The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [146]
Palacios intended nothing of the sort. “He thought I was some fool,” says Palacios, “to sign some document I would later regret for the rest of his life.” Finally after realizing that neither the bottling company nor the Coca-Cola Company would protect him, he reluctantly took a severance package (without a confidentiality agreement) and fled to the United States. It took another two years for his family to be able to join him on asylum there. Now living in Detroit, Palacios started talking with “a certain D.C.-based lawyer” about bringing a lawsuit, which Collingsworth eventually filed in New York Supreme Court in February 2010.
On the face of it, the case for Coke’s culpability was even stronger than the SINALTRAINAL case in Colombia. After all, Potter and Coke’s lawyer had directly inserted themselves into the situation, telling Palacios they could assure his security in exchange for his resignation and his silence. When he refused, they left him and his family unprotected from attack. “I think Coca-Cola could have stopped INCASA from doing what it was doing at any time,” says Palacios. “If they didn’t stop it, it’s because they didn’t want to.”
The parallels between Colombia and Guatemala are too strong to ignore. In one sense at least, Potter is right: The company was all over the case from the beginning. But it was not to protect the workers, but to protect the company. In fact, at the very same time Coke was negotiating with SINALTRAINAL’s leaders to make them leave the union and stop disparaging Coke, it was following the same script with Palacios. To be fair, in both cases the company was dealing with avowed troublemakers with an active anticorporate, even anticapitalist mind-set. Asked what he thinks is really going on with the Colombia case, Potter answers indirectly, but his response speaks volumes.
A few years ago, he says, he read a book about the investigation of the murder of a Catholic priest in Guatemala. “The author describes how trade unionists have learned to protect themselves by making themselves martyrs,” he says. “By drawing attention to themselves, they protect themselves.” In that view, Coke is the scapegoat, exploited by workers for their own self-preservation. In such a scenario, it makes sense that the company should fight tooth and nail against making concessions. No matter how lamentable the violence in some Third World country, it doesn’t justify ransoming the company’s brand.
“I’ve had lots of discussions with some of the oil companies we’ve sued,” says Collingsworth. “Basically the way they put it is: ‘Look, Colombia or Indonesia or Burma, that’s a rough country. We’re there to create jobs and to make the best of a bad situation, but we didn’t start that war. We’re not going to end that war.’ But you can’t say you are an innocent bystander if you are part of the support network for one of the actors in a violent exchange.”
It’s hard to believe that a company like Coca-Cola doesn’t care about the safety of its workers or the health of its customers or the environment at least on some level. If there is a larger lesson to be drawn from the various attempts to hold Coke accountable, it’s that a corporation will never willingly box itself into a corner with any legally binding ties that force it to improve the lot of the communities where it operates—at least not when