Terrorism and Bananas in Colombia
By Sibylla Brodzinsky/ Bogota Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe headed to Washington this week, hoping to contain the fallout from an ever-widening scandal linking some of his closest allies to right-wing paramilitaries — a scandal that is threatening a key free-trade agreeement and future military aid from the U.S.
The trip puts Uribe under the spotlight of a Democratic-controlled Congress, some of whose legislators have expressed concern over the light sentences awaiting confessed paramilitary leaders under a deal negotiated by the Colombian government.
But Washington has made its own deal with at least one backer of the Colombian paramilitaries: Under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in March, banana giant Chiquita Brands International acknowledged it had paid $1.7 million to Colombia's paramilitary groups. The company said it had made the payments to protect its employees, but about half of the money was paid after the paramilitary federation in question, the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, had been placed on Washington's list of foreign terrorist organizations in September of 2001.
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The terms of the deal scandalized human rights activists in Washington and high-level officials in Colombia: "If they had admitted to paying Al-Qaeda, things would be different," said Dan Kovalik, a lawyer with the United Steelworkers Union, which is sponsoring civil suits against a number of U.S. corporations for allegedly hiring Colombian paramilitaries to kill or intimidate union members and officials.
"It's like they're saying, well, yes, they're terrorists, but they're our terrorists," Kovalik said.
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Terrorism and Bananas in Colombia - TIME http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1616991,00.html#ixzz2lJgxzZnj
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