Chiquita Coverup: Money and Power Beats Integrity and Truth

by Anna M. Busch and Larry Burns

In an 18-page segment the newspaper ran on Sunday, May 3rd, the Enquirer, peered into Chiquita's highly controversial operations in Honduras, (where the company grows more bananas than at any other location), as well as elsewhere in the region. The articles described at length the multinational's influence over Honduran society, including making use of venal judges, employing deceptive documentation on land ownership to avoid higher local labor costs, and crop dusting its Costa Rican banana workers with harmful pesticides. But, rather than forthrightly denying the charges, which the evidence amassed by Gallagher's inquiry would not easily allow, Chiquita's almost legendary phalanx of public relations and legal warriors made a red herring out of its professed rage over 2,000 highly embarrassing voice mail tapes of its senior executives, which found their way to Gallagher. The reporter claims that he received them from whistle blowers, in the time honored tradition of those of conscience appalled by their employers' unscrupulous business practices, including Karen Silkwood.

According to its publisher, Harry M. Whipple, and editor, Lawrence K. Beaupre, "The Enquirer has now become convinced that the ... representations, accusations and conclusions [by Gallagher] are untrue and created a false and misleading impression of Chiquita's' business practices." The Enquirer also said "Despite [Gallagher's] assurances to his editors prior to publication that he obtained his information in an ethical and lawful manner, we can no longer trust his word and have taken disciplinary action against him for violations of the Enquirer."

But, confusion arises over the extent of the paper's retraction: whether management was renouncing all of the information Gallagher uncovered on Chiquita's complexly sinister operations, or only the accusations based on the putatively stolen tapes, which the crack investigative reporter continues to insist were turned over by a Chiquita source, which he will not reveal. Compounding this lack of clarity, The New York Times quoted Whipple as stating, "We are not aware of anything to suggest that this is an in stance of a reporter fabricating something."

The last unambiguous statement appears to completely contradict the extraordinarily spineless letter of submission signed by Beaupre and Whipple. Even so, did this conflicting assessment of its exposure mandate that the newspaper was vulnerable to a $10 million judgment against it? While the management's sentence constructions might skirt the provenance of clear prose, it doesn't lessen the mystery of why the Enquirer is sharing so little information with the public as to why it laid down its guns, gave up hopes of a Pulitzer, and why, with its heavy legal talent, any weakness in Gallagher's sourcing was not discovered beforehand.

Gallagher stands accused of merely stealing tapes, while Lindner, on the other hand, absconded with a U.S. foreign policy by donating a half million dollars to the Democratic party the morning after the Clinton White House surprisingly introduced on his behalf a complaint against the European Union before the World Trade Organization. In its petition, the U.S. claimed that the EU unfairly awarded a banana quota to the English-speaking Caribbean islands that cut into Chiquita's sales there. The White House ordered this even though the U.S. does not grow a single banana nor was any production job at stake. With the addition of the Enquirer's $10 million bounty, Lindner's enriched political slush fund presumably will be able to purchase even more White House servitude in the next presidential race.

The Enquirer's concession has opened up a rat hole by conceding everything to Chiquita, following the advice of the very lawyers who earlier had assured management that the series was invulnerable to Chiquita's certain legal counter-attack. Now Enquirer employees have been subpoenaed by a special local prosecutor, doing violence to press freedom standards. Though Gallagher has vehemently denied stealing the tapes -- doing this once again several days ago to a COHA (Council On Hemispheric Affairs) associate -- he already has been assumed to be guilty, at least by NPR and the Lehrer News Hour.

Skeptics are watching whether the Enquirer management will continue its Chiquita expose "in an ethical and lawful manner," as it pledged (Gallagher told COHA that he had at least 100 more Chiquita stories "in the can"). Or will it, like so many other newspapers, now turn to homogenized articles bought from some wire or newspaper service.

The Enquirer initially surprised national affairs specialists when it decided against continuing to be a mediocre provincial newspaper, and took on one of America's most powerful multinationals, infamous throughout Latin America for its unprincipled behavior. By capitulating to Lindner and Chiquita, the paper's feckless management demonstrated a lack of spunk for refusing to stay in the game, and that an apology, along with $10 million, apparently was easier to come up with than an act of sustained journalistic integrity.