Because the government could not secure this vast and largely rural nation beyond its major cities, rich cattlemen began forming militias for protection. The multinational firms sometimes did the same, but mostly they paid the guerrillas protection money—a vacuna, or vaccination. “The guerrillas had you by the short hairs,” says Ambassador Frechette. “You didn’t have much choice.”

Despite its wholesome image, Chiquita was no stranger to the dark ways of doing business with militants and despots. The company, which began its existence more than 100 years ago, had wielded a heavy hand in Latin American affairs. It bribed dictators, overthrew governments, and in 1928, it allegedly directed the Colombian army to violently put down a labor strike (an episode made infamous in the climax of native son Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude).

In 1982, Chiquita bowed to the Marxists’ escalating violence and left Urabá. But it couldn’t stay away for long; the lands were too lush and rich to ignore. Expecting the soon-to-be-established European Union to relax trade restrictions on countries that had previously been off-limits, the company returned to Colombia in 1989. Of course, that meant paying the FARC and E.L.N.

In 1997, according to the federal complaint, a right-wing paramilitary commander named Carlos Castaño came to Chiquita’s subsidiary Banadex with a business proposal. A ruthless killer, Castaño had just become “supreme leader” of several smaller militias that he was banding together as the A.U.C. for a major military offensive against the Marxists. Castaño said he would assure the safety of Chiquita’s workers and property in exchange for a monthly payment. According to the federal complaint, Castaño sent “an unspoken but clear message that failure to make the payments could result in physical harm to Banadex personnel and property.” But he also held out the promise of a permanent solution, saying that the A.U.C. “was about to drive the FARC out of Urabá.”  

The firm’s lawyers have struggled to explain publicly that Chiquita had to make a choice between “life and law” and that it chose the “humanitarian” route of protecting its workers. “This company was in a bad position dealing with bad guys,” says Eric Holder, a Washington attorney representing Chiquita. “There’s absolutely no suggestion of any personal gain here. It’s not a case like Tyco, where someone is squirreling money away. No one is out buying great shower curtains.”

As a corporation, though, Chiquita stood to benefit greatly from the lethal cleansing that Castaño delivered. At the time, the Marxist guerrillas routinely kidnapped U.S. executives, blew up railroads, and sabotaged oil pipelines. Chiquita says it became increasingly difficult to protect its workers and their families. Castaño’s death squads, however, were squarely pro-business. They were not just ridding Urabá of guerrillas; they were killing leftists and eradicating unions.

“The payments Chiquita made to the paramilitaries were part of a project that the A.U.C. called Operation Genesis,” says Gloria Cuartas, who was the mayor of Apartadó from 1995 until 1997, when Castaño threatened her life and drove her out of the area. “It called for the elimination of the left and of all social groups that were supposedly contributing to instability for investors and the multinationals.” Francisco Ramirez, a leading labor lawyer with the United Confederation of Workers, the largest labor union in Colombia, says that money from Chiquita and other companies “created these paramilitary groups and helped destroy the unions.”

The A.U.C.’s wave of terror was swift and brutal. Among the most savage of its many massacres was a 1998 attack on an Urabá village in which paramilitaries murdered 11 peasants after burning them with acid to force them to confess they were guerrillas. The A.U.C. also developed strong ties to politicians and army commanders all over Colombia. (Castaño died under mysterious circumstances in 2004, but the A.U.C. reigned until 2006.)

Ambassador Frechette claims no U.S. company ever told him about any payoffs. If any had, he says, “I would have told them to stop.” Chiquita should have sought help from the U.S., “and then the U.S. government, which gives assistance to Colombia, should have raised hell and said, ‘Get your backsides in gear. Raise enough troops to protect [our interests].’ It would have taken time. In the meantime, the bad guys would have been killing workers. It’s a very cruel choice to make. And Chiquita had financial problems.”

Indeed, the company’s fortunes had begun to spoil. For most of the 1990s, Chiquita was locked in a devastating trade battle with the European Union, which had enacted a restrictive quota system in 1993 that gave preference to Caribbean fruit growers, limiting Chiquita’s access to European customers and cutting the company’s most profitable market in half. The company has said that it spent millions of dollars fighting to reverse the decision. Worse, at the beginning of the decade, believing the E.U. was about to open its doors, not close them, it had reportedly spent $1 billion to expand, buying 14 new refrigerated ships and aggressively enlarging its Latin American land holdings by 32,000 acres.