McCain Fundraiser Oversaw Payment of 1.7 Million to Terrorists

Chiquita (formerly United Fruit Company) has a bloody history in Latin America. This is just the latest chapter.


Nico Pitney

McCain Backer's Firm Pleaded Guilty To Funding Terrorist Group In Colombia

The co-host of a recent top-dollar fundraiser for Sen. John McCain oversaw the payment of roughly $1.7 million to a Colombian paramilitary group that is today designated a terrorist organization by the United States.

Carl H. Lindner Jr., the billionaire Cincinnati businessman, was CEO of Chiquita Brands International from 1984 to 2001, and remained on the company's board of directors until May 2002. Beginning under his tenure, Chiquita executives paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known by the Spanish acronym AUC), which is described by George Washington University's National Security Archive as an "illegal right-wing anti-guerrilla group tied to many of the country's most notorious civilian massacres."

Following a Justice Department indictment last year, Chiquita admitted to illegally funding the paramilitaries and agreed to pay a $25 million fine. Chiquita's payments to the AUC began in 1997 and lasted seven years; roughly half of the funds came after the group was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department in 2001.

According to the Justice Department, the payments "were reviewed and approved by senior executives" of Chiquita, who knew by no later than September 2000 "that the AUC was a violent, paramilitary organization."

Late last week, Lindner co-hosted a $25,000-per-person fundraiser for McCain and the Republican Party in the wealthy Indian Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. The event raised about $2 million; Lindner also serves on McCain's Ohio Victory Team.

While Lindner was CEO of Chiquita, the company began sending money to the AUC through its shipping subsidiary Banadex. A report by the Organization of American States states that Banadex also engaged in arms trafficking, helping to deliver 3,000 Nicaraguan AK-47 rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition to the AUC in 2001. According to federal prosecutors, when company officials realized the arrangement was illegal, they switched to making the payments in cash.

"We believe they saved people's lives," a Chiquita spokesman told Time magazine last year, alleging that the company was simply trying to avoid violence against their employees.

Chiquita's funding of violent paramilitaries does not end with the right-wing AUC. The fruit giant "had been making similar payments to the leftist FARC and ELN guerrillas" since 1989, also on Lindner's watch. Those payments ended in 1997 as "control of the company's banana-growing area shifted" to the AUC, according to the Associated Press.

McCain, who is currently visiting Colombia to promote free trade, has described FARC as "one of the worst" terrorist groups and accused his opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, of being unwilling to support Colombian President Uribe's anti-terrorist efforts.

That the Arizona Republican is raising funds from a man whose company once paid that very same terrorist group seems likely to sully his charge.

Aides to the Senator did not return request for comment, though they have repeatedly argued that the campaign does not have direct connections to companies represented by such fundraisers or advisers and, as such, should not be held accountable for their actions or presumed to be persuaded by their interests.

However, in the past, McCain has done favors on Lindner's behalf. Last May, the Washington Post reported that in the late 1990s, McCain "promoted a deal in Arizona's Tonto National Forest involving property part-owned by Great American Life Insurance, a company run by billionaire Carl H. Lindner Jr., a prolific contributor to national political parties and presidential candidates."

Moreover, McCain's chief political adviser, Charlie Black, lobbied for Chiquita on two separate occasions in 2001. According to records, Black was paid $80,000 to work on foreign trade issues.

Black, as the Huffington Post reported on Tuesday, has represented other controversial clients with operations in Colombia. From 2001 through 2007, his work brought his firm more than $1.6 million in lobbying fees from Occidental Petroleum, a company whose security arm was accused of bombing a Colombian village and killing 17 civilians in 1998.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/02/mccain-fundraiser-oversaw_n_110354.html?view=print

 

Are you saying the facts in the story are false? Are you denying that Lindner was CEO of Chiquita when these payments were made?

 

Still waiting for tater_j to dispute these facts.

 

Sorry tater_j, unlike your squealing about a Michelle Obama "whitey" tape or Obama coke and bj party, these are facts, not rumors. FACTS.

FACT: Lindner is a high level McCain fundraiser.

FACT: Lindner was CEO of Chiquita when the company began sendig more than 1 million dollars to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).

FACT: The AUC was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department in 2001. (DOJ description "violent, right-wing terrorist organization United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia".

FACT: Chiquita continued to send funds to the AUC after they were labled a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department.

The Department of Justice press release on the matter can be viewed here-
http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2007/March/07_nsd_161.html

 

I know Chiquita claims this is the reason they paid money to the AUC. However, given the company's history in the region and the fact that Chiquita helped divert actual weapons and ammo to the AUC, I'm more than a little skeptical, as is Columbia's chief federal prosecutor-


Colombia seeks eight in Chiquita terrorist scandal

The banana conglomorate has confessed to paying right-wing paramilitaries.
By Eoin O'Carroll | csmonitor.com
posted March 22, 2007 at 12:20 p.m. EDT

The Colombian government says that it will likely seek the extradition of eight unnamed people affiliated with the US banana giant Chiquita Brands International for their alleged involvement in the company's payments to and arms trafficking with a violent right-wing paramilitary group.

The Chicago Tribune reported on Thursday that Colombia's chief federal prosecutor, Mario Iguaran, has formally requested from the US Justice Department documents relating to Chiquita's payment of $1.7 million to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known as the AUC, by its Spanish initials) a group that the United States labels a terrorist organization.

Chiquita pleaded guilty Monday in US federal court to making payments to the AUC, and agreed to pay a $25 million fine, payable over five years. As part of the plea agreement, the US government will not publicly identify the senior Chiquita executives who approved the illegal payments.

Speaking in Bogotá, Mr. Iguaran denied Chiquita's claims that the payments were made under duress.

"The relationship was not one of the extortionist and the extorted but a criminal relationship," Iguaran told a handful of foreign correspondents in an interview.

"It's a much bigger, more macabre plan," he added. "Who wouldn't know what an illegal armed group like the AUC does . . . by exterminating and annihilating its enemies," Iguaran said. "When you pay a group like this you are conscious of what they are doing."

The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that Mr. Iguaran said in an interview with a Colombian radio station that he will demand that the United States hand over the eight suspects, whose identities have not been disclosed by the US government. "They must be judged in Colombia," Iguaran said.

According to the US Department of Justice, Chiquita began making payments to the AUC in 1997 through its Colombian shipping operation, Banadex. The payments began when the AUC's then-leader, Carlos Castaño, met with a senior Banadex executive and implied that failure to make payments would result in physical harm to the company's workers and property.

The United States designated the AUC a foreign terrorist organization on September 10, 2001. Despite warnings from lawyers who advised the company to leave Colombia, Chiquita continued to pay the group. In April 2003, the company's board of directors learned of the payments, who later that month confessed to the Department of Justice, who told Chiquita to stop paying. Nevertheless, the payments continued through February 2004.

Additionally, according to a report by the Organization of American States, in 2001 Banadex helped divert 3,000 Nicaraguan AK-47 rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition to the AUC.

Chiquita sold Banadex, its most profitable operation, to a Colombian buyer in June 2004.

The news comes in the midst of a major political scandal in Colombia that has linked many members of the country's political leadership to right-wing death squads.

Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Center for International Policy, a human rights advocacy group, sees Colombia's extradition request as a political move to burnish Bogotá's image domestically. He writes:

The call for Chiquita executives' extradition also taps into a commonly felt frustration among Colombians. Many see their government handing over Colombian citizens to face long jail sentences in the United States, but believe that U.S. citizens accused of trafficking drugs or supporting armed groups in Colombia - including rogue U.S. military personnel who have dealt in drugs or weapons - get slaps on the wrist, such as fines or a few months in prison.

Either way, if the Colombian government wishes to begin punishing foreign executives whose corporations have paid "protection money" to illegal armed groups, it is within its rights to do so - but it may find itself extraditing a lot of people. Such payments are widely believed to have been commonplace for decades.

Journalist Amy Goodman, however, says that Colombian authorities have every right to single out Chiquita, formerly known as United Fruit. In her syndicated column she cites the company's history of right-wing violence in Latin America, which includes helping to orchestrate the 1954 overthrow of Guatemala's democratically elected president and the 1928 massacre of trade unionists in northwestern Colombia.

A $25-million fine to a multibillion-dollar corporation like Chiquita is a mere slap on the wrist, the cost of doing business. Presidents like George W. Bush and Uribe, businessmen first, while squabbling over extraditions, would never lose track of their overarching shared goal of a stridently pro-corporate, military-supported so-called free-trade regime. ...

That next organic, fair-trade banana you buy just might save a life.

The online magazine Slate points out that Chiquita pleaded guilty to the very same crime for which John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, is serving a 20-year sentence.

Shares of Chiquita Brands International Inc. rose six cents overnight to open Thursday at $13.92 on the New York Stock Exchange.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0322/p99s01-duts.html