By Jhoan Sebastián Cote, EL ESPECTADOR, August 25, 2024
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
In spite of the fact that the banana multinational was held responsible in the United States, here in Colombia, the suit against ten executives, two of them U.S. citizens, accused of financing the paramilitaries, is still not resolved. EL ESPECTADOR has examined documents and testimony from that file that includes some heavyweights, like Presidents and some high government officials.
Financing, or extortion. Furnishing agreed-upon funds to strengthen the paramilitary project, or coercion of a conglomerate throughout the world to avoid having its officers massacred. Those are the two versions of a story that Colombia’s legal system is bringing to a close: the file in the criminal investigation, the proven and systematic payments by the banana multinational, Chiquita Brands, to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) of Carlos Castaño. The case is at the trial stage; however, the court that has seen the evidence has decided to keep the whole file in absolute secrecy, not even releasing the parties’ disciplinary complaints. Even so, EL ESPECTADOR has learned details about the trial, and is revealing key testimonies that have been detached from the file in the U.S. case.
Last June, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida concluded that the payment of nearly $1.7 million, between 1997 and 2004, was gasoline that stoked the fire of paramilitary barbarism in Colombia. Furnishing money from Chiquita Brands, which they did through their most successful affiliate, Banadex, which then injected it directly into the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, and indirectly into the security cooperatives, the Convivir, is all under the microscope of the Directorate Specializing in Human Rights Violations, part of the Attorney General’s Office in Colombia. Since August 2018, ten former directors of the banana company in the Urabá region, including four foreign citizens, have been under criminal investigation. They may be charged with criminal conspiracy for allegedly creating a criminal society for the purpose of financing, promoting, and organizing illegal groups. The case is being handled by Branch 6 of the Antioquia Criminal Court.
The defendants are Charles Dennis Keiser (United States), the former general manager and legal representative of Banadex (1990-2000); John Paul Olivo (United States), former controller for Chiquita Brands for North America and Banadex (1996-2001); Fuad Albert Giacoman Hasbun (Honduras), former controller of Chiquita Brands in Colombia (2002-2004); José Luis Valverde Ramírez, (Costa Rica), former manager of production, Banadex (2000-2002); Reinaldo Elías Escobar de la Hoz, former legal representative of Banadex (1994-1998); Victor Julio Buitrago Sandoval, former Banadex chief of security (1999-2004); Álvaro Acevedo González, former manager and legal representative of Banadex (2002-2004); Victor Manuel Henríquz Valásquez, former executive president of Banacol (2000-2008); Jorge Alberto Cadavid Marín, former vice president for finance at Banacol (1993-2008); and Javier Ochoa Velásquez, former manager of planning at Banacol (2001-2004).
EL ESPECTADOR asked to be able to attend the hearings in the case at Branch 6, as we understand that hearings are public in Colombia, but the request was refused for the purpose of protecting the rights to privacy and good name of the defendants. “The mere fact of releasing their names to the public and communication media creates a mantle of doubt about their reputation that could come back on them at any time,” was the response by Judge Diana Lucia Monsalve, adding that the communication media are not part of this proceeding. Such is the secrecy surrounding the development of this case that last July, Branch 6 warned the parties that the virtual call for the hearings could only be used for the purposes established by law, “with the threat of taking disciplinary measures against those who released information from the hearings”.
Sebastián Escobar, an attorney with the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective (CAJAR in Spanish), is representing the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, registered as victims for being the object of persecution and bloody violence by the “paras” that operated in Urabá in connivance with the Colombian Army. He filed a brief with Branch 6, asking that the hearings be open to Colombia, because according to the Rules of Criminal Procedure, under which the proceeding is operating, the trial is open to the public, “and confidentiality can only be applied in extremely exceptional circumstances, which are regulated by the law itself, and which have not been invoked (. . .) It’s not sufficient to allude generically to other principles and rights such as the presumption of innocence to limit access to information, as was done in some of the responses by the office of journalists’ constitutional petition rights.”
EL ESPECTADOR has learned that this file is of the highest caliber in terms of evidence. For example, the former Minister of Defense and Commerce and former Vice President Martha Lucía Ramírez; the former Director of the Administrative Department of Security (DAS in Spanish) and former Superintendent of Oversight, Felipe Muñoz Gómez; and the former Governor of Antioquia between 2002 and 2004 and the current Secretary of Finance in Antioquia, Eugenio Prieto Soto have already given their testimony. Although the former Presidents César Gavíria and Ernesto Samper are cited, they have not yet given their testimony. According to calculations by the victims’ attorneys, the Statute of Limitations on the case might run in 2025, and there are dozens of voices that still need to be heard, as well as the arguments by the prosecutors, by the Inspector General, and by the victims. The risk that the Statute of Limitations will run is smoldering.
The charge and the testimonies
The Attorney General’s Office undertook the investigation of this file in 2007, the same year that the United States Department of Justice imposed a fine of $25 million on Chiquita Brands for financing the AUC, a fine that the home office in Cincinnati paid. They did that in spite of the fact that in 2001, the North American government had placed the AUC on the list of foreign terrorist organizations. Charles Dennis Keiser was the global vice president of production at Chiquita then, and he arrived in Colombia as the general manager of Banadex, which was the most profitable affiliate of the company in this country. In total, Chiquita had come to have 37 plantations and more than 3,500 employees under Keiser’s authority. Chiquita Brands was prosecuted for authorizing at least 32 payments to third parties and to the Convivir between 1998 and 2000, using an internal accounting format.
These cooperatives played a crucial role because, even though they were regulated by the governors’ offices, and could count on the Constitutional Court’s approval, they had been used to commit the crime of criminal conspiracy in the way they were financed. Proof of that was the testimony of Everth Verloza García, alias “HH”, the former commander of the banana growers’ bloc of the AUC. He explained to the prosecutors that business owners and paramilitaries “needed to implement a system for charging the banana growers for the help they gave them. That’s how the Convivir were born; they were created to be able to collect that money.” When his turn came, after nearly a decade and a half, the former paramilitary Raúl Hasbun, alias “Pedro Bonito”, added that, “not only Sr. Keiser, but many of the other business owners, demonstrated the same concern. So we suggested to all of them as an alternative the creation of the Convivir,” reads the criminal charge confirmed in 2021.
The prosecution will have to prove that Keiser voluntarily attended a meeting at Castaño’s ranch, Montecasino, in Medellín (Antioquia Department), where they forged the famous quota of three U.S. cents for every box of bananas exported, to be paid to the AUC by the banana growers. That was discussed and approved in the following months by the Augura banana growers association. Keiser’s willingness at that meeting will be proved by testimony showing that, talking with Carlos Castaño himself, he liked to tell stories about serving in the war in Vietnam. In the same way, the theory of extortion is weakened when you see that in the fine they paid in 2007, they admitted that the connection between the Convivir and the AUC was obvious. The prosecutors wonder how it is that Chiquita stopped paying the “paras” directly right after the meeting at Montecasino, and their accounting records show that, instead, the money went to cooperatives like Papagayo or Lomapiedra.
Keiser’s defense maintains that, just as he paid the AUC, he also paid the People’s Liberation Army (EPL in Spanish), the National Liberation Army (ELN in Spanish), and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC in Spanish). And all of them, he says, with the same objective: protecting the lives of the employees of Chiquita Brands, because of the death threats he alleges. He concludes that he was the victim of extortion, a thesis he has sustained for years. According to revelations by EL ESPECTADOR, he testified in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida last May 30 that “Castaño was cordial in a kind of a manner, but he said very clearly that he and his people had killed 387 people that year”. To a question about why he had authorized the payments, he answered that “because he (Castaño) had the capacity to destroy our plantations, to kill our people, to kidnap, and to cause chaos in the region”, and that “the registers of the alleged extortions were made jointly with the controller’s department, with approval and visibility in Cincinnati.”
Keiser had worked for Chiquita Brands from 1980 to 2012 when he took control as director and president of companies that were agricultural development contractors in Africa and countries in the tropics. In his social network LinkdIn account, he explains that he has even developed projects with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which has a broad presence in Colombia. That agency’s press office responded that that statement is not true. This newspaper sent a more detailed questionnaire but, as of the date of publication of this article, we have received no response. Another defendant, who now is carrying on a completely normal life, is the North American, John Paul Olivo who was the controller for accounting for North America at Chiquita and between 1996 and 2001, for Banadex. Eventually, he devoted himself to his position as president of Fresh Express, a division of Chiquita that sold vegetables all over the United States.
According to the charges, Olivo necessarily had to be involved in the payments to the AUC, because he, more than anyone, explained to Cincinnati what was going on with money management in Colombia. Another one of the defendants, José Luis Valverde, the prior general manager of Banadex, told the investigators that Olivo approved and signed the form16 that was used to register the expenditures. The prosecutors believe that he was an important part of the mechanism, although in his testimony, Olivo shielded himself by, telling the investigators his only function was to connect the company’s accounts, and he had never authorized or made any payments. Keiser, in his testimony in Florida, confessed that “John was absolutely never involved in any negotiations with those groups”, and that the system of payments was put together with the assistance of the other controller, who was a Colombian named Verninio Bonnet.
EL ESPECTADOR has also had access to the testimony that Robert Wyrick Olson, corporate attorney from 1995 until 2004 gave in Florida, where he said that Chiquita was forced to make the payments, and they even sought legal advice from him before they made them. “A person that pays because of extortion is a victim, not an accomplice to the crime, and, therefore, ought not to be punished,” he concluded after a review of Colombian law. He added that Chiquita’s hands were so tied to the AUC that its ships were contaminated with the drugs that belonged to the AUC. However, in the United States, alias “HH” denied all of that, and explained that Chiquita’s support was voluntary and that, within that framework, he had to go “from ranch to ranch forbidding strikes or any kind of protest that would slow down the shipments of bananas.” A former security employee added that Chiquita provided “grenades and munitions” acquired by the company’s security department because they were giving them “the names of the people to be kidnapped or killed.”
Reinaldo Javier de la Hoz, the legal representative for Banadex between 1994 and 1998, was mentioned as one of the directors that attended the meeting at Montecasino and who managed the making of the payments. He responded that the Convivir were legal, and that it was very easy to say someone should have filed a complaint when it happened twenty years ago, and “from the tranquility of a public position in the middle of a prosecutorial agency”. Victor Julio Buitrago was the head of security for Banadex, and had made the payments in person according to the charges. Although he admits that he furnished the money, he asked the prosecutors to differentiate between financing and being subject to extortion. Álvaro Acevedo González, former general manager between 2001 and 2004, faces the charge of making 18 registered payments to the Convivir of more than $1,400,000,000. He answers that he told his superiors in Cincinnati, but they told him to keep on paying in order to avoid tragedies.
At the end of last month, Attorney General Luz Adriana Camargo announced a new strategy for speeding up the accumulated cases of financing paramilitarism. The idea is “to purify a universe of more than 700 certified copies” containing evidence of the debt to justice because of the supports provided to the “paras” for being the bloodiest armed force that committed by far the most crimes in the history of the armed conflict. According to the Land Restitution Unit, they are the principal plunderers of land as denounced by the victims, and according to the National Center for Historical Memory, they lead the list of registered massacres in history, with more than 730. EL ESPECTADOR has learned from official sources that the Chiquita Brands case, as well as those of the banana growers who financed the paramilitary project, is a priority for the prosecutors in the current administration.
The charges focus, specifically, on the proven payments that were the financing mechanism for Carlos Castaño’s AUC. The defendants insist that they have a compelling excuse in the fear that was generated by that violent system that had replaced the system of extortion by the FARC. Even so, the former bosses of the paramilitaries who have taken part in legal proceedings, including alias “HH”, “Pedro Bonito”, and Salvatore Mancuso, are standing firm in their testimony that it was a consensual relationship, and that both parties benefited from it, to the detriment of peace for the people of Urabá, and in favor of the business of exporting bananas. The cards are now laid out on the table, in absolute secrecy. We will soon know, if the legal deadlines allow it, what will be the end of this chapter in the war that was flourishing in what has been called the best corner in America.