By Jhoan Sabastian Cote, EL ESPECTADOR, July 23, 2025
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
Branch Six of the Antioquia Criminal Court sentenced seven former directors of the United States multinational and its Colombia affiliate for providing economic support to the Castaño brothers’ paramilitary project. They failed to prove that the payments they made constituted extortion. In addition, the Attorney General’s Office was criticized for falling short in its investigation. These are the details of the decision.
The biggest banana multinational in the Urabá part of Antioquia is guilty of financing paramilitarism. That’s what Branch Six of the Antioquia Criminal Court found in a historic decision, which ordered the arrests of seven former high officials of the United States company, Chiquita Brands, and its most profitable affiliate in this country, Banadex, and sentenced them to 11 years and three months in prison. With a 170-page document, which EL ESPECTADOR has seen, the prosecution, at least in the trial court, proved that the payments of millions of dollars by this prosperous conglomerate, dollars that fell into the hands of the Castaño family Self-Defense Forces, were illegal and never constituted extorsion.
The sentence is the result of an investigation by the Attorney General’s Office that began in 2007, right after the United States Department of Justice imposed a 25 million dollar forfeiture on Chiquita because it had financed the AUC. The multinational had made payments to the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) in spite of the fact that in 2001 the North American government had placed the armed group on its list of foreign terrorist organizations. According to its financial records, between 1997 and 2004, Chiquita had furnished $1,700,000 to the paramilitaries. That’s not counting the money they had previously furnished to the guerrillas. Although last year, a U.S. Court had ordered the company to pay damages to a group of Colombian victims, this is the first time a court has found individual criminal responsibility for the financing.
Among those convicted are North Americans Charles Dennis Keiser, who directed Chiquita Brands operations in Colombia between 1990 and 2000, and John Paul Olivo, the former Controller for the business in North America and for Banadex between 1996 and 2001. Also, the Honduran Alberto Giacoman Hasbún, the former Banadex Controller between 2002 and 2004. The Court’s order also includes Reinaldo Elías Escobar de la Hoz, Chiquita’s former legal counsel for Colombia; former Manager of Banadex between 2001 and 2004, Álvaro Acevedo González; José Luis Valverde, a Costa Rican and former Legal Representative for Banadex between 2000 and 2002; and Victor Julio Buitrago, who was the head of security for Banadex in the regions of Santa Marta and Urabá from 1999 to 2004.
Since it had already been proved that the payments were made, the trial court had the task of resolving this question: Were the payments made under threats and extortion or was it just out a flat-out financing decision? According to the Court’s findings, it was the second. The Court found no proof that the high-ranking officers of the company had adopted corporate “zero tolerance” policies against anyone’s cooperation with armed groups, in spite of the fact that most United States companies did adopt such policies. In the words of Judge Diana Lucia Monsalve, “the company carried out no measure that would mitigate that risk”. The defendants constantly maintained that Carlos Castaño himself was after them in 1997 and had promised bloodshed if they didn’t finance the AUC.
The Judge began with the premise that coerced payments can generally excuse a defendant as long as it is demonstrated that the threat was “imminent and insurmountable”. For the Judge, it’s untrue that the high-ranking officials were feeling night and day a power that superseded their will, because, besides the fact that they had already paid off the guerrillas, they were fully aware of the armed groups that controlled the area. In spite of that, they had not provided any urgent alert to the authorities. In fact, in her decision, the Judge reproached them for not having contacted the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control, which would have authorized the payments, alleged to be extortionate, while the company could leave the country safely.
A high percentage of the payments made to the AUC by Chiquita Brands were made through the Convivir organizations, which were legal at that time. However, for Judge Monsalve, it was a work of due diligence for the company to investigate something that was known in broad daylight and which human rights organizations had warned about; namely that the Convivir organizations were controlled by the Castaño brothers. By means of that triangulation was born the long-time saying that the criminals received three cents on every dollar per box of exported bananas. “The persistence of the payments, in the face of indications of illegality, sets up an intention, and the failure to complain to the Colombian authorities, along with the absence of preventive measures, all strongly support a finding of intention,” states the decision.
The historic decision, besides being the first to recognize that private businesses financed the groups that perpetrated massacres, kidnappings, forced disappearances, sexual violence, and a long etcetera of war crimes and crimes against humanity, also made clear that the Attorney General’s Office fell very far short in its investigation. For example, the Judge, Diana Lucia Monsalve, criticized the fact that the investigators never connected the case to the principal directors of the company, especially considering that the defendants assured them that they were counting on the blessing of Chiquita’s home office in the United States.
An incredibly serious error, states the decision, was that before the United States government took a position with regard to the AUC, the high-ranking executives believed that financing paramilitary groups was just another cost of doing business in a conflict zone and not an international crime. “The prosecuting agency was satisfied just to pursue middle management,” declared the Judge. The culpability of the directors is proved with such simple facts, reads the decision, such as, if supposedly the payments were for security in the area, they ought to have been registered that way accounting-wise. And they weren’t. They were hidden, until the home office accepted responsibility with the U.S. Department of Justice.
The decision, on the other hand, cleared Javier Ochoa Velásquez, Victor Manuel Henríquez, and Jorge Alberto Cadavid, high officials of Banacol, the company that took over operation of Chiquita Brands, once they left Colombia in 2004. The other seven defendants, if they are not able to overturn the trial court’s decision on appeal, will spend a decade in prison because they strengthened the paramilitarism that left thousands of victims in Urabá.