Article
Chiquita fined $25 mln for Colombia terror cash
A U.S. court on Monday ordered Chiquita Brands International Inc. to pay a $25 million fine to settle charges that it did business with a terrorist organization in Colombia, a company spokesman said...Company spokesman Michael Mitchell said Chiquita will pay the fine in five equal installments over five years...Chiquita paid more than $1.7 million starting in 1997 to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a violent right-wing group known by its Spanish acronym AUC. Chiquita said it made the payments to protect its employees there...The payments continued after the U.S. government designated the AUC as a foreign terrorist organization...By the end of the 1990s [right-wing paramilitary militias & Marxist rebels]...were locked in a dirty war...in which peasants are killed and displaced...