The Coke Machine (29 page)

 

 

 

As the two
sat arguing, another delivery driver and fellow union leader, Luis Eduardo García, pulled into the parking lot. García has worked at the company for thirty years, starting as a driver in 1978. For the last twenty years, he and Flores have been best friends. Both fifty-three, they share the same delivery route and even share an e-mail address. The two are an odd couple, García skinny where Flores is chubby, and fiery where Flores is gentle. When he began working at the company, he earned the nickname “Chile” after he got into a heated argument with a manager, and a work-mate exclaimed, “Wow, you are like a Mexican chile pepper!” Even in death threats he is referred to by that nickname. Chile comes to the interview with an entourage—his adult daughter and his seven-year-old granddaughter (the daughter of his other daughter), whom he promised he’d take shoe-shopping and who sits silently as her grandfather details the atrocities he faced.

When Chile first pulled into the parking lot on that spring day in 1996, he says, he saw González in the pickup motioning to him. “What is happening, Japonés?” he cried. Immediately, an agent walked up to him and grabbed him, slapping cuffs on him and throwing him into the truck. The three were driven to the local police station, where they were put in a jail cell and kept for three days before being arraigned before a judge. They listened in disbelief as the charges were read: terrorism and conspiracy to plant explosives. A witness wearing a mask—a practice at the time to protect identities—fingered them, saying he had seen them bringing bombs into the Coke plant by truck and planting them around the facility. As evidence, the prosecution showed pictures of the two supposed bombs found by the company the year before. Bail was denied, and they were taken to La Modelo, the medium-security federal prison in Bucaramanga.

That was the start of a six-month ordeal for the union leaders. In Colombia, the worst thing you can be is an accused terrorist. The three were mixed in with guerrillas, paramilitaries, and common criminals, all of whom thought they had masterminded a plot to blow up the factory. “We couldn’t trust anyone,” says González. “I would cry every day.” The whole block had only four bathrooms, which the unionists avoided anyway since they were frequently the site of attacks. “If you wanted to use the bathroom, you had to bring a soda pop bottle and a bag into your cell,” says Chile, who shared a four-by-six-foot cell with his best friend, Flores.

At the time, González’s daughter was only four years old, just beginning preschool. He used to bribe guards for admittance to a third-floor courtyard, where she could see him in the afternoons when his wife drove her home. On weekends, the daughters of all three prisoners stood in the street as they threw down notes wrapped around pieces of candy.

Life became more difficult for their families, as the three workers were fired from their jobs and stopped receiving income. When word came out about the accusations, their children were taunted by other children as terrorists, murderers, and worse. Eventually, they had to leave school for the year and began collecting cans on the street or begging for money from other workers at the plant. “Our friends would reject us and we didn’t have any food to eat,” says Chile’s daughter, twenty-year-old Laura Milena García, who has sat throughout the interview listening to her father and his friends talk about their suffering. She, too, breaks down crying, wiping her eyes as her voice falters.

Throughout the interview, Flores sits with his head in his hands for long stretches, periodically lifting up his glasses to wipe both eyes with one big hand as Chile talks for him. In all, the three spent 174 days in La Modelo before the case went to trial in August 1996, just a few months before Gil was shot dead in Carepa. When evidence was finally presented, however, the case started falling apart almost immediately. The only witness provided by the company was the masked one, whose statements about how and where the union members entered the plant were contradicted by dozens of workers and official company documents. Moreover, the masked witness constantly contradicted himself, leading a regional prosecutor to declare that he would need to have been in three different places at the same time to have seen everything he said he had. Prosecutors dismissed his testimony out of hand as completely false, ending the investigation and allowing the three unionists to go free.

Still, according to SINALTRAINAL, prosecutors declined to press charges against the company managers who had accused them of setting the bombs, or even reveal the identity of the masked witness. In a civil suit against Panamco, a judge found the evidence inconclusive to hold anyone at the company to blame. “There has been impunity,” says González angrily. “Everyone remains unpunished. There was a pardon and forgetting.” Even today, the attorney general’s office refuses to reveal the identity of the masked witness.

For the workers, however, being released from prison was just the beginning of their personal ordeals, as they started regularly receiving death threats against them and their families. In 2002, González’s daughter, then twelve, answered the phone to a voice telling her that her “son-of-a-bitch terrorist father” had to give them 20 million pesos ($10,000) or they would kill his daughter. His wife left soon afterward. “She would say, ‘You ruined my life, my family, my daughters.’” González halts again, choking back tears. “Everyone starts to distrust you, even the neighbors.” As the tears flow, so do the words. “They want to destroy the union and because of that the collective bargaining gets worse, and the conditions for the workers get worse. I’m not a guerrilla member, I’m not a paramilitary member. I just have convictions that the country needs to change.”

He suddenly explodes in a sardonic laugh. “You get so fucking pissed off by your helplessness that you want to put a bomb in the place and blow it up. You get in such an extreme psychological state you want to be a suicide bomber and just finish it off.”

Despite the deep ambivalence they now feel about the company that tried to have them imprisoned for life, all three of them still work at the plant, every day lifting and depositing crates with the bright red-and-white Coca-Cola logo. Since the day he walked through the gates of the prison, González hasn’t drunk a single Coke. As soon as he goes through the gates of the company, “I become another Álvaro. I look at the bosses and I know they are my enemies. We left the jail in 1996 and today it’s 2008 and we are in another prison.”

 

 

 

Whether the company
colluded with the violence against the union or just benefited from it, the union has been decimated by the constant threats and attacks. In 1993, when Panamco began buying up bottling plants, SINALTRAINAL had 1,880 workers at the company. By 2009, according to SINALTRAINAL researcher Carlos Olaya, that number was 350. Much of the decline has been due to outsourcing of the workforce to contract or temporary workers, he says; from 10,000 full-time workers in 1993, the company now employs only 2,000. Most of the other workers are so-called cooperative workers who are responsible for their own health insurance and other benefits, and of course excluded from collective bargaining.

Even the direct workers have seen wages decline from a high of $800 a month to near $500. For nonunionized workers, wages are even worse—only $150 a month. In addition, workers have lost overtime and holiday bonuses. All of the consolidation and downsizing, however, has been tremendously successful for the company; Coca-Cola now controls 60 percent of the nonalcoholic beverages market in the country; with the acquisition of Panamco by Coca-Cola FEMSA in 2003, the country has been one of the new anchor bottlers’ primary growth markets.

Despite the supposed demobilization of the paramilitaries in Colombia, however, the threats against SINALTRAINAL continue, sent from a new generation of “successor groups” to the AUC, which have picked up where they left off. In Barranca, there is a new paramilitary boss who is rumored to be the brother of Urabá’s El Alemán. Death threats appear regularly at the union hall, slipped under the door or even e-mailed. “DEATH TO ALL LEFTIST COMMUNISTS—TOTAL EXTERMINATION TO THESE DOGS!” read one e-mail received in November 2008. “WE GIVE A DECLARATION OF DEATH TO ALL . . . TRADE UNIONISTS OF OUR BELOVED BARRANCA.”

In Bucaramanga, paramilitaries kidnapped Flores’s son as he was leaving his high school in November 2007, throwing him in a black SUV and pistol-whipping him before dumping him on the side of the road. Chile’s daughter Laura Milena García was targeted in the summer of 2008, she says, when she was walking home from her university and noticed two men following her. One caught up and hissed, “Don’t scream,” pressing a gun to her side. Luckily she was close enough to her home to recognize a groundskeeper and greeted him loudly, scaring her assailant away. It’s suddenly clear why Chile has brought his daughter and granddaughter to hear him speak—they need to know what has happened to their father because they are targets themselves.

“Now I don’t go alone to the university anymore,” says García, who on the outside looks like your average MTV-watching twentysomething, with a sparkly, midriff-baring shirt and big hoop earrings. Inside, however, she is clearly a chile pepper like her father. “When I’m at the university and a professor starts talking bad about unions, it really makes me angry,” she says, wiping away the tears. “I say, ‘What are you talking about—they defend the rights of workers. How many workers’ rights are violated at his university?’” If there is hope for the union, it clearly lies in the next generation. This one is just struggling to survive. “I started working at the company when I was eighteen—my whole life,” says González. “I was more sane when I was eighteen than I am now. They say, ‘You are just resentful.’ I say, ‘Of course, I am resentful. You threw me in jail.’”

Back in Barranca, Galvis goes out with other union members to a café across the street after being interviewed, downing beer after beer while a regional blend of folk music called
vallenato
blares on television. Afterward, he asks his bodyguards to take him to the town square. A balmy wind rustles through the trees, as couples and groups of friends lounge at outdoor tables over beers and Cokes. Even the bodyguards seem to relax, one of them talking on a cell phone on the corner while the other stands astride the front wheel of a scooter in the park, flirting with a woman on the seat. An old man with a hunchback stops by to show us little metal bicycles he has fashioned from beer cans. Galvis takes the time to talk with him for several minutes, asking whether he has a family and how he hurt his back. The man explains he injured it falling off a roof, and obligingly lifts up his shirt to show it. Galvis hands him some small change without taking a bicycle.

“We must enjoy our lives,” he sighs. “We can’t just work, work, work. That is what the capitalists do.” The constant pressure of driving around with bodyguards waiting for the next death threat has clearly gotten to him. “We union leaders talk a lot of shit,” he sighs. “It is good to be self-critical. But we must continue to struggle, because there are many who get off the bus.” He leans across the table with a hazy stare. Behind him, a waiter is rolling out a stack of red plastic Coke crates full of empties. “It is tough,” he says, “we are on the brink of death, but we keep surviving. We bring in new members to the union, but the company fires them. If it weren’t for international solidarity, we would have been eliminated long ago. That is the truth.”

As in Mexico, the Colombian activists have responded to their perceived injustices by declaring a boycott of Coke in the country. Unlike Mexico, however, they have also been successful in reaching outside of their country’s border to spread their movement to the United States as well. Starting with a response from the United Steelworkers Union, the movement has snowballed to the point where the Coca-Cola Company could no longer stay silent about the charges.

I
t’s not hard to find the United Steelworkers building in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Just past the bridge over the Monongahela River, it’s the one covered on the outside by an enormous diamond-hatched truss of steel. Dan Kovalik is sitting at his desk in front of the window, framed inside one of those diamonds like he’s on some working-class version of
Hollywood Squares
. Boyish-looking despite his bushy black hair and beard, he is a senior associate general counsel for the union, dealing with all manner of cases involving unfair labor practices involving steelworkers.

But Kovalik’s interests are not limited to the concerns of his own union. A black-and-white picture of Kovalik with Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega sits on his desk, taken on the eve of Ortega’s election in 1985, before the socialist president was subject to a U.S.-supported revolt by the right-wing contras. Above his desk is a giant black-and-white portrait of a figure familiar in the union offices in Colombia: guerrilla leader Che Guevara. Kovalik, who grew up in a conservative Catholic family in Ohio, became, in his words, a “Latin American-phile” at age twelve after seeing a documentary about the killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero by right-wing death squads in El Salvador. By nineteen, he was traveling to Nicaragua with the Nicaraguan Solidarity Network, a group of activists who supported the Sandinistas in their civil war against the contras.

“At a pretty young age, I decided the U.S. was on the wrong side of the war in Latin America,” he says. Over the years he traveled to many Latin American countries to do what he could to counter that undue U.S. influence, with its support for military dictators and paramilitary groups. He took his first trip to Colombia in September 2000, two months after the approval of a new infusion of military aid from the United States to eradicate the guerrillas and end coca production, otherwise known as Plan Colombia. Since then, the $6 billion the United States has spent on the plan has succeeded in helping to defeat the FARC and other guerrilla groups, but has done nothing to stem cocaine production, which has actually increased under the plan. To Kovalik, the aid was never about eradicating drugs as much as it was protecting U.S. oil and mining interests.