-OpEd-
BOGOTÁ — The tag on its bananas looks cheerful and exotic but the United Fruit Company, which now goes by Chiquita Brands, has an infamous history in Central America and Colombia. Its truckload of crimes includes spreading the black sigatoka plague as one way of robbing farmers of their land, ruthless exploitation of its workers who were at times treated little better than slaves and all-but inciting massacres like the 1928 killing of farm hands in Colombia who’d dared to go on strike.
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In 1954, the firm was involved in a CIA-organized coup against Guatemala’s President Jacobo Árbenz, a democratically elected leader who initiated farming and labor reforms to improve the living and working conditions of all employees. Beside the core business of producing bananas and other fruits, the firm has, with bloodstained hands, helped produce authoritarian regimes.
The company is the grim protagonist of Mamita Yunai, a novel on its iniquities by the Costa Rican writer Carlos Luis Fallas.
Recently a United States tribunal found Chiquita (‘Little Gal’) guilty of financing the paramilitaries of the United Self-Defense Force of Colombia (AUC or Autodefensas unidas de Colombia) and their crimes, including systematic rights violations in the Urabá and Magdalena departments. We might recall — even as memory tends to fade in Colombia — that it was convicted once before and fined in 2007, for financing gunmen between 1997 and 2004.
Wreaking havoc
In its recent ruling a South Florida court found the firm responsible for the criminal consequences of aiding paramilitary militias in Colombia, in the wake of complaints filed by a number of victims’ families. And while this was not the only complaint filed against Chiquita, in this case the court ruled in favor of eight of the nine families that had persisted for almost 20 years in demanding justice for the murder of their relatives. Nor is this likely to be the last court case against Chiquita, that is before posterity’s judgment.
In its heyday, the firm wreaked havoc, and sowed misery, in the Zona Bananera district of Magdalena in northern Colombia, always with the connivence of weak and inept governments in Bogotá that seemed incapable of standing up to Washington. The firm’s penchant for hellish work conditions found its most horrific expression in 1928, when troops were called in to shoot at strikers, provoking, as the U.S. embassy in Bogotá observed, the deaths of no less than 1,000 people.
And yet the firm has, inadvertently no doubt, contributed to our literary riches. The socio-demographic impact of its activities is cited in the Gabriel García Márquez novella, Leaf Storm, while a section of 100 Years of Solitude describes the 1928 killing of banana workers.Chiquita’s tyranny in Guatemala sets the stage for a trilogy of novels by the 1967 Nobel laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias, Strong Wind, The Green Pope and The Eyes of the Interred.
Must pay the price
Now, Chiquita must pay the families of eight Colombians (among thousands worked or shot to death in Colombia) some million. EarthRights, an NGO representing the victims, praised the ruling as a message to all big firms inclined to put crime in the service of profit. And in contrast with 2007 when Chiquita’s million fine went straight to the U.S. Treasury, the money is going to the victims of paramilitary violence.
The ruling will shine a spotlight on the way the rich and powerfull backed thugs and gangsters in this country
The ruling will again shine a spotlight on the way the rich and powerful have backed thugs and gangsters in this country: because they are more than one, big banana firm. As one notorious gunman Carlos Castaño said once, paramilitaries had six big backers in Colombia, which he suggested included members of the Church and the business world.
The Florida verdict will serve not just to open the door to more compensatory payments to the victims of violence, but to help clarify the reality of life in Colombia over the past century. That’s for posterity. Court evidence may corroborate the revelations of interned gangsters like Salvatore Mancuso about who else was behind the people who spent decades murdering at will, stole land and terrorized the countryside.
Not for the first or last time, the court is the modern David’s sling against the Goliath of big, arrogant firms like Chiquita. We might even say as the hostage Ingrid Betancourt did of her enforced silence in the jungle, impunity too must one day end.
