The Coke Machine (28 page)

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 button-up shirt and removes a pistol from a shoulder holster, laying it on the table. Mendoza’s nickname is Cabezón (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, Coke CEO Doug Ivester was pursuing his “49 percent solution” to finally get the company’s bottlers under control. Coke 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 Coke 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 Coke 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 Coke 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 disassociates 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 Saúl Rincón 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 Rincón 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 Bolívar Bloc of the AUC.

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 harassing 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, shining 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 glass 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-bitch 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 relationship.” 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 assailant 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
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,
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 Bogotá 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
(corn meal pockets) with his colleagues, the local president, Nelson Pérez, casually sticks a pistol in the back of his pants. On the way, the union workers pass a non-union laborer in a red Coke shirt pushing a cart stacked with sixteen full crates of Coke 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 Álvaro González, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the company. “After that, he’ll end up selling fruit on the street.”

González should know, since, at forty-four, he spends most of his days at the Coke plant loading dock, lifting those fifty-pound crates onto and off of trucks. González’s smooth skin and slightly slanted eyes have given him the nickname “Japonés” among his coworkers. Skinny and smartly dressed in a checkered Tommy Hilfiger shirt, khaki pants, and leather loafers, he hardly looks like a manual laborer. Yet he started at the company at age eighteen as a janitor cleaning toilets, gradually moving up the ranks to syrup maker, he says, sitting down in a virtually barren room at the union hall to tell his story.

In the beginning, González had “syrup in the veins.” Excited to be working for the prestigious American company, he put even the most rabid collector of the Coca-Cola Collectors Club to shame. “I used to have Coca-Cola memorabilia all over my house, because I thought I worked at the best company in the world,” he says. “I had Coca-Cola socks, I had Coca-Cola shirts, I even had underwear with Coca-Cola on it. I never thought that I would think of the company in the way I think about it today.”

When he first started, he says, he was a “spoiled brat”—he came to work early and left late, drank on the job, and no one cared. But everything changed in 1990 when he first joined the union. “As soon as I joined the union and said ‘I think differently,’ my whole life changed.” First, his supervisor tried to talk him out of it, he says, offering him a higher-paid warehouse job if he’d reconsider. After the ELN burned ten Coca-Cola trucks in 1992, González says, his supervisors began actively harassing him, threatening to write him up and punish him whenever they saw him away from his post.

Without warning, González breaks down and starts crying. He grabs for a roll of toilet paper on the table, dabbing at his eyes. “This is just so difficult to talk about,” he says. “They made our life impossible. To talk about this I live it again.” The
montaje judicial
that made González’s life a living hell started in the spring of 1994, just a year after the Coca-Cola Company had acquired a minority ownership in the company.

That morning, he says, federal agents from DAS showed up at work and ordered González and two fellow members of the union executive council to strip naked in the locker room and lie on the floor. As the head of security Alejo Aponte looked on, they rummaged through their lockers, telling them there had been a reported bomb threat.

Over the next two years, according to González, the harassment increased. One day in May 1995, Aponte called a company-wide meeting to show workers a device he said was a bomb, which he said he found underneath the carbonation tank. He showed workers another spot where a bomb allegedly did detonate, even though González says there was no visible damage at the spot.

Finally, on March 6, 1996, seven months before Isidro Gil was to be killed in Carepa, the last part of the plan was sprung. González was having lunch at the company cafeteria at the end of his shift when his fellow worker and union leader Domingo Flores returned from his job as a delivery driver. Just as he came up to the gate and called to his friend, four men came up behind Flores and jumped on top of him, wrestling his arms behind him. González watched helplessly from the other side of the fence while Flores screamed—“They are going to disappear me, they are going to kill me!”

At the time, forced disappearances were also common in the Magdalena Medio, and the executive committee of the union had been holding trainings to prepare for them. That was fresh in Flores’s mind when he was grabbed, he says when interviewed a few hours later in the same room. Arriving right from work, he is still wearing the dark green pants and red Coke shirt that bunches over his belly, a feature that has given him the union nickname Gordito—that is, “Fatty” (which in Spanish is more of a term of endearment than in English). Square rimless glasses sit on his dark, round face. Almost immediately, tears well up behind them as he talks, trickling down rough cheeks after he refuses the roll of toilet paper.

“I told them they were going to have to kill me, that I wouldn’t be taken alive,” he says. “That’s when they started beating me.” The agents tried to handcuff him but could get a cuff around only one wrist; it bit into his skin as they dragged him along the parking lot, spilling blood. As Flores was being dragged toward a waiting pickup truck, González says he ran to the manager, who went out to talk to the uniformed agents, and motioned for González to join him. As soon as he left the plant, however, González, too, was jumped from behind by two men and pushed roughly against the fence. Standing there afraid, González felt a hot trickle of piss run down his leg and into his shoe. As the men dragged him across the parking lot to the truck, he stamped his damp sock in a futile attempt to get it out. Thrown into the pickup along with Flores, González shouted at the top of his lungs for anyone who could hear him to call a human rights group. “Shut up!” Flores yelled at him. “You are just making it harder on us.” “Fuck that.” González hissed. “We haven’t done anything wrong. If they want to kill us, they can kill us right here.”