That Time a Banana Company Hired Paramilitary Death Squads

about a month ago you may have seen a headline that said something to the effect of chaita banana found guilty for sponsoring terrorist organizations in Colombia and if you're like me you saw that headline and said what so as someone with way too much free time on his hands I decided to see what that was all about and after looking at the story of not only the court case but the entire story of the company itself I can safely say that funding a terrorist death squad is like the most normal thing they've ever done not

only did this headline open up what is in my opinion one of the shadiest most dastardly companies in American history but it also opens up a whole web of wrongdoing with United States companies operating in Latin America and more specifically the nightmares of the banana trade itself but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself today we're going to look at the history of the United Fruit Company the company that would go on to become chaita Brands International and how as mentioned earlier hiring param milary assassination squads is just a normal Monday for them allegedly actually

wait I don't even have to say allegedly in this one they were found guilty in court yeah they did it duh I have so much weird history to talk about I swear the research for this video started off with just the court case but then it became so much more I don't know what this is going to bake out into uh but I have to you know explain this to someone so you're welcome so I'm going to start this word salad of a story that contains CIA coup uh Market manipulation and manipulation of advertising and

a whole lot of massacres right after the ad which is me I'm the ad for this one I'm not kidding look by the time you're watching this I'll be on the road for the tour of stalker shadow of the Zone but even if you didn't get it on the tour that doesn't mean you have to miss out on the fun that's because right now all of the merch that's available to buy in person at the tour is also available to order yourself among that merch we have this adorable little guy one of the Merc characters

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at the link in the description at wagon. shop I know there's a lot going on right now uh you all have been a blessing there's so many different projects that I have to chill 4 at once uh that's why there's no ad this week because just focusing on this uh thank you all so much for the support you've shown already I really don't deserve it and thank you for the support you continue to show it means the world so yeah check out the shirt or the stalker merch while you can at the links in the

description and really thank you all for everything we are going to go ahead and get into it but as always thank you for watching to find out how a wholesome company like chaita can be found guilty last month of hiring assassins in Columbia we need to start at the beginning all the way back at the beginning of a company that would one day become Chita Brands International the United Fruit Company so it all starts in 1871 when a man named Henry Meigs is contracted by Costa Rica to build a railroad an important thing to note

about world history and specifically like Central America and South America at this time is that a lot of advancements were being made around the world all at once railroads already laid across the entire United States and inventions like telephone and the car would soon be expected of anyone in the industrial world because of that countries like Costa Rica felt pressured to get with the times or else they'd be left behind so in cases like what happened in 1871 they would overcommit to a project that they couldn't afford 6 years after Henry's contracted to build the

railroad he would pass away and his nephew minor C Keith would take over Keith realizes quickly that Costa Rica doesn't have the money to pay him so he starts making deals with the country among these deals Keith has given a 99-year lease to the operations of the railroad as well as 800,000 Acres of property in Costa Rica so Keith goes from just building a railroad to now owning the operations of it well it turned out that owning the operation of the Costa Rican railroad didn't contribute to that much money but what he found did contribute

was bananas see originally during the railroads construction Keith would have bananas grown in the area to just feed the workers because bananas were comparative cheap to grow and grew naturally in Central America well to Keith's luck at the same time he acquired this railroad lease and 800,000 acres of land bananas were becoming All the Rage in the United States as a matter of fact they were so popular in places like New York City that the police commissioner made it a finable offense to leave a banana pill in public because so many people were slipping on

them also that police commissioner was Teddy Roosevelt I'm not kidding now the biggest problem with transporting bananas at the time is industrial Refrigeration didn't exist yet so at the time you pulled the banana from the tree you had a very short window to get it sold on a market this would be a very hard feat to achieve unless you owned your own railroad so Keith's company tropical trading and transport would pick all the bananas load them onto a railroad track and then take them to the port all inhouse through Keith's operation however the next problem

he had was transporting the bananas across the water back to the United States Keith's main competitor with this was a company called Boston fruitco a company that owned a lot of the boats and was growing their bananas in the West Indies Keith became frustrated with this agreement because anytime he wanted to move his product he had to rely on someone else's boats to do it and eventually decided if you can't beat them join them so the tropical trading and transportation company merged with the Boston fruit company to create the United Fruit Company not only that

but their lawyer who would eventually become the director of United Fruit Company Bradley Palmer decided that they should buy stock in their competitors as well so for a Time United fruit company owned 80% of all banana trades into the United States and as soon as they had this money they kept expanding their operation they bought land and built railroad across Central America into the northern part of South America by 1900 it's hard to explain how big United Fruit was like sure there's companies that are bigger today like Amazon but because of the way we as

the public receive information there's so many routes around them whereas back in 1900 United Fruit kind of decided what their image would be as well as even the image of the countries that they ship product from like for example they started something called the Great White Fleet which was named after the military's Great White Fleet these were as the name implies really big ships that were painted white and used to ship bananas to the United States this Great White Fleet would take groups of 50 to 100 people and tour them around the Caribbean this not

only promoted the name of United Fruit but also was the first example of a Caribbean cruise and United Fruit can be credited with sparking that entire Avenue of culture as well like in 1901 Guatemala just had them start running the mail no joke because United Fruit owned all of the railways and had all of the infrastructure for the country Guatemala just decided to contract them to you know decide where letters go in 1913 they created the tropical radio and Telegraph company which managed all of the radio and Telegraph broadcasts throughout Central America in 1930 they

were the largest employer out of anyone in the entirety of Central America and when I say they owned everything I mean they owned everything they owned the land they owned the food they owned the transportation and they owned the people that were on the land as well if you've heard all of this describing United Fruit Company and you hoped that they were at least kind of nice to their workers and that's really cute and I hope the world doesn't hurt you the way United Fruit Company treated their workers in Central and South America is pretty

monstrous not only were workers subjected to 7-Day work days and they would be paid the equivalent of like a130 but not even in normal money in company vouchers that they could only spend at Company locations but the work itself was hard and brutal and if you became injured you were completely unpaid for or any of the time lost if you became ill there weren't any facilities at work sites to treat you at least nothing permanent and if you left to get treated then that was pretty much considered desertion and someone else would come take your

job what this also meant for local governments is without United Fruit Company they have no infrastructure so the government can't really tell them to do anything about it think of it this way say you're the Costa Rican government and you do care about what your workers are going through well if you impose any kind of fine or serious restriction on United Fruit for the way they're treating the workers then at any point United Fruit can just take their ball and go home they own the railroads they own the radios they own the post office they

can either charge you an exorbitant fee for using it or just not allow you to use it altogether so unless you want the entire country to fall into poverty you kind of have to play along now this is also a very favorable look to local governments considering a lot of these officials were also being paid off and didn't really care about the issues you know fruit was creating but suffice to say even if they did care not a lot could be done also want to emphasize I'm kind of oversimplifying by saying that it was just

United Fruit Company and AO Chita bananas that's responsible for all this when in reality there were several large companies that were doing the same thing to different degrees in different places even other fruit companies like companies that would eventually become Dole all had a hand in this pie I'm mainly just picking on United Fruit Company because for one they're one of thear largest who have done it two their name gets brought up the most when you're talking about these historic instances and three they're the guys who once again have an actual guilty conviction but just

assume all circumstances in Latin America are bad at this time because they pretty much were as a matter of fact it was these conditions that caused the author O Henry to coin the term Banana Republic which effectively became a slaying term for any area where a small percentage of elite Commander a very large and abused working class in order to turn a profit or create a good which makes it extra funny that a company decided to name their clothing brand that I don't have anything against Banana Republic as a matter of fact this is one

of their shirts uh and it's very comfortable but I it's just so wild to me that you would hear that whole history be like yeah we'll name we'll name our industry after that why not well while all the heads of the corporation are having a great time and officials are either willingly or unwillingly turning a blind eye to what the United company is doing the workers are not as happy with the arrangement and begin to protest around this time a nickname began to pop up for the United Fruit Company locals refer to it as the

octopus because it has an arm in everything the country does and in the early 1900s a lot of worker strikes happened you can imagine how the United Fruit felt about that initially it started out small with unionizes convincing one company town at a time to revolt against their working conditions but the first really big demonstration would come in 1928 it was then in the town of caga Colombia that a whole lot of workers decided to complain at once when you look at what the workers of this strike were protesting it would be comedic had it

not happened to actual people like among their List of Demands was a Six-Day work week as opposed to a 7-Day work week uh Improvement of Hospital Services weekly wages and abolition of office stores meaning they're paid with real money instead of vouchers the strike began on November the 12th and it seems that rather than hearing the workers out United Fruit Company decided to get Dad involved communism was not as scary to the United States as it would become post World War II but it was still in the minds of the American government so United Fruit

Company framed this entire operation to be a sort of Communist Revolution and the United States was threatening to get involved this caused the Colombian Army to jump into action and they immediately sent about 700 troops into the town on December 6th of 1928 there was about 1,500 protesters camped out within the town at one point General Vargas gives the order to fire it is not known exactly how many people died in the ensuing Massacre estimates are anywhere from 47 people to 2,000 General Vargas would later say he did this to ensure the safety of Colombia

as he feared an American Invasion while 47 bodies are confirmed the reason the number may be as high as 1,000 is because of the message sent from the US Embassy from this message we know not only that the United States knew about this but that it was considered a great success this event is remembered to this day as the banana Massacre and believe it or not it is not the only Massacre we're going to get to in the story well 6 years later the United Fruit Company gets another massive strike and this time it's too

many people to you know just shoot all of them the 19 3 4 demonstration managed to amass over 100,000 workers across different company towns and different vocs and most of what they were protesting for was the same thing at the banana Massacre they were protesting for safer working conditions a new minimum wage United Fruit Company tries to do the same thing they did at the banana Massacre they say that it is a communist takeover they begin deporting a lot of people but in a few weeks they give up this 1934 protest is forever known as

the Great banana strike the protest began on August the 9th and ended on August the 28th with United Fruit Company saying they would agree to the demands however as soon as the mob has dissipated the United Fruit Company simply doesn't do that despite saying they degreed to the demands and the government even enacting some new laws around workers rights United Fruit Company just doesn't do anything and when another strike begins to start up this time they've identified all of the strike leaders and they are all either imprisoned or disappear and by this time in the

1930s the United Fruit company owns 3.5 million acres of land in Central America and in places like Guatemala they're the majority land owner in Guatemala specifically they own about 20% of all the land meaning you can just look at a picture of Guatemala and point at it and there is a one in five chance that you're pointing at United Fruit Company land so for several years this just continued the United Fruit Company had the market cornered and anytime the workers had something to say about it the resistance quickly fizzled out every now and then a

country would try to enact new labor laws and either just find United Fruit Company or United Fruit Company would counter them with being targeted like for example when a law would come that would apply to companies with over 500 workers they would argue that they're the only people in the area with over 500 workers so it's targeted harassment it was in 1944 that the Chita brand would come to exist the chaita name applying specifically to their bananas the mascot for this chaita banana being a banana woman with a bowl of fruit on her head as

well as a catchy jingle that played in my head every time I read about a new Massacre the next big event in this entire story would happen in 1952 and the setpiece for one of the wildest Things United Fruit Company would ever do as well as the CIA is Guatemala see in the previous couple years a lot of worker strikes had started at United Fruit Company properties in Guatemala The Things They Were Striking for are once again absurd and also sad like a150 wage per day or allowance for funerals when workers die in accidents or

compensation for families when workers die in accidents like that what an insane place to be in where you're begging not to not die at work just to not also go broke when you die at work well it was around this time that Guatemala just got democracy and one of the first presidents they elect is jacobo arbin the founder of the Guatemalan party of labor now arbin has a lot of dangerous things things like ideas and among these dangerous ideas one of them is that workers shouldn't die at work a lot of the things arbin tried

to Institute was reasonable working conditions reasonable work hours and of course one of his biggest targets was the United Fruit Company at the time arbin became president the United Fruit Company was making twice as much revenue as the country of Guatemala and even more infuriating when looking at the totality of the land the United Fruit Company owned in Guatemala they were using about 15% of it and if you'll remember United fruit company owned more land in Guatemala than anyone else again about 20% of the country and they were only using 15% of that 20% at

the same same time Guatemala was going through a housing crisis cities were being overcrowded so arbin makes a decision he being the government forcibly buys 200,000 Acres of the land owned by United fruit company buying it from the United Fruit Company at about $3 an acre and immediately begins using that land for those that are landless so the United Fruit Company looks at this this is really the first time they've been told no by a government establishment sure people in a country had protested against them before but you can just shoot those entire governments are

a bit more complicated so what does the United Fruit Company do except go get dad again remember how back during the 20s they were able to convince the United States to threaten a takeover at just the mere mention of the word communism well now it's the 1950s and everyone is terrified of Communism and the leader of a country that an American company is operating in has now seized their land and distributed it to the people samonella also made a video about this well banana republics in general so I'll let you hear his version of how

the conversation probably went oh Eisenhower y what's up this hobo guy he's he's making us pay minimum wages well that doesn't sound very good for business that's not all though he's also taken our unused land and giv it back to the people does that sound familiar familiar oh dear you don't think by the way it's looking Dwight I'd say he's a dirty oh God collectivizing no Kami Kami Ki yeah go get him Dwight President Truman in 1952 signed off on something called operation PB Fortune This was a CIA operation to topple the Guatemalan government it

began at the end of Truman's presidency and Eisenhower was the one who oversaw most of the operations around it the way this coup went down is the CIA found a man named Carlos Castillo armas a former guad malen who was in Exile after trying to take over the government armos was sympathetic to the United States and that was good enough for the CIA so they began to train him and his men and Supply him with money and weapons to overthrow the Guatemalan government so even though United States soldiers were never on the ground we provided

the training and weapons to the soldiers who were on the ground among these weapons was planes and bombs meaning that the United States is directly responsible for the bombing of Guatemala City as a part of the 1952 coup one of the people in Guatemala at the time was a 25-year-old kid named Shay G Vera so I wonder how this event went on to shape his opinion of the United States the United States also conducted a very large propaganda campaign leading up to the coup where they would play radio broadcast or have fly liers and their

normal rigma role to convince the local people that this is actually good for them so much so that when armas's forces got to the capital A lot of the soldiers for the Guatemalan military simply surrendered with that arbin stepped down and Aros 10 days later became the dictator of Guatemala one of the first things armos did was execute everyone armos knew that he had a lot of political enemies in the country people who couldn't be swayed by the psychological operations of the United States he began to round up those that opposed him and in the

first few months of his dictatorship executed about 3 to 5,000 people about 1,000 of those executed were people who spoke out or protested against the United Fruit Company a few years later in 1957 a revolutionary would run up to armos as he was walking with his wife shooting him twice and killing him before the gunman turn the gun on himself this vacuum of power would lead to Guatemalan Conflict for decades to come resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people all because the United Fruit Company didn't want to help their workers out and

again by United Fruit Company in reality it's a lot of companies that were all agreeable to this at the time it just makes me feel better to imagine there's only one monster out there in 1999 Bill Clinton apologized to the country of Guatemala for the United States role in this coup so you know right in the nick of time and in 2011 the government of Guatemala officially apologized to the arbin family for the desecration and smearing they had of arbin while he was in office because you know as a part of the psychological operations they

needed the guy they wanted out of power to look bad so the CIA ran all kinds of smear campaigns against him I should also clarify if Bill Clinton apologizing to the country doesn't do it enough none of this is conspiratorial these are all Declassified documents now you can just read about how we overthrew a government because they didn't want workers to once again die in our fruit company I should also mention that during this time the owners or the chief board members or Executives or whatever of United Fruit Company they kept changing in and out

and in 1970 the majority of shares of the company were acquired by a man named Eli black Eli black became the CEO of United Fruit Company and decided to merge it with his company American sealc cap these two companies came together to make United Brands company however Eli black immediately ran into a problem so it seemed that Black's plan was to use the money and revenue that United Fruit Company had on hand to help his company American seal cap and continue their you know business into the future however when he got a hold of United

Fruit Company there wasn't as much money as he thought there'd be and you may hear that and be confused I've spent this entire video talking about how United fruit company owned it everything they had every Market in Central and South America cornered how could they be out of money well quite poetically the reason they were out of money is because of themselves so as I mentioned way earlier in the video come 1800s everyone in America loves bananas they can't get enough well something that anyone who knows anything about bananas could tell you is there isn't

just one kind of banana bananas come in all different shape sizes and colors and that is something that the American Consumer doesn't like 99% of you when you hear the word banana think of the regular shaped banana that is the regular color yellow once it turns out that's just one kind of banana as a matter of fact it's the kind that was mass-produced by United Fruit Company and United Fruit Company did everything in their power to make sure every banana they put out was the exact same that way they could fit perfectly into the shipping

boxes they needed to be fitted into and then fit perfectly into the image the American Consumer had in mind well when anyone who knows anything about biology and I'm sure hundreds of people were screaming at the executives of United Fruit Company at this time what any one of them could tell you is that genetic diversity is a good thing see when we talk about it as a product and something to be ship and eaten we're not really thinking about the livelihood or the biological well-being of this plant but a plant just like anything can grow

it can die and in this case it can get sick in the 1950s something called Panama disease began to hit several of the banana plantations across Central and South America now normally if a plant gets sick it's okay because even if the disease has found a way to attack that one plant the plant next to it is genetically diverse enough that it's not a one forone transfer but when you're the United Fruit Company and you've spent the past 60 years making sure every single one of your bananas is the exact same well then it is

a one to one transfer it's a one to one how many bananas would there be it's like got to be in the trillions it's a 1 to1 trillion transfer this hurt the banana Market in a big way so United Fruit Company and again other banana salesmen have that's a funny word I don't know other banana companies had spent a lot of energy into marketing the idea of the normal yellow banana into the public Consciousness they would pay cereal companies like Kelloggs to show pictures of banana cut up in cereal or they would pay movies or

TV shows or whatever to subliminally insert the idea of bananas being a part of a balanced breakfast it's funny cuz this is now the second video about corporations and the government subtly filling your mind with food You're supposed to eat and it's also the second video about a bunch of corporate leaders who don't understand how plants work failing to grow set plants in the South or Central Americas well now all of that subliminal messaging is UND done because now the bananas are going to be different after several years the banana producers begin to mass-produce a

new kind of banana and while that's the banana we come to know and love today and it seems to fit in a lot of the damage had been done it took a lot of money and resources to get a new production scale for a new kind of banana running and in the meantime they were now running so many other branches of the world economy that it was hemorrhaging than money and now back to our story this is the position Eli black found himself in 1970 it seems after several years Eli black was not able to

consolidate the loss of money with you know getting more money and on February the 3rd of 1975 he would throw himself from his 44th floor office building it was also found shortly after his death that he had sent a bribe of 1.25 million to the president of Honduras with a promise of another 1.25 million if the president would effectively give them a tax break now is it because Eli black knew he'd be found out for this or because of dire Financial Straits that he jumped we don't know but either way finances are what caused the

issue eventually Carl Linder Jr one of the like richest billionaires or whatever in the world would acquire the company since United Fruit Company was associated with all the company towns and massacres back in South and Central America and since United Brands was was associated with the thing that just happened with Eli black Linder decides to rename the company to the product it is most famous for the chaita banana so in 1990 the company is renamed to chaita Brands International so now if you're hearing all of that and you're thinking oh okay so you know the

company had a sorted history and now we're in the Modern Age and they've call them down right right well it's around this time in 1990 that they're now jakita Brands International that something known as the banana Wars begin effectively chaita had a competitor named FS who was doing better and shaita didn't like that so rather than you know doing better at their own business shaita just decided to play dirty they would periodically have F bananas seized for inspection and then when oh look the bananas have gone rotten after setting in a waiting place for a

week who knew they would just throw him out again Chita has their hands in so much the infrastructure they can have stuff checked out or seized at a moment's notice F estimated that damages done during these banana Wars resulted in as much as $10 million as a matter of fact it was so bad that F's manager filed a lawsuit against chaita saying that chaita had put out a false arrest warrant for him and that if the manager was arrested he would be kidnapped and murdered which you know what I believe him I I don't I

don't need to see any of the evidence or his reasoning for this you think jakita is going to kill you because you're doing better than them at money probably I feel weird making this video over a banana company not because of the CIA stuff not talking about government stuff a banana company that's what has me worried you want to know the wildest thing about it craziest part about me making a video about a banana company I'm allergic to bananas I have a mild banana allergy I can eat some things with banana in it but if

I eat a banana directly it makes like my lips swell up and like my mouth Burns I don't like it so I could hypothetically die by banana and that I I mean that doesn't relate to anything but I'm sure you all will find something funny to say about that but yeah like this guy thinking that chaita is going to kill him I mean yeah yeah dude me too they're going to make me eat a banana or something I don't know what's really funny is in 2014 there was a proposed merger between chaita and Fs uh

that ended up falling through but it reminds me of back at the beginning of this story when uh the tropical Trading Company and the Boston fruit company like hated each other a lot so they hated each other so much that they like kissed and merged businesses that's what this reminds me of that they threatened to kill F's manager and then they thought about becoming one thing or sorry I should clarify they didn't threaten to kill him he claims that they were going to allegedly in Minecraft whatever I should also mention before all of this and

1987 their logo that was an entire banana woman with a fruit basket on her head uh just became a normal woman with a fruit basket on her head that doesn't really relate to the conspiracy or story or anything I just really didn't like that banana lady so this is better now a lot of chaita History's past was kind of outside of the public mind until 1998 it was then that Michael gallager for the Cincinnati Inquirer published an article called chaita Secrets Revealed this alleged that shitao was responsible for everything from drug trafficking to weapon trafficking

to uh coups as mentioned earlier as well as several political assassinations however the article would become discredited when it was found out that Gallagher had broken into chita's answering machine in order to get a lot of his information he was accused of taking a lot of things out of context and you know being unprofessional as a journalist and ended up suing the Cincinnati Inquirer and winning about $10 million because of this The Inquirer printed a retraction and a lot of the details of that article are now considered like UNC you know because he was exposed

for stealing the information but a lot of people look at the information they presented and say in spite of how he went about getting it it's still true which possibly maybe who knows allegedly whatever the story in itself made a lot of people dig and old information like what I've talked about up until this point in the video started to get passed around you know the CIA protecting bananas through revolutions and whatnot now after all of that backstory is out of the way we can talk about the death squads yeah the the article title that

I saw that inspired this entire Rabbit Hole of Discovery I am now going to talk about the thing that article was about now Colombia is a country with a very complicated political past a lot of revolutions and assassinations and whatnot that are too much to get into this late into the video all you need to know for now is that there are a lot of both left and right-wing organizations in the country that hate each other a lot a lot of stories of one party gaining power and massacring everyone on the other side and then

that side gaining power 20 years later and massacring everyone on the other side and that just goes back and forth well in spite of Colombia having this turbulent environment there's a lot of companies that want to do business there and while several companies can be found guilty of the thing I'm about to talk about again jakita is the one that was found guilty in court it was found that in the late '90s and early 2000s Chita was paying a group known as the United self-defense forces of Colombia what are the United self-defense forces of Colombia

well they're a group founded by Carlos castano Gill and yes he's one of the characters in the TV show Naros when Carlos was a young boy he watched his father be killed by the at the time left-wing militants who were controlling Colombia so as mentioned earlier he became one of the right-wing militants to control Colombia he partnered with the cartel and even people like Pablo Escobar to maintain physical power through violence within Colombia this mostly materialized in brutally killing anyone who opposed his regime or really since the self-defense force was a gun for hire anyone

who opposed the regime he was working for at that moment sometimes this would be a stereotypical security service and other times it was executing people who opposed osed whatever you were doing so if he was hired by a local business or cartel that meant executing people who did things like unionize or not like the cartel despite being a sort of gun for hire the United self-defense force was explicitly right-wing because as mentioned not only did they work for a lot of companies to dispel things like trade unions Carlos explicitly said that they would just kill

anyone who was a unionist the United self-defense force was responsible for a little thing called the mapir pan Massacre and what is that you may ask well I don't know let's check out the Weeki uh right here we have a summary it says on July the 15th of 1997 the paramilitaries which is you know the United self-defense Force um arrived at mapan where they used chainsaws and machetes to murder behead dismember and disembowel civilians because the bodies were thrown into a river it is unknown exactly how many people died but the United States Department of

State stated in 2003 that at least 30 civilians were killed so anyway this is the company Chito was hiring as a matter of fact it was found out that they had paid the United self-defense Force $1.7 million over the course of 10 years the Colombian government had a Securities company called convir which was basically a way for companies to hire production or security for their employees within the country it was through this company that chaita paid out the money to the United self-defense Force chito's reason for this was that they were just hiring the company

for the protection of their workers in Colombia and that they had no knowledge of the more illicit doings of the company outside of their security Contracting however we know for a fact this is not true because in 2001 the United self-defense force was labeled as a terrorist organization by the United States and internal memos at chaita say that the company was explicitly told to stop paying them it was after this issuing of them as a tariffs organization that about half of the money was sent out immediately chaita was found of wrongdoing by the United States

justice department and ordered to pay out $25 million Colombia's attorney general said that this was not enough obviously and furthermore accus chaita of using their ships to smuggle thousands of AK47s and millions of rounds of ammunition which at this point absolutely I allegedly that hasn't been proven in court yet or anything but hypothetically could totally see it as part of chita's Defense they also hired two other left-wing extreme militant groups to guard other pieces of their employees um which doesn't excuse anything that's happened so far but also that just means that you play the field

you don't care where the money goes as long as you get what you want out of it likely just shopping for the cheapest option a note that was found written by one of the executives at Chita described this as quote the cost of doing business in Colombia for several years the family members of those killed by the terrorist organization sought damages from jakita because you know they probably wouldn't have been able to cause the damage they did had it not been for chita's money in 2014 a lawsuit of some 4,000 family members was thrown out

as it was seen they didn't have jurisdiction over a United States based company I should also mention in 2014 Chita was lobbying against the Justice against sponsors of terrorism act because they knew that it 100% included them in 2016 a judge named Kenneth Mara of Southern Florida decided to give this whole suit another look under his ruling it was right for family members to sue for damages at least within the United States and in 2018 chaita and the family members came came to an agreement also in 2018 the country of Colombia filed charges on 13

Executives at chaita that they said were responsible for you know the whole pain off terrorist thing nothing yet has come of this and I really doubt anything will the United States doesn't love sending American uh citizens to other countries to be Tried by their legal system and so far all that's come out of this is like eight people at chaita got fired and other than that and whatever the private agreement was with the family members in the suit we don't know what happened again up until a month ago that's because last month in June of

2024 a federal jury under the same judge Kenneth Mara found chaita to be guilty in the wrongful death of eight people killed by the Colombian terrorist organization now of course the actual effects of this organization were far far more but that's at least eight that can be directly pinned as partially caused by chaita chaita was ordered to pay out 38.3 million to the families affected of course a very small touch for the lives that they lost and the years they spent in courts trying to make something of it but hopefully it sets a sort of

Precedence maybe then other things the company's done can be tried maybe other victims can come forward and get a piece of what they deserve out of it maybe even other companies that did similar things can be brought into the light it certainly sets a precedence for crimes of second or third degree that you know jakita just paid off this group they didn't commit the crime but here seeing that they were held accountable for it maybe that's good news for whatever comes in the future I certainly hope so at least the story at whatever way you

look at it is tragic that this much success can be made off of this much blood it's wild to think at the same time Bill Clinton was apology to the country of Guatemala for what the CIA did back in the 1950s at the same time that same company was hiring death squads within Colombia in order to protect their business the same story told over and over again so hopefully I like to think at least as we say sorry this time we're not making another mistake once again uh even though we probably are and then some

other YouTuber or whatever the equivalent of YouTube is in 40 years I'm going to talk about the stupid thing that's happening right now that's going to make me upset but whatever I've done my part that that that's his problem at the end of the day I'm just a stupid YouTuber and I think that this stuff is interesting if not depressing to learn about and if I had to know about all of this then you do too and if nothing else you can at least point to the banana brand at a grocery store and have an

absolutely horrible story to traumatize your family and you're welcome for that and I just want to say thank you for watching again this literally started with a headline I saw a month ago and let all of this so I think a lot of you guys like the weird out of nowhere like you know conspiracy insane rabbit holes even though this isn't a conspiracy it's just a thing that exists that people need to talk about um but I think you all enjoy this kind of thing and I hope you did and if so thank you it

really does mean the most um as mentioned earlier in the ad at the time you're watching this I will be in New York meeting you guys the first event I've ever gone to is wendon that's so weird uh hopefully I'm Not Dead uh but I guess you'll know before I do here now isn't that strange so um I can't wait to meet you guys can't wait to hang out uh and really thank you for the opportunity to do this as as a dumb College Dropout it it's hard to process says but it's all thanks to

you guys and thank you it means the most as mentioned the tour merch is available for a very limited amount of time at the link in the description check that out if you're interested and the um uh do with that what you will t-shirt is also available for at the time you're watching this maybe a two week uh two weeks week and a half whatever I said in the intro the ad uh so get that as well if you want um thank you all so much for the support and even if you never buy a

say even if you can't even if you don't want to I completely understand just thank you for watching the videos you don't know how much that supports me the reason I have any of the success I'm able to do this for a job a able to go on tour and put out dumb t-shirts or whatever it's because of you guys who just click on stuff um and it means a lot so thank you so anyway uh that should be all out of the way I'm going to get packed and get to meeting you guys and

um like I said hopefully I don't die but hey if I did I've had a great run so thank you for watching I hope that you enjoyed and I will see you in the next one bye don't bring me a banana I don't want it