Belching Out the Devil (7 page)

 

Manco had gone into hiding but the following day the para leader, Cepillo, sent out messages that he wanted to talk to the union men, to hold a meeting with them. Manco's world had been destroyed, his certainties had vanished, the only coping mechanism he had left was fear. In order to survive in abnormal situations we need to make abnormal reactions and fear helps us make them. Manco certainly reacted abnormally… he agreed to see the paras, persuaded by another union man that he should go.

The meeting was to be held at the paras' local hang out, an ice-cream shop in Carepa, called La Cieba. Two other union men arrived with Manco to find Cepillo at a table with a group of paras. The killers' commander was a chubby man, aged about 25, wearing jeans and a short-sleeve shirt. The shutters were rolled down, the shop was closed. Manco sat opposite the chubby leader. There were no pleasantries, no one drank, no one smoked, there was none of the usual Hollywood paraphernalia you might expect with such a scene, just an ice-cream shop with armed killers at a table.

 

‘Cepillo said that they had killed Isidro, and they said it was them who burned down the headquarters. And they said that the union was over, that the union was the guerrillas,' said Manco. As they sat in the shuttered shop the paras calmly issued their orders for what was to follow. ‘We could have killed you all today,' said Cepillo, ‘but we can be reasonable.'

 

The following morning the killers' version of being reasonable was unveiled for all to see, at 9am they assembled all the Sinaltrainal members at the Coca-Cola bottling plant. There the paras made them to sign letters resigning from the union. The letters were prepared by ‘Rigoberto Marín, who worked for the company…He gave them out one after the other, like “here's yours, here's yours”,' said Manco.

 

The union in Carepa was smashed. The leadership was in hiding and exiled - they had fled or were dead. The members, cowed by guns, threats and intimidation, had signed away their rights. Meanwhile the managers of the Coca-Cola bottling plant surveyed the wreckage of the union and promptly introduced a pay cut to the workers. According to Sinaltrainal the wages dropped from between $380 - $450 a month for experienced workers, to $130 a month: Colombia's minimum wage. When
asked about this drop, Coke failed to respond. Given that they would have met resistance to this if Sinaltrainal was still there, it is fair to say that, from the point of view of company profits, murder and arson did have an upside.

Back in the union office sitting at a table littered with empty coffee cups and grains of sugar, Manco and Giraldo finish their tales as all exiles do, by talking of the life they fled to. They lived for six months in the building they now tell their stories from - the union office - there was nowhere else for them to go. Both men were in the office when the paramilitaries' package arrived containing the letters of resignation they had made the union members in Carepa sign. The paras even included blank copies for Manco and Giraldo to sign. Eventually Giraldo's family left Carepa to come and join him in Bogota and he moved out of the union office. He has not had a full-time job since. ‘I haven't been able to earn much. I have just been doing odd jobs with three- or four-month contracts…sometimes days go by here where we have no food, because sometimes there's work and sometimes there's not, it's not like it was.'

 

I asked Manco if he has stayed in Bogota since leaving Carepa.

‘Yes, of course, but it's horrible. I don't always get food here, I lost my house, my family, and everything.'

‘Your family?'

‘They didn't want to come so they stayed there, the mother took the children there. And of course I can't go there, I haven't been there.'

 

I watch Giraldo leave. Instinctively and without display he stands by the front door of the building with his coat zipper pulled up tight, tugs his collar around his neck, opens the
door, looks across the street and then along it. He steps out through it glancing both ways and then slips away, a hunched silhouette heading to a home in exile, to wake to a dawn of few certainties. Where work may or not be found, where bellies may or may not be empty; where dead friends' faces haunt posters and memories of home are full of longing. And if you ask ‘Why did he fight so hard and take so many risks to be in a trade union?' The answer is this: so he would not have to live the life he does now.

 

 

‘S
erious charges demand a serious response,' said the company CEO Neville Isdell, referring to allegations of abuse by Coke's Colombian bottlers, in what seems a reasonably appropriate statement; though in all honesty he was hardly likely to say, ‘We lost a couple of Latinos, who gives a fuck.' However, serious statements deserve serious evaluation. According to Sinaltrainal, the murders at the Carepa plant were part of a countrywide campaign against the union. These are the serious charges they make:

These would, by most people's standards, qualify as serious charges. So what was The Coca-Cola Company's serious response? Did the Company itself investigate the allegations of collusion between plant managers and the paramilitaries? The answers are: not much and no.

 

The Company website proudly displays the first and only public audit by The Coca-Cola Company into their bottlers in Colombia.
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This was conducted in spring 2005, over eight years after Isidro Gil was shot dead. Intriguingly, the audit conducted by the Cal Safety and Compliance Corporation does not examine or investigate any charges of collusion or paramilitary activity in the plants. Focusing on the plants compliance issues, the report does however note several health and safety breaches, including:

Fortunately there is no need to get up a petition or start a letter-writing campaign, as I am happy to report that the appropriate remedial action has been taken so as to comply with health and safety regulations. However, reassuring as it is to know that a protective guard now covers the syrup container in the Bogota plant, there still remains the outstanding ‘serious charges' to be addressed by the company. To this day The Coca-Cola Company has not investigated the alleged links of Colombian bottling plant managers with the paramilitaries, despite a man being shot dead under their logo.

 

From the outset the first line of defence coming out of Atlanta was the denial of ‘any connection to any human-rights violation of this type' and to distance themselves from the bottlers saying, ‘The Coca-Cola Company does not own or operate any bottling plants in Colombia'.
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This is the standard use of the ‘Coca-Cola system' operating as an entity but claiming no legal lines of accountability to The Coca-Cola Company. TCCC does not own the bottling plants, the bottlers operate under a franchise. But the case here is similar to that of Gap and Nike in the 1990s. In these particular instances the clothes giants had outsourced their production to factories in the developing world that operated sweatshop conditions. It was not Nike or Gap who forced the workers to do long hours for poor pay, it was the contractors. However, campaigners insisted the companies should have enforceable human rights standards applied throughout the supply chain, compelling the companies to take action. The argument was then, and is now, that no matter where the human rights abuse occurred, if it's your name on the label then you're responsible for sorting it out. In The Coca-Cola Company's case the argument is made more compelling by the fact that, although they franchised Coke production to Bibedas y Aliementos and Panamco, they held 24 per cent of

Panamco's shares
⁵
- a controlling interest. Which gives them considerable clout in how the business is run.

 

This view of the Company's responsibilities is shared, in particular, by Councilman Hiram Monserrate from New York City. He represents a large Latino community and through some of his constituents became aware of the situation. Appalled, he took up the matter and has investigated Coca-Cola's response to the events. And so I visit New York for the first time, to talk to him.