The Octopus: Chiquita against democracy in Honduras and Columbia

Was Chiquita behind the recent coup against Honduran president Manuel Zelaya? More importantly, does the October 29 restoration of the Zelaya government represent a defeat for Chiquita--El pulpo, "the octopus"--a corporation which has done its best to strangle Central American democracy for the past hundred years?

It is well known that Chiquita and its ally Dole fought bitterly against Zelaya's 60% minimum wage increase.  Journalist John Perkins quotes an anonymous Panamanian bank vice president: "Every multinational knows that if Honduras raises its hourly rate, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean will have to follow. Haiti and Honduras have always set the bottom line for minimum wages. The big companies are determined to stop what they call a ‘leftist revolt’ in this hemisphere. In throwing out Zelaya they are sending frightening messages to all the other presidents who are trying to raise the living standards of their people.”

A chain of lobbyists and government officials links Chiquita to the Honduran coup and to the US government, including the Obama administration.  Attorney General Eric Holder is a former partner in Chiquita's Washington law firm, Covington. McLarty Associates is a consulatant firm which works with Covington; its vice chairman is John Negroponte, former ambassador to Honduras in the eighties and supporter of the US-supported Contra war against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. As ambassador, he oversaw the creation of the notorious El Aguacate air base, later used as a detention and torture center, where hundreds of prisoners were murdered and buried in secret.  At minimum, he kept silent about the CIA-trained Battalion 3-16 which kidnapped, tortured and murdered opponents of the Honduran state.   He was close to General Gustavez Martinez, then head of the Honduran military, who created the battalion and oversaw its extra-Honduran work in the Argentinian "dirty war" of the early eighties.

The Octopus

Chiquita doesn't have a nice history.  When it was United Fruit, it was involved in the 1954 coup against the left-leaning government of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. Later it would back and bribe the right-wing goverment of General Oswaldo López Arellano, until the "Bananagate" scandal felled him from power.  During Bananagate, the CEO of Chiquita (then trading as United Brands) fell to his death from a New York skyscraper, an apparent suicide.  Closely entwined with the US government, "el pulpo", the octopus, strangled any activity that threatened its profits. 


Chiquita isn't afraid to take advantage of a disaster, either.  In the late nineties, following a hurricane which displaced hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguan and Honduran workers, the Costa Rican branch of the company took the opportunity to hire thousands of undocumented and insecure refugees who would have no power to organize. 

In the late nineties, the Cinncinati Enquirer published an expose series alleging that workers on Chiquita plantations had repeatedly been exposed to toxic chemicals, that Chiquita forms smaller shell companies to own land and bust labor unions by circumventing the laws of the Central American companies in which they operate, that Chiquita called in the Honduran army to evict villagers resisting the bulldozing of their village, and that Chiquita security guards in Honduras, armed with supposedly-illegal semiautomatic weapons, shot at villagers, apparently for sport.  The text of the stories can be found here. Chiquita filed a lawsuit against the paper and got a full front page of apology and $14 million dollars--but Chiquita did not aim to disprove the actual allegations. Instead, Chiquita showed that the reporter who wrote the story had hacked into the company's voicemail system and drawn much of his reporting from private voicemails between executives. 


Chiquita in Columbia

In Columbia, Chiquita has directly supported the murder of union activists, pleading guilty in 2004 to hiring paramilitary "assassination squads" to kidnap and murder labor leaders in Columbia.  These assassination squads also drove out rival producers and created plantation enclaves essentially ruled by the paramilitaries in the interest of the company.  Both the left-wing guerilla FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) and the paramilitaries known as AUC came to be classified as terrorist organizations under US law.  In 2005 the company made a plea deal with the US government with the aid of current attorney general Eric Holder.   The company was assessed a $25 million dollar fine, which went to the US Treasury, not the families of victims. A lawsuit has been filed against Chiquita in the name of those injured or killed, but Chiquita claims that "a subsidiary" made the arrangements with the paramilitaries and that the company itself should pay no compensation to the victims.  A recent lawsuit alleges that not only did Chiquita know that these arrangements were made but that Chiquita directly provided cash, arms and port access for the paramilitary's cocaine dealing.

In the Huffington Post, Dan Kovalik wrote, "According to Mario Iguaran, the Attorney General of Colombia, Chiquita's payments to the AUC paramilitaries led to the murder of 4,000 civilians in the banana region of Colombia and furthered the growth of the paramilitaries throughout Colombia and their violent takeover of numerous Colombian regions."

Chiquita's liaison with the paramilitaries, Raul Hasbun, has described how he took payments from banana companies--not only Chiquita--and supported a wealthy and heavily armed security apparatus in Uruba, the banana-growing region of Columbia.  Hasbun, in fact, gave the order for the 1998 massacre of five adults and three children associated with the community of San José de Apartadó, a "peace community" or village dedicated to cooperative farming and nonviolence. Hasbun has also confessed to the murder of three union organizers at Coca Cola.

Chiquita claims that these payments were extortion, necessary for the safety of company personnel in a violent region. By happy coincidence, the payments were made to the very groups who would assault or kill union organizers or left-leaning citizens who might threaten Chiquita's profits.

The benefits of being alive

Chiquita's flashier transgressions make it easy to overlook the sheer unpleasantness of even a good day on a banana plantation--an experience of massive exposure to pesticides, repetitive stress injuries, 12 hour days starting sometimes at the age of 14 plus perpetual speed-up. 

Although conditions have never been overwhelmingly good for banana workers, the nineties were at least stable. Banana production was heavily unionized in much of Central America, the result of difficult and dangerous organizing through the Cold War years. But in the late nineties, events converged:  there were more bananas than consumers, since banana companies had justified expansions though the nineties by arguing that capitalism would soon make the former eastern block wealthy and banana-hungry (and of course we all know how that worked out; Hurricane displaced workers and flattened formerly unionized plantations; and new trade agreements gave more power to chains like Walmart, who demanded more bananas faster and cheaper.  By 2004, a subsidiary of Chiquita could propose to its union that bananas would no longer be carted from the fields by machines--instead, field workers should tie ropes around their chests and drag the bananas up to 3 kilometers for processing. (Remember the 1998 expose--were the expose true, that subsidiary might not be so much a subsidiary as a shell company created to absolve Chiquita central of responsibility.)

In Honduras and Costa Rica, workers have sued Chiquita over pesticide exposure.   Chiquita has used pesticides in South and Latin America long after they were banned in the US and Europe for safety reasons.

A change is gonna come, as long as it only benefits the customers

Recently, Chiquita has begun "greening" its operations.  "Today all 110 of Chiquita's company-owned farms and the vast majority of its independent farms are certified by the Rainforest Alliance. Chiquita now recycles 100 percent of its plastic bags and twine and has reduced pesticide use by 26 percent," notes  CNN Business 2.0.

CNN notes incorrectly that "Though the improvements in working conditions aren't nearly as dramatic, things are getting better for Latin American employees, who can now join unions. Disputes with Honduran labor unions in late November [2006] prompted Chiquita to spend two days renegotiating the workers' contracts."  Banana workers have been able to join unions since the fifties and sixties.  Chiquita is dedicated to an improved corporate image, not improved wages for its workers--even CNN can't conceal that much.