The Coke Machine (25 page)

The revolutionary spirit the Zapatistas kicked off, however, has spurred others to take opposition against the Coca-Cola Company, especially in San Cristóbal, where Coke’s presence on Huitepec, the sacred mountain of the Maya, is too egregious for some to ignore. Since 2006, Zapatista rebels have manned a “peace camp” on Huitepec to guard its forest against cutting by logging interests. The real opposition to Coke, however, has come in the city, where a coalition of neighborhood groups under the acronym COCIDEP (Comité Ciudadano para la Defensa Popular) has protested the water rationing faced by residents of outlying neighborhoods, refusing to pay for water and illegally turning their water back on when the water company shut it off. The group has also argued that Coke’s consumption should be limited, especially during dry season when there is scarcity. “We know Coca-Cola is extracting massive amounts,” says César Morales, one of the group’s leaders, as he sits in the back room of a local café. “They don’t ask for public consent. All of the water is from underground—it’s the same—so when you open one well, it affects the whole community.”

Since Coke FEMSA has negotiated a twenty-year contract directly with the federal government, however, COCIDEP has had no legal say-so to limit the company’s extraction. Frustrated, the group has joined a local boycott of the company, urging its members to drink fruit juices and traditional indigenous beverages such as
pozol
. While boycotts of Coke may have worked for New York Jews in the 1960s or southern blacks in the 1980s, however, none of them had to contend with the cultural integration that Coke has achieved in Mexico. “We have Coca-Cola in our blood, and in our heart,” sighs Gustavo Castro, a leftist intellectual with bushy hair and a beard who has helped lead the boycott through his group Otros Mundos (Other Worlds). “You can talk about politics, but you put the idea of Coca-Cola on the table and it creates huge controversy. It’s so deeply a part of Mexican culture that we can’t question it.”

In Castro’s brightly colored office hang posters for various campaigns around water usage and health, including a sign poking fun at Coke 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 Cristóbal spend some $50 million annually on Coke products. Getting people to make the connection between Coke 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 Coke 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 Coke), but they were unable to come to an agreement that would bring prices down to a competitive level.

 

 

 

With the boycott
in Chiapas failing to gather much steam, and the municipal 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 Cívica, 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 Coke 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 Coke products in schools. In Mexico, Coke 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, Coke 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 Huixtán, 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 Coke logos all over school basketball courts behind the schools. In one, the backboards and foul circles are covered in the Coke logo, while Coke signs hang in the stands and spectators swig Coke as they watch.

And some critics of the company see an even more sinister attempt at water privatization in Coke’s school-building operations. COMPITCH’s Juan Ignacio Domínguez alleges that Coca-Cola FEMSA has put its schools in communities with the richest water resources, even while it bypasses communities with greater needs that don’t have access to aquifers. “There are two communities where Coke proposed to bring a high school, and communities nearby don’t even have middle schools,” he says.

In Huixtán, 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 Domínguez, however, Coke 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 Domínguez. “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 Coke’s bottling plant workers in Guatemala, the campaign has rocked the company all the way to its headquarters in Atlanta.

C
louds shroud the windows of the fifty-seat turboprop flying to Apartadó, the capital of the Colombian region of Urabá on the Caribbean coast. As it rises to clear the crest of the mountains, suddenly sunshine breaks in through the clouds, revealing the dark green ridges of the surrounding Andes. It’s easy to see how the guerrillas who first appeared here in the 1960s were able to avoid capture for so long in this forested fortress. As the plane finally begins to descend, the color changes from forest green to a tropical shade of lime and suddenly acre after acre of banana plantations stretch in all directions.

The airport itself is surrounded by towers and fences topped with barbed wire. Just past the open-air parking lot, a bright red billboard sports the familiar hourglass silhouette of a Coke bottle. Printed over it are the words
“El Lado Coca-Cola de Urabá”
—The Coca-Cola Side of Urabá—a riff off Coke’s latest advertising slogan, “The Coca-Cola Side of Life.” Spurting out of the mouth of the bottle is a riot of birds, butterflies, 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 cafés of concrete and corrugated steel, each advertising with a sign for Coca-Cola or its Colombian rival Postobón (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 Urabá, it was built relatively recently by Coke 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 Bogotá for protection, eventually consolidating themselves under the leadership of a guerrilla captain called Manuel Marulanda—better known by his nickname Sureshot for the quickness with which he dispatched any government forces encroaching on his territory.

When the two major parties reached a power-sharing accord in 1958, the communists were left out. The army attacked their bases, scattering them into the jungles, where they took on the new name of Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), or FARC, and adopted a Marxist philosophy and guerrilla tactics of ambushing government troops and bases operating in their territories. While most fled south, some spread northward into the relatively un-populated area of Urabá, where they used their Caribbean location to import weapons from Panama and tax drug shipments bound farther north, kidnapping or killing anyone who opposed them. By some accounts, the FARC also infiltrated the unions in the banana-processing plants run by United Fruit Company.

At any rate, businessmen throughout Colombia had much to fear from the guerrillas, especially from a smaller guerrilla offshoot known as the ELN (National Liberation Army), which operated in the center of the country along Colombia’s largest river, the Río 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 Coke 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
, 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 Ramón Isaza.

Boosted by drug money from Pablo Escobar’s Medellín 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 massacres 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, reconstituting themselves under the leadership of a murderous band of brothers, Fidel, Carlos, and Vicente Castaño. The Castaños originally came from the coffee belt of Córdoba, just south of Urabá, 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.

Urabá was controlled by the brutal Freddy Rendón Herrera, also known as “El Alemán” (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 José 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 massacres 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 Urabá, 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 Bogotá 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.