Part 7 (2/2)

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 owners.h.i.+p. And thanks to Ivester's ”49 percent” solution, c.o.ke intentionally held minority owner-s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 sweats.h.i.+rt 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 s.h.i.+fting 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

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