“Bananas Is My Business”

When I was a kid I had chronic tonsillitis that kept me out of school about a month per year until I was 13. Every time we went to the doctor to see about having my tonsils taken out, he or she would say that they were too swollen for a tonsillectomy.

That was okay with me. I loved staying home on school days, making homemade Orange Juliuses in the blender, reading comic books and watching old movies on TV. To this day I credit my chronic tonsillitis for helping develop my vast knowledge of good and not-so-good black and white movies from the 30s, 40s and 50s.

In 1945 Carmen Miranda was the highest paid woman in the United States. In 1955 the “Brazilian Bombshell” collapsed and died onstage. Her image was later used by the Chiquita Corporation to sell bananas.

Of those old movies, some of my favorites were Shane, Member of the Wedding, The Grapes of Wrath and The Little Colonel, a 1936 classic starring Shirley Temple and Lionel Barrymore about a plucky little girl who loses her father during the Civil War but manages to keep her wits about her and save the South. (I hear it was Temple’s performance that inspired Vivian Leigh’s Scarlet O’Hara in 1939’s Gone With The Wind).

My least favorite genre of old movie when I was a kid was the movie musical. But when you’re home from school and the television only gets three channels, musicals are a far better option than the dreaded soap operas. Consequently, I watched a good number of movies starring Ann Miller, Judy Garland, Ginger Rogers and other actresses who could both sing and dance.

One such actress who popped up in a fair number of these musicals (particularly the bad ones) was Carmen Miranda, known by her nickname The Brazilian Bombshell and her habit of wearing hats adorned with fresh fruit. The original hoochie-coochie girl, Miranda strutted her stuff in such films as Copacabana, Doll Face and Week-End in Havana in the 1940s.

When the South-of-the-Border fad faded in the 1950s, Hollywood roles became scarce for Miranda and she returned to the live stage. Tragically, she collapsed onstage during a Jimmy Durante show and died of a heart attack at the age of 46 in 1955. Her legacy lived on, however, in black and white movie musicals shown in the middle of the day. She was also the inspiration for the Chiquita Banana logo and for the company’s ad campaign that started in the 1960s.

I don’t know if the Chiquita Banana Company ever compensated Miranda’s family for using her likeness to sell bananas…but if recent developments are any indication, I doubt it.

Last week Chiquita admitted doing business with a Colombian terrorist organization allegedly responsible for thousands of murders in that South American country. Chiquita, based in Cincinnati, was ordered to pay a $25 million fine by U.S. federal prosecutors for paying off a right-wing paramilitary organization $1.7 million in exchange for protection and other favors.

Chiquita claimed that the money was paid to the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (also known as the AUC) to ensure the protection of its employees who work on farms in some of the most dangerous parts of South America. The U.S. government designated the AUC a terrorist organization in September 2001 and it is suspected of some of the worst massacres in Colombia in recent years in addition to controlling much of that country’s cocaine trade.

Further developments in the case revealed that Chiquita made similar payments to Colombia’s left-wing paramilitary groups that have been fighting the AUC. But it was not just money that Chiquita’s wholly owned subsidiary Banadex sent to these groups.

The chief federal prosecutor’s office in Colombia stated Friday that it would ask the U.S. Justice Department for information on Chiquita’s role concerning a report that a Banadex ship was allegedly used to unload 3,000 rifles and more than 2.5 million bullets in November 2001 for use by Colombia’s paramilitaries.

Chiquita spokesman Michael Mitchell acknowledged the report but stated, “there is no information that would lead us to believe that Banadex did anything improper.”

Colombians have a hard time believing that statement, particularly since Banadex’s Colombian lawyer, Giovanny Hurtado Torres, was one of four people already convicted in the arms smuggling scheme. They also believe that the U.S. government’s role in the scandal is larger than U.S. federal prosecutors want to admit. According to court documents, Chiquita told the U.S. Justice Department in April 2003 that it was funding the paramilitaries to protect its workers.

These same paramilitaries were blamed for killing human rights workers and trade unionists in the banana-growing state of Antioquia at the same time that Banadex was becoming “Chiquita’s most profitable banana-producing operation.”

Some officials in Colombia are calling for the extradition of Chiquita executives for trial in South America…but it is doubtful that the U.S. government will allow that to happen.

At a time when all eyes (and news cameras) seem to be focused on the Mid-East, it might come to light that a giant U.S.-based corporation is funding what amounts to terrorism in South America. That’s not exactly what I would call a “Good Neighbor Policy” but don’t be surprised if Chiquita executives shrug their shoulders and quote Carmen Miranda by saying “bananas is my business.”