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.
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.
The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink Page 21