[A-List] Columbia steps up

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/20/AR2007032001
698.html


Colombia May Seek Chiquita Extraditions
Eight Executives Targeted in Paramilitary Payment Scandal

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 21, 2007; D01



BOGOTA, Colombia, March 20 -- Colombia's attorney general said Tuesday that
his 
office would try to seek the extradition of eight executives from Chiquita 
Brands International, the Ohio banana company that last week admitted to
paying 
$1.7 million to right-wing death squads that have killed thousands in this 
country's long civil conflict.

In deal with the Justice Department, Chiquita last week agreed to plead
guilty 
to doing business with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a
coalition 
of paramilitary groups whose members have massacred peasants and murdered 
leftist activists for years. In agreeing to pay a $25 million fine, the
company 
characterized the payments as extortion that helped protect banana workers
in 
the northwest Uraba region near the border with Panama.

In forceful, lengthy comments to RCN Radio, Attorney General Mario Iguaran
said 
his office did not view Chiquita's link with the paramilitaries as "an 
extortionist, victim-of-extortion relationship." He said his office, which
has 
been investigating Chiquita, would carefully study the plea deal and
determine 
if the U.S. executives, whose names were withheld by the court and the
banana 
company, could be extradited to Colombia.

"For reasons of justice, because the victims were Colombian, because of that
we 
insist on extradition," Iguaran said. Colombia and the United States have an

extradition treaty.

Mike Mitchell, a spokesman for the company in Cincinnati, said: "We have
seen 
the news reports about it but we have not been contacted about any
extradition 
requests." He said the payments were "old news" that has been dredged up
because 
of the plea deal with the Justice Department.

In his extensive comments, Iguaran also said his office has made significant

progress in an investigation of Drummond Co. of Birmingham, Ala., which is 
facing trial in the United States after Colombian workers filed a lawsuit in

federal court in Alabama accusing the company of paying paramilitaries to
murder 
three union organizers. The company denies the allegations.

Iguaran's comments came during an investigation that has progressed from 
uncovering ties between paramilitaries and congressmen allied with President

?lvaro Uribe to dredging up links that death squads might have had with big 
companies and wealthy families. Up until now, the scandal has been known as 
"para-political," but Iguaran suggested it could snowball into the corporate

world.

"You're very close to also talking about para-businesses," Iguaran said.

Iguaran said that among the issues the attorney general's office is 
investigating in the Chiquita case is the November 2001 unloading of Central

American assault rifles and ammunition at the Caribbean dock operated by the

firm's Colombian subsidiary, Banadex. The smuggling operation was detailed
in a 
2003 report by the Organization of American States.

The Justice Department did not deal with the smuggling operation in its plea

deal. Chiquita admitted making payments to the paramilitaries from 1997 to
2004, 
which Iguaran said violated Colombian law. On Sept. 10, 2001, the State 
Department declared the AUC, as the paramilitary coalition is known, an 
international terrorist group, making it a violation of U.S. law for a U.S. 
company to conduct business with the organization.

"This was a criminal relationship," Iguaran said. "Money and arms and, in 
exchange, the bloody pacification of Uraba."

In the 1990s, the leader of the paramilitaries, Carlos Casta?o, consolidated
the 
group's hold in Uraba, murdering hundreds of people in a scorched-earth
campaign 
designed to terrorize anyone who might support Marxist rebel groups.
Casta?o's 
paramilitaries then used Uraba as a platform to launch attacks, often with
the 
help of military units, across the country.

"This is where Casta?o hatched and started implementing his plan to
exterminate 
not only guerrillas, but any civilian who got in their way," said Maria 
McFarland, Colombia researcher for Human Rights Watch, the New York rights 
group. "And it's from that starting place that the paramilitaries grew and
took 
over control of much of the country."

Francisco Ramirez, a leading labor lawyer with the biggest group of workers,
the 
Unified Confederation of Workers, said Chiquita and other companies took 
advantage of a lawless region to support paramilitaries who not only focused
on 
liquidating rebels but also organized labor. "These are the policies of the 
companies," he said. "This is their security policy, just like they have a 
corruption policy and a policy to violate labor laws."

U.S. prosecutors said that after a 1997 meeting between Casta?o and
Banadex's 
general manager, who is unnamed in court documents, Chiquita made more than
100 
payments. Casta?o told the executive that Banadex should make the payments
to a 
local Convivir, then a legal vigilante group that was propelled by Uribe,
who 
was finishing his term as governor of the state where Uraba is located. U.S.

court documents say the AUC used the Convivirs as fronts to collected money
from 
businesses, which was then used to support their illegal activities.

The Justice Department said that Chiquita's senior executives reviewed and 
approved the payments, even though they had the knowledge that the AUC was
"a 
violent paramilitary organization," court documents showed. In corporate
books, 
the company called the money security payments, doling out checks at first
and 
then paying in cash. Even after the State Department labeled the AUC a
terrorist 
group, Chiquita made 50 payments totaling $825,000, court documents showed.

Iguaran said the evidence shows that Chiquita, as well as other companies
that 
have paid the AUC, have been "conscious of what they did, that what these
groups 
did, among other things, was to assassinate."

Staff writer Sam Diaz in Washington contributed to this report.