The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [137]
The anti-Coke campaign immediately cried foul, pointing out that Ed Potter had been the U.S. employer representative to the ILO for the past fifteen years. “There are 640 people who have a final vote in the ILO conference’s legislative process,” responded Potter. “To suggest there is any undue influence is preposterous.” He had less of an explanation for why the company was willing to admit the results of this investigation in court, when that was such a nonstarter in a student-led commission.
Rogers thought that he saw one: Despite Coke’s assurances that the UN agency would investigate “past and present” practices, an ILO official told him on the phone that the agency would be doing only an “assessment of current working conditions.” At the 2006 meeting, Rogers decried the ILO investigation as just “a new scam” that would do nothing to explore bottling plant managers’ ties to paramilitary violence. “I can’t think that engaging the ILO is a publicity stunt,” replied Isdell coolly. “We have a document. We have an agreement, and they are going to investigate past and prior practices.”
That wasn’t the only investigation the company would be allowing, Isdell told the crowd. The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a respected NGO based in New Delhi, would also be conducting an audit of the company’s water use. “My message to you today is that the transition is complete,” said Isdell. “We are well on our way to becoming the company you expect us to be.” As with the ILO, activists raised red flags against TERI—with Srivastava pointing out that the organization listed Coca-Cola as a sponsor on its website, had been paid by Coke to do environmental assessments in the past, and had publicly declared Coke one of the most responsible companies in India, and thus was hopelessly biased.
But the two proposed investigations were good enough to buy the company time. The University of Michigan reinstated its contract just three months after cutting it, pending the outcomes of the ILO and TERI reports. The campaigns at other colleges, meanwhile, lost momentum as administrators adopted a wait-and-see attitude. By August 2006, Potter insisted that the student campaign had “stalled,” something virtually inconceivable when NYU and Michigan had dumped Coke months earlier. Now he and Isdell sought to press the advantage to get rid of Killer Coke back where the fight began—in court.
The three years since Judge Martínez had dismissed Coke from the ATCA case in 2003 had not been kind to Terry Collingsworth and Dan Kovalik. Martínez’s indifference, if not contempt, for the case was apparent from the get-go. He seemed to take pride in getting details wrong, at points referring to Urabá as “Bogotá or Medellín or wherever the heck it was” and to Isidro Gil as “Joe Blow.” His spontaneous style might seem refreshing to someone without a case before him, but to SINALTRAINAL’s lawyers it was downright infuriating. Each June, he dismissed all pending motions, allowing them to be resubmitted the following year. Finally at a hearing in June 2006, Panamco’s lawyer was reciting the judge’s history of dismissals when Martínez broke in. “If you didn’t know any better,” he said, “you would think that I didn’t want to have anything to do with this case, wouldn’t you?”
Collingsworth and Kovalik were flabbergasted