The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [107]
The two sides first appeared in Miami for a hearing on June 6, 2002. Coke’s lawyer, Marco Jiménez, began by arguing that the acts of violence allegedly committed by the company were not war crimes, and therefore had no business being hauled into U.S. courts as violations of international law. “For all we know [the paramilitaries were] moonlighting to go and take violence or action against union members not for any purpose related to the war, but for a corporate campaign of terror in order to get rid of a union.” It hardly made a difference, responded Collingsworth, whether the paramilitaries were furthering their war against guerrillas or whether the company was simply taking advantage of the war to get rid of the union. “The fact that this war is going on and that leftist trade union leaders can be killed with impunity allowed this to happen, and Coke and Panamco and the Kirby defendants stepped in to take advantage of that.”
As for the Coca-Cola Company itself, Coke’s lawyer argued that it shouldn’t even be there—since its bottler agreement with the franchise didn’t control labor relations anyway. Frustrated by a lack of specifics about the actual agreement, the judge cut to the chase: “Shouldn’t I have a copy of that?”
“I would like to see one myself,” interjected Collingsworth.
At the judge’s request, Jiménez said that Coke could furnish the bottlers’ agreements with Panamco and Bebidas within a few days.
“Try to get here before five o’clock tomorrow,” concluded the judge, calling an end to the hearing. When Coke’s lawyers came back to the court, however, they claimed they didn’t have time to translate the exact agreements between the company and the bottlers in Colombia. In its place, they submitted a sample bottlers’ agreement, a boilerplate document representing the kinds of agreements it had with its bottlers all over the world.
Even as the judge deliberated, SINALTRAINAL received news of another murder in Colombia, when Adolfo de Jesús Múnera was shot dead on the doorstep of his mother’s house in the northern seaport city of Barranquilla. Branded as a guerrilla after organizing a successful strike against a Panamco plant, he had come out of hiding for only a brief time to see his family when the paramilitaries caught up with him. It was a brutal reminder, if one was needed, that the workers at the Coca-Cola plants in Colombia still faced daily threats of violence.
In Miami, meanwhile, a new judge had been put on the Coke case: José Martínez. Known for his conservative opinions and his off-the-cuff style, he pleased no one with his ruling in March 2003. Essentially, Judge Martínez found that Gil’s murder wasn’t a war crime, since it hadn’t happened during an open battle—however, it was still a violation of international law given the Colombian government’s close ties to paramilitary forces. Score one for the union.
At the same time, he ruled that the sample bottlers’ agreement backed up Coke’s claims that it had no control over the bottlers. “Nothing in the agreement gives Coke the right, the obligation, much less the duty . . . to control the labor practices or ensure employees’ security at Bebidas,” the judge wrote. Because of that, Martínez dismissed the Coca-Cola Company from the case, at the same time he kept in the local bottlers—Panamco, Bebidas, and the Kirbys.
As Collingsworth and Kovalik celebrated keeping the case alive, they privately fumed that the judge had prematurely dismissed