The Coke Machine Part 6
In Castro's brightly colored office hang posters for various campaigns around water usage and health, including a sign poking fun at c.o.ke with the slogan "Always Gastritis!" In theory, says Castro, a boycott could do real damage to the company. Castro and his colleagues have calculated that the communities around San Cristobal spend some $50 million annually on c.o.ke products. Getting people to make the connection between c.o.ke and the affect on health and the environment, however, has been difficult. The boycott has fallen far short of its relatively modest goal to register ten thousand people.
Part of the problem with boycotting c.o.ke is the lack of alternatives to the drink, especially in an area where local water supplies are commonly contaminated. Castro's group tried to strike a deal with a Mexico City juice company whose beverage Boing! sells for 15 pesos for 1 liter (versus 10 or 11 pesos for a 2-liter c.o.ke), but they were unable to come to an agreement that would bring prices down to a compet.i.tive level.
With the boycott in Chiapas failing to gather much steam, and the munic.i.p.al government checkmated by federal law, at least one civil society organization is looking ahead to the future-the next generation. "The adults aren't salvageable," says Teresa Zepeda Torres, director of Alianza Civica, which has campaigned to raise awareness of water issues. "The young people and adolescents are the ones who are going to have the problems, and they are the remedy for this, so it's more important to talk with them." in Chiapas failing to gather much steam, and the munic.i.p.al government checkmated by federal law, at least one civil society organization is looking ahead to the future-the next generation. "The adults aren't salvageable," says Teresa Zepeda Torres, director of Alianza Civica, which has campaigned to raise awareness of water issues. "The young people and adolescents are the ones who are going to have the problems, and they are the remedy for this, so it's more important to talk with them."
Zepeda's office in San Cris is covered with brightly colored posters made by young people as part of a contest to draw attention to environmental issues. Even as they embrace campaigns against pollution and water conservation, however, Zepeda says that c.o.ke consumption is difficult to broach. "We are trying to teach children what it does to their health-that it's why they are so chubby," she says. "When I talk about natural resources and the water cycle, the children are very receptive. They propose things. When I talk about Coca-Cola, however, that complicates things."
Perhaps, in part, that's because of the pouring-rights contracts that expose them to c.o.ke products in schools. In Mexico, c.o.ke has gone far beyond the advertising and exercise programs, to concentrate its CSR efforts on building schools themselves. In 1999, the Coca-Cola Foundation put $10 million toward creating the Coca-Cola Foundation/Mexico, which has partnered with government to build, at last count, eight day schools and four boarding schools throughout Chiapas. Of course, the foundation isn't actually building the schools but rather putting up money toward their construction-generally 20 to 30 percent of their total cost. For a $180,000 boarding school, c.o.ke donated $55,000; for a $680,000 secondary school, it put up $155,000.
As in the United States, that investment has often gone hand in hand with supporting the Coca-Cola Company's goal to sell more soft drinks to kids. For one school in Huixtan, a dozen miles east of San Cris, the bottler prevailed upon the community store next door to exclusively sell Coca-Cola drinks, with a bright sign painted right next to the school. In other cases, it has splashed c.o.ke logos all over school basketball courts behind the schools. In one, the backboards and foul circles are covered in the c.o.ke logo, while c.o.ke signs hang in the stands and spectators swig c.o.ke as they watch.
And some critics of the company see an even more sinister attempt at water privatization in c.o.ke's school-building operations. COMPITCH's Juan Ignacio Dominguez alleges that Coca-Cola FEMSA has put its schools in communities with the richest water resources, even while it bypa.s.ses communities with greater needs that don't have access to aquifers. "There are two communities where c.o.ke proposed to bring a high school, and communities nearby don't even have middle schools," he says.
In Huixtan, according to a former town councilor, the company came back just a few weeks after the inauguration of the school in 2002 to request authorization for a small bottling plant in the village. The offer sparked intense debate, with a majority of residents afraid the company would deplete its water. When put to a vote, some 80 percent voted against the authorization. According to Dominguez, however, c.o.ke had already requested the rights from two private landowners. When the town council found out, it protested, forbidding the sale. "They said, The water is public," says Dominguez. "You have to ask everyone, and Coca-Cola didn't want to go through that process."
It's nearly impossible to verify the story, which might be just another version of the European communist rumors of children's hair turning white or the atomic bomb factory at the bottling plant. If nothing else, however, it shows the deep distrust some people in the area have of the multinational's motives, even while it is ostensibly doing something positive for the community. Rumors such as these, however, have failed to turn the majority of people in Chiapas-much less Mexico-against Coca-Cola, which continues to see record growth throughout the country.
Just a few hundred miles south, however, another boycott has taken root, based on a more serious set of disputed facts. Conjuring the deadly history of c.o.ke's bottling plant workers in Guatemala, the campaign has rocked the company all the way to its headquarters in Atlanta.
SEVEN.
"Syrup in the Veins"
Clouds shroud the windows of the fifty-seat turboprop flying to Apartado, the capital of the Colombian region of Uraba on the Caribbean coast. As it rises to clear the crest of the mountains, suddenly sunshine breaks in through the clouds, revealing the dark green ridges of the surrounding Andes. It's easy to see how the guerrillas who first appeared here in the 1960s were able to avoid capture for so long in this forested fortress. As the plane finally begins to descend, the color changes from forest green to a tropical shade of lime and suddenly acre after acre of banana plantations stretch in all directions.
The airport itself is surrounded by towers and fences topped with barbed wire. Just past the open-air parking lot, a bright red billboard sports the familiar hourgla.s.s silhouette of a c.o.ke bottle. Printed over it are the words "El Lado Coca-Cola de Uraba" "El Lado Coca-Cola de Uraba"-The Coca-Cola Side of Uraba-a riff off c.o.ke's latest advertising slogan, "The Coca-Cola Side of Life." Spurting out of the mouth of the bottle is a riot of birds, b.u.t.terflies, and flowers, surrounded by multicolored splatters of paint. It's an unfortunate irony that, in the present context, they look like nothing so much as splatters of blood.
On the road into Carepa, miles upon miles of banana trees speed past, their leaves splayed lazily in the sun. After twenty minutes, the town appears, choked with dust and clogged with a dozen cafes of concrete and corrugated steel, each advertising with a sign for Coca-Cola or its Colombian rival Postobon (distributed by PepsiCo). The Coca-Cola plant is a few hundred meters past the town center on a desolate stretch of highway.
Owned by a bottling company called Bebidas y Alimientos de Uraba, it was built relatively recently by c.o.ke standards, beginning operations in 1979, around the same time that the banana processing plants run by United Fruit Company (which later became Chiquita) set up shop in the area. While the company initially did a good business, sales languished over the years, in part due to the violence gripping the region, which had become a stronghold of guerrillas during the country's increasingly violent civil war.
By all accounts, the conflict began sixty years ago in a period appropriately called La Violencia, a sectarian bloodletting pitting the two major parties, Liberal and Conservative, against each other following the killing of a popular liberal leader in 1948. Caught in between, communist rebels fled into the hills around Bogota for protection, eventually consolidating themselves under the leadership of a guerrilla captain called Manuel Marulanda-better known by his nickname Sureshot for the quickness with which he dispatched any government forces encroaching on his territory.
When the two major parties reached a power-sharing accord in 1958, the communists were left out. The army attacked their bases, scattering them into the jungles, where they took on the new name of Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), or FARC, and adopted a Marxist philosophy and guerrilla tactics of ambushing government troops and bases operating in their territories. While most fled south, some spread northward into the relatively un-populated area of Uraba, where they used their Caribbean location to import weapons from Panama and tax drug shipments bound farther north, kidnapping or killing anyone who opposed them. By some accounts, the FARC also infiltrated the unions in the banana-processing plants run by United Fruit Company.
At any rate, businessmen throughout Colombia had much to fear from the guerrillas, especially from a smaller guerrilla offshoot known as the ELN (National Liberation Army), which operated in the center of the country along Colombia's largest river, the Rio Magdalena, and pioneered the guerrillas' most feared tactic-kidnapping and holding wealthy people for ransom. When it wasn't doing that, it was extorting money from the oil refineries and other businesses-including the ultimate symbol of capitalism, Coca-Cola. Starting in the 1990s, the ELN "taxed" bottling plants 20 cents for every crate of c.o.ke sold. When the company didn't pay, it declared war, stealing and burning its delivery trucks and killing several distributors.
It was these kinds of tactics against businessmen that led to the formation of the first paramilitary groups to fight back. Civilian "self-defense" groups, or autodefensas autodefensas, had existed in Colombia for decades, authorized by law in 1965. But the paramilitaries didn't come into their own until the mid-1980s, when some businessmen and ranchers banded together in Colombia's Middle Magdalena Valley under a grizzled rancher named Ramon Isaza.
Boosted by drug money from Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel, they began killing FARC and ELN "tax collectors," cutting up their bodies and sinking them in the rivers. Soon they were conducting increasingly brutal ma.s.sacres in villages and towns suspected of giving support to guerrillas and targeting policemen and liberal politicians to silence opposition. The paramilitaries went too far in 1989, when they killed a judge and a team of government prosecutors, and were declared illegal by the federal government.
But they didn't disappear; they merely went underground, reconst.i.tuting themselves under the leadership of a murderous band of brothers, Fidel, Carlos, and Vicente Castano. The Castanos originally came from the coffee belt of Cordoba, just south of Uraba, but soon expanded their operations nationally to create the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC. Openly declaring itself in 1997, the new paramilitary coalition began a reign of terror against anyone it suspected of collaborating with guerrillas, including community leaders, human rights activists, and union workers.
Uraba was controlled by the brutal Freddy Rendon Herrera, also known as "El Aleman" (The German) because of his light hair and eyes, and whom human rights groups accuse of killing, disappearing, or forcibly displacing as many as two thousand people in six years; and Jose Ever Veloza, known as H.H., who by his own count confessed to ordering the deaths of three thousand. "More innocents than guilty died"-he shrugged-"but that's because the war is irregular." Their men were known for brutal ma.s.sacres where civilians were gored with chain saws and hacked to death with machetes. In one, paramilitaries raided a school during a "peace education day" and decapitated a boy in front of the crowd; in another, they cut off the head of an elderly man and played a pickup game of soccer with it in the town square.
Even as the paramilitary violence was beginning in Uraba, the bottling plant in Carepa was struggling to survive, subsisting on personal loans from its majority shareholder, Richard Kirby, a businessman who split his time between Bogota and Miami and owned significant interests in several other Coca-Cola bottling franchises in Colombia. Management responded by squeezing workers, forcing them to work sixteen-hour days and firing workers who had more seniority in order to save money on higher salaries and benefits, according to former workers at the plant. the paramilitary violence was beginning in Uraba, the bottling plant in Carepa was struggling to survive, subsisting on personal loans from its majority shareholder, Richard Kirby, a businessman who split his time between Bogota and Miami and owned significant interests in several other Coca-Cola bottling franchises in Colombia. Management responded by squeezing workers, forcing them to work sixteen-hour days and firing workers who had more seniority in order to save money on higher salaries and benefits, according to former workers at the plant.
The union at the time reluctantly went along with the changes, trying to eke out concessions where it could. In 1993, however, a new food and beverage union called SINALTRAINAL began to organize workers with a more militant strategy, taking a hard line in negotiations. Particularly vocal were two of the union's new leaders, Jose Eleazar Manco and Luis Enrique Giraldo, who pushed management for higher wages and increased job security. By Colombian law, workers can be fired at will-unless they are members of a union executive council, who are protected against dismissal.
At the same time that SINALTRAINAL began making noise at the plant, paramilitary graffiti began appearing around town, and rumors circulated about trade unionists coming under attack in neighboring towns. Then, on April 8, 1994, Manco simply disappeared. Two weeks later, it was Giraldo's turn. On April 20, 1994, his motorcycle was stopped on the way to work, and he was dragged into the woods and shot. "There was an investigation," says his brother, Oscar Giraldo, interviewed at SINALTRAINAL's headquarters in Bogota, a nondescript building with a double-reinforced door in a residential neighborhood just outside the center of the city. "A couple of reports were written, but not much happened. My mother suffered a lot." Over the next year, he and other union members started receiving death threats, culminating in the killing of another union leader, Luis Enrique Gomez, who was shot while drinking on his front stoop.
The company was silent about the murders, even as the remaining members of the executive council fled the region. With opposition gone, Bebidas pushed for more concessions from workers. "The company was always sucking the blood of workers, just work, work, work," says Giraldo, who joined with some of his fellow employees to re-form the executive committee. The situation intensified with the arrival of a new manager at the plant, a man by the name of Ariosto Milan. In a small town where everyone knows everyone, workers say they began seeing Milan socializing with local paramilitaries, including the regional commander known as Cepillo (The Brush), a light-skinned man with jet-black hair and almond-shaped eyes, and his lieutenant Caliche (Saltpeter-the active component in gun powder), who was squat and harsh-faced with dark skin. On several occasions, workers say they saw Milan sharing c.o.kes with the paras at the kiosk outside the gates of the plant or drinking beers with them in bars around town.
Worse, they say, he began publicly boasting that he would "sweep away the union." To one worker, he said the only reason the union "hasn't been destroyed is [that] I haven't wanted to destroy it yet." Alarmed by the developments, SINALTRAINAL's national leadership sent a letter to Bebidas and to Coca-Cola Colombia-a fully owned subsidiary of the Coca-Cola Company-in November 1995 protesting Milan's a.s.sociations and urging the company to provide protection for workers. They received no response.
Tensions were running high when the union began negotiating a new labor contract in 1996, pushing for an ambitious pay raise of 35 percent within a year, along with increases in maternity leave, disability insurance, and life insurance, and a fund for sporting activities. Finally, there was a clause demanding increased security for workers and prohibitions on managers consorting with paramilitaries. As chief negotiator, the union tapped secretary-general Isidro Gil, the well-liked gatekeeper at the plant.
Born in a small town one hundred miles northeast of Carepa, Gil was the seventh of ten children. Even as a child, he'd been ambitious, always studying and selling the local newspaper on the side. Before he finished high school, he followed his older brother Martin to Uraba, marrying and raising two daughters. When Martin got a job in the administrative office of the Coca-Cola bottling plant, Isidro again followed him, finding work on the production line. After cutting his finger in a workplace accident, he moved to the front gate instead. Gil thrived at the plant, organizing weekend sports tournaments-soccer, volleyball, baseball-and inviting coworkers to fishing trips on the nearby river. Soon he was friends with everyone at the plant-or almost everyone. When he had a motorcycle accident on the way to work, he argued for a workers' compensation payment from Milan, who refused to grant it.
On the day the company's reply to the labor pet.i.tion was due, December 5, Giraldo was talking with Gil at the front gate. The two of them watched nervously as a motorcycle pulled up in the driveway. "We'll talk in a bit," Giraldo said, quickly excusing himself and walking back toward the yard. He was only halfway there when the crack of a pistol rang out behind him. He turned just long enough to see Gil fall to the ground. Ice coursing through his veins, Giraldo broke into a run, even as he heard the shots continue to ring out behind him.
The union's president, Hernan Manco, was working the packaging machine in the courtyard. He watched Gil's head snap backward as he fell back toward the gatehouse. The killer's pistol followed him down, firing point-blank into his jerking body. In all, he emptied ten bullets into his body-four more into his face, four into his heart, and one into his groin-as he lay lifeless on his right side, his head inside and feet outside the gate.
After the a.s.sa.s.sin walked casually back to his motorcycle and rode away, another worker, Adolfo Cardona, ran to the body. Cradling Gil's head, he watched his friend's skull come apart in his hands. Back in Carepa, Gil's brother Martin received the news by phone. He immediately jumped on his own motorcycle and flew off to the plant, leaving so quickly he must have pa.s.sed the a.s.sa.s.sins as they drove in the other direction. Arriving at the plant, he threw himself down on his brother's body, crying and embracing Isidro. He was still there when investigators with the Fiscalia, the Colombian attorney general's office, arrived to declare him dead.
As the machines stopped and the workers filed out into the yard, the workers stood paralyzed, not knowing if Gil's murder was a personal vendetta or the beginning of a rampage against the union as a whole. At last it was Gil's friend Cardona who volunteered to investigate. He was better known as "El Diablo" (The Devil), mostly as an honorary t.i.tle after his father, who was "El Diablo," too. But it also suited his headstrong personality. stopped and the workers filed out into the yard, the workers stood paralyzed, not knowing if Gil's murder was a personal vendetta or the beginning of a rampage against the union as a whole. At last it was Gil's friend Cardona who volunteered to investigate. He was better known as "El Diablo" (The Devil), mostly as an honorary t.i.tle after his father, who was "El Diablo," too. But it also suited his headstrong personality.
Pedaling onto the highway on his bicycle, he ran into the paramilitaries almost immediately. "Cepillo wants to see you," shouted a man pulling up alongside on a motorbike. Cardona started at the name of the known regional paramilitary commander. But he tried not to show fear. "Well, I need to speak to him, too," he shouted. "Meet him at La Ceiba," spat the paramilitary, naming a soda shop in the center of town.
Cardona followed the motorcycle into the crowded commercial district, past storefronts overflowing with cookware, CDs, knock-off T-shirts, and plastic kids' toys imported from Panama. Pedaling up to the shop, he saw seven or eight tough-looking men sitting at the outside tables. In a moment, the local paramilitary lieutenant, a squat, unattractive man named Caliche, drove up. El Diablo went on the offensive. "I need to meet Cepillo," he said. Caliche shrugged, saying the commander was across town washing up, but would be there shortly.
As Cardona waited, he says, a white Toyota minibus pulled up. Seeing the face of the driver, Cardona went numb. Around Uraba, that car was known as the "Pathway to Heaven." People got in and never got out. Oh my G.o.d, they are going to kill me Oh my G.o.d, they are going to kill me, he thought, eyes quickly darting from side to side in an attempt to find some line of escape. That was when he saw the two men who had shot Gil coming out of the shop. "Hey, man, you come with me," one of them said. Cardona began to move in the direction he indicated, looking to put a little distance between himself and the minibus.
When he had a little opening, he took it. "Catch me if you can!" he yelled, starting to sprint down the street in the direction of the police station two blocks away. Expecting bullets to hit him any moment, he saw a banana waste truck parked up on the sidewalk next to a billiards hall, and ducked behind it. He watched as Caliche parked his motorcycle on the opposite side of the truck --between him and the police station-sending another man around the back. At that moment, El Diablo ran again, narrowly skirting by Caliche as he tried to grab his shirt. "Son of a b.i.t.c.h!" Cardona screamed, running down the street in a zigzag pattern so he'd be more difficult to shoot. "Why are you running?" yelled a startled friend as he careened past. "Can't you see, these sons of b.i.t.c.hes are going to kill me!" he screamed back as he ran for the safety of the police station.
Meanwhile at the plant, the union leaders waited in vain for their friend to return. Finally, word came that he had been seen at his house escorted by police, staying just long enough to get a suitcase. (He eventually fled to Bogota, and later the United States, where he currently lives in asylum in Detroit.) As the unionists took in this information, a company representative emerged to say Bebidas would buy plane tickets for anyone who wanted to leave town tomorrow. As they dispersed to spend a sleepless night, the paramilitaries were busy breaking into the union hall in a cramped neighborhood across town. They grabbed the typewriter and petty cash before burning the hall to the ground.
The next day, a friend appeared at the hiding place of union president Hernan Manco, to summon him to La Ceiba before he could go to the airport. He went to the soda shop resigned to die. As he climbed the stairs, the gate rattled shut behind him. Sitting at a table in the dark bar was Cepillo. "That kid was murdered at the plant because of you," said Cepillo. "The burning of the union hall was because of you. Tomorrow we are going to have a meeting at the plant," he continued. "Anyone who doesn't want to resign, well, we're not responsible for what happens." Addressing Manco directly, he added, "Since you are the president of the union, I don't ever want to see you again."
Manco didn't need to hear more. He and Giraldo headed to the airport to fly to Bogota along with several other executive committee members. The rest of the workers a.s.sembled at the plant the next day to find the yard full of paramilitaries, including Caliche. They pa.s.sed out prepared resignation letters, and one by one the workers signed them. In all, forty-five members signed letters or fled town. The union was finished.
The destruction of the union in Carepa wasn't an isolated occurrence-at least not in the minds of the union leaders. "From the beginning Coca-Cola took a stand to not only eliminate the union but to destroy its workers," says Javier Correa, SINALTRAINAL's national president, speaking in the union's Bogota headquarters. Short and serious with short-cropped dark hair, he talks in almost a monotone, a stoic expression on his pock-marked face. As unions go, SINALTRAINAL is unapologetically militant, pushing for wholesale changes in the state laws to protect people and the environment. of the union in Carepa wasn't an isolated occurrence-at least not in the minds of the union leaders. "From the beginning Coca-Cola took a stand to not only eliminate the union but to destroy its workers," says Javier Correa, SINALTRAINAL's national president, speaking in the union's Bogota headquarters. Short and serious with short-cropped dark hair, he talks in almost a monotone, a stoic expression on his pock-marked face. As unions go, SINALTRAINAL is unapologetically militant, pushing for wholesale changes in the state laws to protect people and the environment.
"Our country, our resources, have been plundered by multinationals for over forty years now," says Correa. And yet, far from reining in the power of big business in the country, he says, government has just facilitated the violence against people pressing for changes, branding them as guerrillas. "What the government has done is to say there are no social movements-only terrorists," says Correa. He himself has received multiple death threats from paramilitaries and has been imprisoned several times as an accused guerrilla, each time found innocent. "My kids say kiddingly that walking with dad is like walking with a time bomb-you never know when something is going to happen," he says. "But I can't leave this struggle. The reality of the situation is that it's better being in a union than being without one."
In addition to the letter Correa and his fellow union leaders sent to Coca-Cola Colombia in 1995, a year before Gil's murder, they followed up with requests to discuss the situation after the murder with Bebidas's lawyer and with its majority shareholder, Richard Kirby. Both told the union they had nothing to say about the situation. Nor did the Coca-Cola Company itself, which later said it learned about the murder days after it occurred, but never provided support for the displaced workers.
Bebidas gave them money only for a plane ticket out of town, telling the workers they couldn't provide them any pay since it was the fault of the paramilitaries, not of the company, that they had to flee. Soon thereafter, they were all terminated for "abandoning their place of work." Since the day they had to flee Carepa, Manco and Giraldo have known little peace. "You have to leave your work, your family, your wife, your kids, your mom," sighs Manco, who has the chiseled good looks of a movie star, now lined and weathered with age. "You are used to a tropical climate, and you come to a city where it's really cold. You get old, you get tired." Asked about his family, he rubs his face with the side of one of his big calloused hands. "I wasn't able to bring my family here," he says. "We're separated now. [My wife] went with her family."
Giraldo has fared little better, living now in a small town outside of Bogota with his wife and four children and working occasional jobs as a doorman. "If I get enough money to buy some food, I don't have enough money to pay bus fare," he sighs. "If I get enough money to buy bus fare, I don't have enough money to buy food." Even so, violence has followed him. Five years after leaving Carepa, in 2001, Giraldo was grabbed by two men on a bus and forced to accompany them to a house where they threatened him at gunpoint. They finally let him go, but not before telling him, "The next time we find you, we'll kill you." Since then, both workers have lived in constant fear. "We don't come out of the woodwork much," says Giraldo. "You don't know who might be waiting for you."
Asked if either of them ever drink Coca-Cola, they both laugh, breaking the tension for a brief moment. Manco turns serious again. "No, we do not drink Coca-Cola. Cola-Cola is death," he says. In the early days of the Coca-Cola Company, when a worker was particularly enthusiastic and loyal to the company, it was said he had "syrup in the veins." Manco turns that exactly on its head: "Drinking Coca-Cola is like drinking the blood of the workers."
Even while it remained silent at the time, the Coca-Cola Company has since vehemently denied any involvement in the violence against its workers in Colombia. "Conducting business in the current environment in Colombia is complex," a company spokesman wrote several years later in a letter to the United Steelworkers Union in the United States. "The loss of life and human rights abuses we read, see, and hear about in some regions of the country are sadly all too frequent and very troubling." Even so, he continues, "the recent allegations contending that the Coca-Cola Company has resorted to illegal and reprehensible tactics in the conduct of its business in Colombia are untrue. Accordingly, the Coca-Cola Company adamantly denies these serious violations regarding human rights violations in Colombia, and does not condone such practices anywhere in the Coca-Cola system." it remained silent at the time, the Coca-Cola Company has since vehemently denied any involvement in the violence against its workers in Colombia. "Conducting business in the current environment in Colombia is complex," a company spokesman wrote several years later in a letter to the United Steelworkers Union in the United States. "The loss of life and human rights abuses we read, see, and hear about in some regions of the country are sadly all too frequent and very troubling." Even so, he continues, "the recent allegations contending that the Coca-Cola Company has resorted to illegal and reprehensible tactics in the conduct of its business in Colombia are untrue. Accordingly, the Coca-Cola Company adamantly denies these serious violations regarding human rights violations in Colombia, and does not condone such practices anywhere in the Coca-Cola system."
On at least one score, the company is right: The situation is complex. Because of the franchise system of bottling established by Asa Candler more than one hundred years before, c.o.ke has devolved responsibility for its labor standards to its independent local bottlers. At the same time, in keeping with the vision of international harmony that is integral to its brand, the company has established a code of ethics for its bottlers, upholding freedom of a.s.sociation and freedom from violence. The question is not only how much Bebidas's local managers aided paramilitaries in committing the violence against the union but also how much Atlanta knew about it and whether it did anything to stop it.
In its defense, the company says Gil's murder was investigated by Colombian authorities, who ultimately dismissed charges against the bottler. On paper, at least, the investigation into Gil's murder is impressive. The Fiscalia's Human Rights Office opened an investigation just a week after the killing, and over the next few years conducted hundreds of man-hours of interviews with workers, officials, and witnesses in an attempt to bring the killers to justice and determine what role, if any, Coca-Cola's bottling franchise played in the crime. On the first score-finding the actual killers-it came up spectacularly short. By the time officials determined the ident.i.ty of "Caliche" as Ariel Gomez, he'd already been killed himself, gunned down in the street a few months after Gil's murder. Cepillo, meanwhile, was identified as Enrique Vergara, a henchman of El Aleman, who had been involved in some of the country's most notorious ma.s.sacres, before disappearing without a trace.
Multiple witnesses attested to the fact that Milan had socialized with known paramilitaries. In addition, witnesses including two security guards and the plant's head of human resources said that the plant's chief of production, Rigoberto Marin, was also friendly with paramilitaries and known to hang out with them. According to the security guards, Marin let the paramilitaries into the plant, ordering them not to record the names in the visitors' book kept at the gate.
By this time, both managers had fled the scene of the crime. Milan had resigned a week before Gil's murder, citing "the health of my dear mother." Marin left six months later, resigning for "personal reasons" in a tersely worded letter. Prosecutors with the Human Rights Office didn't buy it. In September 1999, they issued an arrest warrant not only for Cepillo, but for Marin and Milan as well, declaring them under investigation for murder, terrorism, and kidnapping. The evidence "leaves not the slightest doubt that [Milan] and [Marin] were behind inducing and encouraging the paramilitary group to finish off the union organization at the company," prosecutors wrote, saying their behaviors "demonstrate there was a preconceived plan . . . leading to the dissolution of the union."
Both Milan and Marin declared their innocence, claiming that they'd never met with paramilitaries or threatened the union-in fact, they said, they'd been threatened by paramilitaries themselves. Milan said he had even agreed to pay money to the army post up the road in Apartado, led by General Alejo del Rio, for protection. Marin admitted that paramilitaries had entered the plant, but only to buy drinks; if they weren't recorded in the logbook, it was simply because watchmen were afraid of them. Meanwhile, he claimed that he'd been called to a meeting with a regional paramilitary commander named "Pablo," and been accused of collaborating with guerrillas himself.
With this new information, the Fiscalia reversed itself, releasing Marin from prison on June 19, 2000, on the grounds that it didn't have sufficient evidence to prove he was behind the violence. Six months later, prosecutors closed the investigation into Gil's death. The outcome was deeply disturbing to Gil's surviving family and union colleagues. But it is typical of the Colombian justice system, says Dora Lucy, an attorney with the Bogota-based Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers' Collective, which has worked to combat impunity for paramilitaries. "There are a great number of cases where there will be all this conclusive evidence, but then the Fiscalia will say there's not enough, so we are going to have to close the case."
Of the more than 2,600 reported murders of trade unionists in the past twenty years, there have been fewer than a hundred convictions-most of those in the past few years. Much of that impunity can be traced to the political pressure prosecutors face. Right around the time of the Gil verdict, the power of the guerrillas was at its height, sp.a.w.ning a public backlash against any measures that seemed soft on terrorism. At the time, the attorney general's office was increasingly exposing ties between the army and paramilitary forces. In July 2001, the Fiscalia even arrested General Alejo del Rio-the man Milan says he turned to for help-and accused him of colluding with paramilitaries for years in joint military operations.
That same month, however, a new attorney general, Luis Camilo Osorio, sacked the head of the Human Rights Unit and purged prosecutors he said were overzealous in prosecuting paramilitaries. He overturned del Rio's detention, freeing him a month later. "Osorio did severe damage to the Fiscalia, and they have never really recovered from that," says Adam Isacson, director of programs for the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank focusing on Colombia among other countries.
In addition to the allegations of ties to paramilitaries by the managers at the Carepa plant, there is other troubling evidence that c.o.ke had a more than cozy relationship with paramilitary groups. Longtime National Public Radio reporter Steven Dudley-author of the definitive study of Colombia's civil war, to the allegations of ties to paramilitaries by the managers at the Carepa plant, there is other troubling evidence that c.o.ke had a more than cozy relationship with paramilitary groups. Longtime National Public Radio reporter Steven Dudley-author of the definitive study of Colombia's civil war, Walking Ghosts Walking Ghosts-has reported that paramilitaries have deliberately set up their bases near Coca-Cola bottling plants. And in 1999, Colombia's respected magazine Cambio Cambio-the Colombian equivalent of Time Time-reported that officials with c.o.ke bottler Panamco actually met with AUC head Carlos Castano in August 1998 to negotiate free pa.s.sage for c.o.ke products in the Magdalena Medio, Colombia's largest river.
At the time, paramilitaries under Ramon Isaza were demanding a tax for transporting c.o.ke in the region; when Panamco refused to pay, they prohibited trucks from making deliveries for four months. In response, Panamco officials reached out to paramilitaries through a human rights group to arrange the secret meeting. Sitting down at an AUC camp outside the Colombian city of Monteria, Castano reportedly chastised Isaza for holding up the c.o.ke trucks. "Ramon, we can't turn into mercenaries against the multinationals," he said. "Our objective is the guerrilla." Isaza nodded without saying anything, but acquiesced to lifting the ban, after which the executives and paramilitaries shared a meal of chicken, rice, and c.o.kes.
On the one hand, the incident speaks well of c.o.ke's bottler that it held out against paying paramilitaries, who were then committing some of their most violent ma.s.sacres under the orders of Castano and Isaza. On the other, it's shocking that the executives were secretly negotiating with a group that the Colombian government had declared illegal and the United States has since declared a foreign terrorist organization. "You didn't hear about any other U.S. corporations meeting with Carlos Castano," says Isacson. "The question is, What did c.o.ke in Atlanta know? Your bottlers are meeting with narcotraffickers to move your product, did this bother you at all?"
True, the company was caught between two conflicting groups in a complicated civil war that it had no role in creating. It's possible that c.o.ke's executives-whether in Colombia or in Atlanta-truly believed that they were improving the situation by being there. If the Colombian government couldn't protect them from the violence perpetrated by two warring factions, why shouldn't they sue for their own separate peace? In Colombia at the time, however, there was simply no sitting out the conflict as c.o.ke had done in other political issues in its past, when it had been able to "stand up and be counted," as one executive famously said, "on both sides of the fence."
"I don't think it's valid to say the state couldn't protect us, so we had to seek our own protection," says Maria McFarland, who follows the country for Human Rights Watch. "If you can't do business in a region without supporting a group that is supporting atrocities, you don't do business in that region." That's exactly the conclusion that the U.S. Department of Justice came to years later under the Bush administration when another company-Chiquita Brands International-admitted in March 2007 to paying $1.7 million in protection money to the AUC in Colombia over the course of eight years, from 1997 to 2004 (along with previous payments to the FARC for the prior eight years).
In fact, the company kept paying even after its own internal counsel advised it to "leave Colombia," despite making profits of $10 million a year. While the company insisted it paid the money to protect its employees, lawyers with the U.S. Department of Justice concluded the cash also fueled the ma.s.sacres of trade unionists and human rights workers in the banana plantations of Uraba during almost the same time when the union was stamped out of the Carepa plant. "Simply put," the U.S. Justice Department wrote, "defendant Chiquita funded terrorism." In a deal with the United States, Chiquita agreed to pay $25 million in damages, even as it has remained in Colombia.
Nor was Chiquita the only company to pay off armed groups, according to evidence that has come to light thanks to a recent "peace and justice" law that offered amnesty or reduced sentences to paramilitaries who agreed to disarm and admit their crimes. "The companies that benefited from this war . . . had to pay," said paramilitary commander Ever Veloza, aka H.H., in his testimony. "It wasn't funds to kill people specifically, but with these funds we did indeed kill many people." Another paramilitary from a neighboring province described an arrangement with Chiquita as well as Dole that went beyond providing protection. "The Chiquita and Dole plantations would also call us identifying specific people as . . . 'problems, '" said that province's commander Carlos Tijeras in testimony released in December 2009. "Everyone knew that this meant we had to execute the identified person. In the majority of cases those executed were members or leaders of the unions."
A local businessman in Uraba named Raul Hasbun, who was himself a secret paramilitary commander, told The Miami Herald The Miami Herald that Dole and Del Monte coughed up cash as well. In addition, he said, the Colombian soft drink company Postobon paid $5,000 a month in protection money after the AUC started kidnapping its truck drivers. In one of his testimonies, Hasbun said c.o.ke paid money as well-but later recanted that fact, saying he was mistaken. that Dole and Del Monte coughed up cash as well. In addition, he said, the Colombian soft drink company Postobon paid $5,000 a month in protection money after the AUC started kidnapping its truck drivers. In one of his testimonies, Hasbun said c.o.ke paid money as well-but later recanted that fact, saying he was mistaken.
Without blinking, however, he did admit to ordering the deaths of several members at the Coca-Cola bottling plant, including Isidro Gil, who he said in March 2009 was "collecting money for the guerrillas." The testimony was in some ways d.a.m.ning to c.o.ke-after all, here is a businessman who admitted to extorting money from international corporations to kill people also admitting to murdering c.o.ke workers; on the other hand, his testimony could just as easily exonerate the company, since he said c.o.ke didn't pay him any money directly to carry out the murders.
Whether or not c.o.ke was paying money to the paramilitaries to wage their war of terror, the company has clearly benefited, not only in Uraba, but also in other parts of the country where there is more evidence of links between bottling plant managers and paramilitaries. In the Magdalena Medio, for example, the lazy current belies a dark past-hundreds of bodies have been cut up and thrown into it over the past three decades. As the paramilitaries under Ramon Isaza consolidated their power throughout the 1990s, only the working-cla.s.s city of Barrancabermeja was outside their control, an island of left-wing sympathies in a reactionary region. c.o.ke was paying money to the paramilitaries to wage their war of terror, the company has clearly benefited, not only in Uraba, but also in other parts of the country where there is more evidence of links between bottling plant managers and paramilitaries. In the Magdalena Medio, for example, the lazy current belies a dark past-hundreds of bodies have been cut up and thrown into it over the past three decades. As the paramilitaries under Ramon Isaza consolidated their power throughout the 1990s, only the working-cla.s.s city of Barrancabermeja was outside their control, an island of left-wing sympathies in a reactionary region.
As in Uraba, however, that was about to change. "The threats started in 2001, when the graffiti started appearing inside the plant," says Juan Carlos Galvis, SINALTRAINAL's vice president, who works in the city. "Some mentioned me by name, saying Juan Carlos Galvis leave Coca-Cola, written right in the bathrooms." Short and gregarious, with a sharp nose and intense beady eyes, Galvis arrives at the airport in a gray SUV with dark tinted windows driven by two bodyguards who stay with him at all times as he drives around town. As in Bogota, the local union hall in Barrancabermeja (locally known as Barranca) is unlabeled and well protected with bulletproof doors, but the atmosphere here is more laid-back, with workers filing in and out, constantly cracking jokes, usually at one another's expense.
Galvis's easygoing demeanor fades as he sits down at the head of a long conference table, twisting two rings on his fingers as he talks. After he ignored the threats, he says, he began receiving calls at home, with the voice on the other end calling him a "son of a b.i.t.c.h unionist" and threatening to kill him. The callers knew where his children went to school, they said, and could act at any moment. While they didn't realize it at first, the union workers were witnessing the beginning of a paramilitary takeover.
As Galvis talks, the metal door clangs open suddenly and the local president of the union, William Mendoza, enters, guffawing loudly at his version of a practical joke. He nonchalantly takes off his b.u.t.ton-up shirt and removes a pistol from a shoulder holster, laying it on the table. Mendoza's nickname is Cabezon (Big Head), he says with a smile, a name needing no further explanation. He's been with the union eighteen years, working on the loading docks, and can remember back to a time when the plant was owned by a company called Indega, which enjoyed an uneasy truce with the union throughout the 1980s. At its high point in 1993, SINALTRAINAL had nearly two thousand members throughout the country.
That's when the plant in Barranca was bought by a new company called Panamco, which had been operating in Colombia since 1945, gradually buying up most of the country's bottling territory as well as expanding throughout other South American countries. Back in Atlanta, c.o.ke CEO Doug Ivester was pursuing his "49 percent solution" to finally get the company's bottlers under control. c.o.ke acquired a 10 percent share in Panamco in 1993 that it increased to 15 percent by 1995 at a time when it declared Panamco its "anchor bottler" in South America, and 25 percent by 1997.
Over the years, Panamco consolidated seventeen plants in Colombia (leaving out three small bottlers, including Bebidas y Alimientos in Carepa), going heavily into debt in the process. Antiquated machinery and distribution systems at the new plants further drove up costs-to say nothing of the wages and benefits negotiated by the unions. Because c.o.ke set the price of both the syrup that bottlers bought and the prices at which finished beverages could be sold, the company had few options to increase revenue other than to cut labor costs. Some 6,700 c.o.ke workers were laid off nationally from 1992 to 2002, the vast majority at Panamco plants. In 2003, Panamco simply shut eleven of its seventeen plants, cutting contracts with its workers. That same year, it was acquired by Mexico's Coca-Cola FEMSA to create a new Latin super-anchor bottler.
Even as SINALTRAINAL protested the job cuts, they were in little position to put up much of a fight, as they were increasingly targeted by the paramilitaries, who accused them of collaborating with guerrillas to burn and steal c.o.ke trucks. Mendoza adamantly denies the union's involvement with any armed groups. "In this country, anyone who thinks differently is considered part of the guerrillas," he says. "That was just a way for the company to get us on a list of people who could be murdered." Even as he says this, it's hard not to notice a portrait of Che Guevara that looms above Mendoza's head. The union doesn't see any contradiction in venerating Latin America's most famous guerrilla, even as it disa.s.sociates itself from guerrillas itself. "We consider ourselves to be a left-wing union. We respect the armed struggle," says Mendoza. "Sometimes the people who choose to use weapons can bring about the change we need in the country, but that is not the option the union chooses."
Even as the graffiti attacking the company intensified around town, Panamco provided water and soft drinks to paramilitary protests against guerrillas in the area. According to Mendoza and Galvis, company officials met directly with a member of the AUC inside the plant. Shortly after the city was taken over by paramilitaries, a former union member named Saul Rincon reached out to Mendoza, offering to set up a meeting with a paramilitary commander to strike a deal-be a quiet union and don't cause any trouble, they were told, and they'd be spared any violence. After they rejected the offer, sure enough, Galvis saw Rincon inside the company talking with the head of sales a few months later. Eventually, he was arrested and convicted for conspiracy in the murder of a leader of the oil workers' union in March 2002. As he was sent to prison, he was identified as a member of the Central Bolivar Bloc of the AUC.
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Meanwhile, in 2002, the threats against Galvis and other members of the union began to intensify. Galvis contacted the secret police, known as the DAS, which provided him with a security detail-but applied only to him, not to members of his family. Men began hara.s.sing his wife on the street, blocking her way and telling her they'd kill her husband. In 2002, when she was pregnant with their second child, says Galvis, a motorcycle blocked her way, shining a light in her face. Riding the bike was the paramilitary commander in Barrancabermeja, who threatened to kill her-and then her husband.
Galvis looks down at his hands, spread out on the gla.s.s top of the table, and absently twists his rings. "I felt impotent, because you are totally in their hands," he says. The threats on his family were the worst, he says. His wife began demanding he leave the union, and when he refused, the stress on their marriage was too much, exacerbating existing problems and forcing the couple apart. "We never could reach an agreement on that. I always said no," he says.
Galvis isn't the only one whose family members have been threatened. In the summer of 2002, several men tried to pull Mendoza's four-year-old daughter, Karen, out of her mother's arms. The following day, claims Mendoza, he got a call on his cell phone. "You son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h guerrilla, you are really lucky," the caller menaced. "We were going to kill your girl and return her to you in a plastic bag." He continued, claims Mendoza, by directly linking his actions with the union. "You are speaking out against what we do in Barrancabermeja and the alliance we have with Coca-Cola. And if you continue to do that we are going to murder one of the members of your family." Mendoza reported the incident to the authorities, and a human rights organization came back with an offer of asylum in Switzerland, which Mendoza declined.
Nevertheless, he couldn't sleep for a month after the attempted abduction of his daughter. "This is an innocent life and she is already getting death threats," he says quietly. "My wife said she got attacked because of what I do. It destroyed our relationship." Mendoza's wife eventually left him, as Galvis's had left Galvis, but Mendoza retained custody of their daughter, who is now ten. He sends her to school with bodyguards and forbids her to go outside. "Sometimes she asks me why she can't go out and play like a normal girl," he says. "But it would destroy me as a person if anything happened to her."
After the initial spate of violence, the threats against the union subsided somewhat, but not before Galvis himself was subject to attack. He was driving home with his bodyguards in August 2003, when he turned the corner to find a man in the middle of the street pointing a pistol at the car. One of his bodyguards opened the door to shoot, and the man started firing. After a few exchanges of gunfire, the a.s.sailant drove off on his motorbike, and Galvis reported the incident to the police as an attempt on his life. He heard nothing until 2007 when the attorney general's office informed him there was an investigation against him him for making a false claim. According to police, witnesses reported that an armed robbery was taking place at the time, and the gunman shot at Galvis's SUV only because his bodyguard pointed a gun at him. "I am being criminally investigated for being a victim," he says. "It's a great way for the government to demonstrate internationally that we make things up." for making a false claim. According to police, witnesses reported that an armed robbery was taking place at the time, and the gunman shot at Galvis's SUV only because his bodyguard pointed a gun at him. "I am being criminally investigated for being a victim," he says. "It's a great way for the government to demonstrate internationally that we make things up."
In Colombia, making false charges is so common there is a name for it, making false charges is so common there is a name for it, montaje judicial montaje judicial-judicial setup. In the 1990s, the setups against union members and social activists were increasingly elaborate in the means they took to implicate the innocent. The charges against Galvis in Barranca, in fact, were mild compared with those against three union members fifty miles east in the city of Bucaramanga, in which Panamco bottling plant managers were directly involved.
In contrast to the beaten feel of SINALTRAINAL's headquarters in Bogota or the gallows humor of Barranca, the union hall in Bucaramanga recalls an armed bunker. The Colombian Central Labor Council-known by the Spanish acronym CUT-occupies the building with several affiliated unions, including two rooms for SINALTRAINAL. Going out for a breakfast of black coffee and arepas arepas (corn meal pockets) with his colleagues, the local president, Nelson Perez, casually sticks a pistol in the back of his pants. On the way, the union workers pa.s.s a non-union laborer in a red c.o.ke shirt pushing a cart stacked with sixteen full crates of c.o.ke bottles up a steep hill. Every muscle in his arms bulges as he strains to get the cart up the hill. "He'll work a year before his back goes out," says alvaro Gonzalez, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the company. "After that, he'll end up selling fruit on the street." (corn meal pockets) with his colleagues, the local president, Nelson Perez, casually sticks a pistol in the back of his pants. On the way, the union workers pa.s.s a non-union laborer in a red c.o.ke shirt pushing a cart stacked with sixteen full crates of c.o.ke bottles up a steep hill. Every muscle in his arms bulges as he strains to get the cart up the hill. "He'll work a year before his back goes out," says alvaro Gonzalez, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the company. "After that, he'll end up selling fruit on the street."