by Mark Thomas
San Cristóbal is somewhat quieter these days. The town square has a gentle pace to its colonial colonnades, the narrow side streets in pastel shades are lined with gift shops, all seemingly packed with crystals and small animals made of wood, sold to the tune of non-stop Manu Chau. It is the only place in the world I have been comfortable enough to wear my WOMAD T-shirt in public - an act I wouldn’t normally do, even at WOMAD itself. The local artisans’ market is predictably rammed with things made out of brightly coloured woven thread, hammocks, belts, wrist bands, bags, hats, plant pots - probably driving jackets and slacks too. Rows of stalls covered with canvas sheeting to keep the sun at bay, offer rugs, jugs and shoulder purses on string, next to necklaces and woollen reptiles, not to mention the endless array of small percussion instruments, flutes, pan pipes and wooden armadillos with a shaky tail. You can even get a balaclava with EZLN, the Zapatista acronym, sown in red over the brow - which must be the anarchist equivalent of a Kiss-Me-Quick hat.
The place is stuffed to the gills with arts and crafts crap - or as we like to call it in our house - ‘ethnotat’. There are even Zapatista dolls on sale, small woollen figures wearing balaclavas, riding donkeys and armed with rifles.
‘Who buys this sort of shit?’ I ask Laura, an American friend who lives here.
‘Probably the same people who buy the Subcomandate Marcos pipes,’ she says, then pointing to a display of carved beasts and metal trinkets, warns, ‘Don’t buy anything from that stall. All that stuff is made in China.’
These days even handcrafted, locally produced indigenous produce seems to be subcontracted. Later I wander past two cooing German tourists bent over the Chinese goods and I sneer in superiority, before heading home clutching my two Zapatista dolls and a pipe.
Laura is a twenty-four-year-old American student living in San Cristóbal. She is tall, with short black hair and very clever. She is working on a master’s degree and her thesis is on the local Coca-Cola bottling plant: together we form a Coke obsessives’ support group. Friends of hers find us huddled in cafés hunched over laptops, swapping documents and data or chuckling over an in joke about borehole capacities and water extraction rates. The pair of us are a research paper short of an identifiable dysfunctional condition.
The situation here is unlike India. To the best of my knowledge Coca-Cola has not opened up a plant in a drought-prone region of Mexico (although if anyone knows different please write). Chiapas is water rich; what it lacks is not rainfall but publicly available clean water.
The local bus service is a fleet of white battered combies with wooden seats in the back and a couple of rails to cling to when it gets too cramped - using these and the odd taxi Laura and I set off on a whistlestop trip around San Cristóbal.
Our first stop is San Cristóbal’s water board, where I ask the receptionist if there is any chance that I can talk to someone about the city’s water situation. She mutters in a phone while nearby a fan on a stand rattles loudly as it manfully loses the battle with the hot air. From behind an office door a head pokes out and beckons to us to enter. Jorge Mayorga is a cheery chubby chap with an obligatory moustache and dressed in a pale blue water board shirt.
‘Please,’ he says, pulling out chairs. Sitting behind his desk, hands clasped together, Jorge beams a smile in anticipation, waiting to be asked a question. He is either someone working for an organisation that wants to promote its activities to foreigners who might pop in with a few queries or he doesn’t meet many people interested in his work. He is so impulsively friendly that within five minutes he is offering to give us a tour of the water pumping stations and treatment rooms in the area.
‘I just wanted to get an overview of the city’s water situation,’ feeling my inner nerd flinch at his awesome power.
‘OK,’ he says and starts to explain that part of the cause for the city’s problems. ‘There has been a big increase in the population of San Cristóbal.’ He points out that back in 1991 the water board had 13,867 families on its books, now they have 34,900 families- and these are just the one connected to the water supplies. He gets out a data sheet to illustrate the increase and even helps me understand the water distribution by drawing concentric circles in my notebook. The inner circle represents the centre of San Cristóbal where the hotels and bars are - in the tourist area tap water is available twenty-four hours a day - the middle circle represents households that get water for twelve hours a day and finally the outer circle have their taps working for six hours a day.
‘That’s a very good day if they manage that, ‘ says Laura, ‘I live in the area that should get water twelve hours a day and often that water doesn’t come on at all, and when it does you have to boil it for at least twenty minutes before you can drink it.’
‘When do you know it is OK to drink?
‘You get this white powder, really fine grains that falls to the bottom. God knows what it is but it ain’t water. So when that falls to the bottom I know I can drink the stuff on top of it.’
‘What happens if you don’t boil it?’
‘You don’t want to find out.’
Two days later I didn’t and she’s right - you don’t.
San Cristóbal’s Coordinator of Epidemiology in Sanitary Jurisdiction No. II of the Highlands Region of Chiapas has an office that is only marginally bigger than his title. His name is Cuauhtemoc Zapata Cabrera and he is another eager and smiling official. The building he works out of is just by the abattoir, which is a bit too open-air for my liking. The less brutal environs of his cosy office, are cluttered with papers, books, folders and kids’ toys, which I assume is to make them as happy as the physical state that drew them here allows. Over the next half hour he explains that gastroenteritis is one of the top five sicknesses in the highlands of Chiapas. In his district in 2006 there were 9,998 cases involving intestinal amoebas, intestinal non-specific organisms, giardia, paratyphoid, food poisoning due to protozoa and the like. The infection rates are higher in the indigenous communities and there is a focus on teaching the importance of boiling water and how to soak food in iodine and chlorine.
The lack of water, clean or otherwise, is a common story too. We bump into a friend of a friend of Laura’s, a Spanish teacher called Yasmina who lives with her husband and children in an area that should get water six hours a day. In reality they get it ‘Two or three times a week and maybe for three hours, sometimes four…We never know when it is going to come on, so we have a storage tank.’ The next day her water went off and didn’t come back on for two weeks.
And actually Laura and Yasmina are both relatively well off when it comes to water. Consider the situation the Comunidad 5th de Marzo, (5th March Community) found themselves in. The community squatted on an area of land, which was to have been developed into a hotel golf course, and for that alone they will have my undying love. As far as I am concerned the situation could only have been bettered if a Bush family member had been playing a few rounds at the time. Although initially a Zapatista community, it opened its doors to all comers and has expanded over the years. The water board, after refusing to run taps into homes, charged people instead for the standpipes they ran in. Javiar, one of the community’s inhabitants said, ‘They didn’t give us even public fountains…and because we didn’t pay they say “well we are not giving you any water”.’ So in a land that is water rich and in a culture that relies on taking water from springs, rivers and wells this refusal to pay for the second rate was met with petty punishment. In 2007 the water board issued locks for paying customers - so they can slip the small metal cap over the standpipe and padlock it after they are done, to ensure no free water for these golf-hating ingrates.g
Meanwhile the Coca-Cola plant sits on top of the best water source around, the Huitepec aquifer. The plant has a twenty-year lease to extract water and is legally entitled to withdraw 500 million litres of it a year.1 And in academic research conducted with the anonymous assistance of a senior plant official it was revealed that in 2003 the compan
y extracted 240 million litres of water and paid $320,000 Mexican pesos-about 1p per 150 litres - which is not bad for a main ingredient.2 The concession at Huitepec is one of twenty-seven that Coca-Cola has negotiated with the CNA Comission Nacional del Agua (the National Water Commission)3 - the body run by the ex-Coca-Cola man Cristóbal Jaime Jaquez, who had been appointed by another ex-Coca-Cola man, President Vicente Fox.4
Up on Huitepec mountain above the Coke plant one of the community representatives or agente municipal, says the water level has gone down, He sits in his zip-up mauve jacket and flicked-back greying hair like an elderly member of the Soprano family about to take a driving test, ‘There has been a lot of depletion but that is understandable. There are more of us, there is global warming so we have less water and obviously as water flows underground Coca-Cola has an effect.’ Further along the hill Martin, an ex-agente municipal and farmer is wearing split shoes and no socks. He has worked on the land so long that his huge, gnarled hands look like something could take root on them. His hands tell the story behind his impassive face. When I ask says about the well water on his land, ‘Yeah it has gone down,’ he says and then adds, ‘The thing is they [Coca-Cola] have a very deep well that sucks up a lot of water.’ The situation is not critical in terms of supply but he worries for the future.
There is no allegation that Coke is directly responsible for the lack of clean available water through San Cristóbal, but this is the situation they operate in and one they can take advantage of. Even the guidebooks say ‘Don’t drink the tap water, buy bottled water’ - such as Coke’s water brands. As Yasmina says ‘It is the worst thing…There is a shortage for basic needs, no electricity, no water but everywhere Coca-Cola.’
When I ask Martin what he would say to the CEO of Coke in response to the company claim that they support sustainable communities he said ‘Really, he should realise, instead of helping, how much Coke helps fuck communities over.’
Perhaps it is not surprising that there is some bitterness felt towards the company and later that evening when Laura and I sit among her friends in a café in the centre of town, they laugh as they tell the tale of Coke’s gift to the community. Each year the company donates a thirty-foot high plastic Christmas tree covered in baubles decorated in the Coca-Cola logo and topped off with a large silver star. It stands in front of the church and under the tree is the classic nativity scene, Joseph, Mary and a large Coca-Cola polar bear - the type used in their adverts. In fact it is quite close to the baby Jesus, perhaps not surprisingly Joseph stands further back and Mary is behind him, there is absolutely no sign of the three wise men. Though the bear has a smirk on its face - a smirk and a resentful demeanour, as if to question its Arctic presence in Mexico.
A few years ago in the middle of the night miscreants, set fire to the tree, its thirty-foot plastic leaves momentarily shooting a pillar of fire under the star of Bethlehem. In the morning a sharp odour of molten plastic lingered in the air and a pile of black shrunken gunk was all that was left of Coke’s gift to the community. The local businesses condemned the act, some blamed the Zapatistas, others blamed troublemakers and some blamed drunks - though a polar bear was spotted fleeing the scene.
But it takes more than a burnt Christmas tree to intimidate the Coca-Cola bottler and the very next year a new plastic tree rose from the ashes in all its majesty. And the baby Jesus was placed in its hallowed and traditional place under the Coca-Cola bauble. Mary and Joseph had obviously received some trauma counselling as they too stood strong under the protective plastic boughs. Though this year, the tree did have barriers around. And an armed guard. To enforce peace on earth.
Back in Mexico City right at the start of this trip, Alejandro from El Poder del Consumidor had said, ‘I think Coke is inside the consumer habits of a great part of this society, and it’s stronger in the indigenous communities and with the worst case in Chiapas, Coke is part of the rituals.’ Which is why Laura and I are on a tourist bus bound for Chamula - a Tzotzil Mayan town, where the indigenous community allow visitors in to see their religious ceremonies. Here they use Coca-Cola to help remove bad spirits and nightmares by way of a gaseous emission. Now I have heard of Coca-Cola being used for many different purposes from a misguided anti-spermicidal douche to the LAPD using it to wash blood away at the scene of car crashes, but I have never before heard of Coke being used in an exorcism.h So there are a host of anthropological and cultural reasons to go and witness this event, there are questions to ask of the company regarding their marketing practices, as well as an appraisal of the economic and nutritional consequences. Though I have to admit a significant part of the appeal is the sanctified burping in church. Why they do it and quite how Coca-Cola managed to muscle in on an ancient tradition, are important addendums, but the assault on the mannered orthodoxy of the church by the release of belly air at the altar is too alluring to miss.
Bizarrely this is one of the things that got Laura researching Coca-Cola. As an anthropology graduate she lived in the Highlands of Chiapas and became fascinated by the way the drink had become so ingrained in the religious life of the community. Laura explains her research and interviews with indigenous Mayans on the subject. ‘Basically people say that Coke came to the Highlands, the indigenous communities, when it came to San Cristóbal in the 1950s. It was very much the advertising of the time, they used promotions, free gifts, they sponsored film shows in neighbourhood squares or had loudspeakers on a cart which went around town telling everyone to drink Coke.’
Laura told me the first man to run a Coke concession in Chamula started in 1962 and brought the bottles into the Tzotzil Mayan town on a horse. His wife recalled that no one really knew of Coca-Cola but Coke’s businessmen said they could sell their product and they did very well doing just that. Indigenous people would come here from communities as far as forty kilometres away to buy it.
The tour bus potters through the mountain splendour, leaving the city centre of San Cristóbal behind us in the distance. And as we get nearer to Chamula our tour guide, a thirty-something bearded fellow, runs through the dos and don’ts of the trip like a flight attendant:‘You must respect the traditions of the indigenous people. You must not take photographs unless I say. You must not give money to child beggars, it encourages them stay from school. You must not stare at the people in the church. Remember this is a mix of ancient beliefs - the worship of the sun and the moon and the earth fused with Christianity. It might seem strange too that they drink alcohol in church, indeed some people may be a little drunk but this is their religion and you must be respectful.’
I chime in wanting to demonstrate my understanding nature, ‘Well, the Catholic church serve up wine at the communion rail, so they accept the principle, it’s just the size of the glass that is at issue here…’
But the bearded man turns to me for a second in blank disapproval, then turns back to the group in the bus and starts again, ‘You must respect the traditions…’
The population of Chamula is Tzotzil Mayan - it is an indigenous town, whose peaceful surroundings are constantly pierced by the loud screeching bangs of home-made fireworks and rockets that are set off as part of the religious rituals. And glancing around the surrounding hillsides and the stark blue sky you can see puffs of black smoke popping in the distance before the speed of sound catches up with a crack. Pitched on one side of the square the church of San Juan dominates the town, it has a high bell tower and large wooden doors - the kind that hunchbacks can gratifyingly bang on while calling for sanctuary.
‘Stick close to me please,’ says our bearded guide as we enter.
From the bright light of the cloudless sunny day we pass into the dim church. There are no pews or seats but there is an intense smell of smouldering resin and scattered fresh pine needles that cover the ground. It is a big spacious building but already the grey smoke has filled its entirety. Groups of worshippers clear a space of the green needles to sit, and drip wax on to the floor to stand their rows of burning candles
upright. Some sit at the altar, some in the knave, some by the walls where row upon row of glass boxes house effigies of the saints. Some have a small band of drummers, guitars and singers with them.
‘When you walk around, do not intrude on the worshippers,’ says the guide.
‘Is that a chicken in the bag there?’ asks one of the tour party pointing.
‘Yes, that is a live chicken which will be sacrificed for a healing ceremony.’ Then, turning to the group, he says, ‘Please, a few of you can walk around.’
‘But don’t stare, right?’ says one of the group.
‘Do not stare, just be quiet and if you are lucky you may see a chicken being killed for the sacrifice.’
There are plenty of Coca-Cola bottles, and Pepsi too, set out on the floor, and their metal caps mingle with the pine needles, as families and friends gather in groups sitting, drinking, lighting candles, praying and singing. One family sits with bottles around them and a wicker bag, while the mother and father pray, a grandmother holds a small child on their lap with a bottle of Coke in front of her. This is an image I particularly warm to and think of the memory of my own nan smoking and singing songs.