Chiquita’s Bagman: Key Intermediary Sentenced in Paramilitary Payments Case

Washington, D.C., April 18, 2023 – A Colombian taxi driver who last month was handed a 36-month prison sentence for his part in secretly delivering cash payments from Chiquita Brands International to a right-wing “paramilitary” organization played a more extensive role in the scheme than has been reported and was a key intermediary in the 1990s between the multinational fruit company and practically every major armed actor in Colombia’s conflict, according to internal documents and other material published today from the National Security Archive’s Chiquita Papers collection.

The conviction and imprisonment of Luis Alberto Agudelo Jiménez, a relatively low-level operative for Chiquita’s Colombia-based security staff, is a reminder that, despite mountains of evidence from its own archives, not a single Chiquita executive or manager has been penalized for authorizing and organizing millions of dollars in payments to groups responsible for scores of human rights violations, including massacres, homicides, and forced disappearances that produced thousands of victims.

The primary recipient of the payments, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), was also a major narcotics-trafficking group and was designated a terrorist organization by the United States on September 10, 2001, several years before the payments ceased. Some members of the Colombian security forces, including senior officers, collaborated with the AUC, while many others simply turned a blind eye to its atrocities.[1]

The records examined here suggest that the former banana company bagman likely knows quite a bit about Chiquita’s relationships to a wide variety of armed actors and could be instrumental in helping Colombian authorities understand the roles of Chiquita officials still under investigation in connection with paramilitary human rights violations and of Colombian military officers who encouraged and facilitated those relationships.

Previous reporting from the National Security Archive has detailed how Chiquita saw payments to the AUC, the Colombian military, and even left-wing rebel groups as little more than the “cost of doing business in Colombia.” One senior Chiquita executive, Robert Kistinger, told U.S. investigators that it was “not realistic” to halt operations over something in the range of $100,000-200,000 per year. “I’m sorry, it doesn’t hit the scorecard,” he said, calling such payments “a normal expenditure of running this operation.”

In court testimony, Agudelo described the system used by the company to disguise the true nature of the payments. The managers of Chiquita’s Colombian subsidiary, Banadex, made out checks in his name that he would then convert to cash for delivery, ultimately, to members of the Arlex Hurtado Front, a paramilitary group then active on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Many of these payments were made through “Convivir” self-defense organizations sponsored by the army and promoted by the then-governor of Antioquia (and later president of Colombia), Álvaro Uribe Vélez. Colombian prosecutors have found, in part based on the confessions of former paramilitary leaders, that many of the Convivir groups in banana-growing areas were established to solicit and collect funds for paramilitaries.[2]

Colombia’s attorney general indicted the paramilitary front’s former leader, Raúl Emilio Hasbún Mendoza (“Pedro Bonito”), and 30 of its members in 2017 for a years-long campaign of violence, including acts that the prosecutor has deemed crimes against humanity. Hasbún has confessed to countless human rights violations, including the infamous 1997 massacre at Mapiripán.

As one of Chiquita’s primary go-betweens with armed groups, Agudelo transferred thousands of dollars in payments not just to Hasbún and the Arlex Hurtado Front, as has been widely reported, but also to leftist insurgent groups and a variety of Colombian military units, according to the records published here today.

Among other things, Agudelo could help prosecutors construct a more detailed timeline of when and why the various groups were paid, provide information about the secret procedures Chiquita used to conceal the payments, and identify who his contacts were in the AUC, the military, Chiquita, the Convivir, and the guerrilla groups.

He may also be able to explain to authorities evidence, revealed here for the first time, of Chiquita's ties to former paramilitary finance chief Darío Laíno, who last year was sentenced to 32 years in prison for helping to finance paramilitary operations.

Most significantly, Agudelo may be able to help authorities better understand the nature of the company’s agreements with the groups, including any benefits that the company received in return for the money. Despite repeated claims that the payments were made under duress and amounted to extortion, the National Security Archive has previously revealed evidence that Chiquita obtained tangible benefits from quid pro quo “transactions” with both leftist insurgents and rightist paramilitary forces, including security services and intelligence information. Documents also show that company officials expected that the payments would help them gain leverage in negotiations with labor unions that the company believed were controlled by rebel groups.

For years, the Colombian government has been trying to prosecute U.S.- and Colombia-based Chiquita officials for their involvement in payments that were first revealed in 2007, when the U.S. Justice Department reached a sentencing agreement with the company for disbursements made to the AUC from 2001-2004.[3] After previous efforts to prosecute stalled, Colombia’s attorney general filed new charges against 13 Chiquita officials in 2018, accusing them of crimes against humanity. Charges against three of these officials were dropped in 2020.

Most of the documents published today are drawn from the Chiquita Papers, a special collection of declassified records from the banana company’s own files detailing its financial ties to almost every major armed group then operating in Colombia, including paramilitaries, guerrillas, secret intelligence units of the Colombian armed forces, and regional political figures like former president Uribe. A key tranche of the Chiquita Papers held by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was only disclosed after a National Security Archive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit overcame the banana company’s “reverse FOIA” attempt and required the SEC to divulge records the company had been forced to turn over during a prior investigation. These records, along with documents declassified by the Department of Justice, the FBI, and others unearthed through civil litigation, provide a uniquely extensive paper trail on the multinational corporation’s involvement in Colombia’s conflict.

Chiquita’s First Paramilitary Payment?

The declassified Chiquita records show that Agudelo handled dozens of “sensitive payments” made by the company from 1995-1998, an especially violent period in Colombia’s banana-growing region when the company transitioned away from paying leftist guerrilla groups like the FARC and ELN and instead began to pay anti-guerrilla groups affiliated with the AUC. The AUC was a confederation of outlaw paramilitary militias backed by narcotraffickers, the Colombian security forces, and other Colombian elites that formed in 1997 and grew rapidly during this period. Last year, Colombia’s Truth Commission found that paramilitary groups were responsible for 45% of the homicides in Colombia from 1985-2018—with more than 205,000 victims.[4]

Importantly, Agudelo can likely help authorities pinpoint exactly when and why Chiquita began to pay the AUC by detailing its financial ties to precursor groups that were emerging in the 1990s and that went on to form the nucleus of the national paramilitary confederation. The origins of the company’s relationship with the AUC have long been murky. The “Special Litigation Committee” (SLC) that Chiquita designated to investigate the affair was unable to conclude precisely when the company made its first payments to paramilitaries, finding that it was probably in 1996, although one Banadex official indicated that it may have been as early as 1995. Most of the Chiquita officials interviewed by the SLC said the payments got underway only after an intimidating meeting with AUC chief Carlos Castaño in “late 1996 or early 1997” that is described in dramatic fashion in documents drafted by Chiquita attorneys.

Additional evidence, including the report of Antonio Argiz—an accounting expert hired by plaintiffs suing Chiquita in U.S. court and who reviewed documents obtained during years of civil litigation—also suggests there were several payments to an AUC-like organization in 1995.[5] Tables included in the Argiz report indicate that Agudelo delivered one of the company’s first paramilitary payments in June 1995—more than a year before the window offered by the SLC—after cashing a check from a Chiquita-owned entity (Agroeste). Declassified accounting records from the Chiquita Papers also confirm that on July 14, 1995, Chiquita paid Agudelo through Servicios Bananeros Integrados (Integrated Banana Services – SBI), one of three divisions listed in the company’s Colombia security accounts, for services rendered in May and June.

Evidence of a paramilitary payment two years before the AUC was even formed is another indication that Chiquita’s ties to the illegal right-wing militias go back farther than the company would like to admit. Payments that were said to have begun only after ominous meetings in the late 1990s with top paramilitary leaders who made implicit threats against the company instead appear to have evolved more casually from payments the company had been making for years to an anti-communist militia associated with Esperanza, Paz y Libertad (Hope, Peace and Liberty), the political party formed by demobilized EPL rebels in 1990.

The National Security Archive previously revealed intelligence reports, prepared by Chiquita’s Colombia-based security team, indicating that Esperanza had established an “armed wing” called the Popular Commands (Comandos Populares) that was aligned with military-backed paramilitary groups. Accounting records from Chiquita’s security division show that, through Esperanza, Chiquita paid the Comandos some 13,000,000 pesos (around $18,500) from 1991 through September 1992, accounting for about 17% of its “sensitive” security payments during that period, most of it channeled through an association of banana growers called Augura. (Document 1) The company transferred an additional 16,960,000 pesos (about $20,000) to the groups from Jan 1994 through May 1995, about 7% of the total from those months. (Document 4)

By April 1995, just a few months before Agudelo made the Agroeste payment, Chiquita’s security staff reported a new incursion of 200 well-supplied paramilitaries into the zone who were “ready to do away with anything that smells communist.” The report said the Comandos were conducting “joint patrols” with anti-communist paramilitaries, while Esperanza was asking the company to contribute to its efforts to “reduce pressure” on banana growers. (Document 3) Less than a year later, most of the Comandos formally joined forces with the paramilitary faction that would later form part of the nucleus of the AUC.[6]

Hidden Fincas

Agudelo may also be able to shed light on a group of farms secretly owned and operated by Chiquita that appears to have been another early link between the company and incipient paramilitary groups.

Chiquita’s April 1995 security report on armed groups in Colombia explained that, in asking the company for security payments, Esperanza and the Comandos “appeared to be in association with some of the administrators of farms received by Banadex, and that were previously administered by JR [Jaime Restrepo].”

This is a reference to a group of farms Chiquita secretly purchased through the Grupo Restrepo Arango (Restrepo Group), a Colombian firm that operated banana plantations on behalf of Chiquita during the early 1990s. In SEC testimony, Chiquita senior vice president John Ordman, who oversaw operations in Colombia, described the head of the Restrepo Group, Jaime Restrepo, as “our Colombian guy who had bought a bunch of farms for Chiquita and was administering those farms.” (Document 14)

The April security report explained that the subterfuge was part of an effort “to diminish rumors about a possible purchase [of the Restrepo Group properties] by Banadex,” which, if revealed, had the potential to expose the company to additional extortion attempts by armed groups. As part of this effort hide its ownership of the farms, Chiquita continued to work with many of the same farm administrators who had previously been employed by them through the Restrepo Group.

But a group of these inherited administrators was complicit with Esperanza, according to the security staff report, and together they were encouraging Chiquita to support the paramilitary-linked Comandos.

Up to this point, Chiquita had also been using the same “negotiator” that the Restrepo Group had relied on to arrange its security payments to the various armed groups. But the April report said that it had become necessary to find another “trusted person” for the job after a recent episode in which the negotiator’s identity had been compromised.

Agudelo’s name first appears on the rolls of Chiquita’s sensitive payments accounts the next month, not long before he delivered the June 1995 paramilitary payment from Agroeste, one of the four principal companies that comprised the Restrepo Group. (Document 4 and Document 5). The emergence of Agudelo as the company’s new security negotiator suggests that he could tell Colombian investigators more about early paramilitary influence in the banana-growing region and especially on the properties associated with the Restrepo Group compaines: Agroeste (Agropecuaria del Este S.A.), Manglar (Corporación Agricola Manglar S.A.), Agricola (Agricola Bananera S.A.), and Restrepo Arango Ltda.

Sensitive Payments

Analysis of the available evidence reveals at least 46 payments to Agudelo from 1995-1998, some of which constitute payments to armed groups while others cover the intermediary’s fees and travel expenses. One important source of information on the nature of these payments is an annual summary of expenditures through Chiquita’s “sensitive payments” accounts for 1996 that divides them into two categories: those paid to “guerrillas” (listed in the “Operations” account) and those paid to government officials (“Logistics”). Payments to guerrilla groups are recorded under a variety of coded descriptions, including “Programa Sierra” (“Sierra Program”) and “Programa Control” (“Control Program”), “Cooperativa Zonal” (“Zonal Cooperative”) and “Operación Banadex” (“Operation Banadex”). (Documents 7a-d)

Records show that Agudelo also delivered payments to the Colombian security forces, including units linked to massacres and other human rights violations during this period. One of these payments, labeled “Auxilio Battalón Córdova” (“Support Cordova Battalion”) appears to have gone to a battalion from the Colombian Army’s 17^th Brigade, a unit notorious for its association with Colombian paramilitary groups, especially during that period. Previous reporting from the National Security Archive revealed a declassified U.S. embassy cable indicating that the brigade’s then-commander, Gen. Rito Alejo del Río, relied on the “systematic arming and equipping of aggressive regional paramilitaries,” calling it “pivotal to his military success.”

Agudelo also seems to have been the bagman for a bribe paid in 1996 that led to the SEC’s investigation of the company for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in the late 1990s. Recorded as “Donación Marítima” (“Maritime Donation”) in Chiquita’s books, the bribe, supposedly paid to a Colombian port official, was first revealed in a controversial exposé of Chiquita operations that ran in the Cincinnati Enquirer. The revelations led to a wide-ranging SEC investigation of the company’s accounting records that uncovered the secret accounting system used to conceal years of hidden payments to Colombian guerrilla and paramilitary groups and sparked a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice.

As a go-between and negotiator of security payments with armed groups, Agudelo’s role was similar to that of Rene Osorio, a Colombian attorney who in 1992 signed a services contract with Compañía Frutera de Sevilla, a principal Chiquita subsidiary, to facilitate security payments with armed groups. More details on Rene Osorio’s role as a “Security Consultant” for Chiquita were revealed in a previous National Security Archive report, including draft legal memo from January 4, 1994, which identifies Osorio as the company’s “contact with the various guerrilla groups in both Divisions.” (Document 2)

“Ojos Azules”

Other entries in the ledgers suggest that there might be some connection between Agudelo and Darío Laíno, a top Colombian militia commander who oversaw the paramilitary payroll, organized illegal arms purchases, and signed off on assassinations and massacres. An accounting document found among the Chiquita Papers and documented in the Argiz report records two payments to Laíno, in January and February 1998, on the same days that Agudelo picked up checks.

A longtime behind-the-scenes operator in the world of Colombian paramilitary groups, Darío Laíno Scopetta, also known as “Ojos Azules” (“Blue Eyes”), has been described as the “missing link” in the command structure of the AUC’s Northern Bloc. The November 2022 capture of Laíno, who had been sentenced to 32 years in prison earlier that year, raises questions about what he might be telling Colombian authorities about the groups that financed the growth of paramilitaries in the late 1990s, including ranchers, drug traffickers and large landholders like Chiquita, part of the so-called “para-economy.”

The Colombian judge who handed down his 32-year prison sentence in 2019 (in absentia) said Laíno was “the person who paid the payroll of all the groups of the Northern Bloc, he was the commander in chief and … no homicide was carried out without his endorsement.” Another Northern Bloc commander, Salvatore Mancuso, said that he and Laíno also arranged arms purchases that increased the firepower of the incipient paramilitary bloc in 1997.

Intermediaries Left Exposed

The payments weren’t always handled by professional middlemen like Agudelo and Osorio. The SLC report describes how Charles Keiser, the Banadex general manager, picked up $10,000 in cash needed for Chiquita’s first-ever payment to a Colombian guerrilla group in the late 1980s from one of the company’s senior executives, John Ordman, at a hotel room in Guatemala. Keiser brought the money back to Colombia where it was delivered to FARC guerrillas through one of the company’s farm managers.[7] Eventually, the payments became much more organized and routine. Ordman said he “became comfortable that this was being handled in a responsible way. I became comfortable that it was not being handled willy-nilly or out of control. I think even comfortable that we were dragging our feet enough, but not too much. And I became comfortable with the groups that were – that they groups involved were – I knew them to be taken seriously.”

For many years, the company separately negotiated a payments schedule with as many as five different insurgent groups, carefully guarding information about the true extent of its holdings to avoid being “taxed” at a higher rate. But even as the negotiation of the pace and the amounts of the payments became more formal and routine, the actual process of making the payments was anything but, with the company increasingly relying on intermediaries to hand deliver the “sensitive payments” to the leaders of outlaw groups.

Requests for sensitive payments came through the head of security in Colombia, Juan Alvarado (later replaced by Victor Buitrago). Ordman said that each request was “evaluated for its legitimacy,” but that ultimately it came down to the word of two or three intermediaries, who he characterized as “contacts who had contacts with the guerrilla groups often through third parties.” (Document 14, p. 122)

One of Banadex’s chief accountants, John Olivo, said he was never comfortable with the system the company used to keep track of the payments, explaining to the SEC his “uneasiness” about the way it was done, adding that “there’s no code, secret code, as to if it’s to the left wing or the right wing, or who it is.” (Document 15) Another Banadex controller, Jorge Forton, told the SEC he was “not comfortable” with the arrangement: “How do I [know] those payments are really going to those groups? I mean, how can I audit that? I cannot ask them to sign a receipt.” Regarding his auditing concerns, Forton said that a Cincinnati-based executive had told him: “If nobody is killed, it’s because the money is reaching the end. That’s the only way to say that the money is there.” (Document 13)

But Forton also worried that, in writing checks to Alvarado, Osorio, Agudelo, and others, that Chiquita might open them up to legal jeopardy if anyone ever discovered the illegal payments. “I mean, we are … exposing this person to a major audit,” Forton told the SEC. The middlemen were responsible for handling “a lot of money,” he said. They were “exposing” these individuals, he said, “because if something happened … he needs to explain, and how are we going to explain? I don’t know.”