BurnzPost

Chiquita, our beloved banana company, has admitted to paying paramilitary groups in Colombia $1.7 million. In 2001, Banadex, a subsidiary of Chiquita, received 3,000 Central American rifles destined for paramilitary groups.

In Colombia, this is business as usual. What makes this case different is that someone finally fessed up. This may put major companies such as Coca-Cola, Neslte and Drummond in the lineup, as they have been suspected of supporting terrorist activity in Colombia for some time now.

During the time that Chiquita supported militias, such as the ACU, FARC and ELN, 22 massacres took place across the banana belt, killing 137 people. The following account appears in an article by The Christian Science Monitor as well as on an excellent site called Immigration Orange:

Alberto is a tall, self-assured man in his early 40s. But his voice drops to a whisper when he says he personally witnessed at least 10 murders on one of Chiquita’s 26 plantations where he worked for 11 years.

The thugs waited until everyone took up their workstations then went into the field where one of Alberto’s coworkers was climbing a ladder to bag a banana stem. “They cut off his head with a machete, dumped the weapon, then calmly walked to their motorcycle and drove off, without saying a word,” says Alberto, who asked that his real name not be used.

As Kyle says in his blog entry, this doesn’t seem to be getting much of a reaction. It is now our responsibility to get the word out there. There is too little said about the atrocities that have been brought to you by Coke, Nestle and Chiquita.

To find out more about the case against Coke, check this out: Killer Coke
To learn more about Chiquita’s dark past in Colombia, read this article: “Chiquita in Colombia: Terrorism Gone Bananas?”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 6:12 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.