{"id":264476,"date":"2024-06-17T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2024-06-17T11:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=264476"},"modified":"2025-01-10T15:03:29","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T15:03:29","slug":"daylight-comes-to-chiquitas-use-of-colombian-death-squads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/06\/daylight-comes-to-chiquitas-use-of-colombian-death-squads\/","title":{"rendered":"Daylight Comes to Chiquita\u2019s Use of Colombian Death Squads"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Reuters \/ Alberto Lowe<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

\u201cWork all night on a drink of rum<\/em>
\nDaylight come and me wan\u2019 go home<\/em>
\nStack banana till de morning come<\/em>
\nDaylight come and me wan\u2019 go home<\/em>
\nCome, Mister tally man, tally me banana<\/em>
\nDaylight come and me wan\u2019 go home\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

13 Jun 2024 <\/em>– The song \u201cDay-O (Banana Boat Song),\u201d made famous by the late, great performer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, originated on the docks of Kingston, Jamaica, as workers loading bananas onto boats throughout the night awaited daylight and the arrival of the \u201ctallyman,\u201d to document their labors. While Belafonte made the song a global sensation, its popularity didn\u2019t blunt the human toil behind the global banana trade.<\/p>\n

This week, a jury in a federal court in Miami rendered a $38 million verdict against the multinational Chiquita Brands International for its role in funding right-wing paramilitary death squads in Colombia that killed banana workers there. Thousands of banana workers have been killed over the last century in Colombia, but this case, which wended its way through the US federal court system for over 17 years, was the first ever jury verdict, addressing specifically the murder of eight workers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe jury in this case ruled that Chiquita was responsible for financing the AUC<\/span> paramilitary death squads over a period of at least seven years,\u201d EarthRights International general counsel Marco Simons said after the verdict on the Democracy Now! news hour.<\/a> He was part of the legal team representing the workers and their survivors. The AUC<\/span>, or United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, was a brutal paramilitary that the US designated as a terrorist organization. \u201cChiquita essentially had a partnership with the paramilitaries, that they voluntarily paid these groups in order to protect Chiquita against left-wing guerrillas and essentially to pacify the operating environment in the banana-growing region of Colombia\u2026these eight deaths represent only the start of Chiquita\u2019s potential liability for its conduct, not the end of it. These deaths represent less than 1% of the claims for killings that have been filed against Chiquita in U.S. courts. There are thousands of claims that have been filed.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not the first time Chiquita has been in court over financing murders of banana workers. Simons explained, \u201cin 2007, Chiquita pled guilty to a federal felony for essentially making financial transactions with a terrorist organization, which was the AUC<\/span> paramilitaries, which was prohibited under U.S. federal law. And so they paid a $25 million fine at that point, but none of that money went to the victims of their conduct.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chiquita is the multinational corporation that grew out of the notorious United Fruit Company, a massive enterprise that wielded economic sway over a number of Central and South American countries, including Colombia. United Fruit supported authoritarian governments throughout the region, and successfully lobbied the US government to overthrow the democratically-elected Guatemalan government of President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, after Arbenz enacted several labor and land reforms intended to ease the suffering of Guatemalan workers. Then-US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had represented United Fruit as a corporate lawyer. His brother, Allen Dulles, ran the CIA<\/span>. United Fruit Company operated from 1899 through 1984, when Cincinnati, Ohio billionaire Carl Lindner, Jr. transformed the company into Chiquita.<\/p>\n

The banana business is huge. In 2022, the US imported $2.8 billion worth of bananas from Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia. Yet the workers who grow, harvest, transport and, yes, stack the bananas share in far too little of the revenue.<\/p>\n

An April Op-Ed in The Grocer written by Alistair Smith, International Coordinator for the fair trade organization Banana Link, opened, \u201c\u2018Suck it up, buttercup\u2019 is the message that came from banana industry players at the World Banana Forum conference in Rome this month. In a world where fruit prices are effectively set by supermarkets, it is a message to them: the prices they pay suppliers must go up, and the era of super-cheap banana prices for consumers must draw to a close.\u201d Smith has long campaigned for just wages and safe, humane working conditions for banana workers. His piece continued, \u201cprices must be high enough to ensure a living wage for those who produce bananas\u2026Mass migration to the US and Spain is provoked by the lack of economic opportunities in banana-producing countries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Multinational corporations like Chiquita rarely make improvements unless forced to. \u201cThe jury verdict here is a signal to corporate America that it can\u2019t treat the lives of people in the countries where they work as the cost of doing business,\u201d Marco Simons said. \u201cThat\u2019s what Chiquita did here\u2026producing bananas at the lowest price possible. And that led to the deaths of thousands of people, including the plaintiffs here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanks to this jury verdict, some daylight has come to the violent practices behind the blue sticker on each bunch of Chiquita bananas.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a <\/em>Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

13 Jun 2024 – A federal court in Miami rendered a $38 million verdict against the multinational Chiquita Brands International for funding paramilitary death squads in Colombia, which killed thousands of banana workers there over the last century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":264477,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[867,3322,232,3321,1661,1575,651,541,2137,70],"class_list":["post-264476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-capitalism","tag-anglo-america","tag-banana-republic","tag-capitalism","tag-chiquita-bananas","tag-colombia","tag-death-squads","tag-justice","tag-latin-america-caribbean","tag-south-america","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264476"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264478,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264476\/revisions\/264478"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}