign companies' ownership of farms by setting up local fronts for the corporation's under-the-table investments. One Honduran lawyer who works for Chiquita openly told the reporters that the corporation was trying to "hide its assets" to evade ownership restrictions, to "get rid of its Honduran labor union" and protect itself from "lawsuits and child labor law violations."

Throughout much of Latin America, McWhirter and Gallagher charge, Chiquita subsidiaries spray plantations with highly toxic pesticides banned in the United States and Europe, in direct violation of an agreement with environmentalists. They uncovered the autopsy report of an 18-year-old agricultural worker at a Chiquita subsidiary in Costa Rica who died after working in a recently sprayed field. "He didn't have any experience in this kind of job and he wasn't using any protective gear like gloves and mask either," one of the young man's co-workers had told Costa Rican authorities. The company refuses to allow independent scientific researchers to study the impact of pesticides on its plantations; workers are exposed to pesticides without protective clothing, and runoff from Chiquita pesticides contaminates workers' drinking water.

Chiquita security guards, according to the Enquirer series, are widely accused of using "brute force to enforce their authority on plantations operated or controlled by Chiquita. In an internationally controversial case, Chiquita called in the Honduran military to enforce a court order to evict residents of a farm village; the village was bulldozed and villagers run out at gunpoint."

McWhirter and Gallagher also detailed the precarious economic condition of workers on Chiquita plantations.

To repeat, none of these charges -- none -- depend on Chiquita's hacked voice mails. The series does present one allegation to which the voice mails are central: that company executives bribed Colombian officials to gain use of a government warehouse. And there, the voice mail messages Gallagher recorded, legally or not, were deeply revealing of Chiquita's mind-set. "We can only fire him with cause because of his involvement in the Colombian problem if we file a criminal charge against him with Colombian authorities," the series quoted company lawyer David Hills saying of another executive. "Clearly we would not want to do that because we would be implicating ourselves." Another message caught company Vice Chairman Keith Lindner suggesting the company muscle Panama's foreign minister out of a European Union trade mission deemed not in Chiquita's best interests.

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http://www.salon.com/media/1998/07/08media.html