Word: chiquitas
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...Still, Chiquita continued to make monthly payments to the AUC until February 2004, even after disclosing the situation to the Justice Department. The Justice Department proposed a settlement under which the company would pay a fine of $25 million - one quarter of the maximum criminal fine that would have applied had the company been found guilty in court...
...Colombia's chief prosecutor Mario Iguar?n, who met this week in Washington with Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, has said he might seek the extradition of top Chiquita officials to stand trial here. Uribe himself has said he would like to see those responsible for the Chiquita payments to the AUC face Colombian justice...
...Extraditions are unlikely, although the Justice Department acknowledges that the investigation into Chiquita's payments to the AUC is ongoing - its focus, a DOJ official indicates, may now be on individual company executives on a list of 10 "relevant persons" identified only by letters of the alphabet in the documents filed by the Department in the U.S. District Court in Washington...
...Chiquita spokesman Michael Mitchell said that the company had felt obliged to make the payments to protect its employees. "We believe they saved people's lives," he said. However, during the time Chiquita was making the payments, thousands of people across Colombia died at the hands of the AUC, which expanded its power. In the banana belt alone between 1997 and 2004, right-wing paramilitaries are blamed for 22 massacres in which 137 people were killed, according to government figures...
...Human rights campaigners also complain that the U.S. has not aggressively pursued U.S. financiers of the Colombian paramilitary groups on its own list of terrorist organizations. "It wasn't like this was an aggressive investigation," said Kovalik. Chiquita came forward with information about the payments, and the case "sort of fell in the lap of the Justice Department so they had to do something," he said...