The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [106]
Back in Pittsburgh, Dan Kovalik had closely followed the burgeoning use of ATCA, contacting Collingsworth in 2001 to ask for his help in bringing a case against Coke. Collingsworth was enthusiastic about the prospect, accompanying Kovalik to Colombia in May 2001 to gather testimony. The two filed suit almost immediately afterward, on July 20, 2001, against the two bottlers, Bebidas y Alimientos and Panamco, as well as Richard Kirby and his son Richard Kirby Kielland, Coca-Cola Colombia, and finally the Coca-Cola Company itself. All of them, it argued, had “hired, contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders.”
The case was similar to those involving Unocal and ExxonMobil, Collingsworth and Kovalik argued, in that a U.S. company had aided and abetted violence for its own monetary gain—with one important twist. According to the union lawyers, even though Coke didn’t directly conspire with the paramilitary forces that perpetrated the violence, the company worked through its bottlers to do so, which—given the tight control Coke had over the bottlers in other areas—they argued amounted to the same thing.
“There is no way that Coke didn’t know that paramilitaries were infesting their bottling plants down there and killing union leaders,” says Collingsworth. “When the first guy is killed, you could say, ‘Oh my, what a surprise.’ When the second guy is killed, you say, ‘Oh geez, I hope that doesn’t happen again.’ Number three, number four, number eight. At some point you’ve got to say they knew it and they were willing to accept it as the cost of doing business.”
In addition to the bottlers’ agreements that spelled out in detail how they should produce and sell Coke products, the lawyers argued that the Coca-Cola Company’s quarter share in Panamco, and two seats on its board of directors, gave it direct control over the company. As for Bebidas, Coke had so much control it could block the Kirbys from selling it. A year after Gil’s murder, Kirby and his son Kirby Kielland told Colombian investigators, they had tried to sell, even lining up a potential buyer. There was only one problem. “I sought the permission from the international Coca-Cola Company to sell that company,” said Kirby Kielland, “a request that was denied. . . . We could sell the bottling plant, land, trucks, installation, etc., of the bottling plant in Urabá, but we could not guarantee that the franchise contract we have with Coca-Cola would be transferred.”
With that level of control over its bottlers, Collingsworth and Kovalik argued that the situation in Colombia was essentially no different from the one in Guatemala in the 1980s, when Coke intervened directly in Trotter’s franchise agreement after political pressure from the nuns when workers were murdered there. In this case, the lawyers argued that Coke could have curtailed the violence, or, in an extreme case, severed its bottling contract with any company in Colombia it felt was violating its international labor standards. If it didn’t, it was for the same reason that Chiquita stayed in the country for years while paying off the murderous AUC—it was simply making too much profit.
The Coca-Cola Company, of course, vehemently disagreed with that logic. As soon as the suit was filed, a spokesperson in