The Coke Machine (27 page)

 

 

 

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.”

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, Coke 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 association 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 Fiscalía’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 identity of “Caliche” as Ariel Gómez, 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 Alemán, who had been involved in some of the country’s most notorious massacres, 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 Marín, was also friendly with paramilitaries and known to hang out with them. According to the security guards, Marín 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.” Marín 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 Marín and Milan as well, declaring them under investigation for murder, terrorism, and kidnapping. The evidence “leaves not the slightest doubt that [Milan] and [Marín] 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 Marín 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 Apartadó, led by General Alejo del Río, for protection. Marín 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 Fiscalía reversed itself, releasing Marín 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 Bogotá-based José 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 Fiscalía 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, spawning 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 Fiscalía even arrested General Alejo del Río—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 Río’s detention, freeing him a month later. “Osorio did severe damage to the Fiscalía, and they have never really recovered from that,” says Adam Isacson, director of programs for the Center for International Policy, a Washington 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 Coke had a more than cozy relationship with paramilitary groups. Longtime National Public Radio reporter Steven Dudley—author of the definitive study of Colombia’s civil war,
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
—the Colombian equivalent of
Time
—reported that officials with Coke bottler Panamco actually met with AUC head Carlos Castaño in August 1998 to negotiate free passage for Coke products in the Magdalena Medio, Colombia’s largest river.

At the time, paramilitaries under Ramón Isaza were demanding a tax for transporting Coke 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 Montería, Castaño reportedly chastised Isaza for holding up the Coke trucks. “Ramón, 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 Cokes.

On the one hand, the incident speaks well of Coke’s bottler that it held out against paying paramilitaries, who were then committing some of their most violent massacres under the orders of Castaño 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 Castaño,” says Isacson. “The question is, What did Coke 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 Coke’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 Coke 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 massacres of trade unionists and human rights workers in the banana plantations of Urabá 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 Urabá named Raúl Hasbún, who was himself a secret paramilitary commander, told
The Miami Herald
that Dole and Del Monte coughed up cash as well. In addition, he said, the Colombian soft drink company Postobón paid $5,000 a month in protection money after the AUC started kidnapping its truck drivers. In one of his testimonies, Hasbún said Coke 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 damning to Coke—after all, here is a businessman who admitted to extorting money from international corporations to kill people also admitting to murdering Coke workers; on the other hand, his testimony could just as easily exonerate the company, since he said Coke didn’t pay him any money directly to carry out the murders.

 

 

 

Whether or not
Coke was paying money to the paramilitaries to wage their war of terror, the company has clearly benefited, not only in Urabá, 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 Ramón Isaza consolidated their power throughout the 1990s, only the working-class city of Barrancabermeja was outside their control, an island of left-wing sympathies in a reactionary region.

As in Urabá, 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 Bogotá, 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 bitch 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.