The Coke Machine Part 7
Gonzalez should know, since, at forty-four, he spends most of his days at the c.o.ke plant loading dock, lifting those fifty-pound crates onto and off of trucks. Gonzalez's smooth skin and slightly slanted eyes have given him the nickname "j.a.pones" among his coworkers. Skinny and smartly dressed in a checkered Tommy Hilfiger shirt, khaki pants, and leather loafers, he hardly looks like a manual laborer. Yet he started at the company at age eighteen as a janitor cleaning toilets, gradually moving up the ranks to syrup maker, he says, sitting down in a virtually barren room at the union hall to tell his story.
In the beginning, Gonzalez had "syrup in the veins." Excited to be working for the prestigious American company, he put even the most rabid collector of the Coca-Cola Collectors Club to shame. "I used to have Coca-Cola memorabilia all over my house, because I thought I worked at the best company in the world," he says. "I had Coca-Cola socks, I had Coca-Cola shirts, I even had underwear with Coca-Cola on it. I never thought that I would think of the company in the way I think about it today."
When he first started, he says, he was a "spoiled brat"-he came to work early and left late, drank on the job, and no one cared. But everything changed in 1990 when he first joined the union. "As soon as I joined the union and said 'I think differently,' my whole life changed." First, his supervisor tried to talk him out of it, he says, offering him a higher-paid warehouse job if he'd reconsider. After the ELN burned ten Coca-Cola trucks in 1992, Gonzalez says, his supervisors began actively hara.s.sing him, threatening to write him up and punish him whenever they saw him away from his post.
Without warning, Gonzalez breaks down and starts crying. He grabs for a roll of toilet paper on the table, dabbing at his eyes. "This is just so difficult to talk about," he says. "They made our life impossible. To talk about this I live it again." The montaje judicial montaje judicial that made Gonzalez's life a living h.e.l.l started in the spring of 1994, just a year after the Coca-Cola Company had acquired a minority ownership in the company. that made Gonzalez's life a living h.e.l.l started in the spring of 1994, just a year after the Coca-Cola Company had acquired a minority ownership in the company.
That morning, he says, federal agents from DAS showed up at work and ordered Gonzalez and two fellow members of the union executive council to strip naked in the locker room and lie on the floor. As the head of security Alejo Aponte looked on, they rummaged through their lockers, telling them there had been a reported bomb threat.
Over the next two years, according to Gonzalez, the hara.s.sment increased. One day in May 1995, Aponte called a company-wide meeting to show workers a device he said was a bomb, which he said he found underneath the carbonation tank. He showed workers another spot where a bomb allegedly did detonate, even though Gonzalez says there was no visible damage at the spot.
Finally, on March 6, 1996, seven months before Isidro Gil was to be killed in Carepa, the last part of the plan was sprung. Gonzalez was having lunch at the company cafeteria at the end of his shift when his fellow worker and union leader Domingo Flores returned from his job as a delivery driver. Just as he came up to the gate and called to his friend, four men came up behind Flores and jumped on top of him, wrestling his arms behind him. Gonzalez watched helplessly from the other side of the fence while Flores screamed-"They are going to disappear me, they are going to kill me!"
At the time, forced disappearances were also common in the Magdalena Medio, and the executive committee of the union had been holding trainings to prepare for them. That was fresh in Flores's mind when he was grabbed, he says when interviewed a few hours later in the same room. Arriving right from work, he is still wearing the dark green pants and red c.o.ke shirt that bunches over his belly, a feature that has given him the union nickname Gordito-that is, "Fatty" (which in Spanish is more of a term of endearment than in English). Square rimless gla.s.ses sit on his dark, round face. Almost immediately, tears well up behind them as he talks, trickling down rough cheeks after he refuses the roll of toilet paper.
"I told them they were going to have to kill me, that I wouldn't be taken alive," he says. "That's when they started beating me." The agents tried to handcuff him but could get a cuff around only one wrist; it bit into his skin as they dragged him along the parking lot, spilling blood. As Flores was being dragged toward a waiting pickup truck, Gonzalez says he ran to the manager, who went out to talk to the uniformed agents, and motioned for Gonzalez to join him. As soon as he left the plant, however, Gonzalez, too, was jumped from behind by two men and pushed roughly against the fence. Standing there afraid, Gonzalez felt a hot trickle of p.i.s.s run down his leg and into his shoe. As the men dragged him across the parking lot to the truck, he stamped his damp sock in a futile attempt to get it out. Thrown into the pickup along with Flores, Gonzalez shouted at the top of his lungs for anyone who could hear him to call a human rights group. "Shut up!" Flores yelled at him. "You are just making it harder on us." "f.u.c.k that." Gonzalez hissed. "We haven't done anything wrong. If they want to kill us, they can kill us right here."
As the two sat arguing, another delivery driver and fellow union leader, Luis Eduardo Garcia, pulled into the parking lot. Garcia has worked at the company for thirty years, starting as a driver in 1978. For the last twenty years, he and Flores have been best friends. Both fifty-three, they share the same delivery route and even share an e-mail address. The two are an odd couple, Garcia skinny where Flores is chubby, and fiery where Flores is gentle. When he began working at the company, he earned the nickname "Chile" after he got into a heated argument with a manager, and a work-mate exclaimed, "Wow, you are like a Mexican chile pepper!" Even in death threats he is referred to by that nickname. Chile comes to the interview with an entourage-his adult daughter and his seven-year-old granddaughter (the daughter of his other daughter), whom he promised he'd take shoe-shopping and who sits silently as her grandfather details the atrocities he faced. sat arguing, another delivery driver and fellow union leader, Luis Eduardo Garcia, pulled into the parking lot. Garcia has worked at the company for thirty years, starting as a driver in 1978. For the last twenty years, he and Flores have been best friends. Both fifty-three, they share the same delivery route and even share an e-mail address. The two are an odd couple, Garcia skinny where Flores is chubby, and fiery where Flores is gentle. When he began working at the company, he earned the nickname "Chile" after he got into a heated argument with a manager, and a work-mate exclaimed, "Wow, you are like a Mexican chile pepper!" Even in death threats he is referred to by that nickname. Chile comes to the interview with an entourage-his adult daughter and his seven-year-old granddaughter (the daughter of his other daughter), whom he promised he'd take shoe-shopping and who sits silently as her grandfather details the atrocities he faced.
When Chile first pulled into the parking lot on that spring day in 1996, he says, he saw Gonzalez in the pickup motioning to him. "What is happening, j.a.pones?" he cried. Immediately, an agent walked up to him and grabbed him, slapping cuffs on him and throwing him into the truck. The three were driven to the local police station, where they were put in a jail cell and kept for three days before being arraigned before a judge. They listened in disbelief as the charges were read: terrorism and conspiracy to plant explosives. A witness wearing a mask-a practice at the time to protect ident.i.ties-fingered them, saying he had seen them bringing bombs into the c.o.ke plant by truck and planting them around the facility. As evidence, the prosecution showed pictures of the two supposed bombs found by the company the year before. Bail was denied, and they were taken to La Modelo, the medium-security federal prison in Bucaramanga.
That was the start of a six-month ordeal for the union leaders. In Colombia, the worst thing you can be is an accused terrorist. The three were mixed in with guerrillas, paramilitaries, and common criminals, all of whom thought they had masterminded a plot to blow up the factory. "We couldn't trust anyone," says Gonzalez. "I would cry every day." The whole block had only four bathrooms, which the unionists avoided anyway since they were frequently the site of attacks. "If you wanted to use the bathroom, you had to bring a soda pop bottle and a bag into your cell," says Chile, who shared a four-by-six-foot cell with his best friend, Flores.
At the time, Gonzalez's daughter was only four years old, just beginning preschool. He used to bribe guards for admittance to a third-floor courtyard, where she could see him in the afternoons when his wife drove her home. On weekends, the daughters of all three prisoners stood in the street as they threw down notes wrapped around pieces of candy.
Life became more difficult for their families, as the three workers were fired from their jobs and stopped receiving income. When word came out about the accusations, their children were taunted by other children as terrorists, murderers, and worse. Eventually, they had to leave school for the year and began collecting cans on the street or begging for money from other workers at the plant. "Our friends would reject us and we didn't have any food to eat," says Chile's daughter, twenty-year-old Laura Milena Garcia, who has sat throughout the interview listening to her father and his friends talk about their suffering. She, too, breaks down crying, wiping her eyes as her voice falters.
Throughout the interview, Flores sits with his head in his hands for long stretches, periodically lifting up his gla.s.ses to wipe both eyes with one big hand as Chile talks for him. In all, the three spent 174 days in La Modelo before the case went to trial in August 1996, just a few months before Gil was shot dead in Carepa. When evidence was finally presented, however, the case started falling apart almost immediately. The only witness provided by the company was the masked one, whose statements about how and where the union members entered the plant were contradicted by dozens of workers and official company doc.u.ments. Moreover, the masked witness constantly contradicted himself, leading a regional prosecutor to declare that he would need to have been in three different places at the same time to have seen everything he said he had. Prosecutors dismissed his testimony out of hand as completely false, ending the investigation and allowing the three unionists to go free.
Still, according to SINALTRAINAL, prosecutors declined to press charges against the company managers who had accused them of setting the bombs, or even reveal the ident.i.ty of the masked witness. In a civil suit against Panamco, a judge found the evidence inconclusive to hold anyone at the company to blame. "There has been impunity," says Gonzalez angrily. "Everyone remains unpunished. There was a pardon and forgetting." Even today, the attorney general's office refuses to reveal the ident.i.ty of the masked witness.
For the workers, however, being released from prison was just the beginning of their personal ordeals, as they started regularly receiving death threats against them and their families. In 2002, Gonzalez's daughter, then twelve, answered the phone to a voice telling her that her "son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h terrorist father" had to give them 20 million pesos ($10,000) or they would kill his daughter. His wife left soon afterward. "She would say, 'You ruined my life, my family, my daughters.'" Gonzalez halts again, choking back tears. "Everyone starts to distrust you, even the neighbors." As the tears flow, so do the words. "They want to destroy the union and because of that the collective bargaining gets worse, and the conditions for the workers get worse. I'm not a guerrilla member, I'm not a paramilitary member. I just have convictions that the country needs to change."
He suddenly explodes in a sardonic laugh. "You get so f.u.c.king p.i.s.sed off by your helplessness that you want to put a bomb in the place and blow it up. You get in such an extreme psychological state you want to be a suicide bomber and just finish it off."
Despite the deep ambivalence they now feel about the company that tried to have them imprisoned for life, all three of them still work at the plant, every day lifting and depositing crates with the bright red-and-white Coca-Cola logo. Since the day he walked through the gates of the prison, Gonzalez hasn't drunk a single c.o.ke. As soon as he goes through the gates of the company, "I become another alvaro. I look at the bosses and I know they are my enemies. We left the jail in 1996 and today it's 2008 and we are in another prison."
Whether the company colluded with the violence against the union or just benefited from it, the union has been decimated by the constant threats and attacks. In 1993, when Panamco began buying up bottling plants, SINALTRAINAL had 1,880 workers at the company. By 2009, according to SINALTRAINAL researcher Carlos Olaya, that number was 350. Much of the decline has been due to outsourcing of the workforce to contract or temporary workers, he says; from 10,000 full-time workers in 1993, the company now employs only 2,000. Most of the other workers are so-called cooperative workers who are responsible for their own health insurance and other benefits, and of course excluded from collective bargaining. colluded with the violence against the union or just benefited from it, the union has been decimated by the constant threats and attacks. In 1993, when Panamco began buying up bottling plants, SINALTRAINAL had 1,880 workers at the company. By 2009, according to SINALTRAINAL researcher Carlos Olaya, that number was 350. Much of the decline has been due to outsourcing of the workforce to contract or temporary workers, he says; from 10,000 full-time workers in 1993, the company now employs only 2,000. Most of the other workers are so-called cooperative workers who are responsible for their own health insurance and other benefits, and of course excluded from collective bargaining.
Even the direct workers have seen wages decline from a high of $800 a month to near $500. For nonunionized workers, wages are even worse-only $150 a month. In addition, workers have lost overtime and holiday bonuses. All of the consolidation and downsizing, however, has been tremendously successful for the company; Coca-Cola now controls 60 percent of the nonalcoholic beverages market in the country; with the acquisition of Panamco by Coca-Cola FEMSA in 2003, the country has been one of the new anchor bottlers' primary growth markets.
Despite the supposed demobilization of the paramilitaries in Colombia, however, the threats against SINALTRAINAL continue, sent from a new generation of "successor groups" to the AUC, which have picked up where they left off. In Barranca, there is a new paramilitary boss who is rumored to be the brother of Uraba's El Aleman. Death threats appear regularly at the union hall, slipped under the door or even e-mailed. "DEATH TO ALL LEFTIST COMMUNISTS-TOTAL EXTERMINATION TO THESE DOGS!" read one e-mail received in November 2008. "WE GIVE A DECLARATION OF DEATH TO ALL . . . TRADE UNIONISTS OF OUR BELOVED BARRANCA."
In Bucaramanga, paramilitaries kidnapped Flores's son as he was leaving his high school in November 2007, throwing him in a black SUV and pistol-whipping him before dumping him on the side of the road. Chile's daughter Laura Milena Garcia was targeted in the summer of 2008, she says, when she was walking home from her university and noticed two men following her. One caught up and hissed, "Don't scream," pressing a gun to her side. Luckily she was close enough to her home to recognize a groundskeeper and greeted him loudly, scaring her a.s.sailant away. It's suddenly clear why Chile has brought his daughter and granddaughter to hear him speak-they need to know what has happened to their father because they are targets themselves.
"Now I don't go alone to the university anymore," says Garcia, who on the outside looks like your average MTV-watching twentysomething, with a sparkly, midriff-baring shirt and big hoop earrings. Inside, however, she is clearly a chile pepper like her father. "When I'm at the university and a professor starts talking bad about unions, it really makes me angry," she says, wiping away the tears. "I say, 'What are you talking about-they defend the rights of workers. How many workers' rights are violated at his university?'" If there is hope for the union, it clearly lies in the next generation. This one is just struggling to survive. "I started working at the company when I was eighteen-my whole life," says Gonzalez. "I was more sane when I was eighteen than I am now. They say, 'You are just resentful.' I say, 'Of course, I am resentful. You threw me in jail.'"
Back in Barranca, Galvis goes out with other union members to a cafe across the street after being interviewed, downing beer after beer while a regional blend of folk music called vallenato vallenato blares on television. Afterward, he asks his bodyguards to take him to the town square. A balmy wind rustles through the trees, as couples and groups of friends lounge at outdoor tables over beers and c.o.kes. Even the bodyguards seem to relax, one of them talking on a cell phone on the corner while the other stands astride the front wheel of a scooter in the park, flirting with a woman on the seat. An old man with a hunchback stops by to show us little metal bicycles he has fashioned from beer cans. Galvis takes the time to talk with him for several minutes, asking whether he has a family and how he hurt his back. The man explains he injured it falling off a roof, and obligingly lifts up his shirt to show it. Galvis hands him some small change without taking a bicycle. blares on television. Afterward, he asks his bodyguards to take him to the town square. A balmy wind rustles through the trees, as couples and groups of friends lounge at outdoor tables over beers and c.o.kes. Even the bodyguards seem to relax, one of them talking on a cell phone on the corner while the other stands astride the front wheel of a scooter in the park, flirting with a woman on the seat. An old man with a hunchback stops by to show us little metal bicycles he has fashioned from beer cans. Galvis takes the time to talk with him for several minutes, asking whether he has a family and how he hurt his back. The man explains he injured it falling off a roof, and obligingly lifts up his shirt to show it. Galvis hands him some small change without taking a bicycle.
"We must enjoy our lives," he sighs. "We can't just work, work, work. That is what the capitalists do." The constant pressure of driving around with bodyguards waiting for the next death threat has clearly gotten to him. "We union leaders talk a lot of s.h.i.t," he sighs. "It is good to be self-critical. But we must continue to struggle, because there are many who get off the bus." He leans across the table with a hazy stare. Behind him, a waiter is rolling out a stack of red plastic c.o.ke crates full of empties. "It is tough," he says, "we are on the brink of death, but we keep surviving. We bring in new members to the union, but the company fires them. If it weren't for international solidarity, we would have been eliminated long ago. That is the truth."
As in Mexico, the Colombian activists have responded to their perceived injustices by declaring a boycott of c.o.ke in the country. Unlike Mexico, however, they have also been successful in reaching outside of their country's border to spread their movement to the United States as well. Starting with a response from the United Steelworkers Union, the movement has s...o...b..lled to the point where the Coca-Cola Company could no longer stay silent about the charges.
EIGHT.
The Full Force of the Law It's not hard to find the United Steelworkers building in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Just past the bridge over the Monongahela River, it's the one covered on the outside by an enormous diamond-hatched truss of steel. Dan Kovalik is sitting at his desk in front of the window, framed inside one of those diamonds like he's on some working-cla.s.s version of Hollywood Squares Hollywood Squares. Boyish-looking despite his bushy black hair and beard, he is a senior a.s.sociate general counsel for the union, dealing with all manner of cases involving unfair labor practices involving steelworkers.
But Kovalik's interests are not limited to the concerns of his own union. A black-and-white picture of Kovalik with Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega sits on his desk, taken on the eve of Ortega's election in 1985, before the socialist president was subject to a U.S.-supported revolt by the right-wing contras. Above his desk is a giant black-and-white portrait of a figure familiar in the union offices in Colombia: guerrilla leader Che Guevara. Kovalik, who grew up in a conservative Catholic family in Ohio, became, in his words, a "Latin American-phile" at age twelve after seeing a doc.u.mentary about the killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero by right-wing death squads in El Salvador. By nineteen, he was traveling to Nicaragua with the Nicaraguan Solidarity Network, a group of activists who supported the Sandinistas in their civil war against the contras.
"At a pretty young age, I decided the U.S. was on the wrong side of the war in Latin America," he says. Over the years he traveled to many Latin American countries to do what he could to counter that undue U.S. influence, with its support for military dictators and paramilitary groups. He took his first trip to Colombia in September 2000, two months after the approval of a new infusion of military aid from the United States to eradicate the guerrillas and end coca production, otherwise known as Plan Colombia. Since then, the $6 billion the United States has spent on the plan has succeeded in helping to defeat the FARC and other guerrilla groups, but has done nothing to stem cocaine production, which has actually increased under the plan. To Kovalik, the aid was never about eradicating drugs as much as it was protecting U.S. oil and mining interests.
With that view in mind, he traveled to Barrancabermeja that first trip to gather stories of union officials, including the local president of SINALTRAINAL, William Mendoza. On his second trip, in March 2001, he heard about the case of Isidro Gil, which immediately struck him as a flagrant use of paramilitaries to rub out union organizing. "Here you have a guy killed within the walls of the plant by paramilitaries," he says. "He was killed after the manager threatened to wipe out the union. The paramilitaries returned, gathered all the workers within the plant, told them to resign from the union or they would be killed." In his mind, the finger pointed all the way up to the top.
"I don't think necessarily someone from Atlanta said do this," he says, "but it seemed like a combination of complicity and turning the other way and allowing things to happen." Whether it was a sin of commission by giving tacit approval for violent tactics to its bottlers, or a sin of omission by not taking stronger action to condemn the violence with the full weight of c.o.ke's corporate power, it amounted to the same thing in Kovalik's mind. What was less clear to him was how the Coca-Cola Company could be held accountable for actions that were at best taken by a foreign bottler, if not the managers of a foreign bottler, in a foreign country, with its own set of laws and system of justice. Only months before, the Fiscalia had officially ended its own investigation into Gil's murder without even staging a trial.
Talking it over with SINALTRAINAL leadership, Kovalik hatched a new idea. If the union couldn't get a fair trial in Colombia, he would try Coca-Cola in the United States. And Kovalik knew just the person to talk to-a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer named Terry Collingsworth, who had made a career out of holding corporations accountable for not just freedom of a.s.sociation, but also things like murder, slavery, torture, and imprisonment in far-flung places around the world-the exact kinds of crimes that c.o.ke had been accused of by SINALTRAINAL.
Together Kovalik and Collingsworth crafted a case in order to determine exactly how much c.o.ke knew about the violent activities at its bottling plants in Colombia-and hold it responsible for any actions it had played in profiting from that violence. Just a few months after Kovalik's first trip to Colombia, in July 2001, the lawyers filed suit in U.S. District Court in Miami on the basis of a little-used law dating from the eighteenth century called the Alien Tort Claims Act. That law, they contended, gave them the right to sue c.o.ke for crimes committed in a completely different country.
The road that took Collingsworth to court that month began in Malaysia nearly two decades before. After graduating from Duke Law School in 1982 and paying off his law school debts, Collingsworth set off on a back-packing trip across Asia. Arriving in Kuala Lumpur, he ran upon a protest of workers fighting for their right to unionize at their company, U.S.-based Harris Semiconductor, which had been exempted from collective bargaining by the Malaysian government. Impulsively, he offered to help them when he returned to the United States, even though it had little to do with his own dreams of becoming a lawyer who, like Kovalik, would defend the rights of American workers to unionize. that took Collingsworth to court that month began in Malaysia nearly two decades before. After graduating from Duke Law School in 1982 and paying off his law school debts, Collingsworth set off on a back-packing trip across Asia. Arriving in Kuala Lumpur, he ran upon a protest of workers fighting for their right to unionize at their company, U.S.-based Harris Semiconductor, which had been exempted from collective bargaining by the Malaysian government. Impulsively, he offered to help them when he returned to the United States, even though it had little to do with his own dreams of becoming a lawyer who, like Kovalik, would defend the rights of American workers to unionize.
Although he now looks like the very picture of a b.u.t.toned-up lawyer, Collingsworth grew up in unions himself, following his father and uncle into a copper plant near his hometown of Cleveland. His job was to operate a crane dumping copper ore into a molten furnace, and he admits the union made it a cushy one. "My total collective work time was probably like an hour and a half a night," he says. "Looking back it's almost outrageous." He used his free time to get a college degree, attending Cleveland State by day and studying books in the crane cab by night with the goal of helping people like his father and his uncle who were getting increasingly squeezed.
By the early 1980s, it was clear that manufacturing was in trouble. The same shareholder value movement pushed by Jack Welch and Robert Goizueta was leading to ma.s.sive downsizing of employee rolls and reliance on temporary workers or relocation of plants overseas in search of cheap labor. (Collingsworth's own plant eventually was moved to South Korea.) The protest he saw in Malaysia was the flipside of the equation-whereby developing countries were easing up on human rights and environmental standards in order to attract companies from the United States and Europe.
The question Collingsworth faced then-and the one that he and Kovalik would face two decades later-was how to impose morality on multinational corporations driven by economic factors that were inherently amoral. As long as compet.i.tors were doing everything they could to increase their own profits, taking moral questions into account in their business plans was a sure way of going out of business. At the same time, developing countries were in effect competing against one another to attract foreign investment to lift themselves out of poverty, giving them even less incentive on their side to push for more stringent labor requirements.
As it happened, when Collingsworth returned from his Asia trip he found a representative from his home state of Ohio, Don Pease, who was working on legislation to deal with this very issue. Pease's idea was to give those incentives in the form of preferential trading status to countries "taking steps to afford internationally recognized workers' rights" such as collective bargaining and a minimum wage. After it was pa.s.sed, Collingsworth partnered with one of Pease's staffers, William Gould, to form the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) in an attempt to enforce the new law by filing pet.i.tions on behalf of workers around the world. Their very first pet.i.tion dealt with the computer workers in Malaysia. Unfortunately for them, however, the law's language that a country could retain benefits as long as it was "taking steps" to change provided enormous wiggle room to companies and to the panel appointed by the Reagan administration to interpret the new law.
After years of getting nowhere with the countries, Collingsworth and his colleagues eventually gave up, and began to work on companies instead. With the second wave of corporate social responsibility rolling over corporate America in the mid-1990s, companies were eager to present themselves as responsible to the needs of the less fortunate around the world-as long as it didn't cut into their profits by disadvantaging them against their compet.i.tors. Collingsworth and other labor and environmental activists reasoned that if everyone could agree to the same standards, then companies could "do the right thing" without worrying about losing ground to compet.i.tors. At the same time, they could earn that much-sought-after boost to their brands by showing sensitivity to the social concerns their consumers cared about.
The idea emerged as a voluntary "code of conduct" that companies would commit to following for their factories and suppliers overseas. The idea especially caught on after university students began criticizing apparel companies such as Nike for using sweatshop labor to create campus athletic gear. In a short time, the issue was national news, shaming everyone from Liz Claiborne to Kathy Lee Gifford. As he would several years later with the soda companies over obesity, Bill Clinton mediated a compromise in 1999. Then president, Clinton brought apparel companies and unions together to agree on a new voluntary set of standards similar to those of Pease's law a decade before, along with a new nonprofit organization called the Fair Labor a.s.sociation, to monitor them.
While c.o.ke was not a signer to that agreement, it did partic.i.p.ate more broadly in the "code of conduct" movement of which it was a part through other means, including the Sullivan Principles, a set of standards first established by a Pennsylvania minister in the 1970s in an effort to commit companies to racial equality in their doing business with apartheid-era South Africa. After the principles were ineffective in dealing with the issue (and, according to some critics, even counterproductive since they stalled the more powerful divestment campaign), their creator abandoned the principles. But in the midst of the Nike debate, they were reconst.i.tuted in 1999 through the United Nations as the brand-new Global Sullivan Principles, which committed companies to respecting freedom of a.s.sociation, paying workers enough to at least make basic needs, and providing a "safe and healthy workplace."
Around the same time, c.o.ke took the lead in working with the United Nation's International Labour Organization (ILO) to create a set of principles against the use of child labor overseas and established its own "code of conduct" for bottlers that went further than either of the United Nations codes that it had signed. But these codes had problems. In addition to the fact that they were completely voluntary, c.o.ke also interpreted them to apply only to companies in which it held a majority ownership. And thanks to Ivester's "49 percent" solution, c.o.ke intentionally held minority owner-ships in nearly all of its "anchor bottlers," which made up most of the Coca-Cola system overseas, and certainly most of the employees in places like Colombia who might benefit from those worker protections. With the increasing use of contract workers, many of those employees weren't even employed by companies in which c.o.ke had a minority minority share. share.
Similarly, Collingsworth found the Fair Labor a.s.sociation to be a bust. Whatever good intentions those signing the agreement might have had, the mechanism to enforce it was underfunded and weak. Nike reaped gobs of positive publicity, yet a 2005 report by the company found that workers in up to half of its factories were still forced to work sixty-hour weeks, made less than minimum wage, or were denied use of bathrooms and drinking water. "At the end of the day, it turned out to be a real whitewash," sighs Collingsworth, who admits to being at a loose end in the late 1990s, no closer to holding corporations accountable for their sins overseas than he had been during that trip through Asia.
That's when a man with the felicitous name of U Maung Maung walked into his life. General secretary of trade unions in Burma-a country taken over by a military junta in 1962, and known also as Myanmar since 1989-he told Collingsworth about an alarming new trend. Refugees crossing over into Thailand told horrific stories about being forced by the army to clear the jungle with machetes or search for land mines; those who refused were tortured, raped, or murdered. More shockingly, the work was being done for the benefit of two foreign companies-French-based Total and California-based Unocal. Maung appealed for help. "You're a smart lawyer," he told Collingsworth. "Here's a case where you can show there's slave labor, there's brutality, and it's being done on behalf of a U.S. multinational company."
However much he wanted to help, Collingsworth was stymied. The favored-nation legislation created by Pease had failed to create any meaningful changes in company operations, and the code of conduct movement had turned out to be a weak Band-Aid on the problem. And here Maung wasn't talking just about poor working conditions or subsistence wages, but about rape, torture, and murder. Obviously, the ILRF couldn't file suit in Burma. And ironically, given that Unocal was just six miles away from his office at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, he didn't see any way he could sue in the United States either.6 The problem was discussed with other lawyers for months, and it was finally a summer a.s.sociate named Doug Steele who came up with the solution: the Alien Tort Claims Act. The problem was discussed with other lawyers for months, and it was finally a summer a.s.sociate named Doug Steele who came up with the solution: the Alien Tort Claims Act.
The law is ancient to say the least, going back to the 1789 Judiciary Act that set up the U.S. federal justice system. In its entirety, it reads: "The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States." Translated into common speech, that essentially means a foreigner can sue in U.S. courts providing it is over a violation of international law. The law's history is murky; apparently pa.s.sed to protect American diplomats or possibly American ships from piracy on the high seas, it had been used exactly twice before 1980.
That's when a Paraguayan by the name of Joel Filartiga used it to sue the policeman who had tortured and murdered his son after the policeman had moved to Brooklyn, eventually winning $10 million in a wrongful death suit. Filartiga was never able to collect, and the policeman was shortly deported back to Paraguay. But the floodgate had been opened. Soon Ethiopian prisoners were using it to sue their torturers, Guatemalan peasants to sue their foreign defense minister, and a group of Bosnian rape victims to sue Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadic, in the last case leading to $4.5 billion in damages in 2000.
While no one had ever used the law against a corporation, there was nothing in theory stopping them. The same legal precedent that established a corporation as a "person" for the purposes of owning property more than a hundred years ago in the Southern Pacific Railroad case could also be used against them to drag them into court like any other person who committed human rights abuses.
Not that it wasn't a stretch. To sue Unocal under the ATCA statute, the lawyers with the ILRF had to prove that the actions rose to a violation of international law, and that the Burmese villagers couldn't get adequate relief in their own country. Furthermore, no one was saying that Unocal directly raped and tortured anyone-only that they willingly aided and abetted the military in performing those acts. First filed in 1996 in California, the case was thrown out of court by a judge who argued that the company had no control over the Burmese military. That decision was overturned in 2002 by an appeals court that ruled it could go forward. Rather than proceed with a trial, Unocal settled for an undisclosed amount, without admitting any wrongdoing.
Nevertheless, the case was a huge victory for the human rights lawyers, giving them a new tool in their a.r.s.enal to hold corporations accountable. Collingsworth was elated. "We had tried negotiating with companies, but now we finally had a real tool to get their attention," he says. "Believe me, this is what got them to care about this stuff." The group giddily went about bringing cases against corporations for a grab bag of injustices around the world-among other cases, suing ExxonMobil for funneling money to brutal Indonesian dictator Suharto to protect its oil pipeline and a Del Monte subsidiary in Guatemala for meeting with paramilitaries before beginning a campaign of torture and intimidation of union members.
Back in Pittsburgh, Dan Kovalik had closely followed the burgeoning use of ATCA, contacting Collingsworth in 2001 to ask for his help in bringing a case against c.o.ke. Collingsworth was enthusiastic about the prospect, accompanying Kovalik to Colombia in May 2001 to gather testimony. The two filed suit almost immediately afterward, on July 20, 2001, against the two bottlers, Bebidas y Alimientos and Panamco, as well as Richard Kirby and his son Richard Kirby Kielland, Coca-Cola Colombia, and finally the Coca-Cola Company itself. All of them, it argued, had "hired, contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders." Dan Kovalik had closely followed the burgeoning use of ATCA, contacting Collingsworth in 2001 to ask for his help in bringing a case against c.o.ke. Collingsworth was enthusiastic about the prospect, accompanying Kovalik to Colombia in May 2001 to gather testimony. The two filed suit almost immediately afterward, on July 20, 2001, against the two bottlers, Bebidas y Alimientos and Panamco, as well as Richard Kirby and his son Richard Kirby Kielland, Coca-Cola Colombia, and finally the Coca-Cola Company itself. All of them, it argued, had "hired, contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders."
The case was similar to those involving Unocal and ExxonMobil, Collingsworth and Kovalik argued, in that a U.S. company had aided and abetted violence for its own monetary gain-with one important twist. According to the union lawyers, even though c.o.ke didn't directly conspire with the paramilitary forces that perpetrated the violence, the company worked through its bottlers to do so, which-given the tight control c.o.ke had over the bottlers in other areas-they argued amounted to the same thing.
"There is no way that c.o.ke didn't know that paramilitaries were infesting their bottling plants down there and killing union leaders," says Collingsworth. "When the first guy is killed, you could say, 'Oh my, what a surprise.' When the second guy is killed, you say, 'Oh geez, I hope that doesn't happen again.' Number three, number four, number eight. At some point you've got to say they knew it and they were willing to accept it as the cost of doing business."
In addition to the bottlers' agreements that spelled out in detail how they should produce and sell c.o.ke products, the lawyers argued that the Coca-Cola Company's quarter share in Panamco, and two seats on its board of directors, gave it direct control over the company. As for Bebidas, c.o.ke had so much control it could block the Kirbys from selling it. A year after Gil's murder, Kirby and his son Kirby Kielland told Colombian investigators, they had tried to sell, even lining up a potential buyer. There was only one problem. "I sought the permission from the international Coca-Cola Company to sell that company," said Kirby Kielland, "a request that was denied. . . . We could sell the bottling plant, land, trucks, installation, etc., of the bottling plant in Uraba, but we could not guarantee that the franchise contract we have with Coca-Cola would be transferred."
With that level of control over its bottlers, Collingsworth and Kovalik argued that the situation in Colombia was essentially no different from the one in Guatemala in the 1980s, when c.o.ke intervened directly in Trotter's franchise agreement after political pressure from the nuns when workers were murdered there. In this case, the lawyers argued that c.o.ke could have curtailed the violence, or, in an extreme case, severed its bottling contract with any company in Colombia it felt was violating its international labor standards. If it didn't, it was for the same reason that Chiquita stayed in the country for years while paying off the murderous AUC-it was simply making too much profit.
The Coca-Cola Company, of course, vehemently disagreed with that logic. As soon as the suit was filed, a spokesperson in Atlanta dismissed it out of hand, saying that "wherever we operate, we adhere to the highest ethical standards" (a somewhat empty statement, since the same spokesperson then averred that "the Coca-Cola Company does not . . . operate any bottling plants in Colombia"). Panamco and the Kirbys, meanwhile, didn't deny that paramilitaries targeted workers but vehemently denied any a.s.sociation with them. "You don't use them, they use you," said Richard Kirby. "One day they showed up at the plant. They shut it down, put everybody up against the wall, and started shooting. Now it has been turned around so that it's our fault."
The two sides first appeared in Miami for a hearing on June 6, 2002. c.o.ke's lawyer, Marco Jimenez, began by arguing that the acts of violence allegedly committed by the company were not war crimes, and therefore had no business being hauled into U.S. courts as violations of international law. "For all we know [the paramilitaries were] moonlighting to go and take violence or action against union members not for any purpose related to the war, but for a corporate campaign of terror in order to get rid of a union." It hardly made a difference, responded Collingsworth, whether the paramilitaries were furthering their war against guerrillas or whether the company was simply taking advantage of the war to get rid of the union. "The fact that this war is going on and that leftist trade union leaders can be killed with impunity allowed this to happen, and c.o.ke and Panamco and the Kirby defendants stepped in to take advantage of that."
As for the Coca-Cola Company itself, c.o.ke's lawyer argued that it shouldn't even be there-since its bottler agreement with the franchise didn't control labor relations anyway. Frustrated by a lack of specifics about the actual agreement, the judge cut to the chase: "Shouldn't I have a copy of that?"
"I would like to see one myself," interjected Collingsworth.
At the judge's request, Jimenez said that c.o.ke could furnish the bottlers' agreements with Panamco and Bebidas within a few days.
"Try to get here before five o'clock tomorrow," concluded the judge, calling an end to the hearing. When c.o.ke's lawyers came back to the court, however, they claimed they didn't have time to translate the exact agreements between the company and the bottlers in Colombia. In its place, they submitted a sample bottlers' agreement, a boilerplate doc.u.ment representing the kinds of agreements it had with its bottlers all over the world.
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Even as the judge deliberated, SINALTRAINAL received news of another murder in Colombia, when Adolfo de Jesus Munera was shot dead on the doorstep of his mother's house in the northern seaport city of Barranquilla. Branded as a guerrilla after organizing a successful strike against a Panamco plant, he had come out of hiding for only a brief time to see his family when the paramilitaries caught up with him. It was a brutal reminder, if one was needed, that the workers at the Coca-Cola plants in Colombia still faced daily threats of violence. the judge deliberated, SINALTRAINAL received news of another murder in Colombia, when Adolfo de Jesus Munera was shot dead on the doorstep of his mother's house in the northern seaport city of Barranquilla. Branded as a guerrilla after organizing a successful strike against a Panamco plant, he had come out of hiding for only a brief time to see his family when the paramilitaries caught up with him. It was a brutal reminder, if one was needed, that the workers at the Coca-Cola plants in Colombia still faced daily threats of violence.
In Miami, meanwhile, a new judge had been put on the c.o.ke case: Jose Martinez. Known for his conservative opinions and his off-the-cuff style, he pleased no one with his ruling in March 2003. Essentially, Judge Martinez found that Gil's murder wasn't a war crime, since it hadn't happened during an open battle-however, it was still a violation of international law given the Colombian government's close ties to paramilitary forces. Score one for the union.
At the same time, he ruled that the sample bottlers' agreement backed up c.o.ke's claims that it had no control over the bottlers. "Nothing in the agreement gives c.o.ke the right, the obligation, much less the duty . . . to control the labor practices or ensure employees' security at Bebidas," the judge wrote. Because of that, Martinez dismissed the Coca-Cola Company from the case, at the same time he kept in the local bottlers-Panamco, Bebidas, and the Kirbys.
As Collingsworth and Kovalik celebrated keeping the case alive, they privately fumed that the judge had prematurely dismissed c.o.ke Atlanta without even looking at the actual bottling agreement-or at least giving them the ability to question the Colombian bottlers to see if there were any differences between their agreements and the sample agreement. Frustrated with the mixed ruling in the courts, Collingsworth and Kovalik immediately appealed the case against c.o.ke Atlanta. Procedural rules, however, required them to wait until the case against the bottlers was finished before it could go forward-a process that could take any number of years, depending on how many motions the other side presented. "We needed to figure out a way that c.o.ke sees delay as bad," says Collingsworth. They found it-and so much more-in an aging labor activist by the name of Ray Rogers.
The attempt to hold c.o.ke accountable in the United States might have died a slow death in fruitless hearings and procedural motions had it not been for Rogers, whom c.o.ke eventually considered the biggest threat to its brand in more than a hundred years-and in some ways more serious than the fight over childhood obesity it was engaged in at the same time. The lawsuit might have made c.o.ke listen, but it was Rogers's tactics-brash and confrontational-that made c.o.ke actively take steps to defend itself.
The contrast between c.o.ke's gleaming headquarters towering over downtown Atlanta and the office from which Ray Rogers has launched his attack to bring down the giant could not be greater. The Manhattan Bridge runs directly outside the window of his ramshackle Brooklyn warehouse s.p.a.ce, drowning out all conversation every few minutes as the subway rattles noisily overhead. The dimly lit s.p.a.ce overflows with file cabinets piled high with flyers, books, and DVDs, and the air is musty with the smell of the office's full-time resident, a long-haired crossbreed cat named Melvin. between c.o.ke's gleaming headquarters towering over downtown Atlanta and the office from which Ray Rogers has launched his attack to bring down the giant could not be greater. The Manhattan Bridge runs directly outside the window of his ramshackle Brooklyn warehouse s.p.a.ce, drowning out all conversation every few minutes as the subway rattles noisily overhead. The dimly lit s.p.a.ce overflows with file cabinets piled high with flyers, books, and DVDs, and the air is musty with the smell of the office's full-time resident, a long-haired crossbreed cat named Melvin.
Sitting amid the confusion this Sat.u.r.day morning, Rogers is wearing a navy blue sweatshirt and matching sweatpants, as if he's just returned from the gym. At age sixty-five, he has a shock of white hair and the physique of a longsh.o.r.eman, a fact he attributes to his earliest education as an activist. "One of the best things to happen to me was when I was beat up in the third grade," he says. After the incident, he took up weight-lifting and boxing, and the next time someone picked a fight with him, he gave as good as he got. "I never liked the bully syndrome," he says. Only these days, he's the one picking fights-as a self-described corporate-thug buster. "There is tremendous imbalance of power, with corporations having far too much of it," he says. "What we want to do is equalize that balance."
Rather than use legislation or the courts, however, Rogers's favored tactics have been loud and contentious activist campaigns that target companies' financial connections and corporate image. In 2003, he was gearing up for his most ambitious campaign yet-an attempt to take on ExxonMobil over its failure to pay for the Exxon Valdez Exxon Valdez oil spill. Knowing Collingsworth had himself sued ExxonMobil in the past, he sent him an e-mail asking for help. Instead, Collingsworth called him with a very different proposal: developing a campaign against c.o.ke. "Look, we've got a very serious life-and-death situation," he said. "But we don't have any money." Rogers didn't hesitate. He knew that he couldn't build a campaign against ExxonMobil without a boatload of cash. But c.o.ke was different. "I said, you know, we could really try to build from scratch. There are some good elements that make it vulnerable." oil spill. Knowing Collingsworth had himself sued ExxonMobil in the past, he sent him an e-mail asking for help. Instead, Collingsworth called him with a very different proposal: developing a campaign against c.o.ke. "Look, we've got a very serious life-and-death situation," he said. "But we don't have any money." Rogers didn't hesitate. He knew that he couldn't build a campaign against ExxonMobil without a boatload of cash. But c.o.ke was different. "I said, you know, we could really try to build from scratch. There are some good elements that make it vulnerable."
Rogers should know. He coined the term "corporate campaign," now in common usage among activists, back in the late 1970s. The son of two union factory workers, he began working as a union organizer after college, including a stint with Cesar Chavez's Farm Workers a.s.sociation, whose members popularized the idea of product boycotts to pressure agriculture companies. In 1976, Rogers was working with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) in their fight to unionize at North Carolina textile giant J. P. Stevens. He quickly ruled out a boycott, since few of the company's products were sold retail. At a loss one day, he drew a big circle in the middle of a chart and said, "That's J. P. Stevens." Then, getting more and more excited, he began drawing arrows representing all of its business and financial interests. With some research, he developed a list of banking and insurance companies, each with interlocking members on their boards of directors, who could all be subject to personal pressure.
He launched his new "corporate campaign" with a big punch at the company's 1977 shareholder meeting, when six hundred textile workers attended, bringing the meeting to a standstill as one by one they stood up to denounce the company, threatening that anyone involved with them be held accountable. Thus putting them on notice, Rogers moved against one bank where two Stevens board members served as directors, threatening to pull out millions of dollars of union money if it didn't dump the two executives. The bank blinked, and the two directors stepped down. Only emboldened, Rogers moved against insurance giant MetLife, which did a huge business insuring union pension funds. In a panic over the prospect of negative publicity, MetLife's president cleared his schedule to meet with the union, and eventually pressured Stevens to come to the bargaining table. The contract eventually signed on October 1980 ensured the unions' rights to organize, but only if they agreed to never "engage in any 'corporate campaign' against the company." Stevens employees dubbed it the "Ray Rogers clause."
Business advocates spared no criticism for Rogers's tactics, which they saw as little more than extortion. "Because Stevens can't be beaten in a fair and square stand-up fight, Amalgamated has now resorted to terrorizing businessmen who do business with Stevens," wrote The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. And they weren't the only ones who took issue with Rogers. Some union leaders as well derided his scorched-earth tactics as overly confrontational, leaving little room to negotiate. Throughout the campaign, Rogers constantly ran afoul of the ACTWU's own lawyers, who feared a countersuit on defamation charges. Rogers pushed ahead regardless, leaking information to the media behind the lawyers' backs. "What the labor movement has done that I really criticize is they have turned more and more to lawyers to fight their battles," he said at the time. "You can't confront powerful inst.i.tutions and expect to gain any meaningful concessions unless you're backed by significant force and power yourself." in an editorial. And they weren't the only ones who took issue with Rogers. Some union leaders as well derided his scorched-earth tactics as overly confrontational, leaving little room to negotiate. Throughout the campaign, Rogers constantly ran afoul of the ACTWU's own lawyers, who feared a countersuit on defamation charges. Rogers pushed ahead regardless, leaking information to the media behind the lawyers' backs. "What the labor movement has done that I really criticize is they have turned more and more to lawyers to fight their battles," he said at the time. "You can't confront powerful inst.i.tutions and expect to gain any meaningful concessions unless you're backed by significant force and power yourself."
Rogers's tactics bear an obvious debt to the controversial father of modern community organizing, Saul Alinsky, the Chicago radical who published the seminal Rules for Radicals Rules for Radicals in 1971. In detailing tactics for successful organizing, Alinsky turned common conceptions of power on their head, arguing that the goal of anyone wanting to change the world was not to in 1971. In detailing tactics for successful organizing, Alinsky turned common conceptions of power on their head, arguing that the goal of anyone wanting to change the world was not to fight against fight against power, but to power, but to gain gain power herself. With that view, the morality of what was fair was a luxury for those removed from any real stake in the situation-or as Alinsky put it, "rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest." For those in the fight to win, the question isn't what was right, but what is effective. Situations were always complicated and murky-a fact that corporations and governments always use to their advantage in shifting responsibility for problems-the way that c.o.ke can always say that obesity is a complicated problem with many factors beyond soft drink consumption; or that bottled water bottles account for only a small amount of the entire munic.i.p.al waste stream; or that Colombia is a complicated country with a long history of violence by conflicting forces. power herself. With that view, the morality of what was fair was a luxury for those removed from any real stake in the situation-or as Alinsky put it, "rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest." For those in the fight to win, the question isn't what was right, but what is effective. Situations were always complicated and murky-a fact that corporations and governments always use to their advantage in shifting responsibility for problems-the way that c.o.ke can always say that obesity is a complicated problem with many factors beyond soft drink consumption; or that bottled water bottles account for only a small amount of the entire munic.i.p.al waste stream; or that Colombia is a complicated country with a long history of violence by conflicting forces.
"In a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil," says Alinsky. "There is a constant, and somewhat legitimate pa.s.sing of the buck." If an activist wants to be effective, it is his job to stop that inevitable game of hot potato. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it," says Alinsky. "If an organization permits responsibility to be diffused and distributed in a number of areas, attack becomes impossible." It's for this reason that anticorporate activists have tended to pick one company-usually an industry leader-to focus their efforts on. When it came to the evils of tobacco companies, Corporate Accountability International and others focused their efforts on Philip Morris. When it came to sweatshops overseas, United Students Against Sweatshops publicly shamed Nike.
Not only does personalizing a corporate target help crystallize a complicated issue in the mind of the public, but it also quickly leaves them bereft of allies, as their compet.i.tors (say Brown & Williamson or Adidas) trip over themselves to avoid a.s.sociation with the now toxic target. That is the principle that Rogers's newly formed Corporate Campaign, Inc., used to great effect after the Stevens battle, picking off other companies involved in labor battles, and in successful campaigns against Campbell's Soup and American Airlines.
In the mid-1980s, however, Rogers met defeat in a disastrous strike against the meatpacking company Hormel when he became the polarizing figure. After Hormel made heavy cutbacks in the midst of a national recession, the local union called Rogers to put on the pressure. Rogers b.u.t.ted heads immediately with the international union, which advocated a more cautious approach. When a judge forbade pickets at the plant, Rogers and the local went ahead anyway. Police called in tear gas and dogs, carting off more than two dozen people, including Rogers, to jail. Eventually demoralized, the union gave up their fight, and 650 people lost their jobs. In an Oscar-nominated doc.u.mentary about the struggle, American Dream American Dream, Rogers comes across as a caustic carpetbagger, seeking confrontation and publicity at the expense of a more reasoned settlement with the company.
By 1988, Time Time magazine was referring to Rogers as "one of the labor movement's most controversial and innovative figures," writing that "while supporters describe his approach as a welcome addition to strike tactics, critics attack him as a glory hound who seduces local unions into pursuing his interests-publicity and influence over the rank and file-rather than theirs." The head of the local union, Jim Guyette, however, continued to praise Rogers-at a recent sixtieth-birthday party for Rogers, he gave a heartfelt tribute to his courage and personal sacrifice in the fight. Rogers himself lost everything and was forced to relocate Corporate Campaign, Inc., from a s.p.a.cious office in Manhattan to a dark warren in Brooklyn, the predecessor to his current ramshackle office. magazine was referring to Rogers as "one of the labor movement's most controversial and innovative figures," writing that "while supporters describe his approach as a welcome addition to strike tactics, critics attack him as a glory hound who seduces local unions into pursuing his interests-publicity and influence over the rank and file-rather than theirs." The head of the local union, Jim Guyette, however, continued to praise Rogers-at a recent sixtieth-birthday party for Rogers, he gave a heartfelt tribute to his courage and personal sacrifice in the fight. Rogers himself lost everything and was forced to relocate Corporate Campaign, Inc., from a s.p.a.cious office in Manhattan to a dark warren in Brooklyn, the predecessor to his current ramshackle office.
It wasn't long before Rogers found his footing again with several more victories against companies. By the time he got the call from Collingsworth, his strategy of going after interlocking financial interests was well established. From the very beginning, however, he saw a new weakness he could exploit in the fight against c.o.ke: its brand.
The Campaign to Stop Killer c.o.ke began in April 2003 with a letter to Rogers's Rolodex of union contacts. "We need your help to stop a gruesome cycle of murders, kidnappings, and torture," the letter began, bearing an image of a c.o.ke can with-in the same expressive Spencerian script Frank Robinson had so indelibly created more than a hundred years before-the words "Killer c.o.ke." From the beginning, Rogers did everything he could to tweak c.o.ke's brand image to highlight its culpability in the Colombian murders, producing posters with the slogans "The Drink That Represses" and "Murder-It's the Real Thing." One particularly gory image t.i.tled "Colombian c.o.ke Float" featured a flared soda tumbler with dead bodies floating on top and the caption: "Unthinkable! Undrinkable!" Another depicted two blue, wrinkled feet, tagged with the words "Colombian Union Worker" as if in a morgue, along with the caption, "Ice Cold." began in April 2003 with a letter to Rogers's Rolodex of union contacts. "We need your help to stop a gruesome cycle of murders, kidnappings, and torture," the letter began, bearing an image of a c.o.ke can with-in the same expressive Spencerian script Frank Robinson had so indelibly created more than a hundred years before-the words "Killer c.o.ke." From the beginning, Rogers did everything he could to tweak c.o.ke's brand image to highlight its culpability in the Colombian murders, producing posters with the slogans "The Drink That Represses" and "Murder-It's the Real Thing." One particularly gory image t.i.tled "Colombian c.o.ke Float" featured a flared soda tumbler with dead bodies floating on top and the caption: "Unthinkable! Undrinkable!" Another depicted two blue, wrinkled feet, tagged with the words "Colombian Union Worker" as if in a morgue, along with the caption, "Ice Cold."
A parade of union carpenters carried the posters in front of Coca-Cola's shareholder meeting in Houston on April 16, 2003. Inside, William Mendoza, up from Barrancabermeja, challenged c.o.ke's general counsel, Deval Patrick, to intervene against the ongoing violence against c.o.ke workers in Colombia. The action was hardly more than a jab, but it was enough to get c.o.ke's attention. Immediately, the company released a statement emphasizing all that it was doing to protect its workers, providing transportation, housing loans, and bodyguards for threatened union leaders. SINALTRAINAL was quick to point out that the company had nothing to do with those protections, which were afforded by the Colombian government. And still the violence continued, with the alleged attempt on Juan Carlos Galvis's life in August 2003, and the kidnapping and beating of the son of Limberto Carranza, a union leader in Barranquilla, the day afte