Word: colombia
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...Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe headed to Washington this week, hoping to contain the fallout from an ever-widening scandal linking some of his closest allies to right-wing paramilitaries - a scandal that is threatening a key free-trade agreeement and future military aid from...
...Washington has made its own deal with at least one backer of the Colombian paramilitaries: Under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in March, banana giant Chiquita Brands International acknowledged it had paid $1.7 million to Colombia's paramilitary groups. The company said it had made the payments to protect its employees, but about half of the money was paid after the paramilitary federation in question, the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, had been placed on Washington's list of foreign terrorist organizations in September...
...terms of the deal scandalized human rights activists in Washington and high-level officials in Colombia: "If they had admitted to paying Al-Qaeda, things would be different," said Dan Kovalik, a lawyer with the United Steelworkers Union, which is sponsoring civil suits against a number of U.S. corporations for allegedly hiring Colombian paramilitaries to kill or intimidate union members and officials...
...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...
...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...