The bloody side of the political economy: Corporations in Colombia
by barb howe
A few months ago it came out that Chiquita Banana admitted to paying "protection money" to illegal armed groups in Colombia. It’s not the first time the company has found itself receiving negative publicity as a result of its involvement in the bloody side of the political economy of a Latin American country. The company used to be known as United Fruit until negative publicity around its exploitation of the “banana republics” of Central America forced it to change its name in the 1980s to the brand we know today.
In Colombia -a country engaged in an ongoing low-scale civil war for more than forty years- it is not news that a company that works in the area that Chiquita did* (an area with a heavy presence of armed actors) had to pay vacunas to armed groups to ensure their continued operation in the area. Extortion is one of the ways the illegal armed groups on both sides finance their own operations. But Chiquita did more than allow itself to be extorted. The general manager of the Chiquita subsidiary, Banadex, met personally with Carlos Castaño, the infamous former head (since assassinated) of the largest paramilitary group in the country. Banadex even smuggled 3,400 AK-47s and millions of rounds of ammunition into the country for the group . That's not simple extortion; that's active collaboration with a terrorist organization.
While Chiquita was financing the paramilitaries, thousands of people across Colombia died at the hands of the right-wing militias. For many of them, being affiliated with a union made them targets. Colombia is the most dangerous country on the planet for a union organizer according to Amnesty International. Paying off/working with the paramilitaries is not exactly an effective policy if your goal is to protect workers. If your goal is to intimidate them, however, it makes much more sense. It is reasonable to ask what sort of incentives a company doing business in that country would have to collaborate with a terrorist organization that targets those trying to subvert or protect themselves from the capitalist system. It's long been known that Coca-Cola did the same thing (for more info see www.killercoke.org).
As an article from a Colombian daily says:
"The Chiquita case reveals the responsibility of the private sector for the reach of paramilitary dominion in large parts of the country. And just as we speak of the para-political alliance, there is also a para-industrial alliance"
This is the nature of the conflict in Colombia. The war is between right-wing paramilitary forces that support neoliberal economic policies in which the few become wealthy while the majority remain poor and Marxist guerrilla groups who, inspired by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro and the wave of insurrectionary movements across Latin America in the 1960s, believe that it is not only possible but imperative that a different economic system be put into place. Both sides are willing to kill and die for what they believe in.
Any particular corporation may engage in bloody practices such as these but those of us concerned with peace and justice issues have to ask why. It’s not because some people have an irrational hatred for humanity. It’s because such behavior under this economic system is profitable. In a neoliberal economic system, a corporation must think only of the bottom line; human life is of secondary concern. It’s a bloody political economy.
To pressure individual companies to NOT rely on paramilitary armies to make a country safe for capitalism is like trying to convince water to NOT flow downhill. We can put some dams up but that will just redirect the flow. Until we have an economic system that does not encourage or give incentive to this sort of behavior more cases of gross human rights violations will continue to occur.
Sure, boycott Coca-Cola and condemn Chiquita for being “irresponsible” corporate citizens, but understanding the bigger picture of the role economics plays in the world of business and politics pushes us further towards a more lasting resolution to human rights violations by corporations not only in Colombia but around the world.
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* Chiquita sold off its Colombian subsidiary in 2004.
1. CNN March 17, 2007, online at: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/03/17/colombia.chiquita/index.html
