The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [102]
But Kovalik’s interests are not limited to the concerns of his own union. A black-and-white picture of Kovalik with Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega sits on his desk, taken on the eve of Ortega’s election in 1985, before the socialist president was subject to a U.S.-supported revolt by the right-wing contras. Above his desk is a giant black-and-white portrait of a figure familiar in the union offices in Colombia: guerrilla leader Che Guevara. Kovalik, who grew up in a conservative Catholic family in Ohio, became, in his words, a “Latin American-phile” at age twelve after seeing a documentary about the killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero by right-wing death squads in El Salvador. By nineteen, he was traveling to Nicaragua with the Nicaraguan Solidarity Network, a group of activists who supported the Sandinistas in their civil war against the contras.
“At a pretty young age, I decided the U.S. was on the wrong side of the war in Latin America,” he says. Over the years he traveled to many Latin American countries to do what he could to counter that undue U.S. influence, with its support for military dictators and paramilitary groups. He took his first trip to Colombia in September 2000, two months after the approval of a new infusion of military aid from the United States to eradicate the guerrillas and end coca production, otherwise known as Plan Colombia. Since then, the $6 billion the United States has spent on the plan has succeeded in helping to defeat the FARC and other guerrilla groups, but has done nothing to stem cocaine production, which has actually increased under the plan. To Kovalik, the aid was never about eradicating drugs as much as it was protecting U.S. oil and mining interests.
With that view in mind, he traveled to Barrancabermeja that first trip to gather stories of union officials, including the local president of SINALTRAINAL, William Mendoza. On his second trip, in March 2001, he heard about the case of Isidro Gil, which immediately struck him as a flagrant use of paramilitaries to rub out union organizing. “Here you have a guy killed within the walls of the plant by paramilitaries,” he says. “He was killed after the manager threatened to wipe out the union. The paramilitaries returned, gathered all the workers within the plant, told them to resign from the union or they would be killed.” In his mind, the finger pointed all the way up to the top.
“I don’t think necessarily someone from Atlanta said do this,” he says, “but it seemed like a combination of complicity and turning the other way and allowing things to happen.” Whether it was a sin of commission by giving tacit approval for violent tactics to its bottlers, or a sin of omission by not taking stronger action to condemn the violence with the full weight of Coke’s corporate power, it amounted to the same thing in Kovalik’s mind. What was less clear to him was how the Coca-Cola Company could be held accountable for actions that were at best taken by a foreign bottler, if not the managers of a foreign bottler, in a foreign country, with its own set of laws and system of justice. Only months before, the Fiscalía had officially ended its own investigation into Gil’s murder without even staging a trial.
Talking it over with SINALTRAINAL leadership, Kovalik hatched a new idea. If the union couldn’t get a fair trial in Colombia, he would try Coca-Cola in the United States. And Kovalik knew just the person to talk to—a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer named Terry Collingsworth, who had made a career out of holding corporations accountable for not just freedom of association, but also things like murder, slavery, torture, and imprisonment in far-flung places around the world—the exact kinds of crimes that Coke had been accused of by SINALTRAINAL.
Together Kovalik and Collingsworth