here's a blurb concerning a 1998 segment on "democracy now!" concerning chiquita/united fruit..strange that it sounds so similar to the situation outined in the op....
Quote:
Last week, in one of the largest and most unusual settlements by a news organization, The Cincinnati Enquirer published an apology across the top of its front page and said it had agreed to pay Chiquita Brands International Inc. more than $10 million to avoid being sued for a series of articles that exposed the fruit company's criminal practices. [includes rush transcript]
The articles, which appeared in an 18-page special section on May 3rd, were partially based on 2,000 internal voice mails that were said to have been obtained from "a high ranking Chiquita executive."
The newspaper however, after initially defending its year-long investigation of Chiquita, said last week that it was convinced that the voice mails had been stolen from the company, and that it had renounced the articles. The Enquirer also fired Michael Gallagher, the reporter who led the investigation.
The ties between Chiquita banana C.E.O Carl Lindner and the Cincinnati political and business elite are strong; until 1979 Lindner was the controlling shareholder of the company that owned The Enquirer before its current publisher, the Gannett newspaper chain. The Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph Deters, whose office is driving the investigation into Gallagher and who is responsible for appointing a special prosecutor, has received campaign donations from Chiquita.
While Chiquita hailed The Enquirer for acknowledging "that the conclusions in the article were untrue," Harry Whipple, the Enquirer's publisher, has said he believed the voicemails, despite how they may have been obtained, were real. In an interview with the New York Times, he said "We are not aware of anything to suggest that this is an instance of a reporter fabricating something."
Nevertheless, the Enquirer has erased all the articles from its website; previously existing links on the internet to the stories now all lead to the Enquirer's apology to Chiquita instead.
Chiquita, formerly known as the United Fruit Company, is the world s largest banana producer. Among the illegal Chiquita practices uncovered by the Enquirer s investigation:
Chiquita secretly controls dozens of supposedly independent banana companies. It also suppresses union activity on the farms it controls.
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 U.S., Canada, and the European Union. Chiquita also released harmful toxic chemicals into farms, killing at least one worker in Costa Rica according to a coroner's report.
Chiquita's fruit transport ships have been used to smuggle cocaine into Europe. More than a ton of cocaine was seized from 7 Chiquita ships in 1997. (The Enquirer story says the illegal shipment was traced to lax Colombian security rather than to Chiquita)
Chiquita executives bribed Colombian officials
Chiquita called in the Honduran military to evict residents of a farm village; the soldiers forced the farmers out at gunpoint, and the village was bulldozed.
An employee of a competitor filed a federal lawsuit charging that armed men hired by Chiquita tried to kidnap him in Honduras.
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http://www.democracynow.org/article..../04/07/0342243
here is a more extensive background piece on chiquita/united fruit and rightwing paramilitary action in colombia--see in particular the james petras letter (second item on the page as of now)....
http://mparent7777.blogspot.com/search/label/Colombia
this kind of multiple intertwining--american state policy, american-based corporate activity and repression/violence on the part of rightwing militaries and paramilitaries is not new.
it is one of the main faces of american-style domination, particularly in latin america.
united fruit had a long history of exploitation backed with american military power--the arbenz coup in guatemala 1954 is but the most well-known instance. this stuff has continued, in various forms, ever since. backing colombian rightwing death squads which target union activists is just a logical extension of the politics of mcworld. as are the intertwined relations of corporations like chiquita, the us government and the world trade organization, which have acted and act as a bloc in fighting over the international banana trade. have a look here:
http://www.converge.org.nz/lac/articles/news990407a.htm
here is a an overview of the international banana trade itself:
http://www.fao.org/docrep/007/y5102e....htm#TopOfPage
when folk go on about the non-sustainability of globalizing capitalism in its present form, they refer to the particular modes of neo-colonial domination around which it is built. the principle agent for the construction and maintenance of the present neo-colonial order has been the united states. the "lifestyle" that americans live owes much to this neo-colonial order. the problems this order generates are legion.
the strange thing is that all are on the back side of the ideological mirror, and that most americans do not see it, do not understand this, and do not make connections between their modes of life and systematic exploitation tht has been transferred geographically to spaces far away.
the current system must be changed. if the americans cannot see what the system that has been fashioned in their name means and does, then the implosion of american power becomes simply an element of that change. conversely, the continuation of american power/domination means the continuation of this system. it obviously does not have to be this way--but it is difficult to see alternatives--they would have to come from within the states, it seems to me, an the condition of possibility for that would be something more like accurate, multi-levelled journalism/information flows that could serve as the basis for political mobilizations within the states.
perhaps the long, slow implosion of the bush administration and the ideology for which it stands will open onto a possibility for awakening from a dark night shaped by neo-liberal dreamtime, the one in which fictional accounts of autonomous entrepreneurs competing manfully against each other across fields of free markets substitutes for neoliberalism as an ideological figleaf for the dismantling of state regulation in a context already shaped by significant concentration of wealth and economic power...a fiction that enables american consumers to construct delusions of global equitability which are reinforced each time they engage in the only everyday politics allowed them in the states, which is to buy things...
that americans live in an ideological bubble, a kind of strange sphere lined with mirrors such that whichever way they look they see themselves and what they want to see, not what is--is a symptom of the more general problem of globalizing capitalism american-style. and it is hard not to see in this unhinging of american domestic life (and the ideology that enframes it) from the system of production that underpins it. from a certain viewpoint, we too are objects to be dominated and controlled--the shaping of information is a form of control, its internalization is a form of domination. that we television viewers do this to ourselves is a simple index of the efficiency of contemporary forms of domination. why bother with direct, violent control when it is cheaper and more efficient to persuade people to do it to themselves? why impose directly when you dont have to? shape information flows and everything else follows.
it may be fun, but sooner or later there'll be hell to pay for this system.
and obliviousness will not excuse anyone.