Belching Out the Devil (34 page)

I
am getting to that age where I find travelling by foreign public transport to be quite exciting. I actually believe there should be an intermediary Freedom Pass for people like me, who are not technically in retirement but have adopted some of its attributes early. Nonetheless I love the fact that the Mexico City Metro stations not only have a station name but they also have their own pictoral representation - an individual logo for illiterate travellers to guide themselves by. Which also has the incidental benefit of enabling ignorant tourists to use them too. On one journey I boarded the train at the station of the ‘jug of water with wavy lines' then zipped past the ‘wasp' changed at the ‘two snakes wrapped around a sword', stayed on as we went by the ‘white cross' and then the ‘cannon' too, finally getting off at the ‘silhouette of an army bloke'.

 

Charles Dickens would have loved the Metro, all forms of urchin life are here. The carriages are packed but somehow the tide of hawkers runs a path around the cramped bodies: men selling peanuts, women waving packs of Chiclets chewing gum, a line of blind beggars and a woman selling Superglue. Who would have thought that there was a commuting market for Superglue? But here there must be.

My favourites are the home-made CD compilation sellers, playing their tracks on a portable player wired into a loudspeaker strapped to their chests- they look like jihadist DJs. One minute the carriage is filled with the sounds of salsa, the next it is dance music; one man's CD was so good I nearly missed the ‘two snakes wrapped around a sword' and only just made it through the doors in time. On the platform the station's own speakers forlornly played ‘I'd rather be a hammer than a nail' on pan pipes.

 

While feeling a tad despondent that no one had called me with Raquel Chavez's phone number, something rather remarkable happened. I got a source. Someone from inside Coke, willing to talk on condition of anonymity and this time there really was good reason not to name this person. Woodward and Bernstein had ‘Deep throat'; I have ‘Coke Throat'.

 

What can I tell you about Coke Throat? Well, essentially not a huge amount except that I was passed a piece of paper with a phone number and a time to dial it. I waited and dialled. A voice answered and asked me ‘Are you having a good time in Mexico Mr Thomas?'

I said, ‘Getting a stranger's phone number is often the way a good time starts.'

Coke Throat laughed but only just.

‘I think you might want to talk to me.'

And that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Coke Throat sung loud and long. So did Nana Mouskouri. But this stuff wasn't Greek to me.

 

Coke Throat knew all about the big trouble with Big Cola and was keen to tell me how it started. Instead of using sales staff, distribution warehouses and a fleet of delivery trucks, Big Cola opted for a more innovative distribution method and caught
Coke on the hop. The Peruvians simply said anyone who has a truck or even a car can come to the warehouse, pick up crates of drink and go and sell it on commission to the ‘Mom and Pop' stores. These 700,000 ‘Mom and Pop' stores account for 80 per cent of soft drink sales in Mexico, so Big Cola were able to simply bypass the normal practice of setting up a sales force and delivery system and still get their product into the market. According to Coke Throat, the sudden arrival of Big Cola in these stores, ‘gave them a huge massive presence that Coke never expected so that, combined with the nice pricing they have, almost 40-50 per cent cheaper than us, was why a lot of low-income consumers switched their preference to Big Cola and it started to hit us…we underestimated that product and it came and hit us in the face.'

 

Mexico offers soft drinks companies an extremely lucrative profit margin and with so much money at stake Coca-Cola decided something had to be done. ‘The idea was to start blocking them at the point of sale,' Coke Throat explained.

‘It was like that at the very beginning.' Coke assembled its sales force with the simple tactic. ‘The name of the game is availability, if Big Cola was available, Big Cola has a winning formula that can sell. So the idea was to remove them, and if you are a salesman and if you have a hundred stores you should not have more than five stores selling Big Cola [in your area]. That was the benchmark.'

 

The operation against Big Cola even had its own name, ‘The ABC plan - Anti Big Cola plan.' Local comedians were hired to appear in training videos for the sales forces, ‘training them how to remove Big Cola from the point of sales and the consequence of not doing that. So less income, less job security and not having their nice house in at retirement.'

Coke's assault was a well-coordinated strike at the ‘Mom and Pop shops' that stocked Big Cola, Coke Throat called it ‘the red wave' and they used a variety of tactics.

‘There was the direct change of Big Cola products for Coca-Cola products.'

‘You take Big Cola out of the shop physically?' I enquire.

‘Physically, yes.'

‘You swap it bottle for bottle…'

‘Bottle for bottle…I'm the salesman I see this Big Cola bottle I switch it for a Coke and throw the other to the garbage or throw it in the street so the shop doesn't sell it now.' In some cases the sales force would empty Big Cola down the drains in front of the shop.

‘But why would a shop swap?'

‘You offer two for one.

 

Coke Throat goes on to describe how the sales force would issue a ‘direct order to remove Big Cola from any Coca-Cola cooler in the shop. [They would tell the store owner] that they would be losing the cooler if they have one Big Cola available either in the cooler or even in the store.'

 

Just to be clear I go over it again, ‘So you would say to them if you have Big Cola in the fridge here, it's a Coca-Cola fridge, get the Big Cola out or I'm taking the fridge.'

‘Exactly, or get Big Cola out of the store or I won't supply you with Coca-Cola.'

It all sounds slightly Al Capone with carbonation, going round to stores and intimidating or cajoling shopkeepers to get rid of Big Cola and I say, ‘That's almost like Mafia tactics isn't it? ‘

Coke Throat affords a smile, ‘Well, let's just call it protecting my market share.'

The big question is who sanctioned this?

‘Very clear, from top to bottom, it was a well-organised army going into war.'

‘So was this the Mexican bottlers…' I begin.

‘It was Coca-Cola who coordinated it with bottlers, [we're] the brain power and the mastermind behind everything…we bring a lot of practices from other countries, we put them on the table and we find strategy with local knowledge, that might be the bottlers, we define it and then we go to war.'

‘We wanted to get out of this saying to people “we do not sell Coca-Cola and we didn't do anything, we just sell concentrate” but the reality - and that's why the competition commission brought us down - was that we have the brainpower and are the money behind everything and we are the ones that make everything work in a synchronised way.' The FCC investigation visited various shops to examine the claims against Coca-Cola and found that Big Cola was either not available or was placed way at the back of the shop, away from the Coca-Cola fridges at the front, in 500 instances that they examined. The ‘red wave' had struck across Mexico.

On 4 July 2005 the CFC fined the ‘Coca-Cola system' $157 million pesos (approx USD$13 million) for monopolistic practices, as Coke's conduct contravened Article 10 Part IV of the Federal Law of Economic Competition. The fine was levelled at the bottlers and distributors FEMSA, Contal, Grupo Peninsular, Grupo Fomento Queretano as well as The Coca-Cola Export Company (Mexico) which is a subsiduary of The Coca-Cola Company. They were also ordered to immediately stop putting conditions on the sale of Coke products. The decision was appealed by Coke. But on 17 November 2005, the CFC ruled upheld the earlier decision and threw Coke's appeal out.
¹¹

As for Raquel Chavez the search was not going well, the six degrees of separation theory - that we are all but six phone calls away from the person we need to reach, the very theory that had worked its bizarre charm in Turkey - was failing to find her. True, it had turned up some interesting and charming folk along the way, including a former guerilla, a workers co-op and someone who knew someone who knew someone that could summon up the ghost of Leon Trotsky, but no Raquel Chavez. Not even an address for her shop. I trawled the internet looking for clues and found a couple of pictures of her from when she won the case. She was forty-nine in 2005 and photographed sitting in her small shop amidst its grilles and crates. She had black shoulder-length hair and a flowery top - that was all I could make out.

 

The part of town she lived in was called Itzapalapa and it quickly developed the status of a desolate moor, as every time I mentioned the place in the presence of a Mexican - be it a receptionist at a hotel or local folk I was meeting up with - they would pause significantly, adopt a Cornish accent and say, ‘You don't want to go up there sir, not on a night like tonight.'

‘Why?' I would ask.

‘Why sir, the last tourist that went up there by 'em self never came back…though they do say on a dark moonless night you can hear the pages of a Rough Guide book a'rustlin' in the breeze.'

 

I was beginning to think somehow I missed the boat. Everyone I asked seemed to know someone who might know how to get to her but then never did. And time simply ran out. Or it nearly did. A telephone number was found at the last minute and although I didn't get to see her I did finally speak to Raquel Chavez over the phone.

She does indeed live in Itzapalapa and it is indeed a tad… er…Moss Side. Some have called it impoverished, others worse but Raquel says ‘We are a working-class area. This is a difficult area,' then adds, ‘ as everywhere is.'

‘I wanted to meet you personally but I have only just got your phone number,' I explain, ‘ all the numbers I had for you were dead.'

‘I had to change all the telephone numbers. After I won the case against Coca-Cola people thought I had won thirteen million dollars. But the fines go to the judicial system I had not won any money. So people phoned. I got death threats, I got blackmail attempts, people phoned up just wanting me to give them money. But what could I do with all these people threatening me? I had to make ends meet I still have to go to work - I just had to change the phones.'

 

Then she told me her story. Raquel wanted what many working-class parents want: for her children to have a better life than her own. ‘My biggest dream was to give them a professional career and get them to go to university. I was in a economic bind, so I started the shop and I started with all my energy and enthusiasm in 1992.' It was on the corner of mall but it was a ‘Mom and Pop shop'.

Then in 2002 her Coke salesman came by and politely asked ‘Why don't you swap your Big Cola bottles for Coca-Cola? I will give you two bottles of Coke for every one bottle of Big Cola you give me.'

Recounting the moment to me she explained, ‘If I accepted they would give me the Coca-Cola and would take away the Big Cola but the condition was that I could not sell Big Cola any more.'

‘What did you say to the Coke salesman?'

‘I said “No. My shop is free. Even if it is only one customer
who wants Big Cola I have to offer him the best service.” He were very upset and annoyed.'

The Coke salesman had obviously seen one of the training videos that Coke Throat described, as Raquel's initial refusal didn't deter him. But Raquel kept saying no.