Snipped from Immigration.Campustap.com.

One of my blogging friends over at Immigration Orange wrote an interesting piece about corporations and their complete lack of ethics/morals when it comes to the treatment of foreign workers, and the corporation’s ties with known terrorist organizations. This particular article is about the Chiquita Corporation. Although this company is no different than the other hundreds of companies that fund dictators and terrorist groups and enslave and exploit domestic citizens, my friend Kyle is on a mission to do something about it. He wants to help these poor Columbian citizens in their struggle with paramilitaries that govern with terror.

Here is a portion of the article:

The saddest thing for me about Chiquita’s admission to paying $1.7 million dollars to identified terrorist groups was my intial reaction. I was shocked by Chiquita admitting to the practice but paying thugs in the South seemed like business as usual to me for multinational corporations. …

It wasn’t until I read an article in the Christian Science Monitor that I felt that I had to take action on this. It was in this article that I first read about the charge that Chiquita might have had a hand in importing 3,000 rifles for a paramilitary group, and it also contained the brutal personal testimony that truly galvanized me.

“Alberto is a tall, self-assured man in his early 40s. But his voice drops to a whisper when he says he personally witnessed at least 10 murders on one of Chiquita’s 26 plantations where he worked for 11 years.

He vividly remembers the last murder he saw on the Banafinca farm in 1999. When Alberto and his coworkers arrived on the plantation they saw two men known to be paramilitary henchmen standing menacingly near the packing plant. The thugs waited until everyone took up their workstations and then went into the field where one of Alberto’s coworkers was climbing a ladder to bag a banana stem. “No one knew who they had come for that day,” Alberto says.

The thugs waited until everyone took up their workstations then went into the field where one of Alberto’s coworkers was climbing a ladder to bag a banana stem. “They cut off his head with a machete, dumped the weapon, then calmly walked to their motorcycle and drove off, without saying a word,” says Alberto, who asked that his real name not be used.”

Al Jazeera and the BBC covered a new effort by families afflicted by paramilitary massacres to sue Chiquita. I’m hoping that this move along with the efforts of good people will be enough to bring this the national attention in the U.S. that it deserves. Another person that has to be commended in the struggle against paramilitaries in Colombia is the top prosecutor Mario Iguaran. The Christian Science Monitor, the only media outlet to cover this well, has done a piece on him showing that all it takes is one person committed to good to clean up years of corruption and malevolance.

Why do we need to take this on? I think this issue is a good one to try and tackle with a blog because one of the biggest problems with this is the lack of media coverage on the subject. This is big news. Multinational corporations are often suspected of committing crimes but rarely do they so blatantly admit to it. If we’re going to try and tackle the root of the problems associated with migration, the first thing we’re going to have to do is take a stand on the things that are forcing people to leave. Asking companies not to pay groups that butcher the local population is probably a good start.

In the original article (link below), there is a plan of action. So please visit his site and scroll down a little until you get to “Step 1: Campaign for Broader Media Coverage.” There you can help out his mission and further his cause. Thanks for the help, and I hope to hear from you guys about this issue.

Read Full Article Here!