Reign of Terror
Paramilitary gunmen of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (A.U.C.), photographed in 2006. The A.U.C. has committed an estimated 62 massacres in the region of Urabá, killing 3,778 people and forcing 60,000 peasants off their land.
Killing Fields
Banana fields near the northwestern coast of Colombia. Between 1997 and 2004, Chiquita Brands International, the $655 million fruit giant, gave $1.7 million to the A.U.C., whose death squads destroyed unions, terrorized workers, and killed thousands of civilians.
Banana Republic
A worker carries a freshly cut bunch of bananas at a plantation in Apartadó that sells to Banacol, Chiquita’s Colombian supplier. Apartadó is the main town in Urabá, the center of Colombia’s banana industry.
Chiquita
Bananas are pulled along a cable to the washing and packing plant.
Paramilitary Payoffs
Paramilitary fighters on patrol in 2003. 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. Castaño said he would assure the safety of Chiquita’s workers and property in exchange for a monthly payment.
Coming Clean
Workers cut and wash the fruit at an Apartadó packing plant that supplies Banacol. Chiquita’s lawyers have struggled to explain publicly that the firm had to make a choice between “life and law” and that it chose the “humanitarian” route of protecting its workers.
Lean Harvest
A tugboat pulls a barge full of produce. 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.
Full Ship
Banacol workers load a banana boat. During the A.U.C.’s reign of terror, according to the federal complaint, the region would become Chiquita’s most profitable farming operation in the world.
Back to: The Banana War
