The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [94]
“I don’t think it’s valid to say the state couldn’t protect us, so we had to seek our own protection,” says Maria McFarland, who follows the country for Human Rights Watch. “If you can’t do business in a region without supporting a group that is supporting atrocities, you don’t do business in that region.” That’s exactly the conclusion that the U.S. Department of Justice came to years later under the Bush administration when another company—Chiquita Brands International—admitted in March 2007 to paying $1.7 million in protection money to the AUC in Colombia over the course of eight years, from 1997 to 2004 (along with previous payments to the FARC for the prior eight years).
In fact, the company kept paying even after its own internal counsel advised it to “leave Colombia,” despite making profits of $10 million a year. While the company insisted it paid the money to protect its employees, lawyers with the U.S. Department of Justice concluded the cash also fueled the massacres of trade unionists and human rights workers in the banana plantations of Urabá during almost the same time when the union was stamped out of the Carepa plant. “Simply put,” the U.S. Justice Department wrote, “defendant Chiquita funded terrorism.” In a deal with the United States, Chiquita agreed to pay $25 million in damages, even as it has remained in Colombia.
Nor was Chiquita the only company to pay off armed groups, according to evidence that has come to light thanks to a recent “peace and justice” law that offered amnesty or reduced sentences to paramilitaries who agreed to disarm and admit their crimes. “The companies that benefited from this war . . . had to pay,” said paramilitary commander Ever Veloza, aka H.H., in his testimony. “It wasn’t funds to kill people specifically, but with these funds we did indeed kill many people.” Another paramilitary from a neighboring province described an arrangement with Chiquita as well as Dole that went beyond providing protection. “The Chiquita and Dole plantations would also call us identifying specific people as . . . ‘problems, ’” said that province’s commander Carlos Tijeras in testimony released in December 2009. “Everyone knew that this meant we had to execute the identified person. In the majority of cases those executed were members or leaders of the unions.”
A local businessman in Urabá named Raúl Hasbún, who was himself a secret paramilitary commander, told The Miami Herald that Dole and Del Monte coughed up cash as well. In addition, he said, the Colombian soft drink company Postobón paid $5,000 a month in protection money after the AUC started kidnapping its truck drivers. In one of his testimonies, Hasbún said Coke paid money as well—but later recanted that fact, saying he was mistaken.
Without blinking, however, he did admit to ordering the deaths of several members at the Coca-Cola bottling plant, including Isidro Gil, who he said in March 2009 was “collecting money for the guerrillas.” The testimony was in some ways damning to Coke—after all, here is a businessman who admitted to extorting money from international corporations to kill people also admitting to murdering Coke workers; on the other hand, his testimony could just as easily exonerate the company, since he said Coke didn’t pay him any money directly to carry out the murders.
Whether or not Coke was paying money to the paramilitaries to wage their war of terror, the company has clearly benefited, not only in Urabá, but also in other parts of the country where there is more evidence of links between bottling plant managers and paramilitaries. In the Magdalena