Part 6 (1/2)

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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 ambus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+pments 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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, pus.h.i.+ng 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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-s.h.i.+rts, 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+rt. ”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.