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and intimidation. The Killer Coke campaign pounced, throwing back Neville Isdell’s comments from the shareholder meetings in which he promised to investigate “past practices.” But sure enough, that was never what the IUF had asked Coke to do, says Ron Oswald, the general secretary of the international union that formally requested the assessment. He confirms all along that the assessment was intended to look only into current working conditions, despite Coke’s clearly positioning the report as a response to the student protests at NYU and Michigan. “We told them very clearly they should not do that,” he says. “It was never intended to be the response that a number of people continue to ask for and what I think is a legitimate request.”

In fact, such an investigation was beyond the scope of the ILO committee that led the inquiry, says Kari Tapiola, the head of the ILO’s Committee on Standards and Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. “We said right from the beginning that we can only look into what the situation is currently,” he says, “we would not start going into an area that is covered by the complaint section of the freedom of association.” The what? “A separate committee to which trade unions or employers can complain.” As it happens, that’s the very ILO committee to which SINALTRAINAL filed its complaint after ending negotiations with Coke, sending the company immediately running to Judge Weinstein for sanctions.

Virtually the only interview granted by the Coca-Cola Company for this book was a forty-minute phone interview with Ed Potter. Asked when the company first discovered that the ILO wouldn’t be looking into past practices, Potter equivocates. “I think there is a little dancing on the head of a pin here,” he says, “because when you are looking into the present presumptively you are also looking into the past.” But clearly the company “would never have agreed” to looking into acts of violence that were already subject to court proceedings, he says. “It was never going to happen.” As with the TERI report, the scope of the report had been seemingly predetermined to support Coke; in no case would it answer the question that NYU had presumably asked it to—whether the company had colluded with paramilitaries to perpetrate violence against its workers.

The question now was whether the university would accept the ILO assessment as fulfillment of its call for an independent investigation. The university senate held off the vote until February 5, 2009—by coincidence the day after SINALTRAINAL was finally scheduled to get its hearing in Miami on the appeal of the ATCA case. That morning, Collingsworth headed to the twentieth floor of Miami’s federal building. Waiting there for him was a panel of three judges, each with a scowl deeper than the last. Collingsworth launched into an argument he’d been rehearsing for the better part of three years—that the case had been wrongly decided when Judge Martínez allowed the sample bottling agreement as the sole item of discovery.

“Who at Coca-Cola wanted Gil murdered—who?” interrupted Judge Bernard Tjoflat. Collingsworth began to answer, “On an aiding-and-abetting theory . . .”

“Who?” barked Tjoflat.

“We don’t know that information yet,” Collingsworth admitted. But the names of plant managers listed in the complaint, he continues, should at least be enough to get them a copy of the actual bottler agreement and a list of those responsible for implementing it.

“Here is the fishing in this area of the law,” said Tjoflat, referring to Judge Martínez’s earlier warning against “international fishing expeditions.”

If there was any doubt the hearing was turning into a disaster, the relatively easy reception given to Coke’s lawyer Faith Gay clinched it. After the hearing, Collingsworth walked down to the courthouse cafeteria with Bill Scherer, a well-known Republican lawyer in Florida whom he’d brought with him to help make his case. Scherer reassured him, “I thought you did great.” After all, he said, isn’t Coke dealing in contradiction? In its public announcements, the company