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And I do know that this is a rare exception to the rule, as to the horrors in Colombia, and Body Shop deserves special praise for bucking the trend. This shows admirable commitment and courage in doing right.
However, what we ultimately need is for business people and investors to seek out information like this on their own--as, for instance, Thanksgiving Coffee Company (a Fort Bragg, CA-based company) did long ago in the 1970s (and is still doing). They went to the sources of the coffee beans and helped set up coops and other beneficial projects to empower the poor coffee bean producers in Central America--and, in particular, in Nicaragua, which was suffering a cruel U.S. embargo at the time (aimed at toppling the popular Sandanista government). They were very pro-active in finding out what conditions were and addressing them up front.
Business people and investors shouldn't wait until a human rights group contacts them. They should be pro-actively contacting human rights groups wherever they are operating or seeking to operate, and investigating human rights conditions on their own. It commonly takes human rights groups years and constant, difficult and often dangerous work and constant fundraising and expenditure of their resources to get the attention of one business, or to get attention focused on one issue. The topsy-turviness of this is obvious. While Chiquita International execs hire death squads to murder trade unionists on their farms in Colombia, and get P.R. cover from the U.S. government, and while THOUSANDS of trade unionists, human rights workers, journalists, teachers, community activists, peasant farmers and others have been murdered by the Colombian military and its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads (with the U.S. larding the Colombian military with $7 BILLION in military aid), and while FIVE MILLION peasant farmers have been displaced from their land in Colombia, by means of state terror--the second worst human displacement crisis on earth--the resources of human rights groups are staggeringly inadequate to conduct similar campaigns to this one, to change these corporate practices. Hell, the current U.S. Attorney General was Chiquita's lawyer--got them off the hook for their murders!
I hope that Body Shop's decision sparks a change in this overwhelmingly bad corporate culture. I am not saying that it can't. I know that it CAN. It is by no means a trivial thing, just because it's only one company. And I hope they have learned from this to be pro-active--not to wait, to go and investigate and know what is happening in source countries. But I don't know--and tend to doubt--that this bad corporate culture can be changed, voluntarily, from within, on a large scale, without intervention by the governments that charter multinational corporations--that is, the U.S. government, U.S. state governments, and other legal entities, such as the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, and the governments of foreign countries where the corporations are operating. Chiquita could not have gotten away with hiring death squads in a country that was not already run by a fascist elite which itself is using death squads to control and oppress the poor, and/or if the U.S. government had been sincere in its requirement that death squad murders and Colombian military murders be stopped (and it wasn't sincere about this then, and isn't now). (The U.S. just arranged swift, middle-of-night extradition of key Colombian death squad witnesses, to the U.S., where they have been buried in the U.S. federal prison system, by the complete sealing of their cases--out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors. Colombian prosecutors objected to this, to no avail. This is under Obama--and A.G. Holder!)
The problem is huge, and it goes to the nature of our own government, and our loss of democracy--to multinational corporate and war profiteer rule. Body Shop's action will affect only a tiny group of the 5 MILLION displaced peasant farmers in Colombia, in the near term. I hope it has a ripple effect, and it could--but I think it will take an immense effort here, to regain democratic control of our government, great effort within exploited countries (most especially Colombia and Honduras) at risk of life and limb, and the efforts of leftist democracies elsewhere in Latin America to resist such exploitation, violence and theft against the poor. There is rather an awesome leftist democracy movement elsewhere in Latin America--including Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Nicaragua and other countries--to resist and reject U.S. dominated "free trade for the rich" and other U.S. policies that encourage crimes against the poor. That gives me the most hope--not that Chiquita or Exxon Mobil or Chevron can be influenced by Body Shop--but that these bad actors will be booted out of Latin America by common consent of the people who live there, by peaceful, democratic means, if they won't follow democratically laid down rules. That IS possible. That IS, in fact, happening in many countries--in a collective effort by leftist leaders to achieve Latin American sovereignty and social justice.
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