The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [144]
Posed exactly that question, Potter responds in great detail about the series of audits and worker complaint mechanisms that have been put in place to enforce Coke’s new workplace policies, including its “guiding principles” for bottlers since 2006. For the big bottlers, he says, the Coca-Cola Company gets directly involved when violations of labor or environmental policies occur. “We really do not let go of these conversations until there is a resolution,” he says. “Believe me, in my whole time here, I have never had a bottler that said we are not going to play here. It’s never happened.”
In other words, Potter is saying the company does have control over its bottlers—if nothing else, through the power of influence. So does that mean the bottling agreements have changed since the days of Gil’s murder? “My sense is the language of the franchise agreements hasn’t changed for a long, long time,” he says. “But the understanding of what people need to be responsible for, accountable for, has evolved over time.” If the Gil case had happened today, he says, “It’s not something that would linger and fester. There would be people on the ground, and it would be a different degree of attention to the issues that were raised.” It’s hard to believe Potter is actually saying this, basically admitting that Coke had everything it needed to deal with the violence at bottlers in Colombia from the moment it happened, as early as the first murder in Carepa in 1994. And yet Coke failed in its responsibility to stop or investigate the crimes.
Now, more than twelve years later, the company was still shirking that responsibility. The night of the Miami hearing, Adolfo “El Diablo” Cardona stood in front of a blackboard in a small room in NYU’s Vanderbilt Hall. With Romero translating, he retold for perhaps the hundredth time the story of Gil’s murder, his attempted abduction, the destruction of the union. The next day, Romero sat in the hearing room of the NYU senate as its members deliberated their ban on Coke. The chair, Arthur Tannenbaum, began the meeting arguing that the ILO assessment, while not perfect, is the best the university could hope to achieve. At this point, an investigation into the murders would be impossible. Hearing those words, Romero felt his heart sink. When the vote came down, it was a close defeat, twenty-eight to twenty-two, in favor of lifting the ban. The last bright spot of the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke had dimmed.
Even as the campaign watched its two biggest victories snatched away, one would think they could take solace in the new framework the company had put in place to control its bottlers. After all, Ed Potter himself promised that if a situation similar to the violence in Colombia occurred today it would be handled much differently. That hasn’t necessarily been borne out, however. In fact, a similar case did occur. It happened in Guatemala, and it happened on Potter’s watch.
José Armando Palacios was spared the violence that infected Coke’s bottling plants in Guatemala in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though he began to work for Coke in 1979, it was at a separate plant not owned by anti-union John Trotter, but by another company named INCASA. He joined the union early, soon becoming a leader. In 1991, he took a job as an in-house security guard, a position that had been forbidden by management to unionize. Palacios had a secret plan to organize the security guards anyway—arguing that they would be a valuable asset to the union, able to tip off union leaders to visits by authorities when they engaged in work stoppages or slowdowns.
He quickly succeeded in persuading the other five guards to join. But at the time, union leaders thought the idea too risky, so Palacios bided his time for more than a decade until 2004 when new leaders were willing to risk it. As soon