Chiquita Paid $1.7 Million to a Terrorist Group. No US Executive Was Ever Charged.

Chiquita Brands International's Colombian subsidiary, Banadex, made more than 100 payments totaling roughly $1.7 million to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) between 1997 and 2004 — continuing for at least sixteen months after Chiquita's own outside lawyers told the company in writing that it had to stop. In 2007 the company pleaded guilty to a single federal charge and paid a $25 million fine. No Chiquita executive was charged in the United States.

In June 2024, a federal jury in Florida ordered Chiquita to pay $38.3 million to the families of eight men the AUC killed — more than twenty times what the company admitted paying the organization responsible for those deaths. In July 2025, a Colombian court did something the U.S. Department of Justice never did: it sent seven former Chiquita executives to prison.

Payments by the Numbers

• October 1991–1996: Chiquita's Colombian operation pays an estimated $856,815 to left-wing guerrilla groups, including the FARC and the ELN, according to internal auditing records later obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
• 1997: Control of the banana-growing regions of Urabá and Magdalena shifts from the guerrillas to the AUC, a right-wing paramilitary umbrella organization. Chiquita's Banadex subsidiary begins paying the AUC instead.
• September 10, 2001: The U.S. State Department designates the AUC a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The payments continue.
• October 31, 2001: The U.S. Treasury Department separately designates the AUC a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity. The payments continue.
• 1997–2004: Banadex makes more than 100 payments to the AUC totaling approximately $1.7 million in cash, according to the factual record underlying Chiquita's 2007 federal plea agreement.
• June 2004: Chiquita sells Banadex to Invesmar Ltd. (parent of C.I. Banacol) for $28.5 million in cash, plus assumed debt and pension liabilities. The AUC payments stop the same year.

The Designation and Sixteen More Months

In February 2003, a Chiquita officer told outside legal counsel that the AUC had been designated a terrorist organization. According to the Justice Department's account of the case, the attorneys advised in writing that the company "must stop" the payments. Chiquita did not stop. Payments to the AUC continued for approximately sixteen more months, into June 2004.

The following April, Chiquita voluntarily disclosed the payments to the Justice Department — a self-report that both prosecutors and the company later cited as a mitigating factor. The disclosure came roughly a year and a half after the AUC's terrorist designation, and after Chiquita's own lawyers had already told the company to stop.

The Plea Deal

On March 19, 2007, Chiquita Brands International pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to one count of engaging in transactions with a specially-designated global terrorist. The company agreed to pay a $25 million criminal fine, payable in five annual installments of $5 million plus interest. The court approved the plea agreement at a sentencing hearing that September, and Chiquita paid the first installment.

Ahead of that hearing, the Justice Department announced it would not pursue charges against any then-current or former Chiquita executive. Prosecutors said they had chosen not to publicly identify the individuals involved, citing the "reputational and privacy interests" of the uncharged executives. Chiquita, the corporate entity, bore the fine. The people who approved and continued the payments did not appear in any U.S. courtroom.

Who Knew, and Said So

The factual record behind the 2007 plea did not name names, referring instead to unidentified "Relevant Persons" labeled Individual A through J. Freedom of Information Act requests and SEC deposition transcripts later allowed researchers at the National Security Archive to match several of those labels to specific executives, including Robert F. Kistinger, then head of Chiquita's Banana Group, and John M. Ordman, a senior vice president overseeing the company's Colombia-linked operations.

In an SEC deposition taken in connection with the case, Kistinger described continuing to operate — and pay — in Colombia as a routine cost of doing business, comparing it to an unavoidable added expense rather than a decision to be reconsidered. Internal records reviewed by the Justice Department showed senior Chiquita executives were aware by no later than September 2000 that the company was paying the AUC and that the AUC was a violent armed group.

A Civil Jury Rejects the Duress Defense

The 2007 guilty plea did not end Chiquita's legal exposure. Families of Colombians killed by the AUC filed civil suits that were eventually consolidated into multidistrict litigation, In re Chiquita Brands International, Inc., in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida — representing, across the full docket, thousands of individual claims. Nine wrongful-death claims went to trial first, as a "bellwether" test of how juries would weigh the evidence.

On June 10, 2024, the jury found Chiquita liable in eight of those nine cases and ordered the company to pay a total of $38.3 million to the victims' relatives. At trial, Chiquita argued it had paid the AUC under duress — extortion payments made to protect employees in a conflict zone, not material support for the group's campaign of killings. The jury was unpersuaded.

That October, the presiding judge denied Chiquita's motion to slash the award to roughly $50,000 per plaintiff under an argument that Colombian law caps damages; the court ruled the cap didn't apply to a U.S.-based company being sued in a U.S. court. Chiquita has said it will appeal and maintains its position that the payments were extortion rather than collusion.

Convicted, Just Not Here

In July 2025, a court in Colombia's Antioquia department did what no U.S. prosecutor had: it convicted individual people. Seven former Chiquita and Banadex executives — including former general managers of the company's Colombian operations between 1990 and 2004 — were found guilty of aggravated conspiracy to commit a crime over their financing of the AUC. The court sentenced them to more than 11 years in prison, along with financial penalties, according to multiple Colombian and international outlets covering the ruling.

It was the first criminal conviction of individual Chiquita executives anywhere, eighteen years after the company itself pleaded guilty in Washington and walked away with a corporate fine.

Add it up: roughly $2.5 million paid to armed groups in Colombia over fifteen years, a $25 million corporate fine spread across five annual checks, a $38.3 million civil verdict still under appeal, and prison sentences that landed on seven individuals only once a Colombian court, not an American one, decided to look past the corporate entity and ask who signed the payments.

Filed from public reporting:

• Washington Post — Chiquita Pleads Guilty in Terror Probe
• U.S. Department of Justice — Chiquita Brands International Pleads Guilty to Making Payments to a Designated Terrorist Organization and Agrees to Pay $25 Million Fine
• CBS News — Chiquita funded Colombian terrorists for years. A jury now says the firm is liable for killings.
• NPR — Jury: Chiquita liable for paramilitary killings in Colombia
• NBC News — Chiquita must pay $38.3m to families of Colombian men killed by paramilitary groups, Florida jury says
• Business & Human Rights Resource Centre — Judge rejects Chiquita's motion to reduce plaintiffs' award
• EarthRights International — U.S. court upholds landmark jury verdict for victims of paramilitary violence in Colombia against Chiquita
• National Security Archive — The New Chiquita Papers: Secret Testimony and Internal Records Identify Banana Executives Who Bankrolled Terror in Colombia
• National Security Archive — Chiquita Papers Document Over $800,000 in Payments to Colombian Guerrillas
• The Tico Times — Chiquita Executives Convicted in Colombia for Financing Death Squads
• FreshFruitPortal — Colombian Court Sentences Former Chiquita Execs to 11 Years in Prison
• Deseret News — Chiquita to Sell Operations of Its Colombian Subsidiary