Hiring Death Squads Is Coming Back to Haunt U.S. Companies

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."

Tijeras' statement -- which reads like the confessions of a
corporate death squad leader and directly refutes his paymasters'
version of events -- has now been entered into the record in a case
filed against Dole last April in California by attorneys with Conrad and Scherer:

"I've been told that Chiquita has asserted that they paid the AUC
funds, but that this was coerced and was a form of extortion. I have
also heard that Dole claims to have never paid us any funds. Both of
these assertions are absolutely false. In fact, my agreement with
Chiquita and Dole was to provide them with total security and other
services."

Tijeras is not a lone whistleblower by any means. Salvatore Mancuso,
the overall commander of the AUC, also testified in early 2008 that
Dole and Del Monte, like Chiquita, had been providing major support to
the AUC since its inception. He repeated the accusation to "60
Minutes," which originally aired the segment in September, 2008.

According to these and other witnesses as well as investigators
familiar with the bloody history of Columbia, the AUC was originally
hired by the companies to drive the leftist FARC guerillas out of the
banana-growing region and protect their plantations from "the gangs of
common delinquents that robbed their supplies and equipment." (Tijeras)
Once the FARC was vanquished and order restored, the banana companies
continued to pay the AUC to "pacify" their work force, suppress the
labor unions and terrorize peasant squatters seeking their own
competing land claims.

Tijeras: "After we restored order and became the local agents of law
enforcement, managers for Chiquita and Dole plantations relied upon us
to respond to their complaints...We would also get calls from the
Chiquita and Dole plantations identifying specific people as "security
problems" or just "problems." Everyone knew that this meant we were to
execute the identified person. In most cases those executed were union
leaders or members or individuals seeking to hold or reclaim land that
Dole or Chiquita wanted for banana cultivation, and the Dole or
Chiquita administrators would report to the AUC that these individuals
were suspected guerillas or criminals."

According to Tijeras, for years the companies provided up to 90% of the AUC's income.

When a case was filed by the families and heirs of dozens of victims against Dole this past April (2009), the company immediately rejected the charges as
"baseless allegations" that "are the product of the most untrustworthy
sources imaginable" and "nothing more than the false confessions of
convicted terrorists from Columbia, who had every motive to lie about
their activities in order to minimize their jail time."

(The plaintiffs' complaint is a horrific litany of summary
executions, off-the-bus abductions, forced-entry murders and
kidnappings, ghoulish disappearances and other crimes committed against
trade unionists and land reform activists.)

Of course Dole is correct to refer to the AUC as "terrorists" -- a
designation that the U.S. State Department assigned to the group
(coincidentally) on September 10, 2001. But if the payments are proven,
then, as Chiquita learned, the consequences will be harsh: Payments to
designated terrorists are illegal -- whether coerced or not -- and
whether or not the company is cognizant or indifferent to the
consequences.