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as they made their intentions clear, though, Palacios says he started receiving threats from the plant’s personnel manager, Eduardo García, who allegedly told him he’d have to abandon the effort, or else he’d use his connections in the army to have him disappeared. (Palacios reported the incident to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which set up a meeting with García, in which he denied making any threats but did sign a statement with Palacios promising to continue woking with “mutual respect” in the future.) A few months later, in June 2004, Palacios was working the graveyard shift when he heard shouts at one-thirty in the morning saying, “You are going to die, you son-of-a-bitch unionist!” Palacios threw himself to the ground just as shots rang out. He crawled under a truck, heart pounding and breathing heavily as he waited to be killed.

He survived, as several private security guards arrived to rescue him and his assailants fled. Those same guards later showed him a copy of a memo they had received from García to the head of their company, a retired army colonel, saying Palacios was “totally damaging” to the company, and listing the hours he worked at night. If anything, the shooting strengthened Palacios’s resolve to unionize, with memories of the bravery of the bottling plant leaders in the 1980s still in his mind. “If our movement didn’t have martyrs, capitalism would have swallowed us long ago,” he says.

After the shooting, the bottler offered to pay him severance and fly him to the United States if he resigned. Soon after he refused, men burst into his house while he was out shopping, threatening his wife and son at gunpoint before leaving—an incident Palacios sees as a direct reprisal for his intransigence. Finally, in May 2005, the bottler fired him, just two months after Ed Potter had arrived at Coke, and even as he was promoting Coke’s new zero-tolerance policy for anti-union violence. The union protested the firing as illegal, and fought to reinstate him at the company. After several more attempts on his life, however, Palacios went into hiding, eventually reaching out through a nonprofit to the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta.

In December, he received an e-mail from Ron Oswald, head of the IUF—the international union that had supported the organizing effort in Guatemala in the 1980s, but had more recently been critical of SINALTRAINAL’s fight in Colombia. Oswald told him that he’d been in contact with Ed Potter, and the Coca-Cola Company was offering to “make resources available to improve security” for him—if he agreed to leave the bottling company. “They recognize that this cannot be done through the bottler since there is at least some ground for our suspicions that the threats are instigated by the local bottler,” he wrote. (In an interview, Oswald says that he was not involved in the details of the negotiations with Coke, though he does feel that the bottling company in Guatemala has long been hostile to union organizing.)

But Palacios didn’t want to leave the bottler, he told Oswald, as e-mails flew between intermediaries with the company. In January 2006, he received another offer from a Coke representative, repeating the offer that Coke Atlanta would fund a hefty “protection package” if Palacios would only leave the bottling company. Once again, Palacios refused. The very next day, he headed home briefly to pick up a few things, parking his red pickup truck on the street. As he got out of the car, another man in a red car pulled up on the same street and got out at virtually the same time. A man standing on the corner pulled out a revolver and shot that man three times in the chest, killing him right in front of Palacios, who believes the shots were actually intended for him.

From that point on, Palacios lost faith in talking with Coke. Oswald still wrote e-mails assuring him he was in “almost daily contact” with Potter about the case, but there might be a complication should Palacios happen to be “approached by a certain D.C.-based lawyer with promises of significant sums of ‘settlement’ money”—a clear