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Copyright © 2010 by Michael Blanding
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blanding, Michael.
The Coke machine : the dirty truth behind the world’s favorite soft drink / Michael Blanding.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-44340-8
1. Coca-Cola Company—History. 2. Soft drink industry.
3. Bottled water industry. 4. International business enterprises. I. Title.
HD9349.S634C
338.7’66362—dc22
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication.
Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
Part One - “ALL THAT AMERICA STANDS FOR”
ONE - A Brief History of Coke
TWO - Building the Brand
THREE - Biggering and Biggering
FOUR - The Battle for Schools
FIVE - The Bottled Water Lie
Part Two - TEACHING THE WORLD TO SING
SIX - “¡Toma lo Bueno!”
SEVEN - “Syrup in the Veins”
EIGHT - The Full Force of the Law
NINE - All the Water in India
TEN - The Case Against “Killer Coke”
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
For Alex—for everything
Introduction
The Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa, Colombia, is an unlovely pile of brick on the outskirts of a sweltering Caribbean backwater. It sits past sad dogs blinking away flies on dirty streets, men loading yuccas and plantains into peddle carts, and gaudy open-roof chivas spewing diesel fumes as they idle by the roadside. Surrounding it, fields stretch to the horizon, studded with lonely palm and banana trees. The only consolation is a roadside Madonna on the edge of the gravel parking lot, a solitary benediction to bless the way of those leaving town.
On the morning of December 5, 1996, two men pulled a motorbike into the gravel driveway. They circled the parking lot a few times before coming to a stop in front of the gate. Inside the battered chain-link fence was a courtyard piled with soda crates waiting to be loaded onto delivery trucks. On either side was a wall of heavy pink brick, painted with the Coke logo. And to the right, a small gatehouse set into the wall looked through metal slats at the parking lot.
The motorcycle’s passenger dismounted, while the driver sat with the engine idling. Walking up to the fence, he addressed the gatekeeper, a thin man with light brown skin, coffee-colored eyes, a mustache, and heavy eyebrows. That matched the description the visitor had been given, but he had to be sure.
“Are you Isidro Gil?” he asked.
Inside, the man hesitated slightly before replying. “Yeah. But why do you want to know?”
“We need to go inside and see a client.”
“Wait a minute,” replied Gil, who just then saw a delivery truck rumbling up from the yard. “Let me deal with this truck first, and then I’ll help you out.”
With nothing to do but his job, Gil unlocked the gate and pulled the chain-link fence toward either side to allow the truck to pass. Perhaps he suspected the danger he was in and simply resigned himself to his fate. More likely he somehow thought he would be spared from any potential violence by his position in the hierarchy of the bottlers’ union, by promises the plant management had given ensuring his safety, by the fact that it was nine in the morning in a public location with plenty of people milling around the plant.
In fact, this was not the first strange motorcycle that he had seen this morning. A half-hour earlier, another had pulled up to the small kiosk by the side of the road that served Coke to workers before and after their shifts. Gil had watched one of his coworkers point him out, and the cyclist nod before driving off. Gil was still worrying about the incident when the second motorcycle appeared.
In Colombia, a motorcycle isn’t just a motorcycle. It’s also the transport of choice for the paramilitary death squads that target guerrillas and anyone remotely associated with them on the other side of the country’s smoldering thirty-five-year-old civil war. In Medellín at the time, men were forbidden from carrying another man as a passenger, since it was so common for one to drive while the other pulled a trigger.
But Gil wasn’t the kind of person to back down from confrontation. Among his coworkers, the twenty-eight-year-old was a natural leader. Gregarious and charismatic, he’d organize fishing trips to the river and soccer and baseball tournaments on the weekends. He started out on the production line, but was reassigned to his current job at the front gate in 1994, just around the same time the paramilitaries started ominously appearing in the region.
Ostensibly, the death squads targeted the guerrillas who used the Caribbean location to import guns from Panama or tax drug shipments heading farther north. But the guerrillas were difficult targets, hiding in camps buried deep in the jungles. So soon the death squads turned their attentions to the civilians whom they suspected of supporting the guerrillas—a long list, including left-wing politicians, academics, health and human rights workers, teachers, and trade unionists.
The union at the Coke plant, SINALTRAINAL, was a natural target. Two of its leaders had already been killed by the time Isidro Gil was named secretary-general and put in charge of renegotiating the workers’ contract with the bottling company. On November 18, 1996, the union submitted its final proposal for a new contract, demanding increased pay and benefits, along with protection from firing and new security measures to keep uni
on leadership safe from violence.
The Coke plant’s local managers and its Florida-based owners had until December 5 to respond to the collective bargaining proposal. As he stood at the gate that morning, Gil was mentally preparing for the meeting that day, not knowing it would never take place. As he opened the gate to let out the delivery truck, he stepped back behind the gatehouse. The truck rumbled past, its bright red Coke logo shining in the morning light. Before Gil could push the metal frame closed, the visitor walked right through the gate behind it. Pulling out a .38 Special, he raised it to Gil’s face and shot him between the eyes.
On the face of it, this was just one more casualty in a Third World country’s long and bloody civil war, a war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives—including more than 2,500 union members in the last twenty years. For the national leaders of SINALTRAINAL, however, this was something more: part of a coordinated campaign to stamp out union activism at the bottling plant, orchestrated by the bottler and the Coca-Cola Company itself. Before it was over, eight union leaders would be killed in Carepa and the union driven to extinction. At best, they charged, Coke stood by and let it happen. At worst, they said, company managers directed the violence through regular coordinated meetings with paramilitaries inside the plant.
It’s a shocking allegation to level at the company that has presented through its advertising one of the most compelling visions of international peace and harmony the world has ever seen. And yet it’s not the only charge that has been leveled in recent years against the Coca-Cola Company, which stands accused of decimating water supplies of villagers in India and Mexico, busting up unions in Turkey and Guatemala, making kids fat throughout the United States and Europe, and hoodwinking consumers into swallowing glorified tap water marketed under its bottled water brand Dasani.
Perhaps it’s not too much of a surprise to find the Coca-Cola Company on the stand for these injustices. In this era of cynicism, it’s standard practice to believe corporations from Halliburton to ExxonMobil capable of every form of evil, trained by the profit drive of capitalism to turn a blind eye to the worst consequences of their actions. The Coca-Cola Company, however, represents a special case—at once the quintessential example of a giant American multinational corporation and a beloved pop culture symbol that has spent billions of dollars to present an image of wholesomeness and harmony that has made it cherished by millions of people around the world. Finding the Coca-Cola Company accused of murder is like finding out Santa Claus is accused of being a pedophile.
So how is it that a company that, in its own words, “exists to refresh and benefit everyone it touches” now stands accused of drought, disease, exploitation, and murder? To truly understand that contradiction, it’s necessary to go back to Coca-Cola’s origins as a cocaine-laced “nerve tonic” in the turn-of-the-century American South. It’s there that the seeds of its inexorable drive to growth were planted, along with the decisions that have allowed it to disavow responsibility for its bottlers around the globe. That’s the essence of Coca-Cola—what one of its legendary executives once called “the essence of capitalism.”
Step, now, inside the Coke Machine.
Part One
“ALL THAT AMERICA STANDS FOR”
Coca-Cola represents the sublimated essence of all that America stands for, a decent thing, honestly made.
-NEWSPAPER EDITOR WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE, 1938
ONE
A Brief History of Coke
In Atlanta, Coke gets in your face. The drink is everywhere, from the Coca-Cola memorabilia store in the airport entry hall to the announcements on the subway train for Coca-Cola headquarters. All around the city, Coke’s leading executives have lent their names to the city’s major landmarks: Pemberton Park, the Candler Building, the Woodruff Arts Center, and the Goizueta Business School at Emory University to name just a few. But few authentic landmarks remain from the drink’s history. The home of its inventor and the pharmacy where it was first served have both disappeared.
Those faithful seeking out the origins of Coca-Cola are directed instead to the World of Coca-Cola, a massive homage to the beverage in the center of the city that remains virtually the only place in the world where the public can come face-to-face with the history of its favorite soft drink. And come they do. One million visitors crossed under the thirty-foot Coke bottle hanging over its entrance in the year after it relocated here from a smaller space across town in 2007. Visitors still must call ahead to reserve a time for a tour, paying $15 for the privilege.
What they get when they do, of course, is an image of Coke completely mediated by Coke. Even before they enter, ambient advertising ditties—“Always Coca-Cola,” “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”—float down from speakers above. Inside, the company starts early to establish a spirit of benign internationalism, with a lobby full of giant “folk art” bottles decorated by artists from around the globe, set against a conspicuously multicultural portrait wall of world citizens—Japanese teenagers, a white-bread couple on the beach, three tropical dark kids, a pierced chick in a bar—all enjoying their Cokes.
The theme continues as the doors open into a blinding atrium whose walls churn with words like “refresh,” “heritage,” and “optimism” printed in every language. There are more multicultural portraits here, too. A phone receiver hanging next to each one, playing a recorded loop that describes Coke-funded work to tackle HIV/AIDS in Africa, water depletion in Pakistan, and child malnutrition in Argentina. There’s even an American doctor from the Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness, which is pioneering research to counter the national childhood obesity epidemic.
If you knew nothing else about it, you’d think the Coca-Cola Company was incorporated for the sole purpose of spreading peace and social equality around the world. The real work of the museum, however, happens when visitors step out of the lobby and into the first exhibit—called “Milestones of Refreshment”—telling the story of how it all began.
“When John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola in 1886, he had no way of knowing what a phenomenon his creation would become,” narrates a soothing baritone emanating from a video screen. Upon entering, visitors meet a bronze statue of the man himself, stirring a kettle with a wooden spoon. Broad-shouldered, bearded, and wearing overalls, the man in the statue looks more like a Soviet-era paean to the proletariat than one of the great progenitors of capitalism. “His idea,” the video continues, “was to create a beverage specifically formulated to be served ice-cold.” In doing so, he “invented a completely new category for refreshment, and his formula for Coca-Cola became one of the world’s most closely guarded secrets. Still, people began to discover the most exciting thing about Coca-Cola: that it’s delicious and refreshing. And that’s no secret at all.”
The short video is impressive for hitting all of Coke’s marketing leitmotifs—Delicious. Refreshing. Ice-Cold. Secret Formula. In reality, however, it was not so poetic. Pemberton’s goal was hardly to create a new category of cold drink; like many people, he wanted to make himself rich. And in 1880, the quickest way to do that was found inside a bottle, through the creation of medicinal cure-alls called “patent medicines.” The Coca-Cola Company doesn’t like to talk about its early medicinal past; the sordid proto-history doesn’t fit in well with the clean-scrubbed mythology it promotes in the World of Coca-Cola (and more broadly in the world of Coca-Cola). Even today, however, traces of the company’s patent-medicine past are present in how it promotes and markets the drink.
The term “patent medicines” has nothing to do with the United States Patent Office, originating instead in the practice of British kings’ granting “patents of royal favor” to favorite medicine makers. A few decades after bumping up against Plymouth Rock, colonists began importing medicines like Hooper’s Pills and Daffy’s Elixir to treat rheumatism, gout, tuberculosis—even cancer. Their inventors took great pains to guard the secret formulas of their proprietary combination of ingredients. As late Atlanta historian
James Harvey Young writes in the definitive Toadstool Millionaires, “Rivals might detect the major active constituents, but the original proprietor could claim that only he knew all the elements in their proper proportions.”
If Britons invented patent medicines, Americans became obsessed with them. After the Revolutionary War, vast swathes of the newly independent United States were a mucky, roadless wilderness. Doctors were scarce, and even when available, they were as apt to kill their patients as to heal them. The cutting edge of medical practice, after all, included bleeding with a sharp lancet and “purging” the bowels with mercury, thereby weakening and poisoning already sick patients. By the early 1800s, a backlash against doctors was in full swing, with many people avoiding them altogether in favor of whatever home remedies they could find. The practice grew into a fad with the publication of New Guide to Health by Samuel Thomson, a self-taught herbalist from New Hampshire who claimed any man could be his own doctor using plants readily available in the fields and woods of the young country.
Less scrupulous entrepreneurs and con men exploited the trend with their own American patent medicine blends that went far beyond the British concoctions in both claims and popularity. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Connecticut physician Samuel Lee, Jr., mixed up a batch of soap, aloe, and potassium nitrate and pressed them into “Bilious Pills,” which he touted as a cure against indigestion and flatulence. Within a decade, they were sold as far away as the Mississippi River. Soon after, Thomas W. Dyott amassed a fortune of a quarter of a million dollars with concoctions such as the hot-selling Robertson’s Infallible Worm Destroying Lozenges. These tycoons found a ready clientele with the rapid industrialization of the early 1800s, when laborers crowded into disease-ridden tenements. The Civil War brought new patients in the form of soldiers suffering from wounds and disease, many of whom received tonics along with their rations.
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