Chiquita Charged With Doing Business With Terrorists

[0699]

This coming from the banana connoisseur :eek:

I don't think I could survive without bananas. A banana a day keeps the leg cramps away.

"All you homos look away. I'm getting ready to eat a banana and I don't want you getting all excited."
- Me in the chow hall in Kuwait before we went into Iraq.

 

[Polar Bear]

and so it begins. For those that think we will not send these 8 people down south are mistaken. The Colombian gov last year alone extradited over a 100 drug dealers to the US. If we want to keep w/ the good relationship these men or women will be on the next plane south.

http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs....1/BIZ/703210338/1076/BIZ&template=printpicart
Colombia's chief prosecutor wants eight Chiquita workers extradited
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BOGOTA, Colombia - Colombia's chief prosecutor said Tuesday he will demand the extradition of eight people employed by Chiquita Brands International Inc. accused of being involved in the company's payments to right-wing paramilitaries and leftist rebels to protect its banana-growing operation.
Cincinnati-based Chiquita pleaded guilty Monday in federal court in Washington to one count of doing business with a terrorist organization. The plea is part of a deal with prosecutors that calls for a $25 million fine.
The agreement ended a lengthy Justice Department investigation into the company's financial dealings in Colombia with what the U.S. government deems terrorist groups. Chiquita has said it was forced to make the payments and was acting only to ensure the safety of its workers.
Chief federal prosecutor Mario Iguaran did not identify the people he hopes to extradite, and the U.S. complaint did not identify anyone by name - it simply said that 10 people working for Chiquita or its Banadex subsidiary were involved in the illegal payments.
Chiquita spokesman Mike Mitchell said this week the company was not aware of any extradition requests.

 

[Paddlefoot]

I don't think I could survive without bananas. A banana a day keeps the leg cramps away.

"All you homos look away. I'm getting ready to eat a banana and I don't want you getting all excited."
- Me in the chow hall in Kuwait before we went into Iraq.

No shit, bananas are a staple. I eat at least one a day to keep my pottasium level stable.

There was a guy in my section at DLI, a character from central Texas, who always made some comment when I would start peeling my banana on break.

I'd start eating it and making strange, orgasmic like sounds, finally reaching a "climax" on my final bite, lol.

 

[Chopstick]

I'd start eating it and making strange, orgasmic like sounds, finally reaching a "climax" on my final bite, lol.

Im getting worried about you.:uhh:

 

[Paddlefoot]

Im getting worried about you.:uhh:

I'm more worried about somebody who looks at a banana as some sort of phallic symbol.

I was just messin' with him, it's a military thing. I've matured since then, I only emit a low grunting sound now when I eat a banana.

 

[Polar Bear]

http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/news/ng.asp?n=75283-chiquita-terrorist-funding-banana
Chiquita execs could face extradition for terrorist funding

By Lorraine Heller

3/27/2007- Senior management executives of banana firm Chiquita may face extradition to Colombia to face criminal charges after the company recently pleaded guilty to funding terrorist groups in the country.

However, the firm said it has not as yet been contacted with any extradition requests.

Chiquita's dealings in Colombia have been the focus of a US Department of Justice investigation, which this month resulted in the company being slapped with a $25m fine.

The three-year government inquiry focused on payments made by the company to certain groups in Colombia designated under US law as foreign terrorist organizations.

The leading banana supplier pleaded guilty to making the payments through its Colombian subsidiary, but said it was "forced" to make payments to right- and left-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia to "protect the lives of its employees".
The investigation included an examination of the conduct of a number of Chiquita's employees and directors, and their role in the payments. Company officials may face extradition to Colombia to face criminal charges.

Colombian authorities are said to have made statements saying they will call for the extradition of some company executives, but Chiquita said it has not received any requests and it "doesn't know" if these will be likely.

The firm, which voluntarily disclosed these payments to the Justice Department in April 2003, sold its Colombian subsidiary in 2004.

A document detailing the payments, which were reportedly approved by senior company executives, was filed by the Justice Department in federal court in Washington. The payouts totaled more than $1.7m, according to the court document.

However, Chiquita yesterday told FoodNavigator-USA.com that no individuals have been named or charged by the Justice Department.

According to the firm, the plea agreement reached in recent weeks was a "reasoned solution" to an "admittedly very difficult situation".

Chiquita, which is one of the world's largest banana producers, said it does not expect the fine will impact its ability to operate its business. It said it has recorded a reserve for the full $25m, which is payable in five installments upon sentencing. The hearing is due to take place on June 1, 2007.

However, the firm also continues to be impacted by "challenging" market conditions, including new import regulations in the EU. These have resulted in Chiquita's announcement last week that its banana prices have again risen globally.

Banana prices in Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East rose six percent on a US dollar basis, compared to the year ago period. North American prices also continued to rise, although on a more modest level of one percent.

 

[Gypsy]

Sure will be interesting to see if there is a call for extradition...

 

[pegasus]

You will never look at a banana the same way :)

http://www.brevardtnt.org/Documents/Fuel/bananas.htm

 

[Chopstick]

You will never look at a banana the same way :)

http://www.brevardtnt.org/Documents/Fuel/bananas.htm

I eat at least one banana everyday(no comments from ANYONE!) and I also eat an orange everyday. I just dont feel right if I dont get my banana(again..no comments!)

 

[cb88]

Chiquita (Banana) being sued over funding terrorist group

Colombians sue Chiquita over payments to terror group

NEW YORK (AP) — Victims of Colombia's bloody civil conflict filed an almost $8 billion lawsuit against the U.S. banana importer Chiquita Brands International (CQB) on Wednesday for making payments to a paramilitary group responsible for thousands of killings.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, accuses the company of complicity in hundreds of deaths by financially supporting the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, also known by its Spanish initials, AUC.

The plaintiffs include relatives of 387 people believed to have been killed by the right-wing group, which was responsible for some of the worst massacres in Colombia's long-running conflict. It was designated a terrorist group by the U.S. government in 2001.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/world/2007-11-14-columbia-chiquita-lawsuit_N.htm?csp=34



Nice...I'm switching to Dole Bananas :confused:

 

[ROS]

Uh huh, and people thought the perv banana smiley was bad.

In all seriousness, with a company as large as Chiquita, I'm sure it isn't difficult to get funding, no matter whom you are.

 

[Polar Bear]

http://www.shadowspear.com/vb/showthread.php?t=3376&highlight=Chiquita

 

[Paddlefoot]

Tales of intrigue behind the banana trade

Interesting piece on bananas and the fight to control their cultivation and distribution.

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/...ml?source=rss&aim=/books/feature?source=yahoo

When bananas ruled the world

Intrigue. Power. Corruption. Death. Sex. The history of oil has nothing on that of the yellow fruit.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

April 19, 2008 | On a trip to Honduras, journalist Dan Koeppel caught the banana bug. Researching an article for Popular Science about attempts to breed a disease-resistant banana, the American journalist wandered the grounds of the old Chiquita compound, amid the fading colonial mansions and golf course, where he stumbled upon the cheery yellow fruit's unsavory past.

"I went out for drinks at the old country club, and this old-timer turns to me and goes, 'In this room, governments were overthrown.' It was like something out of a movie," Koeppel says.

Flipping through an old Chiquita guest book, Koeppel saw the scrawled names of United States senators, scientists, CIA agents and Honduran presidents. "Everybody was in there," he says. Browsing through the research facility's library, the journalist paged through a chipper recipe book featuring the Chiquita banana girl, who was shown topless, as she always was, giving instructions on how to prepare such delicacies as "banana coconut rolls." "I found these strange Chiquita cookbooks a hundred yards away from where massacres were planned," he says.

For generations, the banana has been embraced and celebrated in pop culture: "Yes, we have no bananas. We have no bananas today!" But it took muscle and outright carnage to turn this fragile tropical treat into the most popular fruit in the United States. The banana is "the yin and yang of American culture and blood," Koeppel says. The fruit became his obsession and the subject of his book, "Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World."

Surprisingly, Koeppel isn't the only journalist of late to light out to the tropics and come back with tales of the banana's bloody role in history. For Peter Chapman, a Financial Times reporter, who spent years covering Latin America, the great banana company, United Fruit, which later became Chiquita, prefigured the rise of the modern multinational corporation. "It's interesting, isn't it, that something we would imagine as innocuous as bananas has produced as many exercises in regime change as has ever been enacted in the name of oil," says Chapman, whose book is called "Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World."

The banana we eat today may be natural in the sense that it grows on a plant, but it's as much a mass-market product as a Big Mac, designed to be cheap, sweet and reliable. Yet the human affinity for bananas goes back 7,000 years, long before pesticides, refrigerated shipping, transportation networks and branding, like the Dole sticker on the peel of the supermarket variety.

"It shocked me to see that the history of this fruit goes hand in hand with the history of humanity," says Koeppel. "Wherever people went, the banana accompanied them." Some biblical scholars argue that the fruit Eve tasted in the Garden of Eden was not an apple, but the much more suggestively shaped banana.

The mass-produced banana first came to the United States in the 19th century. As the next century rolled on, buccaneering banana men pioneered such innovative business practices as propping up puppet heads of states throughout Latin America, keeping them in power through corporate largesse, and exploiting local workers, when not actually encouraging local governments to enslave or kill them. By building railroads, in exchange for land for plantations, United Fruit tightly entwined itself with the economies of many countries, and came to own huge swaths of Central America. Its reach was so extensive that it became known as "the Octopus."

When local leaders threatened taxes or complained about the company's abysmal labor practices, such as paying workers exclusively in company scrip to be spent only at the company store, United Fruit threatened to leave the country, taking its business next door. Mere bribes to local officials were strictly junior varsity in this jungle.

In some countries, United Fruit blatantly paid no taxes at all for decades. In others, when troubled by local officials, it simply installed a more sympathetic government. In Honduras in 1911, the banana men not only staged an invasion to depose the current regime and put in a new one, they had the audacity to demand the new government reimburse the costs incurred in the invasion!

United Fruit was not to be crossed. In Colombia in 1928, 32,000 banana workers went on strike, demanding such niceties as toilet facilities at plantations. In a massacre later immortalized in literature by Gabriel García Márquez in "One Hundred Years of Solitude," the military killed 1,000 unarmed striking workers and their families in the town square in Cienaga after Sunday church services.

The banana men, however, saw themselves not as ruthless corporate overlords but as a force for all that's good in civilization. In 1912, in Guatemala, while clearing the jungle for banana plantations, the company uncovered the Mayan ruins of Quiriguá, and paid for archaeologists to restore it, welcoming comparisons between the great lost civilization of the Mayans and the new one the company was building in the jungle.

"They thought they were bringing back the era of the Mayans, returning Central America from the savages back to its glory days of empire," says Koeppel. The company used that notion to buff its image at home and abroad. As Chapman explains, the companies "knew how to use such methods to ingratiate themselves into the minds of ordinary people, and come across appearing on the side of light and justice."

Today, when the business buzzword "corporate social responsibility" is so commonplace that it has its own acronym, CSR, it's sobering to remember that the banana czars themselves invented the term. "Now, we are expected to entrust our futures to the free market and better-behaved companies as a result of this new doctrine of 'corporate social responsibility,'" says Chapman. "But it does make you wonder, given the very inventor of the concept represented itself as a paragon of virtue, which didn't stop it from committing all manner of abuses."

It may seem hard to believe that the banana business could be as nefarious as the oil business. But to our banana chroniclers, it may have been worse. The banana men managed to be at once ferociously exploitative, while cultivating a beloved image with their customers, pioneering public relations and marketing practices still in use today.

"Nobody has ever loved the oil companies," says Koeppel. "Everyone has needed them, and they have a bloody history, but no one has ever said, 'Gee whiz! Those guys at Shell have such a cute little jingle.'" But when it comes to bananas, the 1944 Chiquita song is arguably the best-known jingle ever: "I'm Chiquita banana and I've come to say…"

But the banana men's mastery of spin didn't stop at catchy jingles. In the 1950s, President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala tried to force United Fruit to sell its fallow land back to the government. The president planned to redistribute it to landless peasants. To incensed banana leaders, this was an act of sovereign defiance.

One United Fruit P.R. man wrote a "report," which he sent to 800 influential conservative Americans, sounding the alarm about communism gaining a foothold in Latin America via Guatemala. The company employed no lesser force than the father of public relations himself, Edward Bernays. Promptly, Bernays flew journalists to Guatemala on luxury "fact-finding" missions, which resulted in dozens of articles published in Time, Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, portraying the Guatemalan leader as a dangerous threat.

Bernays called the stories "masterpieces of objective reporting," and went so far as to suggest that somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, Russia was training revolutionaries to take over Latin America. In case anyone missed the point, United Fruit's P.R. team put out a movie titled, "Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas." It wasn't long before the Guatemalan president, who had dared to defy United Fruit, was ousted with the help of the CIA. He ended up stripped down to his underwear, paraded before the press in the airport, and sent into exile, never to return again.

Today's banana companies don't have anywhere near the power in Central America that they once did. That's in part because they don't have to. They've discovered the joy of outsourcing. After all, why deal with those pesky labor problems when you can have local producers assume all the inherent risks of growing an agricultural commodity?

What the banana men figured out, Chapman explains, is that "we don't have to own the land, we can give it to the local guy who wants to run his own plantation. We still have our railway, shipping line and sophisticated access to marketing. We don't have to be involved at the ground level with all the expense and aggravation, and all the headaches that go with it." Chiquita is now mostly a distribution and marketing concern.

But the legacy of their bad old days lives on. You can't blame United Fruit for everything that's wrong in Central American politics, says Chapman. Yet in many cases, by propping up weak governments, it helped create a power vacuum that's been filled by right-wing death squads and left-wing guerrillas. In Guatemala's decades-long civil war, more than 200,000 people have died. When some moderate leaders have advocated for a civilian government, they've been summarily executed. "I was with one such leader myself," says Chapman.

Even today, the taint of international scandal dogs the bananas in our supermarkets. In 2002, Human Rights Watch documented banana workers in Ecuador suffering "widespread human rights abuses," including use of child laborers as young as 8 years old, and workers being fired for trying to organize. In 2007, Chiquita was fined $25 million by the U.S. Department of Justice for making payments to "terrorist organizations" in Colombia.

Both books also peel back the environmental fallout of bananas. The authors suggest that the commonplace banana we eat today, a cultivar called the Cavendish, will likely become the next victim of the same Panama disease that drove its predecessor, the once ubiquitous Gros Michel cultivar, to commercial extinction.

The race is on to build a better banana that can stand up to Panama disease and shipping, ripen at the right rate once picked for the grocery store customer, and still be cheaper than that locally grown apple or pear. In a few decades, we could be eating cornflakes topped with an entirely different variety of banana, a notion that's certainly more comforting than the idea that we might have to give up this cheap, potassium-rich comfort food altogether.

In the meantime, the mass production of bananas for the world marketplace threatens the local varieties that millions of people around the globe depend on to keep starvation at bay. "It's a lot like AIDS, which is believed to have spread through Africa along newly built highways," says Koeppel. "As more and more commercial plantations are being built in Africa, the chances of cross-contamination increase. We are creating the possible disease vector."

Scientists are trying to create a more disease-resistant banana through cultivation and genetic engineering. But it's not easy. The banana, which is a giant berry plucked from the world's largest herb, is seedless, sexless and sterile. Because banana offspring are genetically identical to their parents, it makes them all the more vulnerable to disease.

Ultimately, banana fan Koeppel says he hopes learning more about bananas won't cause readers to turn away from them. "What I don't want people to think is, 'Oh my gosh, I should never eat a banana.' I just want people to think about this universal fruit in a real way."

 

[ROS]

Well, they'd better figure something out. They went from .33/lb to .52/lb, and with them being the perfect food, I am not pleased.

 

[Paddlefoot]

Yea, bananas are great. The first real food I can remember eating, bananas and milk.

I always eat at least one per day.

 

[ROS]

To me, gourmet food is peanut butter and banana on white bread with really cold milk.