Michael W at A Second Hand Conjecture heard this report from NPR:
Chiquita Brands International will plead guilty to doing business with gunmen in Colombia. Prosecutors said the banana company made $1.7 million in "protection payments" to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a right-wing paramilitary group linked to some of Colombia's worst massacres. The company will pay $25 million to settle the charges.
That was apparently the extent of it. Then Michael read the story at CBS and found another angle:
Prosecutors said the company made the payments in exchange for protection for its workers. In addition to paying the AUC, prosecutors said, Chiquita made payments to the National Liberation Army, or ELN, and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, as control of the company's banana-growing area shifted.
Leftist rebels and far-right paramilitaries have fought viciously over Colombia's banana-growing region, though the victims are most often noncombatants. Most companies in the area have extensive security operations to protect employees.
In other words, Chiquita was making payments to both rightist and leftist paramilitaries, but NPR reported only on the payments to rightist factions. I would be very interested to hear if NPR reported on the leftist protection payments in another segment, but if it did not, there is something very wrong with the editorial staff -- telling one angle of the story and not the other presents a skewed picture of the situation in Colombia.
Via Pajamas Media
1. Why do you think they were called banana republics? Fruit companies have been utter gangsters in Central and South America.
Locally, meaning here in the U.S., when mob bosses are put on trial for murder, arson, trafficking in slaves, buying elections, and/or cheating on taxes, people line up to tell all the good the mob boss has done the neighborhood-- put kids through college, paid off a family's medical bills, got the potholes fixed, etc. But if crime got the boss the money and power to do those good things...
3. All I could remember of the joke was the punchline and the point, and that was enough to find it: http://www.humorbin.com/showitem.asp?item=20
4. Whimsy plays a part. The NPR reporters might have been making a point about the OCD-like levels anti-terrorist concerns have reached.
Posted by: Marco McClean | March 20, 2007 at 07:06 PM
I don't really think they should be making points like that in a news story, only in an editorial. It's actually a better story when you point out, as CBS did, that Chiquita was paying protection money to both sides.
Posted by: gail | March 20, 2007 at 08:31 PM