Part 6 (2/2)

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, pus.h.i.+ng 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, pus.h.i.+ng 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+rt 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, s.h.i.+ning 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 relations.h.i.+p.” 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 s.h.i.+rt pus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+rt pus.h.i.+ng 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.”

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