Luxagraf

A short and brutal history of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita). From the Virginia Quarterly Review:

By the twenties, United Fruit also had transformed small villages such as Santa Marta, along Colombia’s Caribbean coast, into booming industrial centers. Workers flooded into Santa Marta from distant places at a time when paying jobs were scarce. By the decade’s end, however, newly elected liberal representatives and labor leaders criticized the company and the tax-free export deal it had brokered with the government. In 1928 workers went on strike, paralyzing the company. In response, the right-wing government of Miguel Abadia Mendez called out the army, which promptly sealed off the streets to a plaza full of assembled civilians in Cianaga and opened fire. It was a massacre that Gabriel Garcia Marquez would immortalize in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

And what of the Chiquita company funding right wind guerillas in Colombia and allowing shipments of cocaine on it’s freighters? Former head of the UAC Salvatore Mancuso:

“What must also be clearly understood is the historical context that existed at that time. What were the pressures [Chiquita] faced, what was happening with them in that area. The part of Uraba where they had their banana investments was completely dominated by the guerrillas. The Colombian state was precarious there. They had to do what the guerrillas told them. In fact, they were thinking of selling their property and leaving the country at that time. When we entered the area and confronted the guerrilla phenomenon, we told [Chiquita], ‘Look, you are the best generators of jobs, of labor, of stability in the area. Stay here, don’t leave, keep investing. We’ll provide you with protection, but in exchange for that we want you to pay a tax.’” On the central question of drug exports from the Banadex port, Mancuso said in his clear, educated Spanish, “In the specific case of Chiquita, I don’t know. But surely they must have loaded up a lot of ships there. Now, I don’t know if Chiquita had its own fleet or not. I think that they didn’t have one, that the ships that came in were from the shipping line, and surely those boats were used and loaded with drugs.”

The company will no doubt say that if there were any drugs shipped on its freighters when the AUC controlled its port, it did not know about them. But over the years, people did find out about it and were either intimidated or paid to stay silent. This export scheme was the exact mechanism that allowed the AUC to grow and to commit crimes on a vast scale. To acquire weapons it had to ship cocaine to the United States and Europe, so it looked for an export channel. Simple. In Uraba, AUC was merely a symbiont on the body of a larger corporation that happened to share its interests. It, too, was a kind of corporation. They fed off each other.

For even more see Metafilter.

Visit Site: http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2007/fall/robertson-octopus-cathedral-sal...