Drugs and Bananas and Colombia and Israel

At the beginning of Goldfinger, James Bond makes a crack about "heroin-flavored bananas." Turns out he was prescient. Marcy Wheeler, drawing our attention to a story that deserves widespread attention, opens with these priceless words:

Remember that banana scandal, where a high-powered Republican lawyer advised Chiquita to go on paying right wing terrorists even though it was a felony? Where said high-powered Republican lawyer alleged that Michael Chertoff--the guy now in charge of protecting our country--told him that he could go on funding terrorists so long as he also cooperated with Administration investigations of the terrorists? And where, just last week, DOJ said the high-powered Republican lawyer would not be charged?

Now, if I told you that there were weapons and cocaine involved, would you start looking for those acid washed jeans you put away a couple of decades ago and make an appointment for a Fawn Hall doo?

The terror group, in this case, is a right-wing paramilitary gang in Colombia called the AUC. As for Chiquita -- well, as most of you probably know, the company used to be called United Fruit, and they were pretty damned spooked up. Chiquita bananas are loaded with vitamin CIA.

From an article bearing the marvelous title "The Octopus in the Cathedral of Salt":

According to the DEA, the quantity available in the United States has not dropped since the advent of the Plan Colombia, the multibillion-dollar eradication program. Colombian production actually went up during a period of intense spraying and military actions: the growers just moved to different parts of the country. Who is behind the trade? Although the FARC is involved deeply in the business, it is the right-wing AUC that worked closely with the cartels to organize the smuggling system.

FARC is a left-wing group which AUC has ruthlessly opposed, usually with the blessings of the Colombian government. The story goes on to describe drug shipments aboard boats owned by Chiquita:

The captain said, “Sometimes they put the drugs on the banana boats.” I was stunned. I had been under the impression that drug traffickers only used small fast boats to move cocaine from place to place, but this isn’t true. The freighters are difficult to search and blend into normal shipping traffic—because that is exactly what they are. They can also haul a ton at a time if the kilo bricks are well hidden.

More:

Lorenzo watched the AUC load drugs onto Chiquita boats; he knew about it because he was there when it happened. “Look, there were drugs, and there were times that they sent drugs for weapons. They sent the kilos of drugs, and from out there, those duros said we are going to send this many kilos of drugs and I need this many rifles,” Lorenzo said.

These two paragraphs reward close study:

In 1997, shortly after the AUC arrived in Urabá, it began to consolidate power through a series of massacres and assassinations intended to drive out the FARC, which had organized in the banana fields. Swept up in the paramilitary net were civilians who had no connection to any armed groups. A large number of villagers and workers were summarily executed after being tortured or fingered as sympathetic to the FARC. Many of the killings took place around river towns. AUC gunmen would arrive, assemble the villagers in a central place and begin to interrogate them. Often, they were killed regardless of their answers. Establishing guilt in this system is just a pretext for widespread murder. It was a tremendous success. Eventually, the AUC controlled the entire banana-growing region of Urabá, any leftist agitators were in hiding, and the AUC had access to the Chiquita port. They controlled it, but the commanders were still engaged in a brutal fight for control of the banana and coca fields. They faced a serious logistics problem. The paramilitary group was winning, but it badly needed war material to expand its influence.

On November 5, 2001, four years after the AUC arrived in Urabá, a mysterious shipment of thousands of AK-47 assault rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition arrived at the Chiquita docks, a lethal cargo that went directly to the AUC commanders. Aside from an Organization of American States (OAS) report that focused on the two Israeli arms dealers who arranged the deal from Guatemala and Panama, there have been few details to emerge about how the weapons were handled on the Colombian side. It is also true that people directly associated with the shipment have had a tendency to disappear.

In a previous piece, I discussed the Israeli connection to AUC.

Colombian intelligence agents arrested Yar Klein, a former Israeli Army Colonel, in 2000, when he tried to deliver a massive number of guns to the terrorists. He was convicted of similar charges by an Israeli court in 1991, and had to pay a nearly inconsequential fine.

Obviously, Klein operated at the behest of the Israeli power structure, which protected itself by draping Klein in a thin veil of plausible deniability. From an excellent piece by Jeremy Bigwood:

According to a 1989 Colombian Secret Police intelligence report, apart from training Carlos Castao in 1983, Israeli trainers arrived in Colombia in 1987 to train him and other paramilitaries who would later make up the AUC.

Fifty of the paramilitaries' "best" students were then sent on scholarships to Israel for further training according to a Colombian police intelligence report, and the AUC became the most prominent paramilitary force in the hemisphere, with some 10,000-12,000 men in arms.

The Colombian AUC paramilitaries are always in need of arms, and it should come as no surprise that some of their major suppliers are Israeli. Israeli arms dealers have long had a presence in next-door Panama and especially in Guatemala.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the right-wing paramilitaries in South America attracted many out-and-out Nazis, some from Europe. And yet we have ample documentation of Israeli cooperation with these fascists.

Why? What brought the Israelis to that remote locale? What lured them into a partnership with the kind of people most Jews would consider blood enemies?

Drugs and guns.

That's how a pariah nation stays financially afloat.