In return, Taylor’s forces provided security to the plantation that allowed Firestone to produce rubber and safeguard its assets. Between 19, the company invested $35.3 million in the plantation. Over the next year, the company doled out more than $2.3 million in cash, checks and food to Taylor, according to an accounting in court files. The company signed a deal in 1992 to pay taxes to Taylor’s rebel government. John Toussaint Richardson, one of Taylor’s top advisersįirestone served as a source of food, fuel, trucks and cash used by Taylor’s ragtag rebel army, according to interviews, internal corporate documents and declassified diplomatic cables. We needed Firestone to give us international legitimacy. In the first detailed examination of the relationship between Firestone and Taylor, an investigation by ProPublica and Frontline lays bare the role of a global corporation in a brutal African conflict. At a pivotal meeting in Liberia’s jungles in July 1991, the company agreed to do business with the warlord. Taylor wanted Firestone to help his rise to power. In operation since 1926, the rubber plantation was considered to be the largest of its kind in the world, a contiguous swath of trees, mud-brown rivers, low hills and verdant bush that at the time splayed across 220 square miles – roughly the size of Chicago.įirestone wanted Liberia for its rubber. For the attack that October morning, he had built his army of butchers and believers in part with the resources of one of America’s most iconic businesses: Firestone.įirestone ran the plantation that Taylor used to direct the October 1992 assault on Monrovia. Orchestrating the anarchy was Charles Taylor, a suave egomaniac obsessed with taking over Liberia, America’s most faithful ally in Africa. Five American nuns would be slaughtered, becoming international symbols of the conflict’s depravity. Half the country’s population would become refugees. More than 200,000 people would die or suffer terrible injuries, most of them civilians - limbs hacked off, eyes gouged out. It would whip savagely out of control over the next decade.
Embassy, hunkered on a high spot overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.Ī new phase of Liberia’s civil war had begun. As they pressed in, the killers forced men, women and children from their homes. Boy soldiers canoed across mangrove swamps. Mortars arced through thick, humid air that smelled of rot. They loosed their attack on the sleeping city. In the pre-dawn darkness, they surrounded Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. They clutched talismans of feather and bone to protect them from bullets. Grotesque masks made them look like demons. The killers wore ripped jeans and T-shirts, women’s wigs and cheap rubber sandals. Thin teenagers lugged rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Men in camouflage mounted rusted artillery cannon in battered pickup trucks.
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