Chiquita Sues to Block Release of Files on Colombia Terrorist Payments

Washington, D.C., April 8, 2013 – Chiquita Brands International last week filed a "reverse" Freedom of Information lawsuit to block the release of records to the National Security Archive on the company's illegal payments to Colombian terrorist groups, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court.

At issue are thousands of documents the company turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from 1998-2004 as part of an investigation of the company's illegal transactions with leftist insurgents and right-wing paramilitaries from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).

Two years ago, the Archive published "The Chiquita Papers," a declassified collection of more than 5,000 pages of internal Chiquita documents turned over to the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as part of a criminal investigation of more than $1.7 million in payments to the AUC over six years, and for nearly three years after the group was formally designated as a terrorist organization. That case resulted in a 2007 sentencing agreement in which Chiquita admitted to more than ten years of payments to a variety of Colombian guerrilla and paramilitary groups.

The Chiquita Papers included evidence that Chiquita and its Colombian subsidiary had received tangible benefits from those transactions, undermining one of the key aspects of the company's defense: that it had never received "any actual security services or actual security equipment in exchange for the payments." Chiquita's "reverse" FOIA complaint now claims that the news headlines based on the documents were part of "a media campaign to publicize biased mischaracterizations of the documents."

"We strongly reject Chiquita's assertion that we mischaracterized information found in their own corporate records," said Michael Evans, director of the Archive's Colombia Documentation Project. "Chiquita admitted to more than a decade of regular payments to death squads and narcotraffickers," he added. "Now, Chiquita wants to cover up the documents that would let us judge for ourselves whether those payments were extortion or security for banana operations, or both."

Among the evidence that Chiquita did, in fact, benefit from its "sensitive payments" is a 1994 legal memo indicating that Colombian insurgents provided security at some of Chiquita's plantations in Colombia. The memo says that the general manager of Chiquita operations in Turbó told company attorneys that "Guerrilla Groups" were "used to supply security personnel at the various farms." A subsequent draft of the same memo includes annotations asking, "Why is this relevant?" and, "Why is this being written?"

Another document published by the Archive in April 2011 shows that Chiquita also paid right-wing paramilitary forces for security services-including intelligence on guerrilla operations-after the AUC wrested control of the region from insurgents in the mid-1990s. The March 2000 memo, written by Chiquita Senior Counsel Robert Thomas and based on a conversation with managers from Chiquita's wholly-owned subsidiary, Banadex, indicates that paramilitaries formed a front company to disguise "the real purpose of providing security." The unidentified Banadex official said Chiquita "should continue making the payments," because the company "can't get the same level of support from the military." More

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Could the payments made to '1992 May 8 – Chiquita legal memo on whether support for Colombian military counterinsurgency operations through a "trade association of banana exporters" known as Fundiban is a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)' be payments to military officers trained at the 'School of the Americas' the United States Army notorius counter-insurgency training establishment which Since 1946, the SOA has trained over 64,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. These graduates have consistently used their skills to wage a war against their own people. Among those targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, “disappeared,” massacred, and forced into refugee by those trained at the School of Assassins. Editor

 

The struggle to maintain fertile lands continues to decimate Campesino communities in Honduras.

Under the hot sun of a mid-March afternoon, I sat on a plastic chair outside the gracious home of Gregorio Chavez's family in the community of La Panama community, located in the Lower Aguan region of Northern Honduras.

Trees bearing ripe oranges hung over the driveway swaying gently in the breeze, and children and animals gambolled about.

Gregorio's brother Jose offered us a brief, somber welcome before inviting us to accompany him and Gregorio's children on the path that Gregorio walked to tend to his land on July 2, 2012, the last day he was seen alive by his family.

We passed the lush gardens and paused a few hundred yards down the path, to where Jose, his face grim and eyes downcast, gestured to where Gregorio's machete was found in the grass by those who were alarmed when he did not return for dinner on July 2.

Jose could not bear to recount that along with the machete, the search party found blood and other evidence suggesting that Gregorio had been gravely injured, bound and dragged onto the neighbouring property by security forces in the hire of palm oil magnate Miguel Facusse.

Facusse, reportedly the largest landowner in Honduras, claims to own the Paso Aguan plantation that abuts the community of La Panama, though his right to that land is contested by the campesinos, who had legally received the land through agrarian reform initiatives in the previous decades.

Aguan's land conflicts

Members of the community formed a search party and began scouring the area for Gregorio, accompanied by police from the neighbouring town of Trujillo. After four days of increasingly desperate searching, they came across a freshly dug grave on the property occupied by Facusse's Dinant Corporation. As Gregorio's body was being exhumed, Facusse's Orion security forces and soldiers from Honduras' 15th Battalion were observed fleeing the area in Dinant's trucks.

Although Gregorio was found with a plastic bag over his head, authorities declined to conduct any serious, competent investigation into the circumstances surrounding his death. International observers denounced the autopsy as shoddy, and the family was never provided with the official results they believed would confirm the haunting truth, that Gregorio had been tortured before his death.

Tragically, Gregorio's death is not an isolated incident. Instead, it occurred within the context of bloody land conflicts in the Lower Aguan, which must be situated within the global landscape that supports the ability of the Honduran agro-oligarchy and military to act with impunity.

Human rights groups estimate that at least 98 other campesinos have been killed in the Aguan's land conflicts since the 2009 military coup that ousted democratically elected President Mel Zelaya. Because of this and other violence targeting human rights defenders, members of the LGBTI community, lawyers, journalists and others, Honduras is now the murder capital of the world.

Although conflict over the land has been percolating for decades, the post-coup era has been marked by a rapid and harrowing escalation in the violence and repression. Gregorio, a community leader, was presumably targeted for his resistance to the fraud and coercion exerted by Facusse and several other large landowners in amassing large swaths of fertile land that had been legally distributed to the campesinos through agrarian reform initiatives.

Facusse's security forces do not operate in a vacuum, and have been seen working with Honduran troops from the Xatruch III military operation, who in turn have received training from the US Military. US links to the violence do not end with the military - a recent Associated Press expose reported that State Department officials have been dissembling to members of Congress in order to fund the Honduran police despite another Associated Press investigation that outlined current death squad activity conducted by the Honduran police.

In contravention of a US law sponsored by Senator Leahy, money flows to forces controlled by Director General Juan Carlos "El Tigre" Bonilla, believed to be involved in past death squad activity, including three extrajudicial killings a decade ago and suspected involvement in 11 assassinations and disappearances.

Despite widely reported human rights abuses, Facusse's Dinant Corporation has received loans from the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and other multilateral financial institutions. Dinant has also received carbon credits through the United Nations for his production of "green energy". More