Chiquita Lawyer Tracked Secret Ties to AUC Death Squads

By Desmond Okafor · August 7, 2026

Colombian peasants and union leaders were targeted by death squads while Chiquita's senior counsel used privileged memos to cloak early ties to the AUC paramilitaries.

September 12, 2000. Robert Thomas, senior counsel for Chiquita Brands International, sat down to write a memorandum to file. He was not writing a press release or a report for shareholders. He was documenting the early, fragile interactions between Banadex—the Colombian arm of the fruit giant—and the United Self-defense Forces of Colombia, better known as the AUC.

The AUC were not security consultants. They were right-wing paramilitaries, a loose coalition of death squads and former military officers who waged a scorched-earth campaign against anyone they suspected of leftist sympathies, including union leaders, peasants, and activists. In the hills and valleys of Colombia, the AUC didn't just "secure" territory; they cleared it through massacres and forced disappearances.

"Confidential and Legally Privileged"

According to the National Security Archive's curated description of the record, this five-page memorandum was marked "Confidential and Legally Privileged." This phrasing is a standard shield in the corporate world, a linguistic wall designed to keep the internal workings of a company away from the eyes of prosecutors and the public. When a company marks a document as privileged, it is often because the content is not meant for a courtroom—at least, not as evidence of a crime.

In this case, the privilege was meant to cloak the specifics of how a multinational corporation navigated its relationship with a paramilitary organization. The archive's catalogue entry records that Thomas used the memo to lay out information he had gathered about the "initial encounters" between Banadex officials and the AUC.

For a corporation operating in a conflict zone, the temptation to outsource security to whoever holds the guns is potent. But when the gun-holders are the AUC, "security" becomes a euphemism for complicity. The corporate logic is simple: stability is required for export, and if the paramilitaries provide that stability by terrorizing the workforce, the cost of doing business is merely a matter of legal risk management. Robert Thomas's memo was the ledger of that risk.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

Robert Thomas

As senior counsel, Thomas's role was to manage the legal exposure of Chiquita. The fact that he was gathering information on these "initial encounters" suggests a consciousness of the danger. You do not write a privileged memorandum to file about meetings with a paramilitary group unless you know those meetings could one day be viewed as criminal.

Historical context provides the grim backdrop that Thomas's memo sought to manage. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, the AUC expanded its reach across Colombia, often working in a symbiotic, if unofficial, partnership with sectors of the Colombian military. Their goal was the eradication of the insurgency, but their methods were indiscriminate. For Banadex, the AUC represented a force that could ensure the plantations remained operational, regardless of the human cost in the surrounding villages.

The gap between the sterile language of a corporate memo and the reality of the Colombian countryside is vast. While Thomas was "gathering information" in a quiet office, the AUC was redefining the boundaries of the state through violence. The memorandum represents the bridge between the boardroom and the battlefield, the point where corporate strategy meets paramilitary brutality.

Banadex

Banadex operated as the operational heart of Chiquita's Colombian interests. In the logic of multinational expansion, the subsidiary is often treated as a buffer, a way to distance the parent company from the messy realities of local operations. Yet, the memorandum to file was written by Chiquita's own senior counsel, not a local Banadex lawyer. This indicates that the relationship with the AUC was not a rogue operation by local managers, but something known—and managed—at the highest levels of the company's legal apparatus.

We do not have the full text of those five pages here; we have the archival description of what they contain. We know that Thomas was documenting the start of a relationship. We do not know from this summary exactly what was promised in those first meetings, or how much money changed hands to ensure that the AUC kept the "peace" on Chiquita's land.

What remains is the fact of the encounter. The document confirms that by September 2000, the lines had been blurred. The corporate entity had ceased to be a mere observer of the Colombian conflict and had become an active participant in its management, engaging with a group that the world would eventually recognize as a criminal enterprise.

The record leaves us with a five-page gap. The catalogue entry tells us the memo exists and what its subject was, but the specific details of those "initial encounters" remain tucked away in the file.