Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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This past August, OSHA, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced they would work together to fight health and safety hazards. On September 9th, 1977, three of these agencies held a news conference in the Labor Department building in Washington and disclosed plans to combat the dangers of dibromochloropropane, also known as DBCP.
In the 1950s, Dow Chemical and the Shell Company developed a long-awaited pesticide called dibromochloropropane, or DBCP, that was designed to eliminate a microscopic parasitic soil-dwelling worm called a nematode, which had been feeding on the roots of banana plants unchecked for far too long.
As advertised, DBCP proved very effective at killing the nematodes, and reportedly every other creature that happened to take a sip from the runoff. But in 1977, factory workers at an Occidental Petroleum Corporation plant in California, where DBCP was produced under the brand name Nemagon, discovered that the chemical was also very effective at killing another kind of microscopic organism as well.
Lab tests revealed that the sperm counts for a third of the staff responsible for producing DBCP at that occidental plant were so low that the men were declared sterile. This news came as a surprise to the workers who had not been informed of the chemical's dangers even though the chemical's dangers had been observed even before it had been approved for sale.
Studies conducted by Shell and Dow 20 years earlier had found that in animals, prolonged exposure to DBCP led to liver, kidney, and lung damage, in addition to elevated levels of cancer and shriveled testicles. Yet the product was approved for sale by the United States government anyway because the companies had expressed doubt that the results would not be repeated in humans. Whoops.
Thanks to a lawsuit, Occidental Petroleum would ultimately pay out millions of dollars to those employees affected by the chemical. And more importantly, in 1979, DBCP was banned from use in the continental United States. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is issuing an emergency temporary standard to limit worker exposure. The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing a suspension on crop application and other uses of this pesticide.
However, companies based in the United States were not banned from using DBCP in foreign countries. And conveniently, that's where all of the banana plantations that relied on the chemical were located.
Dow Chemical initially hesitated with the notion of continuing to provide the dangerous pesticide to those banana companies, but the Standard Fruit Company, who was now known as the Dole Food Company, insisted that their supply be refilled or else Dow Chemical would be in breach of contract.
So, Dow Chemical provided the remaining stock of the pesticide to Standard Fruit. And Standard Fruit continued its use of DBCP on foreign soil for years after the harmful effects had been discovered. Tens of thousands of banana workers in countries such as Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Philippines were affected. Los Afectados, they are called.
Dow Chemical defended its role in the affair by pointing to the new Spanish warning labels it included on the product, even though they knew that most of the workers couldn't read, and the company issued a set of safety guidelines to abide by.
Those guidelines advised wearing protective gear when working with DBCP. Protective gear that was never provided. In fact, because of the tropical conditions, many of the laborers preferred to work in nothing more than shorts and, uh, yeah, that's it, just shorts. No masks, no gloves, no shoes, no training whatsoever. Proven by the fact that in some places, the DBCP had not been applied by the book.
Instead of injecting the pesticide directly into the roots of the banana plants, some plantations sprayed from above, coating the stems and trapping the vapors beneath the thick banana leaves. Every day the workers would emerge for lunch completely soaked in the chemical. It's no wonder that 20 years later those workers' skin was cracking and their kidneys were failing. Many of them were sterile, others had miscarried. The offspring that did survive often possessed deformed limbs and appendages.
But at least we got rid of those nematodes and whatever else was exposed. Just so that the picky western consumer could purchase an unblemished banana that they would ultimately just let turn black and throw away. But if it was sympathy the affected were looking for, they would not find it at the companies that produced the chemical.
In response to a question about the sterility of the Central American banana workers, Clyde Macbeth, one of the chemists who developed DBCP for Dow and Shell, told a Mother Jones reporter, quote, From what I hear, they could use a little birth control down there. Statements like that made it obvious that righting the wrongs would not happen voluntarily. So the banana workers began to sue the major players, namely Dow Chemical, Shell, Occidental, Chiquita, and Dole.
The first lawsuit was filed in Florida in 1983, with plenty more to follow, and the workers were winning, easily, thanks to a variety of smoking guns, including an internal memo from Dole instructing managers to ignore safety precautions because they were, quote, "...not operationally feasible."
According to the New York Times, all of the companies settled in 1997 with 26,000 former banana workers in Central America, Africa, and the Philippines for $41 million. All of the companies except for Dole Food Company, who continued to deny responsibility.
Obviously, the company did not enjoy seeing millions of dollars walk out the door in the form of settlements, so Dole's counsel claimed forum non-convenience, which is a legal doctrine whereby a court determines that a different court would be more appropriate to hear the case. And in this case, according to Dole's lawyers, that more appropriate court was somewhere in Central America, and the North American judges were convinced to agree. Susanna Bomey wrote in the Boston Review, quote,
Each formal non-convenience dismissal was a de facto victory for the defendants, as workers' home courts usually had high barriers to filing and offered little hope of significant restitution. In addition, the corporations knew that their plaintiffs were sick. They knew that the longer the lawsuits dragged out, the more plaintiffs would die and their complaints would disappear.
and in most cases there was no future generation to follow up with lawsuits on their behalf, since many of the workers, for some odd reason, were never able to have children. By using that legal doctrine, Dole essentially immunized itself from accountability for their abuses committed abroad by effectively denying the victims their right to a remedy, and that immunity lasted for decades, until 2001.
That's when Nicaragua passed Law 364 to specifically address the DVCP pesticide exposure cases instead of the small awards that had been handed out in recent years. Thanks to a new law, Nicaraguan courts began awarding banana workers hundreds of millions of dollars at a time for a total of $2 billion in a few short years. As Susana Bomi wrote, suddenly, Nicaragua no longer looked so convenient.
So Dole began arguing that the country of Nicaragua lacked the legal infrastructure to adequately hear the cases, and eventually the lawsuits returned to the now friendlier courtrooms of the United States. But those courtrooms turned out to be not as friendly as the fruit company had anticipated. Mr. DiLorenzo, as the manager of the Nicaraguan division, did you know the amount of DBCP that was considered dangerous by the government?
I probably maybe knew the statistics, I may not have recalled them, but basically what we were told is if you could smell it, there was kind of a dangerous level you didn't want to be spending any time in a plantation that you could smell it. Did you have a medical toxicologist that was employed by your firm at the time? No, I don't believe we did. We rely on the manufacturers
who do work with the government in these issues and they're specialists in this. Were you aware of the fact that the government of the United States took the position that any contact of DVCP with the human skin could cause sperm damage? Yes, certainly after 1977 we did, yes. Mr. DiLorenzo, you got a report that 10 out of 10 workers checked in Costa Rica were sterile. And when you got that report in 1978,
the Nicaraguan division continued to use DBCP unchanged in 1978, 1979, and 1980. Correct? That's correct. We continued using DBCP in both Honduras and Nicaragua following the Costa Rican incident, and for, I think, very good reasons. As our people went out and talked to people, talked to the doctors, talked to the teachers, talked to the workers,
I recall no report back that we had infertility anyplace and that's what gave us a great deal of comfort about using the chemicals. In the November 2007 case of Telles v. Dole, a California jury awarded six Nicaraguan banana workers $3.2 million in damages and another $2.5 million in punitive damages.
It was the first time a United States jury had found Dole liable for its conduct outside of the United States, and the implications were immense. When the news reached the villages of Nicaragua, there were celebrations in the street. It was a landmark decision, a bellwether case. It was a precedent of hope for tens of thousands of banana workers that justice would finally prevail in the 39 remaining cases.
You can see the lead up to the decision in a documentary called Bananas, punctuated with an exclamation point and an asterisk. Dole Food Company liked the movie so much they threatened to sue the Swedish filmmaker for defamation. But the company eventually dropped their claim after being criticized for silencing free speech. Because while Bananas admittedly only tells one side of the story, the events depicted in the documentary were true. But as Dole complained, the movie ended too soon.
Because what the documentary does not show is that two years later, that historic decision in Telos V. Dol was thrown out by Judge Victoria Chaney when it was discovered that the plaintiff's lawyer in the case, a Cuban-born personal injury attorney in Los Angeles named Juan Dominguez, had recruited and coached thousands of people off the Nicaraguan streets to pose as sterile banana workers.
Dole also alleged that work certificates had been forged and lab results had been faked, which meant that the decision on Telazavi Dole was based on a fraud. In the videotaped testimonies introduced by the fruit company, witnesses claimed that the plaintiff's lawyers had organized training seminars to prepare the phony workers for their roles and instructed them to hide their children so as not to set off any alarms.
The witnesses also claimed that they were promised millions of dollars if they played along and said that they were threatened with violence if they even thought about exposing the scam. And those threats of violence were enough for Judge Chaney to issue a series of rulings to keep the identities of the witnesses secret from everybody, forever. Which made it quite difficult for Juan Dominguez and the plaintiffs to dispute the allegations.
Later, according to Susanna Bomey at the Boston Review, "A union leader implicated by the secret testimony filed a legal action in Nicaragua which resulted in sworn testimony from at least seven people to the effect that Dole personnel had offered them cash to serve as secret witnesses in the California litigation. If that testimony was true, then the phony worker fraud had been manufactured by Dole in order to frame Juan Dominguez and the plaintiffs."
And not only were those fraud allegations successful in overturning Telizavidol, those fraud allegations effectively destroyed any Nicaraguan's ability to seek compensation in a U.S. court. Judge Cheney dismissed two other DBCP sterility cases based on that secret testimony, and at one hearing she issued a stern promise, quote,
Judge Cheney also expressed remorse for those who were legitimately sickened. Quote,
She continued, "'I can't believe in lab reports, work certificates, medical reports. What is there for me to believe? Nothing. And that's what the vast majority of the affectados had received and will receive. Absolutely nothing.'
although they're still fighting to this day. And in 2011, 30 years after the exposure, the LA Business Journal reported that Dole Food Company agreed to settle 38 lawsuits from farm workers who alleged injury from exposure to DBCP for an undisclosed amount. Thousands of others wait their turn. That story about the poisoned workers and DBCP is just one of many harrowing tales to be found in the history of banana production.
It's a history that features massacres, military coups, and terrorism, brought to life by a vast cast of characters that includes presidents, mercenaries, and multinational corporate behemoths. But the most notorious role belongs to the United Fruit Company, or Chiquita as it is currently known, a company at one time powerful enough to overthrow nations. Let's talk about bananas on this episode of Swindled.
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For example, take the banana. Far older than history itself is the banana's use as a food for man. Let us visit the Caribbean country, where the greatest banana farms of the world are located. Building a railroad through the jungles of Costa Rica is hard work. That's what a man named Miner Cooper Keith discovered in the late 1800s.
Miner's uncle Henry, a builder of railroads, had recruited Miner and his three brothers to help manage the project after securing a contract with the Costa Rican government. The brothers Keith knew that the job wouldn't be easy, but none of the men had anticipated the endless horror that laid in store. The weather was brutal, the terrain was uninhabitable, and the tropical diseases were unavoidable.
The tracks were being constructed at a glacial pace that would take years, decades even, to complete. For Miner Keith, the privately schooled New Yorker and son of a wealthy lumber baron, Costa Rica was hell on earth with extra mosquitoes. But soon, Miner Keith realized that he was one of the lucky ones. In fact, Miner Keith had inherited the Costa Rican Railroad project as his own six years into the job.
Miner took over after his uncle Henry and all three of his brothers died from malaria or yellow fever or dysentery. Take your pick. And they weren't the only ones. It is estimated that as many as 5,000 people died during the construction of the first 25 miles of those Costa Rican tracks. The project seemed as cursed as a project could be. But that didn't stop Miner Keith from trudging along. Although he was finding it more and more difficult to field a crew,
The Costa Rican locals who surely noticed the workers in their villages dropping like flies didn't seem very interested in taking the jobs, so Keith began sourcing labor from China, Jamaica, and Italy. He also imported 700 inmates from New Orleans jails, only 25 of which would survive to see the railways completion, which would finally happen in 1890. But by then the railroad wasn't even serving its original purpose of transporting passengers and exporting coffee beans.
Instead, the rail cars were full of an exotic new fruit called bananas, which were previously unknown to the Western world. In the final 10 years of the Costa Rican railroad construction, bananas had exploded in popularity in the United States thanks to miner Cooper Keith, the builder of railroads and owner of banana plantations.
Keith had planted the fruit alongside the railroad as it was being built. He relied on the bananas to feed his workers in times of financial uncertainty, of which there were plenty. Halfway through construction, the Costa Rican government had run out of money to fund the project. So miner Keith obtained loans from private investors and banks and renegotiated the interest rates on money that Costa Rica already owed.
In return, the president of Costa Rica rewarded Minor Keith with approximately 800,000 acres of tax-free land along the railroad tracks, plus a 99-year lease on the operation of the train route. This vertical integration of owning the plantations as well as the railroad turned out to be quite lucrative for Minor Keith, who began marketing and exporting bananas to the U.S. until it became one of the most popular fruits on the planet.
and yet through what appears to be nothing more than bad luck. Miner Keith lost all of that banana and railroad money at the turn of the century when the brokerage firm he trusted with his fortune went bankrupt. On March 30th, 1899, in order to save his company, Keith merged his business with the Boston Fruit Company, previously one of his biggest rivals. Business enemies united under the branch of a common fruit. They called themselves the United Fruit Company.
Until his death in 1929, Miner Keith remained involved with the banana business. He served as United Fruit's vice president where he continued to do what he did best, build railroads and plantations in Central American countries. And many of those countries welcomed United Fruit with open arms after seeing how industry and transport sprouted everywhere the company planted seeds.
After witnessing the success of Costa Rica's new crop, the country of Guatemala invited miner Keith to complete the construction of their equivalent railroad in exchange for banana land. Three years into the project, Guatemala tried to pull out of the deal, but United Fruit balked and threatened to leave the country entirely, and United Fruit held all of the leverage. As Andrew Scheinman for the Contemporary Food Lab explained, quote,
Competing builders may have had the savoir faire to piece together a railway, but no other enterprise could promise a complementary banana industry. From that point on, the United Fruit Company slowly encroached into every aspect of Guatemalan life.
The company owned a massive amount of land. They operated the country's railroad, the shipping port, and the telephone lines. United Fruit even began taking over government functions. And of course their first order of business was to exempt themselves from taxes. The Guatemalan people referred to United Fruit as "El Pulpo" or "The Octopus" because they had their tentacles and everything.
A powerless government taking orders from their corporate overlords while abusing cheap labor and hoarding all of the wealth generated from the country's only export. Guatemala in the early 1900s was a literal banana republic. In fact, US author O. Henry coined that term to describe United Fruit's similar exploitation of Honduras.
consumerism demands necessary evils. Large amounts of private capital from the United States are being invested to build new industrial and agricultural enterprises which help to strengthen the economy of Central America. From 1901 to 1910, Americans increased their annual consumption of bananas from 15 million bunches to 40 million bunches, an everlasting demand.
and creating a banana republic was the most efficient way of satisfying that demand. David B. Lauterwasser described United Fruit's aggressive business practices in an article he published on Medium. Quote,
This meant that the banana industry had to control land and labor with the help of corrupt governments, often put in place by banana industry bribes or threats in the first place, putting foreign companies' interests before those of their own people. Although not quite the textbook definition of a banana republic, the citizens of Colombia found out the hard way what happens when a corrupt government puts a foreign company's interests before those of its own people. On November 12th, 1928,
32,000 United Fruit workers in Santa Marta went on strike. In addition to medical care and sanitary housing facilities, the strikers demanded shorter hours and better pay, better pay with real money this time. Leading up to the strike, United Fruit had been compensating its workers in Colombia with coupons to spend at the office store that United Fruit owned. A livable wage and healthcare.
"Sounds like communism," said the United Fruit Company to the United States government, who threatened military intervention if the Colombian government didn't get the uprising under control, a message that was received loud and clear. On December 6, 1928, after church, a massive crowd of banana workers and their families gathered in the small banana town of Cienega to listen to a speech by the regional governor.
Above them, the Colombian military were stationed on rooftops with machine guns. The crowd was ordered to disperse within five minutes or else, an impossible task due to the sheer number of people. Those five minutes ticked away and the Colombian military started shooting into the crowd and didn't stop until the piles of bodies stopped moving. Dead men and women and children lined the streets before they were later dumped into the ocean.
A little more than a month later, a dispatch from the United States Embassy in Colombia to the U.S. Secretary of State read, quote, I have the honor to report that the Bogota representative of the United Fruit Company told me yesterday that the number of strikers killed by the Colombian military exceeded 1,000. You can only imagine how honored that person felt delivering the follow-up message that the true number of deaths was closer to 3,000.
That massacre of banana workers in 1928 planted the seeds for an era of violence in Colombia known as La Violencia, which included a decade-long civil war that ravaged the country until the 1950s. Thousands more men, women, and children were killed during that period, all while the tentacles of El Popo continued to grow.
By the mid-1950s, the United Fruit Company owned more than 3.5 million acres of land in Central America, and they had close allies and positions of power in the United States government. The director of the CIA, Alan Dulles, had previously sat on the board of United Fruit, and Alan's brother, John Foster Dulles, who would later become the Secretary of State, had worked for Sullivan & Cromwell, a powerful Wall Street law firm that represented the United Fruit Company.
According to The Economist, even United Fruit's public relations officer had deep ties to the federal government. He was married to President Eisenhower's private secretary. The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge, had personal stock holdings in United Fruit Company. The Assistant Secretary of State, John Lodge, had personal stock holdings in United Fruit Company. The Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles,
His law firm did legal work for, I believe it's the Schlafly Bank, which held the papers on the Guatemalan Railroad, which was owned by the United Fruit Company. And the CI director, Alan Dulles, was his brother, also was a member of the same law firm with this indirect financial interest in United Fruit Company.
That is a former Marine and CIA officer named John R. Stockwell. Stockwell resigned from the agency in December 1976 and wrote an expose about his time there titled "In Search of Enemies." The Central Intelligence Agency retaliated by suing Stockwell into bankruptcy. The point of all of this is that the United Fruit Company wielded extraordinary power and influence at home and abroad, and they were not afraid to use it.
The most egregious example of the company flexing its muscles took place in Guatemala in the early 50s, when a former military man named Colonel Jacobo Arbenz was elected as the country's president. Arbenz had campaigned on an ambitious plan to reclaim and redistribute uncultivated land to more than 500,000 Guatemalan citizens, and early in his administration he began taking steps to make good on his promise.
The only problem was that the United Fruit Company owned much of that land the new president planned to just give away. So President Art Benz offered the company $525,000 for the rights, which was in line with the market price of $2.98 an acre, and equaled the value reported by United Fruit on its tax returns. United Fruit issued a counteroffer, asking for $16 million.
At an obvious impasse, the relationship between the United Fruit Company and the Guatemalan government was getting dark faster than a banana. The final straw came when President Arbenz publicly supported the United Fruit Company worker strike in 1951. It was time to remove this communist scum from office. But before we show you some of the reasons why the Kremlin must hate bananas, let's glance at a map of Central America, where most of the fruit comes from.
United Fruit turned to their old friends in the United States government, who turned to a public relations guru named Edward Bernays to build public support at home for a potential military invasion. Operation PB's success was, in effect, the goal to overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala.
However, Jacobo Arbenz was not a communist.
This is former CIA officer John Stockwell, again. Arbenz was not a communist and there was not a single communist in his cabinet. But they organized a coup and threw him out so that they could make some money on their investments.
United Fruit, via the CIA, via Edward Bernays, created a massive disinformation operation to paint the Arbenz administration as being propped up by the Soviet Union to lead a communist takeover of Central America. United Fruit has put to useful production hundreds of thousands of acres of otherwise unproductive tropical lands. It has created jobs for thousands of workers, providing housing, schools,
hospital facilities and churches. No wonder then red leaders detest and fear the company that grows ships and markets bananas so successfully. In Guatemala, Bernays paid students to distribute propaganda. Guns and money were given to peasants to play revolutionaries, and bribes and intimidation were directed at the Guatemalan army to encourage them to abandon their leader.
At the same time, the United States public was frothing at the mouth thanks to their own conditioning. He also created a fake independent news agency in America called the Middle American Information Bureau. It bombarded the American media with press releases saying that Moscow was planning to use Guatemala as a beachhead to attack America.
The CIA also launched psychological warfare and scare tactics against Arbenz, staging battles by putting bullet holes in walls, lighting fires, and killing mules along the roads. The fake news radio broadcasted warnings of militant combat caravans storming the border, while the US airplanes dropped bombs in Guatemala City to stir confusion.
At one point, President Arbenz reportedly reached out to US President Eisenhower for help, unaware that his supposed ally was one of the masterminds behind the attack. On June 27th, 1954, Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz and his wife fled their home country, and thanks to the CIA's far-reaching smear campaign, the couple found very few countries willing to grant them political asylum.
Ultimately, Arbenz settled in Mexico, where he died of a serious illness in 1970. Or was it a heart attack? Or suicide? Historians have never agreed. The American PB success campaign brought the government down and drove Arbenz and his wife into exile. 9,000 of his supporters were arrested.
Many were kept in jail without trial for years. With Jacobo Arbenz out of the picture, the United States government handpicked his successor, Carlos Castillo Armas, a right-wing authoritarian, a military dictator, and more importantly, a puppet for Uncle Sam and Aunt Banana. This is U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon congratulating Armas on defeating communism.
This is the first time in the history of the world that the communist government has been overthrown by the people. And for that we congratulate you and the people of Guatemala for the support they have given. And we are sure that under your leadership, supported by the people whom I have met by the hundreds on my visit to Guatemala, that Guatemala is going to enter a new era in which there will be prosperity for the people
together with liberty for the people. Thank you very much for allowing us to see this exhibit of communism in Guatemala. You're welcome.
On July 26, 1957, after launching a violent campaign against trade unions and offering a sweetheart deal to United Fruit, President Castillo Armas was shot twice and killed by a member of his own security detail in the presidential palace, a fate that would become a common occurrence for Guatemalan presidents in the years to come.
if it was United Fruit's goal to bring stability to Central America. Well, it didn't work. It didn't work. But not for lack of trying. The next three leaders of Guatemala died violent deaths. Amnesty International tells us that 85,000 people have been killed by subsequent governments in Guatemala that are supported by the United States. This is not making friends for the United States in the long haul, I assure you.
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Despite the United Fruit Company's constant tinkering in Central America to serve its corporate interests, the company experienced a period of financial decline in the 1960s. Wasting money on failed invasions of Cuba to dispose of Fidel Castro will do that to you.
Look up the Bay of Pigs if you aren't familiar. El Popo had a tentacle in that too. To save itself, in 1970, United Fruit merged with another company called AMK, which was a conglomeration of meatpacking and manufacturing businesses owned by a man named Eli M. Black.
Eli Black purchased roughly 10% of United Fruit's total stock for $40 million on the open market. According to the New York Daily News, at the time, it was the largest single purchase ever recorded on ticker tape. The United Fruit Company became United Brands, and Eli Black, the chairman of the new multinational conglomerate, took great strides in distancing the banana from its bloody and exploitative past.
In addition to unloading all of the company's Guatemalan assets, Black hired native managers in these Central American countries to replace the unrelatable gringos. He raised wages across the board, and he funded efforts to improve employee education, housing, and medical care.
Eli Black also diversified the United Brands portfolio by acquiring popular brands like Baskin Robbins and A&W in hopes that maybe one day the company wouldn't be so dependent on their little yellow friend. Because within the first few years of his control, Eli Black discovered that he had made a huge mistake in merging with United Fruit.
The banana business sucked. The profit margins were paper thin. The industry was super competitive. United Brands was becoming crippled with debt just trying to keep up. And with the death blow of tax increases looming on the horizon in places like Honduras, Eli Black took some desperate measures.
In 1975, the Securities and Exchange Commission uncovered a $1,250,000 bribe that United Brands paid to Honduran President Oswaldo López-Ariano under authorization by Chairman Eli Black in order to obtain a reduction of taxes on banana exports. That news was reported by the New York Times in February 1975.
Just a few weeks earlier, aware of the pending exposure, Eli Black had arrived to work before everyone else as usual and went up to his 44th floor office in the Pan Am building in Manhattan. Once inside, Black locked the door behind him, removed his hat and coat, and then bashed a window open with his briefcase. Carefully, Eli removed large chunks of glass to avoid cutting himself and then jumped to his death in front of horrified motorists on the northbound ramp of Park Avenue.
His briefcase followed him down and rolled across the street.
United Brands was fined just $15,000 by the SEC for their attempted bribe. And in 1984, the company was sold to billionaire Carl Lindner's investment group and relocated to Cincinnati, Ohio, where it was renamed and rebranded to Chiquita Brands International. ♪ I'm Chiquita Banana and I come to say ♪ ♪ I come from Little Island down East Quater Way ♪ ♪ I sail on Bigger Banana boat from Cavalry ♪ ♪ To see if I can help good neighbor policy ♪
With their cute new name and mascot, Chiquita picked up right where United Fruit and United Brands left off. In the early 90s, Chiquita began illegally seizing and destroying a competing banana company's cargo, as well as bribing judges to validate detention orders on their ships.
and it was discovered later that the company made generous donations to the Clinton administration to put pressure on Europe to relax its banana tariffs. Time magazine reported that the Clinton administration was ready to mount a global trade war on Chiquita's behalf after Carl Lindner, the company's majority owner, showed he would, quote, "...dispense cash to the Democrats."
But those actions paled in comparison to what would be revealed next. On May 3rd, 1998, the Cincinnati Inquirer published an 18-page special on Chiquita based on 2,000 voicemails that were said to have been obtained from a high-ranking official at the company. And those voicemails contained a trove of evidence that Chiquita was involved in some highly illegal and unethical practices.
For instance, the Inquirer's investigation uncovered that Chiquita secretly controls dozens of supposedly independent banana companies and actively suppresses union activity on those farms. And despite its pact with environmental groups to abide by pesticide safety standards, Chiquita subsidiaries have used pesticides in Central America that are banned in the US, Canada, and Europe. Yeah, that's pretty status quo with what we have learned so far. But wait, there's more.
The Cincinnati Inquirer series also charged that Chiquita's fruit transport ships have been used to smuggle cocaine into Europe. More than a ton of cocaine was seized from seven Chiquita ships in 1997. Chiquita executives bribed Colombian officials. The Cincinnati Inquirer report said...
Also, that Chiquita called in the Honduran military to evict residents of a farm village. The soldiers forced the farmers at gunpoint out and the village was bulldozed. And the series said that an employee of a competitor filed a federal lawsuit charging that armed men hired by Chiquita tried to kidnap him in Honduras. Cocaine smuggling, briberies, violent land acquisitions and kidnapping. El Popo lives on.
but that Cincinnati Inquirer expose did not, because those voicemails that the story was based on had been illegally obtained. Mike Gallagher, one of the reporters that authored the story, had actually hacked into the Chiquita phone system himself. A disgruntled former lawyer for the company had given him the access codes, so the story was pulled from the Inquirer's website. In its place was an apology to Chiquita for all the world to see.
Mike Gallagher, the reporter, was fired and later pleaded guilty to felony charges for which he was sentenced to five years of probation. As for Chiquita, Lynn Oberlander wrote for the New Yorker, "...its business practices went mostly unexamined, and it found itself at least $10 million richer."
That's because the Cincinnati Inquirer's parent company agreed to pay Chiquita $10 million to avoid being sued for publishing the report, even though Chiquita never denied any of the story's claims. And as sensational as the Inquirer's claims may have been, the most shocking was yet to be revealed.
This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.
I want to get back to the men and women, but I have one quick question for you. Congress has done something today that they have never done to you before. You vetoed a bill that would have allowed 9-11 families to sue Saudi Arabia. They today overrode your veto that has never happened to you before. Your reaction? Well, I think it was a mistake. And I understand why it happened. Obviously, all of us
still carry the scars and trauma of 9/11. Nobody more than this 9/11 generation that's fought on our behalf in the aftermath of 9/11. And, you know, those families deserve support and they deserve resources. That's why we set up a victims' compensation fund. On average, families received about $2 million each. But what this legislation did was it said,
If a private citizen believes that having been victimized by terrorism that another country didn't do enough to stop one of its citizens, for example, in engaging in terrorism, then they can file a personal lawsuit, a private lawsuit in court. And the problem with that is that if we eliminate this notion of sovereign immunity, then we
In May 2016, with almost unanimous and bipartisan support, the United States Senate passed a bill named the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, or JASTA.
The practical effect of the legislation was to allow the continuation of a long-standing civil lawsuit brought by families of victims of the September 11th attacks against Saudi Arabia for its government's alleged role in the attacks, though the law does not mention Saudi Arabia by name. This is Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal. If the Saudi government had no involvement in 9-11,
In September 2016, the House of Representatives followed suit and voted in favor of the bill. But when JASTA landed on the desk of President Barack Obama to be signed into law, he vetoed it. Obama was concerned about some unintended consequences. Quote,
The concern that I've had has nothing to do with Saudi Arabia per se, or my sympathy for 9/11 families. It has to do with me not wanting a situation in which we're suddenly exposed to liabilities for all the work that we're doing all around the world, and suddenly finding ourselves subject to the private lawsuits in court where we don't even know exactly whether they're on the up-and-up in some cases.
In other words, if victims of terrorism were allowed to sue the governments of the terrorist home countries that failed to prevent or even encouraged it, what would stop people in foreign countries from suing the United States for what might be considered by some its own acts of terrorism? Nevertheless, Obama's warnings fell on the deaf and naive ears of Congress. Although that was to be expected, it was an election year.
A legislator going on record against anything related to 9/11 was a political death sentence in America. So five days later, Obama's veto was overridden by the House and the Senate. On this vote, the yeas are 97, the nays are 1. Two-thirds of the senators voting, a quorum being present. Having voted in the affirmative, the bill on reconsideration is passed. The objections of the President of the United States to the contrary notwithstanding.
Jasta was the first and only presidential veto override of Obama's entire administration. But he wasn't the only one disappointed. The 9/11 victims bill is called Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. The Daily Beast reports that Chiquita paid nearly $800,000 to lobbyists and lawyers trying to block the bill.
Turns out Chiquita Brands International was worried about those unintended consequences too. That's because Chiquita had been sponsoring terrorism in Central America for almost 20 years. The company admitted to it. Hell, they basically turned themselves in.
In April 2003, a board member of Chiquita, accompanied by lawyers, approached the U.S. Justice Department with information that the company had been making payments to a far-right Colombian paramilitary group called the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, also known as the AUC. According to NBC News, the AUC was responsible for some of the worst massacres during Colombia's civil war.
Thousands of peasants, labor leaders, teachers, and anyone else who might have had leftist sympathies suffered violent deaths at their hands. Sometimes entire villages were wiped out. Gloria Coartes was the mayor of one of those towns affected. She said that in 1996, while she was giving a speech to young students at a school, the AUC barged in and murdered a 12-year-old boy who had done nothing more but announce their presence. Coartes told 60 Minutes, quote,
They cut off his head and they threw the head at us. I went into a state of panic. They were there for four hours with their weapons, firing shots toward the ceiling. Did they say anything to you? No. No. Their language was death. Between 1997 and 2004, Chiquita International had funneled a total of $1.7 million to these murder squads through hidden channels.
The company apparently disguised the payments in their books.
This company has blood on its hands. He's talking about Chiquita, the banana company which paid nearly $2 million in protection money to a murderous paramilitary group that killed or massacred thousands of people in Colombia. These were extortion payments. These were payments that had to be made to protect the lives of our employees. And so it's one of those situations where you just simply had no other choice. Either you paid...
or your people get killed. And you decided to pay? And the company decided to pay, absolutely. Chiquita said it had been extorted by the AUC. The payments were to ensure protection for its employees and operations, it said.
and the company claimed that, since 1989, it had made similar payments to other paramilitary groups such as the National Liberation Army and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, depending on who was in control of their growing territory at the time. The payments were mandatory, Chiquita claimed, or else all of the workers would have been killed. So if anything, Chiquita was a victim too.
but according to former members of the AUC, that simply wasn't true. Chiquita were making the payments voluntarily, and they were not the only company doing so. In a sworn statement, former AUC commander Carlos Tajiras said quote: "I've been told that Chiquita has asserted that they paid the AUC funds, but this was coerced and was a form of extortion. I've also heard that Dole claims to have never paid us any funds.
Both of these assertions are absolutely false. In fact, my agreement with Chiquita and Dole was to provide them with total security and other services. Tigeris alleged on record that the banana companies paid AUC to quote, pacify their workforces and suppress labor unions, and to terrorize peasant squatters seeking their own competing land claims.
He continued, quote,
In most cases, those executed were union leaders or members or individuals seeking to hold or reclaim land that Dole or Chiquita wanted for banana cultivation. And the Dole or Chiquita administrators would report to the AUC that these individuals were suspected guerrillas or criminals. A terrorist word versus the word of a banana company with a long history of immoral behavior. Which one are you supposed to believe?
If it helps, numerous AUC leaders went on record with similar accusations, including Salvatore Mancuso, the overall commander of the militia who alleged that Chiquita, Dole, and Del Monte had been providing major support to the AUC since its inception. At one point, the companies were providing AUC with 90% of its total budget.
And furthermore, Chiquita's own actions placed the company's innocent victim story in doubt, because their payment to the paramilitary federations in question continued even after those paramilitary federations had been placed on the United States government's list of foreign terrorist organizations in September 2001, a move that designated payments to such groups as a federal offense.
and Chiquita was aware of that, as evidenced by an email from February 2003 in which their outside counsel responded with advice sought by the company regarding their legal quandary. In all caps, Chiquita's lawyers wrote, Bottom line, cannot make the payment.
But Chiquita continued to make those payments for another 16 months after that. According to a special litigation committee report, until that point, Chiquita's strategy, set forth by senior executives in Cincinnati, was to, quote, "...just let them sue us, come after us." And so they did. To quote a U.S. attorney handling the case, "...funding a terrorist organization can never be treated as a cost of doing business."
and Chiquita's punishment for admittedly funding terrorists, a fine of $25 million, less than 1% of its annual revenues in 2007 when the penalty was handed down, and there was an agreement from the prosecution not to name or prosecute the executives involved in ordering the payments.
The information filed today is part of a plea agreement, which we view as a reasoned solution to the dilemma the company faced several years ago, Chiquita's chief executive, Fernando Aguirre, said in a statement. The payments made by the company were always motivated by our good faith concern for the safety of our employees.
Chiquita sold its Colombian banana operations in 2004. Nearly 250 Colombians who say they and relatives were victims of violence by Colombian right-wing paramilitaries have filed a lawsuit seeking more than $1 billion in damages from the Chiquita Banana Company, which has admitted making payments to paramilitary.
Almost immediately, dozens of lawsuits were filed against Chiquita in the United States, including a class action lawsuit by Earth Rights International on behalf of almost 400 Colombian families accusing the company of financing torture, war crimes, and other human rights abuses. The plaintiffs in the class action were seeking $10 million in damages, along with $10 million in punitive damages for each of the 393 victims named in the suit.
for a total of $7.86 billion. Chiquita conspired with the AUC, aided and abetted them in a far-reaching conspiracy and plan to control every aspect of banana growing, distribution, and sale. Attorney Jonathan Ryder said,
Since most of the claims were nearly identical, all of the cases were moved to a federal court in West Palm Beach to be decided by a single judge.
South Florida's proximity to Columbia was one of the reasons it was selected, and that's where the cases remain. Thanks to various appeals and emotions to dismiss, the cases have been pending since 2008.
The resolution has turned into a decade-long legal battle. A divided U.S. appeals court on Thursday threw out claims against produce giant Chiquita Brands International made by relatives of thousands of Colombians killed during years of bloody civil war. Most recently, in 2019, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Mara threw out claims filed against Chiquita on behalf of 10 Colombians who were murdered.
As reported by the Palm Beach Post, Judge Mara ruled that the grieving families cannot definitively link their loved ones' brutal deaths to the AUC, much less Chiquita. The evidence introduced by the plaintiffs, some of which could be considered substantial, was either discounted or excluded entirely. A day after those ten lawsuits were dismissed, Judge Mara sent his decision to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta to review.
Since then, new claims have been filed. So now, we wait. Until then, Chiquita remains the leading distributor of bananas in the United States and one of the biggest growers and suppliers worldwide. For more information about the ongoing legal battle, visit the website of Earth Rights International at earthrights.org and look up Doe v. Chiquita. As for bananas...
Enjoy them while they last. Are bananas going extinct? That's the fear after a fungus decimating the banana industry is spreading. Headlines share troubling news that bananas are on the way out. Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen. With original music by Trevor Howard, a.k.a. Deformer, a.k.a. El Popo.
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