The widening scandal may engulf other U.S. firms doing business in Colombia. Two jailed leaders of the A.U.C. (which agreed to disband last year) have testified in Colombian courts that many multinational corporations operating in Colombia paid them off. Congressman Bill Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts who is leading a House subcommittee investigation, told me he plans to call the Coca-Cola Co., Nestlé, Occidental Petroleum, and Drummond (an Alabama mining outfit), among others, into congressional hearings to explore accusations that they or their business partners also funded the A.U.C. or other groups. “We want to know,” Delahunt says, “if American companies are fueling the violence that has beset Colombia for decades.” All four companies deny they funded paramilitaries. Delahunt says, “If a company did not participate, it’s unfair to let allegations sit out there. But we’ll find out the truth.”

Chiquita’s illicit behavior—outlined in a Justice Department complaint that reads like a corporate spy thriller, packed with shadowy threats, clandestine meetings, and money drops—illuminates the dark side of U.S. business practices in conflict zones. The unfolding revelations point out the central moral dilemma Chiquita faced: Refuse to pay the bad guys and risk having your workers killed and your business sabotaged, or pay up and support the murder of innocent civilians. “You’re putting a company between the devil and the deep blue sea,” says Myles Frechette, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia from 1994 to 1997.  

With federal prosecutors closing in, Chiquita came up with a solution to its problems in 2004. It sold its Colombian subsidiary, Banadex (which had been making the A.U.C. payments), to a local outfit called Banacol. But as part of the sale, Chiquita negotiated a contract to buy 11 million 40-pound boxes of bananas a year—the entirety of Chiquita’s former Colombian harvest—from Banacol for eight years. In other words, Chiquita has not given up a single banana from Colombia.

Even though the A.U.C. disbanded in 2006, companies in the region may be no better off. Colombian politicians and human-rights organizations believe that paramilitary splinter groups are still extorting money from area companies—meaning that American consumers may still be helping fund the violence. Banacol denies it is paying protection money to the militias.

Considering all this, it’s hardly surprising that the workers toiling on the banana farm this July morning are tense. To speak openly of the A.U.C. or its ties with Chiquita and Banadex is to find yourself pulled off a bus after work and shot. Each worker I ask about the violence or the paramilitaries falls silent and walks away. All of them know that they are being watched at all times, and the slightest sign of cooperation will draw the attention of informants. The militias are always ready to make an example out of someone: About 48 hours from now, two gunmen in fatigues will order a community leader off a Jeep 20 minutes up the road and kill him on the spot as a warning to others not to oppose the paramilitaries.

Eventually I find myself in a steamy banana grove with three workers, who eye me warily. One man searches for ripe clusters and chops them from their stalks; another carries them to a taut metal cable, from which the third man suspends them. The bananas are then pulled along the cable, which stretches for more than a hundred yards, to a clearing, where they are washed and boxed.

When the other two are far enough away, I ask the man with the machete what he knows about the ­paramilitaries. He shrugs. I ask if they still control the area. He shrugs again and pokes into the banana leaves to see if the cluster is ripe. I ask why the militias terrorize peasants. He stops, looks around quickly, and then answers, “To show they have power.”

Apartadó is the main town in Urabá, the center of Colombia’s ­banana industry. With a population of 130,000, it is a dusty, sprawling maze of brick homes, muddy roads, and a few traffic lights. People sip soft drinks in the shade of open-air bodegas and cafés. It gets hot here, 100-plus degrees in summer. And every afternoon around 5, like clockwork, it rains—often in torrents that pour off the awnings of hotels and appliance stores.

Hortensia Castro is the director of El Heraldo de Urabá, a regional newspaper. She is also the editor, sometime reporter, and face of this slim, 12-page biweekly, which most of the banana workers read. On a typical scorching weekday, she sits with the back of her chair propped against the blood-orange walls of her small three-room office, which has its front door open to the noisy street. Trucks and scooters kick up dust as they roar past, just a few feet away.

“Many times,” says Castro, a 60-year-old with skin the color and texture of a sun-dried apricot, “we would be sleeping, and then Urabá would wake up to a massacre. We would run out there with our cameras and do the journalistic work. And we followed that horrible pain of the families of these banana workers. We would go with them to the hospital and wait for them to give the bodies back. And we would go with them to the cemetery. So we were living the tragedy with them. And we were afraid the paras would come back.”

In the early 1990s, Marxist guerrillas had infested this region, which straddles the isthmus between the Caribbean and the Pacific and serves as a drug corridor for high-speed go-boats headed north to the U.S.  For decades, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and, to a lesser extent, their ideological rivals, the National Liberation Army, known as the E.L.N., had funded their leftist fight against the government by trafficking narcotics, kidnapping wealthy Colombians, and extorting multinational firms. The FARC, among the strongest and richest guerrilla armies in the world, continues to terrorize half the country, battling the wealthy classes and American capitalist interests, they claim, on behalf of Colombia’s poor.