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By Root 510 0

In the last draft of the settlement agreement from October 2007, “Killer Coke” is mentioned repeatedly throughout the text, which spells out in heartless detail exactly what issues can be raised by whom and when. In return for the leniency granted the union in the face of their breach of negotiation terms, SINALTRAINAL was offered even less money—$8 million. And of that, $3 million would go to the lawyers for a “discretionary fund” to cover their fees and “ensur[e] that the Killer Coke Campaign is dismantled.” In other words, Coke would get rid of its biggest adversary, all for less money than the $10 million it had paid a year before to establish its Colombian foundation.

Even before the final draft was inked, Correa and his colleagues in Bogotá had made up their minds not to go along with it. “Ladies and Gentlemen of The Coca-Cola Company,” Correa began in a letter sent in September. “It is not right that . . . SINALTRAINAL remains unprotected and silent, while the company has no restrictions, deactivates the campaign and does not adopt policies which respect the rights of its workers. . . . Given this situation, we have decided to tie ourselves again to the campaign.”

The union demonstrated that in a big way with its next move: filing a complaint with the International Labour Organization alleging paramilitaries were carrying out violent attacks against workers at the same time the company was implementing policies to suppress union representation. Coke demanded the complaint be withdrawn, saying it would “cause irreparable damage both to [the Coca-Cola Company] itself and to the chances of successfully negotiating an end to the KillerCoke [sic] campaign.” It was a strange attitude to take from a company that had already committed itself to an independent investigation of the very same claims by the very same agency. When the union refused to withdraw it, Coke again appealed to Weinstein for another fine. Collingsworth gave up—faced with a client who had already pulled out of negotiations, in action if not in word, and an adversary ready to pounce on any infraction, he made it official and told Weinstein that the union was pulling out of negotiations and canceling its obligations under the term sheet.

A year and a half after entering negotiations, he and Kovalik had to admit they had little to show for the effort. All the union stood to gain was money—and without promises of protection, even that was a double-edged sword in Colombia, opening them up to the possibility of heightened violence. Meanwhile, whether or not Coke was bargaining in good faith, the delay only helped the company.

Even as the negotiations foundered, Rogers was ready to go back on the attack at the many universities ripe for the picking. At most of them, however, the key student activists who had started the campaigns had graduated. And now, Coke was about to unveil a one-two punch to ensure that no new activists would take their places.

While Colombia and the negotiations with SINALTRAINAL occupied the forefront of Coke’s attention, the villagers in India had pressed on with their battle against the company. In Uttar Pradesh, Nandlal and Srivastava released a devastating report about pollution at a second bottling plant one hundred miles from Mehdiganj, complete with pictures of bags of sludge strewn around the property. Three months later, the franchisee Brindavan Brothers announced it was shuttering its doors because of “unbearable financial losses.”

While Coca-Cola was seemingly losing ground, it was planning to outflank activists with the TERI report—the investigation done at the behest of the University of Michigan—which it finally released in January 2008. Surprisingly, given TERI’s ties to Coke, the environmental group appeared to support the campaign’s demand to close the plant at Kala Dera, saying that “it is obvious that the area is overexploited and it is highly unlikely that the water situation would improve.” Unless the company could transport water from another location or store it during the rainy season, TERI wrote, the