The bilateral free trade agreements, the Puebla-Panama Plan (PPP), and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), in the neoliberal context, seek to maximize profits for transnational corporations.  It is the simple logic of the market, of competition; of the appropriation of riches, of real estate, of prices; it controls life itself.  In this framework, one of the areas where corporations obtain greatest profits is through the exploitation of workers.  And Coca-Cola, like all major transnational corporations, benefits from the fiscal adjustment policies that countries are obligated to implement by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB).  And it has been and is this way, even if we don’t like it.  And this is not just an ideological discourse.

The aspect that we are currently interested in is called “labor reform,” “making labor competitive,” “strengthening human capital,” “reducing production costs,” among other catch-phrases that governments and corporations use.  In practice this means freezing salaries; eliminating labor unions; ending collective wage contracts; eliminating social loans (credit for housing, health, etc.); firing older workers and with this ending future indemnizations; eliminating retirement and pensions; eliminating the distribution of profits; converting all labor into temporal work; appropriating savings of the workers, sequestering them in banks for the benefit only of those same banks; lowering equipment costs, thereby endangering the safety of workers; using massive layoffs; extorting workers, demanding extra hours without pay, or threatening to give their jobs away to another person who will do it – these, among other actions, greatly affect the workers.  There are also other “adjustment” measures, such as the liberation of price controls on basic products and those most important for daily meals; the elimination of subsidies on products for basic consumption; the privatization of health and education sectors; the raising of prices on State-provided services; the raising of regressive taxes, etc.  All these measures end in hanging the worker.

All of this has been used to the benefit of the Coca-Cola Company.  In Columbia, there have even been allegations that Coca-Cola has been using cooperatives of associated workers to form part of a industry chain at their own risk and without cost to the company.  In this way, Coca-Cola has been avoiding paying just wages and providing other work benefits, as well as displacing union labor which is protected by international labor laws.  At the same time, Coca-Cola controls the conditions of service contracts for these cooperatives, thereby guaranteeing that its interests are preserved.  But Coca-Cola has done even more.  The State and transnationals like Nestle and Coca-Cola have begun a campaign to make all forms of social protest a crime, from defamation crimes related to unions working with guerrilla groups against the company’s interests, to lawsuits against the leaders of supposed terrorist acts, based on false premises, slander, and libel; they even defame workers and level union offices.

COCA-COLA, PARAMILITARY GROUPS, AND HUMAN RIGHTS

We will now present some of the most scandalous cases of violation of human rights involving the Coca-Cola Company.

GUATEMALA: Since the labor union for Coca-Cola workers was founded in 1968 through 1980, six of the union’s leaders were assassinated and four others were “disappeared.”  On January 2^nd, 1980, the International Food Workers Union sent by mail to its affiliates a portrait soaked in red (for blood) of Pedro Quevedo, the first labor organizer of Coca-Cola to be killed.  In May, four more fell.  Union workers and protesters in Latin America, profoundly indignant, knocked down Coca-Cola signs from stores that sold it.  In Guatemala they made posters that said: COCA-COLA: THE SPARK OF DEATH!  There was also military occupation of factories and union headquarters by the Guatemalan army, as well as transnational armed forces.  In one of them, on June 21^st, 1980, Edgar René Aldana Ruano was tortured and assassinated.

PERU: The last decade was difficult for workers of the Latin American Bottling Company.  Beginning in 1993, the workers with the most seniority were displaced until the union was finally dissolved in 1995.  From these years until the fall of President Fujimori, the workers suffered cuts from their labor rights, low wages, extra unpaid hours, poorly paid night work, and third-party contracts for full-time workers.  Beginning in 2001, the workers attempted to organize again to defend their rights.  They had clandestine meetings, until March 2002, when they had an assembly with 79 workers, where they elected the first executive committee for two years.  The Coca-Cola Bottling Company, when it discovered this, began to fire all those affiliated with the labor union.  Nonetheless, when faced with other unions and organizations supporting the nascent union, the company had to re-hire those they fired in connection with the union.

AUSTRALIA: The powerful union confederation of Construction, Woodworking, Mining and Energy of Australia announced an international boycott of Coca-Cola products and demanded sanctions against all those who financed paramilitary groups in Columbia.  They also demanded respect for the lives of Columbian workers, and that crimes committed by Coca-Cola officials be investigated by national and international authorities.  If there were no investigation, judgment, and punishment of the responsible, they would call an international boycott of all products of this corporation with the help of related workers unions on a global scale.  Andrew Ferguson, Secretary General of the union, indicated to ANNCOL that “the organization sent energetic messages to the international directors of Coca-Cola against the paramilitarism of this company and its complicity in crime with those who oppose the regime of Alvaro Uribe Velez, with the support of the United States government.”  For its part, the Bolivaran Movement for a New Columbia, with headquarters in Australia and guided by Vluadin Vega, Susana Rivas, and Gladis Almario, sent a message backing the position of the Australian union confederation and calling it “without precedent and of great civil value, favoring the Columbian people in the fight against governmental paramilitarism and in defense of human rights to have work and life respected, in Columbia’s civil war.”  On April 17^th, 2002, the unions in Columbia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and the Philippines, began to mobilize to denounce the constant human rights violations in Columbia by the multinational directors of Coca-Cola.  They demand that Coca-Cola sign a protocol that guarantees respect for all workers in all factories in the world.  What happened in Columbia?  You’re not going to believe it, but…

COLUMBIA: There are twenty Coca-Cola bottling plants in Columbia.  Their workers are organized in the National Union of Food Workers of Columbia (SINALTRAINAL), which was founded in 1982, although it traces its roots back 50 years to the arrival of Nestle in the country.  SINALTRAINAL groups the workers of the transnational corporations Nestle, Coca-Cola and Corn Products Corporations.  In 1986, these companies associated with the government and paramilitary groups to terrorize the union.  In this year, Hector Daniel Useche Beron, Nestle worker and head of SINALTRAINAL, is killed.  To date, 14 leaders, 8 Nestle workers, and 7 Coca-Cola workers have been killed; three of them were assassinated during the negotiation for labor rights in the workplace.  There are also 48 displaced, two exiles, two “disappeared” and numerous unjust imprisonments of union leaders.  Worker movements and protests have been militarized and in many cases personal escorts of the Leaders of Coca-Cola and their security guards have been used to repress the union.  Meanwhile, labor legislation and conventional rights have been permanently violated and diminished.  In recent years, Coca-Cola; Nestle; Fruco C.P.I.; Indunal S.A., whose boss is Congressman Fuad Char Abdala; Meals of Columbia and other companies where the union has members, have fired more than 20,000 workers.  Half of these were from the Coca-Cola Company, replacing full-time workers with temporary labor.  For its part, the government has strengthened the campaign to criminalize protests and demands.

The paramilitaries’ defense is that they must end all resistance for the entrance of multinational corporations and the FTAA.  The regions with the most massacres and displacement of peasants are those with the most natural resources.  Currently, there are more than 3 million rural inhabitants that have been displaced to the city in Columbia, many of them related to transnational workers or victims of violence in areas where the transnational corporations have interest.  This strategy of corporate and State terror has caused SINALTRAINAL to reduce from the number of members from 5,400 to 2,300 in the last ten years.  The government has not conducted investigations, nor punished those guilty of these crimes; instead, it has granted more guarantees to transnational corporations for reforms, privatizations, and natural resources, creating maquiladora zones.  The sum of this is the Plan Columbia of the United States government, which promises to increase levels of violence and eliminate all social organizations.

In Coca-Cola runs the blood of its workers.  In 1992, the manager of Coca-Cola, Jose Gabriel Castro, publicly accused the workers and the union of being guerrillas.  In 1994 Jose Manco David is assassinated.  One year later, another Coca-Cola worker falls, Luis Enrique Gómez Granados.  Also, in 1995 the Columbian army leveled the offices of the Coca-Cola Service Workers Cooperative (affiliates of SINALTRAINAL), and repeated the action again after the block of the National Police search.  In 1996, the paramilitaries arrive at the Coca-Cola plant and shoot the Secretary General of SINALTRAINAL of the Carepa section and negotiator with the corporation, Isidro Segundo Gil Gil, four times in the head, six in the chest and testicles.  After assassinating him, the paramilitaries enter the union headquarters again by force, sack it, and set it on fire.  Then, they hold a meeting with workers in the interior of the plant where they threaten to kill them if they didn’t leave the union that same afternoon.  At the end of that year, a 65-year-old worker named Jose Libardo Osorio Herrera, was taken by force from the Coca-Cola plant in Carepa by armed men and then assassinated.  Before the end of the year, SINALTRAINAL received 43 typed resignations, all written the same.  Other workers abandoned Carepa – some of them are still in hiding.  Four years later, on November 18, 2000, Alcira de Carmen Herrera Perez was assassinated.  She was Isidro’s wife.

An ex-worker from Carepa told Reuters that the paramilitaries intended to Hill him after killing Gil.  The worker has lived in hiding during the last four years, with his wife and two daughters.  When the paramilitaries find him, he moves to another village.  “I had just gotten to work and I was in the warehouse when I heard the first shot.  I looked and Isidro was falling.  I was the first to arrive to where he had fallen, but he was already dead by the time I reached his side.”  The company Panamco, which bottles 95% of Coca-Cola Columbia’s products, denied having links to the paramilitaries and threatened to sue anyone who made those allegations.  Nonetheless, another worker in the city of Cúcuta denounced that he was kidnapped by armed men who demanded that he stop causing problems for Coca-Cola.  The national president of SINALTRAINAL, Javier Correa, affirmed that harassment exists in the Coca-Cola bottling plants in Columbia.  He also denounced frequent death threats.  “The telephone threats to people’s homes are constant; the most recent was a message saying, ‘With this you’re gonna burn,’ and then the sound of a chainsaw being turned on,” he said in an interview in the union headquarters in Bogotá.  Correa said that the majority of the workers in the Coca-Cola bottling plant are now subcontractors and not affiliated with the union.  In the Carepa plant, the union presented a formal petition to re-negotiate labor conditions with the company in November of 1996.  Nonetheless, the union confirmed that on the last day the company had to respond, union worker Gil was assassinated.  The plant manager and other administrators admitted in their testimony that paramilitaries entered the factory grounds but said that they were afraid to interfere.  Other administrators testified that they knew that the paramilitaries had threatened union workers.  The authorities said the paramilitaries were responsible, but didn’t point the finger at higher management.  The United Steelworkers of America and International Labor Rights Fund presented a judicial demand in name of the Gil’s family and SINALTRAINAL.

In 1999 the magazine CAMBIO 16 published an article where it noted that the corporation resolved its problems by means of the paramilitary groups, and accused some directors of Coca-Cola of meeting in Monteria the year before with a messenger of paramilitary chief Carlos Castaño.  The next year Oscar Dario Soto Polo, Coca-Cola worker in Monteria, is assassinated.  According to Amnesty International, at least 112 Columbian union workers were assassinated in 2000.  In the years 2000 and 2001, the Coca-Cola bottlers in Columbia locked in workers against their will with the goal of pressuring them to renounce their labor contracts.  Those who didn’t quit were fired.  With these precedents, SINALTRAINAL presented a penal demand against Coca-Cola before the South District Court of Florida (Miami), invoking the Alien Torts Claims Act (ATCA), approved by the United States Congress in 1789.  The union had help in solidarity from the United Steel Workers and the International Labor Rights Fund.  But the Columbian workers didn’t settle with the legal strategy, but also worked for a social movement through the Popular Public Audience.  The movement was intended to create mechanisms of protection, attention, accompaniment, and solidarity for the workers and civil society.  At the same time, the Audience looked to “link the activism of the Columbian workers’ struggle against State Terrorism, impunity, transnational corporations, and neoliberalism, with worldwide resistance against globalization and the search for global justice.”

The Audience proposed to denounce Coca-Cola in three public events in 2002 in Atlanta, Brussels and Bogotá, with the objective of judging and publicly condemning Coca-Cola and the Columbian government for the systematic violation of the human rights of the workers, shown by murders, kidnappings, forced resignations, threats, firings, and violations of national and international conventions, as well as damaging the environment.  The goal was to “pressure both Coca-Cola and the Columbian government so that they cease their policy of persecution, criminalization, and extermination of workers and unions, and adhere to recognized standards for human rights and preservation of the environment.”  The Audience also intended to “organize actions to struggle against the transnational Coca-Cola in solidarity with the workers.  The Audience will strengthen the fight against impunity and the construction of a broad anti-globalization movement.”  The popular initiative was established as a species of popular tribunal that would include personalities and representatives of social organizations of different nations that, due to their humanistic principles, would guarantee the impartiality of the investigation and the public declaration at its conclusion.  “SINALTRAINAL will document those cases most significant of crimes and outrages committed against workers and the workers’ organization.  The presentation of the cases will be juridical, testimony and document-based and handed over to the participants.  The representatives of social organizations, will autonomously assess the cases presented and order the tests necessary to establish the veracity of those cases and the levels of responsibility of the Coca-Cola syndicates and the Columbian government.”

On March 31, 2003, the judge José E. Martinez concluded that the cases presented by the Columbian plaintiffs under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) of human rights violations committed by paramilitary forces in the name of the Coca-Coca Panamerican Beverages, Inc. (PANAMCO) bottlers and Bebidas y Alimentos in Columbia, could proceed.  The court decided that the allegations were sufficient to permit the case to continue, based on the theory that the paramilitaries have a relationship with the Columbian government.  With this theory, the requirements of ATCA that there must be a component of “state action” in the acts of violence against the plaintiffs were fulfilled, and this permits the claims to proceed against the private actors PANAMCO and Bebidas y Alimentos.  So, on April 4^th, 2003, the workers of SINALTRAINAL called an international boycott against Coca-Cola Company products, affirming that “with the boycott, we defend our right to life.”

Coca-Cola decided not to wait and interposed a claim against seven SINALTRAINAL workers, accusing them of insult and slander.  The lawyer for Coca-Cola, Bernal Cuellar, who was General Attorney of Columbia where the crimes were denounced, was informed that the Fiscal Seccional 61 Dr. Juan Carlos Lozada, had accepted the company’s accusation on August 6, 2003, against the workers.  But one month later, on September 10^th, the syndicate denounced more acts.  Four men with their faces covered with hoods pulled a 15-year-old named David Jose Carranza Calle off his bike in Barranquilla.  They forced him into a white bus, drove off, and tortured him to find out the whereabouts of his father, Coca-Cola worker and national leader of SINALTRAINAL, Limberto Carranza.  Some hours later, they dumped him in a site known as the Cañón de la Ahuyama.  While this was happening, the Carranza household received a phone call with the following threat: “Sonofabitch unionist, we’re going to break you, we’re going to get your house.”  The union leader said that “this act adds to the list of assassinations, murder threats, forced resignations, imprisonments, massive layoffs, and other illegal acts, including the most recent murder attempt on August 22^nd against Juan Carlos Galvis, vice president of SINALTRAINAL in Barrancabermeja and the intimidation that we are receiving in various regions.”

In the opinion of the labor union, Coca-Cola Femsa S.A. reacted with a new “criminal offense against the workers” beginning with its resistance on September 9, 2003.  SINALTRAINAL accuses them of “continuing to imprison workers by force in hotels and factories, pressuring them to quit their labor contracts for an indemnity.”  The union says that “Coca-Cola’s attack forms part of its strategy to reduce costs, subcontract labor, elimination labor organizations and collective work contracts, in order to concentrate production in a minimal number of mega-plant bottlers with fewer workers.  We have seen for many years that the corporation is preparing the way for this strike against the workers and is taking advantage of the opportunity that the Uribe administration has granted, with the so-called globalization process and the benefits that the FTAA would bring.”

Coca-Cola announced the close of its production lines in Barrancabermeja, Pereira, Cúcuta, Valledupar, Monteria, Cartagena and Pasto.  It then announced that it was firing 300 workers throughout the country.  This provoked a mobilization of the workers and civil society because it violated collective labor contracts and workers’ rights.  Dispatches were sent to Barrancabermeja by the Santander Bottlers.  William Mendoza, SINALTRAINAL leader, noted that administrative personnel in plants across the country are now being fired: “the corporation’s offense is now with administration.  We have been informed that the corporation requested approval for a collective layoff from the Ministry of Labor.”  He further explained that “there are some conventional articles that protect use and talk about the re-hiring of workers affected by partial or total closures in production lines.”  With the close of the production line in the Puerto Petroleo plant, the workers “did not accept the economic arrangement proposed by the corporation, because this would imply the liquidation of the union.”  Nonetheless, he affirmed that, of the 70 workers who were fired on September 10^th, some are arriving at a possible financial agreement with the corporation.

The union is making a call to “support the world campaign against Coca-Cola, to not drink it, disinvest, and permanently protest in order to guarantee that the corporation does not achieve its goal of bringing its products to other cities and possibly other countries, maintaining its market, raising its profits, all while leaving thousands of families in the streets.”

And you, what do you think?  If this isn’t enough, just wait until we talk about Coca-Cola in Mexico, and specifically Coca-Cola in Chiapas…

Sources: “Coca Cola, una historia empresarial de terror y crimen”, Sinaltrainal/Rebelión, 3 de septiembre del 2002; Grupo de Apoyo Suiza, “Colombia Nunca Más”; SINALTRAINAL; Boletín Informativo Comercio y Desarrollo, No.10, Abril 2002, Guatemala; Sinatrel; Reuters; Organic & Food News; Organic Consumers Association; UITA, Secretaría Regional Latinoamericana, Montevideo, Uruguay; Diarios de Urgencia, Resumen Latinoamericano No. 303; Edgar Omar Bustos, “Barrancabermeja: por cierre de las factorías protestan trabajadores despedidos de Coca Cola”, Sunday September 21, 2003 at 06:03 AM; Vanguardia.com Bucaramanga – Colombia.

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