The New Dark Age

2 May 2017 — National Security Archive

• Colombia Payments a “Leap of Faith”
• “We are funding their activities, or we are protecting ourselves. It’s questionable.”
• CFO asks: “How can I audit that? I cannot ask them to sign a receipt.”

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 589

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Washington, D.C., May 2, 2017 – Chiquita’s Colombia-based staff questioned the company’s payments to illegal armed groups, and asked whether Chiquita had gone beyond extortion and was directly funding the activities of leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups, even while top company executives became “comfortable” with the idea.

This is the second in a series of stories jointly published by the National Security Archive and VerdadAbierta.com documenting how the world’s most famous banana company financed terrorist groups in Colombia.

The New Chiquita Papers are the result of a seven-year legal battle waged by the National Security Archive against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and later Chiquita itself, for access to tens of thousands of records produced by the company during an investigation of illicit payments made in Colombia.

The Archive has used these records to identify individual Chiquita executives who approved and oversaw years of payments to groups responsible for countless human rights violations in Colombia, but whose roles in the affair have been unknown or unclear until now.

In this installment, we examine the roles of financial officers, security staff and hired intermediaries on the ground in Colombia who managed an unorthodox payments process one official described as a “leap of faith.”

The following article was also published today in Spanish at VerdadAbierta.com.