The Coke Machine (60 page)

Despite initial promises to arrange interviews with Coca-Cola Company executives, corporate spokeswoman Kerry Kerr ultimately declined cooperation with this book. The only interview the company provided was a forty-minute conversation with director of global labor relations Ed Potter, which appears in the final chapter. After that interview, the company asked that further questions be provided in writing. Several dozen questions were submitted to Kerr, and she responded in an e-mail: “Much of the information you are requesting is proprietary in nature and we are unable to comment. The remaining questions are about topics to which we have responded over the years multiple times. Given the fact that this information is widely available, coupled with the decidedly subjective slant in which your questions were framed, we are declining further comment. . . . The Coca-Cola Company’s practice continues to be one of engagement in conversations with all stakeholders—including supporters and critics—as long those discussions can be fair and objective.”

BMI, a measure used to estimate a healthy body weight according to height, is calculated by dividing one’s weight by the square of one’s height.

Even those disputing the existence of the obesity epidemic, such as Paul Campos and Eric Oliver (authors of
The Obesity Myth
and
Fat Politics,
respectively), single out soda as harmful for “wreak[ing] havoc on our bloodstream,” as Oliver writes, “affect[ing] cholesterol, blood pressure, and metabolism.”

Still hustling, DeRose would agree to speak for this book only in exchange for $20,000 and 5 percent of the profits. This offer, it should go without saying, was declined.

Despite several attempts, López Gómez was unavailable for an interview himself. When I arrived for an appointment at the distribution center, I was told he had just left. I traded several messages with him over the next three days, but he always seemed to be in Chamula when I wasn’t.

A New York judge hearing a case against Union Carbide for its gas explosion in Bhopal, India, that killed more than three thousand people dismissed it as “another example of imperialism . . . in which an established sovereign inflicted its rules, its standards and values on a developing nation.”

The
killercoke.com
site has since been taken down.

While the IUF was the main union opposing Coke during the violence in Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s, it had recently taken a more conciliatory approach to negotiating with the company. In fact, it was an IUF affiliate that had replaced SINALTRAINAL at the Carepa plant in Colombia. Despite ostensibly supporting SINALTRAINAL in its case against Coke, the IUF continued to throw cold water on its allegations by publicly insisting there was no evidence linking Coke to the violence.