Although several El Espectador journalists were killed in the 1980s and ’90s, many young reporters aspired to being on the staff of the storied Colombian newspaper at the end of the 20th century. I loved working there, despite the risks. After the Medellín Cartel bombed our headquarters, my colleagues and I rescued from the rubble the desk on which Gabriel García Márquez wrote his first stories for the paper.
We dreamed that an invisible Mr. García Márquez, from that empty desk, urged us to pursue stories that would expose injustice in Colombia. In 1998, when The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that the American banana company Chiquita Brands had bribed Colombian officials to obtain a license for the use of a port loading facility in Turbo, Urabá, a city on Colombia’s coast, I began investigating the firm as if Mr. García Márquez himself had handed me the assignment.
Chiquita denied the allegations of the 1998 Enquirer story. The paper later publicly apologized and renounced the investigation after it was revealed that a reporter lied about sourcing and illegally obtained voice mail records. But at El Espectador we felt that The Enquirer was on to something. We published the allegations, noting that the paper had retracted the article and the story’s reporter was being investigated by the police in Ohio. And for years — even when I left El Espectador for “Noticias Uno”, a nightly news program — I continued to look into the company. In 2002, after speaking with Nicaraguan police and military officials as well as the police in Panama, I reported that 3,000 weapons for the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a right-wing paramilitary group known as the AUC, had landed in the Urabá port from Nicaragua and that Chiquita appeared to have been aware the militants were using its facilities to receive weapons.
Now, I like to think that Mr. García Márquez would have smiled at the outcome of a Florida lawsuit against Chiquita. In June, a jury found Chiquita liable for the deaths of eight men killed by the AUC, which Chiquita helped finance. (Seventeen years earlier, the Department of Justice found that Chiquita paid the group over $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004.) The firm was ordered to pay $38.3 million in damages to the men’s families. It was the first time that Chiquita was found liable for its actions in Latin America. A representative for Chiquita, responding to questions about this essay, said that the company’s payments to the AUC were made under duress and it is appealing the verdict.
The world has known something was amiss in the banana business for a while. In Colombia, “Noticias Uno” had reported on Chiquita’s association with the AUC since the early 2000s. And while that relationship has come under legal scrutiny in the United States, Chiquita has yet to face judgment in Colombia. The Florida case raised long neglected ethical questions in both countries about the real cost of one of the least expensive fruits in American supermarkets. We should all ask ourselves: How much bloodshed is behind the bananas we eat for breakfast?
In the Urabá region, there’s been far too much. Chiquita set up an operation there, where the land to grow bananas was inexpensive, but it was forced to pay the AUC through its subsidiary in Colombia to operate safely, the company has said. In the 20th century, Fusarium wilt, a deadly fungus also known as Panama disease, destroyed banana crops in parts of the Caribbean and Central America but not in Colombia. Then, in 1998, some of Chiquita’s banana operations in Honduras and Guatemala suffered hurricane damage, costing the company $74 million. Chiquita, it seemed, accepted that paying the paramilitaries was the cost of doing business in Colombia.
But the company was doing business with criminals. In the 1999 Saiza massacre, AUC militants burned down most of the houses in the Urabá village and killed several people. The paramilitaries ousted all Saiza’s residents, threatening to kill them if they didn’t leave. AUC killings continued into and throughout the 2000s. The victims’ widows and orphans told me that a subgroup of the AUC known as the Bloque Bananero, loosely translated as the Banana Bloc, was unofficially involved in the banana operation, putting off union demands and obtaining new land for plantations by killing and driving people out of Urabá. More than 100,000 people were displaced from the region between 1995 and 2006. I saw firsthand how residents struggled to find any justice for these crimes.
In 2001, the United States designated the AUC as a foreign terrorist organization. Chiquita’s senior leadership wasn’t aware of that status until February 2003. That April, Chiquita admitted to the United States Department of Justice that it had paid AUC and had continued to pay the paramilitary group even after its designation as a foreign terrorist organization. Chiquita told the Justice Department that it was forced to pay the paramilitary group because of the danger it presented; AUC leaders said in an interview years later that Chiquita financed them voluntarily. In 2004, Chiquita sold its Colombian operation to Invesmar Ltd., the holding company of the Colombia-based Banacol, which reportedly produced bananas under similar conditions.
Chiquita’s admission prompted the Justice Department to open an investigation into the firm. In 2007, three years after getting out of the Colombian banana business, Chiquita pleaded guilty in the United States to one count of engaging in transactions with a specially designated global terrorist organization. As part of a plea agreement, Chiquita paid a $25 million criminal fine to the government for its ties to the paramilitaries. Before the sentencing hearing, the Justice Department informed Chiquita’s lawyers that it would not prosecute company employees connected to the investigation.
After the settlement, Mario Iguarán, who was then Colombia’s attorney general, said that Chiquita executives should be extradited to Colombia and that the $25 million fine should be sent to Colombia as reparations for the AUC’s victims. But that and other attempts to hold Chiquita accountable in the Colombian legal system have either gone nowhere or stalled. In 2008, the Colombian attorney general’s office charged 10 Chiquita executives for their actions with the AUC. The charges included conspiracy to commit aggravated crimes by financing, promoting and organizing illegal armed groups. In 2019, 11 years later, the trial began. And it’s only now advancing. Hearings will take place until November.
Encouraged by the Justice Department’s victory against Chiquita, AUC victims and survivors in Colombia have taken their claims to the United States. Today there are more than 4,000 family members of victims of AUC violence seeking reparations from Chiquita in the United States. June’s landmark ruling is one of those cases, potentially setting an important precedent for other claimants.
Chiquita has said it will file an appeal of the verdict; a second trial scheduled to start last month has been put on hold while the appeal is pending. “During the recent civil trial in Florida, Chiquita presented compelling evidence that its operations were the victim of extortion”, a company representative told The Times. “These payments were made under duress and the threat of violence”. The company has not admitted to aiding the AUC’s arms trafficking, neither at the time of my reporting nor in its 2007 plea. The company declined to comment on those allegations, the violence that victims say the AUC’s Banana Bloc unleashed on their community and the charges it faces in Colombia.
In Colombia, the Florida verdict has raised new questions about why the country’s own justice system has yet to hold Chiquita accountable. It prompted President Gustavo Petro to write on X: “Why was the U.S. justice system able to determine in judicial truth that Chiquita Brands financed paramilitarism in Urabá? Why couldn’t the Colombian justice system?” Since Chiquita admitted to paying the AUC in 2003, Colombia has seen three presidents and 11 attorneys general come and go, all missing the opportunity to bring the firm to justice. And bananas from Urabá continue to be sold around the world, grown on the same land that was terrorized by the AUC.
Last month, I visited El Espectador after the American jury’s ruling. I reminisced with its new staffers about how the newspaper once exposed Chiquita’s wrongdoing. Mr. García Márquez’s desk is gone, but he no longer needs to push us to tell this story. Each year hundreds of millions of people worldwide eat bananas, a fruit that’s rich in vitamins and minerals. But here’s what the average consumer should know: Every bite contains a drop of the banana industry’s bloody history.
Ignacio Gómez G. is the director of Noticias Uno, a Colombian news program. He was formerly a reporter at El Espectador and has been covering drugs, crime and corporate corruption in Colombia for 40 years.