Coca-cola, Chiquita, and Nestle' are fucking up Colombia.
Chiquita Brands International will plead guilty to doing business with gunmen in Colombia. Prosecutors said the banana company made $1.7 million in "protection payments" to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a right-wing paramilitary group linked to some of Colombia's worst massacres. The company will pay $25 million to settle the charges.
This morning, NPR reports that Chiquita paid 1.7 million to a right wing paramilitaty group in Columbia to "make a problem go away".
The group is one of the worst in Columbia, the United Self-Defense Forces (AUC).
Other Chiquita links
Mon 10 – UN envoy: Colombia is humanitarian catastrophe; Mancuso rejects accusations.
While visiting a shantytown in Cartagena, Jan Egeland, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs reports that in the last year, "the number of kidnappings and assassinations has gone down, but the humanitarian situation in Colombia is worsening because poor Colombians are being attacked by armed groups and are forced to flee their homes". According to the UN figures over the last four years, the number of people forced to flee their homes has increased by about 1 million and Colombia now has the third-largest number of displaced people in the world — behind Congo and Sudan, he said. "Colombia is therefore by far the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of the Western hemisphere," Egeland told a news conference.
Leader of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), Salvatore Mancuso denies that any of its forces have infiltrated Venezuela. "We reject the accusations that are being made by Venezuela's leaders&ldots; only sick people with messianic delusions of staying in power by the force of dictatorship can put forth stories so far from reality," he told Colombia's RCN television.
Apparently, Coca-cola, Nestle, as well as Chiquita have also been benefitting from the stranglehold from Colombia's right-wing paramilitaries. An April 2006 report details the investigation of the three companies in the murder of Columbian trade unionists. Link
The PPT's main accusation against the three companies is that in Colombia they have engaged in practices that violate the most basic human rights, through connections with paramilitary networks, under the guise of protecting their investments and ensuring security.
Victims of human rights violations and relatives of victims gave their testimony in the public hearing. Some of the cases discussed involved the murders of trade unionists, 10 of whom worked for Nestle and nine of whom worked for Coca-Cola
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Who are the PPT? The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal "was inspired by, and is considered a successor to, the Russell Tribunal, a public international body organized by renowned British philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell. The Russell Tribunal, which was designed to investigate and draw attention to war crimes committed by US forces during the Vietnam War, held sessions on that war in 1966 and 1967, and on military dictatorships in Latin America in 1974 and 1975." (From link above)
The PPT also claims evidence that in 2001 Chiquita "transported 3,000 AK-47 assault rifles and five million munitions to paramilitary groups in Córdoba and Urabá, regions in northwestern Colombia that are dominated by the right-wing militias."
Many members of the National Food Service Workers Union (SINALTRAINAL) — which represents Coca-Cola workers in Colombia — have been murdered in connection with their union activities or threatened with death, kidnapped or tortured, and total impunity continues to surround these crimes, said the PPT.
Meanwhile, Coca-cola has downsized it's workforce, sharply cut the number of long-term unionized employees, and SINALTRAINAL is disappearing from Nestle and Coca-cola-which are showing 250% salary cost reductions (coke) and 59% salary cost reducations (Nestle) from 1998-2005.
Coca-cola's annual profit margin in Colombia is 80%. Nestle makes $427K per worker in Columbia.