Belching Out the Devil (35 page)

One day the salesman came into her shop and started again, ‘Mrs Chavez, come on, I will give you two bottles of Coca-Cola for every bottle of Big Cola you give to me.'

‘No,' said Raquel ‘ Not even if it is ten bottles of Coke to one of Big Cola will I do it.' And the salesman left.

A little later he came round again, this time arrogant and cocky, ‘OK,' he said ‘We will give you ten for one - I will give you ten bottles of Coca-Cola for one for Big Cola.' I suspect he even afforded himself a little knowing smile. He simply did not expect Raquel to say ‘No. I won't let you buy me.'

 

So it began. At first they refused to give her any promotional presents or offers; the other shops had them, but not hers. Then they wanted to only allow Coke products in the Coke fridge in the shop. She said to the salesman, ‘You can take your fridge away. I can buy one myself.'

 

The Bank Holiday in March is a big day and lot of drinks get sold. So Raquel placed her orders with ‘Pre-sales - there is a person who comes round the day before and asks what we need and the following day the truck comes and brings the drinks. But they didn't bring any to my shop. They left me during that important Bank Holiday without a bottle.'

 

The following day when the truck came around she rushed out and gave them a new order on a handwritten note.

‘Why didn't you deliver my order?' She said and started back to her shop.

The manager came after her holding her order in his hand and waving it in the air.

‘Are you going to bring my order now then?'

But he kept waving the paper in the air. Smirking.

‘You are not allowed any of our products any more,' He said.

‘What? Why not?' She said, dumbfounded.

‘Because you don't support us and because you won't stop selling Big Cola.'

‘This is unconstitutional!' said Raquel, not knowing if it was or it wasn't.

‘No,' he said, ‘Coca-Cola does what they want…You can do whatever you want. Coca-Cola has too many lawyers and too much money. No one can touch them.' He waved her order in the air, ‘If you want this you know what to do.'

‘No, thank you,' she replied.

And with that they stopped bringing the products for good.

 

The trouble is people drink a lot of Coca-Cola in Mexico and if the shop doesn't have it then that shop loses a lot of custom.

‘People are too used to buying Coke so people stopped coming to my shop and I didn't see them any more. I was completely alone. I had to start to work long hours into the evening and try to recover what I hadn't sold during the day. I lost a lot of money, I think I lost 50 per cent of my income at that time. Fridays and Saturdays I shut the shop at 2am,' she sighs. ‘Too many hours for too little profit. Even my husband was upset with me.'

‘How dare you do that against them,' he had said. ‘You know they are very powerful, they will ruin us.'

 

On one rare day when she was away from the shop she asked her husband to mind it and on that day the Big Cola salesman came around. Her husband promptly cancelled the Big Cola orders. They did not stay cancelled for long. Raquel returned to her shop, and just as promptly reordered the Big Cola. Her husband simply didn't understand, he kept asking, ‘What is it you want? What is it you want?'

Finally Raquel went to Federal Competition Commission to denounce Coca-Cola and ask them to investigate. ‘I asked them “What can I do?”'

‘What can we do?' they retorted.

‘You are the Federal Competition Commission!'

‘What can we do when no one will denounce them? When there are more people in the same situation I will talk to you.'

So Raquel went and found others.

Her husband became unhappier still. ‘He kept putting a lot of pressure on me because of The Coca-Cola case.' But Raquel said to him, ‘I would prefer to close the shop, and go and wash clothes in other people's houses in order for my children to have an education, but I won't let Coca-Cola humiliate me. I will never let them humiliate me.'

And she didn't. The FCC found The Coca-Cola Export Company, a direct subsidiary of The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta, guilty along with the bottlers and fined them in November 2005. As Raquel said she gets no money as the fines go to the state. So why did she do it?

‘Although economically I didn't win anything I wanted to have the pride of winning. My motivation was my pride… Raquel Chavez will always be a sour name for Coca-Cola and it will always be like that. I am very proud of myself.'

Recently a student came to visit Raquel and she lent him the papers from her case, showing the verdict in her favour. He was doing a new course on monopoly practices in business and wanted to study her case. There is a certain joy that a woman who fought so hard for her children to go on to higher education should finally have her story being taught at university.

‘San Cristóbal is my Tara of
Gone With the Wind
. It's a place I go back to. It's the place where you get strength, where you get strong.'

 

 

I
t was the city of San Cristóbal in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas that hosted the unlikely relaunch of the balaclava. Who would have thought a fashion comeback was ever on the cards? I for one thought its long association with peeping toms and the IRA had finished it off but it bounced right back into the limelight with Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas when he boldly started to accessorise standard revolutionary army fatigues. Out went cigars and berets and in came balaclavas
^f
and tobacco pipes. Through
the power of the internet Subcomandante Marcos, the enigmatic spokesman and poster boy for the Zapatistas Army of National Liberation or EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), became a world-wide phenomena. The Zapatista 1994 uprising was primarily the indigenous Mayan people's struggle against poverty and racism but they became synonymous with anti-globalisation and opposing neo-liberal economic changes. And for a while the picturesque city of San Cristóbal became the epicentre of Zapatista activity and it was to this city that the solidarity groups, sympathisers and curious lefties flocked to witness the struggle. These supporters became quaintly and quickly know as Zapatouristas.

 

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.