The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [100]
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