COLOMBIA MAY EXTRADITE CHIQUITA OFFICIALS

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Colombian officials said over the weekend that
they would consider seeking the extradition of senior executives of
Chiquita Brands International after the company pleaded guilty in
United States federal court to making payments to paramilitary death squads.

Chiquita, one of the world's largest banana producers, agreed to pay
a fine of $25 million last week to the United States Justice
Department to settle the case. Chiquita told the Justice Department
that from 1997 to 2004, a subsidiary in Colombia had paid $1.7
million to right-wing paramilitary groups, which are classified by
the United States government as terrorist organizations.

The company said that the payments had been motivated by concern for
the safety of employees, and that similar payments had also been made
to left-wing Colombian groups.

Officials from Chiquita, which is based in Cincinnati, did not
respond Sunday to repeated requests for comment.

President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia told reporters on Saturday that
extradition "should be from here to there and from there to here."
Colombia, the Bush administration's closest ally in South America,
has extradited hundreds of drug-trafficking suspects to the United
States since Mr. Uribe took office in 2002.

Chiquita, whose history in Colombia goes back more than a century,
said it voluntarily informed the Justice Department in Washington of
its payments to the paramilitary groups in 2003, after the
organizations' classification as terrorist organizations.

The company's former chief executive from 2002 to 2004, Cyrus
Freidheim Jr., on Friday told the board of directors of the Sun-Times
Media Group, of which he is currently chief executive, that he is
among present and former officials at Chiquita that may be subjects
of the investigation in the United States.

Tammy Chase, a spokeswoman for Sun-Times, declined to comment Sunday
on Colombia's potential efforts to extradite current or former
Chiquita executives.

Extraditions of prominent American business executives to Latin
America are rare. Though the possibility of any American executives
of Chiquita doing jail time in Colombia may be slim, the company is
coming under greater scrutiny there despite the sale in 2004 of
Banadex, its Colombia unit, for about $43.5 million.

United Fruit Company, one of the companies that merged to create
Chiquita, was long considered a bastion of American influence in
Colombia's banana-growing regions. Thousands of striking United Fruit
workers were massacred in Colombia in 1928, an incident that made its
way into "One Hundred Years of Solitude," the epic novel by Gabriel
Garcia Marquez.

In 2003, a report by the Organization of American States said that a
ship used by Chiquita's Colombian subsidiary may also have been used
for an illicit shipment of 3,000 rifles and 2.5 million bullets for
Colombian paramilitary groups. The chief prosecutor's office in
Colombia said last week that it would ask the United States Justice
Department for details about the shipment, thought to have been made in 2001.

Colombia's current government has also been accused of ties to the
right-wing paramilitaries, which also exported large amounts of
cocaine to the United States. A widening scandal tying prominent
supporters of Mr. Uribe, including the former chief of the executive
branch's intelligence service, has resulted in several resignations
and calls to oppose a proposed trade agreement between Colombia and
the United States.