I have to be honest the first time I heard about this I was shocked about the actual legal admission, but my first instinct upon hearing this is that it's probably a normal thing.  It doesn't make it right but I can see how the argument could be made that it's necessary for business in the area.  After reading this though I've realized the necessity for indignation about this. 

In 2001, Banadex, the Chiquita subsidiary, unloaded 3,000 Central American rifles in their port which eventually made their way to paramilitary groups.  That's ridiculous.  As if paying money isn't bad enough, facilitating arms trade and providing these groups with weapons is unnerving.

The most enlightening viewpoint is provided by Alberto, one of Banadex's workers.  Chiquita might have paid the paramilitary to save employee lives and to ease business, but Alberto argues the "contributions to the paramilitary groups helped strengthen them and allowed them to expand throughout the country. 'The money Chiquita paid helped finance the paramilitaries. Their coffers grew, and they were able to buy more weapons.'"  Here's a ghastly story he relates about one of the paramilitary murders.

Alberto is a tall, self-assured man in his early 40s. But his voice drops to a whisper when he says he personally witnessed at least 10 murders on one of Chiquita's 26 plantations where he worked for 11 years.

He vividly remembers the last murder he saw on the Banafinca farm in 1999. When Alberto and his coworkers arrived on the plantation they saw two men known to be paramilitary henchmen standing menacingly near the packing plant. The thugs waited until everyone took up their workstations and then went into the field where one of Alberto's coworkers was climbing a ladder to bag a banana stem. "No one knew who they had come for that day," Alberto says.

The thugs waited until everyone took up their workstations then went into the field where one of Alberto's coworkers was climbing a ladder to bag a banana stem. "They cut off his head with a machete, dumped the weapon, then calmly walked to their motorcycle and drove off, without saying a word," says Alberto, who asked that his real name not be used.

If you really want the problems with immigration to go away then you've got to fix happenings like these.  Chiquita put almost two million dollars into the coffers of designated "terrorist" groups, tacitly supporting murders like the one above.  Worst of all it's multinational infrastructure was used to facilitate the arms trade.  All of this is simply unnacceptable.

But that's okay, because Chiquita cares for the rainforest: