Of course it's wrong, but a company has to look out for its employees. What are they supposed to do, let them get captured, tortured, and shot? If sure you would feel different if it was YOUR ass being held captive, wondering if you would ever see Hilary on tv again. There IS a difference between governments, and private businesses operating on foreign soil. Businesses aren't there to solve local problems (as much as you think they should), they are just trying to do their best to keep risk low. People hate 'western' companies irregardless of what they do, why should this change anything.
Although it would be the Christina thing for businesses to help the communities they are in, even if that happens to be outside of the U.S. border, I don't think one can legislate against that (nor do I think it's necessarily desireable). However, one cannot just allow businesses to take advantage of of unethical situations that enfringe on people's human rights. It's a matter of holding companies to a basic human-rights/economic fairness standard, not about making them charitable. In addition, the payment to terrorist paramilitary groups is only one possible example of unethical actions by Chiquita, such as using the ports to smuggle weapons for the United Self-Defence Force (which has been called a death squad). Chiquita's record of ethics is far from exemplery. Its record with pesticide use harmful to its workers demonstrates that its payment for "protection" was, at the very least, probably not made out of a good-will intent for their employees.
We're taking the word of a corporation whose past actions should speak for themselves? (One example, from Mike Gallagher and Cameron McWhirter of the Cincinnati Enquirer):
"Security guards have used brute force to enforce their authority on plantations operated or controlled by Chiquita. In an internationally controversial case, Chiquita called in the Honduran military to enforce a court order to evict residents of a farm village; the village was bulldozed and villagers run out at gunpoint. On a palm plantation controlled by a Chiquita subsidiary in Honduras, a man was shot to death and another man injured by guards using an illegal automatic weapon. An agent of a competitor has filed a federal lawsuit claiming that armed men led by Chiquita officials tried to kidnap him in Honduras."
I do hope Chiquita has made improvements, and will continue to do so.
I think you can make a case that some people at this point are against anything "Western" as far as business is concerned. However, those companies have, and still do, give plenty of reason to reject many of them and their products.
