Although several El Espectador journalists were killed in the 1980s and ’90s, many young reporters aspired to being on the staff of the storied Colombian newspaper at the end of the 20th century. I loved working there, despite the risks. After the Medellín Cartel bombed our headquarters, my colleagues and I rescued from the rubble the desk on which Gabriel García Márquez wrote his first stories for the paper.

We dreamed that an invisible Mr. García Márquez, from that empty desk, urged us to pursue stories that would expose injustice in Colombia. In 1998, when The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that the American banana company Chiquita Brands had bribed Colombian officials to obtain a license for the use of a port loading facility in Turbo, Urabá, a city on Colombia’s coast, I began investigating the firm as if Mr. García Márquez himself had handed me the assignment.

Chiquita denied the allegations of the 1998 Enquirer story. The paper later publicly apologized and renounced the investigation after it was revealed that a reporter lied about sourcing and illegally obtained voice mail records. But at El Espectador we felt that The Enquirer was on to something. We published the allegations, noting that the paper had retracted the article and the story’s reporter was being investigated by the police in Ohio. And for years — even when I left El Espectador for “Noticias Uno,” a nightly news program — I continued to look into the firm. In 2002, after speaking with Nicaraguan police and military officials as well as the police in Panama, I reported that 3,000 weapons for the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a right-wing paramilitary group known as the AUC, had landed in the Urabá port from Nicaragua, and that Chiquita appeared to have been aware the militants were using its facilities to receive weapons.

Now, I like to think that Mr. García Márquez would have smiled at the outcome of a Florida lawsuit against Chiquita. In June, a jury found Chiquita liable for the deaths of eight men killed by the AUC, which Chiquita helped finance. (Seventeen years earlier, the Department of Justice found that Chiquita paid the group over $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004). The firm was ordered to pay $38.3 million in damages to the men’s families. It was the first time that Chiquita was found liable for its actions in Latin America. A spokesperson for Chiquita, responding to questions about this essay, said that the company’s payments to the AUC were made under duress and it is appealing the verdict.

The world has known something was amiss in the banana business for a while. In Colombia, “Noticias Uno” had reported on Chiquita’s association with the AUC since the early 2000s. And while that relationship has come under legal scrutiny in the United States, Chiquita has yet to face judgment in Colombia. The Florida case raised long neglected ethical questions in both countries about the real cost of one of the least expensive fruits in American supermarkets. We should all ask ourselves: How much bloodshed is behind the bananas we eat for breakfast?

In the Urabá region, there’s been far too much. Chiquita set up an operation there, where the land to grow bananas was inexpensive, but it was forced to pay the AUC through its subsidiary in Colombia to operate safely, the company has said. In the 20th century, Fusarium wilt, a deadly fungus also known as Panama disease, destroyed banana crops in parts of the Caribbean and Central America but not in Colombia. Then, in 1998, some of Chiquita’s banana operations in Honduras and Guatemala suffered hurricane damage, costing the company $74 million. Chiquita, it seemed, accepted that paying the paramilitaries was the cost of doing business in Colombia.