The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [1]
“Are you Isidro Gil?” he asked.
Inside, the man hesitated slightly before replying. “Yeah. But why do you want to know?”
“We need to go inside and see a client.”
“Wait a minute,” replied Gil, who just then saw a delivery truck rumbling up from the yard. “Let me deal with this truck first, and then I’ll help you out.”
With nothing to do but his job, Gil unlocked the gate and pulled the chain-link fence toward either side to allow the truck to pass. Perhaps he suspected the danger he was in and simply resigned himself to his fate. More likely he somehow thought he would be spared from any potential violence by his position in the hierarchy of the bottlers’ union, by promises the plant management had given ensuring his safety, by the fact that it was nine in the morning in a public location with plenty of people milling around the plant.
In fact, this was not the first strange motorcycle that he had seen this morning. A half-hour earlier, another had pulled up to the small kiosk by the side of the road that served Coke to workers before and after their shifts. Gil had watched one of his coworkers point him out, and the cyclist nod before driving off. Gil was still worrying about the incident when the second motorcycle appeared.
In Colombia, a motorcycle isn’t just a motorcycle. It’s also the transport of choice for the paramilitary death squads that target guerrillas and anyone remotely associated with them on the other side of the country’s smoldering thirty-five-year-old civil war. In Medellín at the time, men were forbidden from carrying another man as a passenger, since it was so common for one to drive while the other pulled a trigger.
But Gil wasn’t the kind of person to back down from confrontation. Among his coworkers, the twenty-eight-year-old was a natural leader. Gregarious and charismatic, he’d organize fishing trips to the river and soccer and baseball tournaments on the weekends. He started out on the production line, but was reassigned to his current job at the front gate in 1994, just around the same time the paramilitaries started ominously appearing in the region.
Ostensibly, the death squads targeted the guerrillas who used the Caribbean location to import guns from Panama or tax drug shipments heading farther north. But the guerrillas were difficult targets, hiding in camps buried deep in the jungles. So soon the death squads turned their attentions to the civilians whom they suspected of supporting the guerrillas—a long list, including left-wing politicians, academics, health and human rights workers, teachers, and trade unionists.
The union at the Coke plant, SINALTRAINAL, was a natural target. Two of its leaders had already been killed by the time Isidro Gil was named secretary-general and put in charge of renegotiating the workers’ contract with the bottling company. On November 18, 1996, the union submitted its final proposal for a new contract, demanding increased pay and benefits, along with protection from firing and new security measures to keep union leadership safe from violence.
The Coke plant’s local managers and its Florida-based owners had until December 5 to respond to the collective bargaining proposal. As he stood at the gate that morning, Gil was mentally preparing for the meeting that day, not knowing it would never take place. As he opened the gate to let out the delivery truck, he stepped back behind the gatehouse. The truck rumbled past, its bright red Coke logo shining in the morning light. Before Gil could push the metal frame closed, the visitor walked right through the gate behind it. Pulling out a .38 Special, he raised it to Gil’s face and shot him between the eyes.
On the face of it, this was just one more casualty in a Third World country’s long and bloody civil war, a war that has claimed tens of thousands