The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [77]
Taking advantage of the situation, Trotter threatened the union organizers with violence if they didn’t give up their efforts. Shortly thereafter, Israel Márquez was sprayed by machine-gun fire in his jeep, narrowly escaping with his life. Pedro Quevedo wasn’t so lucky. Sitting in his truck during deliveries, he was ambushed by two men, who pumped four rounds into his face, then another eight into his throat before driving away on waiting motorcycles. Another union leader, Manuel López Balán, was also killed, his throat slit while making deliveries on his route.
Even as most of the workers resigned from the union, Márquez traveled to Wilmington to confront Coke chairman Paul Austin at the 1978 annual meeting. In a soft voice, he detailed the murders of his colleagues, before directly appealing to Austin’s business sense. “Coca-Cola’s image in Guatemala could not be worse,” said the small Guatemalan man through a translator. “[In Guatemala,] murder is called ‘Coca-Cola.’ I have come here today to ask your immediate help so that blood no longer flows through the Coca-Cola plant.” Unmoved, Austin tabled the resolution as out of order. Then amid cries from the audience, he gaveled the meeting to a close.
In truth, Austin’s hands were tied—intervene in the dispute and he’d call the entire franchise system into question, potentially opening the Coca-Cola Company up to a flood of labor complaints from other countries. At the same time, if he didn’t intervene, he’d abrogate all the goodwill he’d so eagerly sought through Coke’s CSR efforts. Even as Coke execs privately decided not to renew Trotter’s contract, they declined to break it, instead sending another company exec to investigate the situation. He, too, exonerated the franchisee—and no wonder, since he never even questioned Trotter or set foot inside the plant. Unconvinced, the Guatemalans appealed to the International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF), a Geneva-based super-union, which issued a call to boycott Coke in November 1979 and instigated work stoppages at Coke plants in Finland, Sweden, and New Zealand.
As the situation quickly grew out of hand, the company assured critics that it would not be renewing Trotter’s contract when it expired in 1981. Meanwhile, the rampage continued, with four more union organizers killed. Street protests against Coke in Guatemala led to a dramatic fall in the company’s market share. Finally, the pressure was too much for Coke to stall any longer. Even though it had repeatedly claimed it could do nothing until the contract expired, company execs flew to Houston in July 1980 to present Trotter with an offer he couldn’t refuse—a generous buyout by two handpicked bottling executives, with most of the financing provided by Coke Atlanta, and no questions asked. The new owners approved a contract with the union after the sale.
But Coke’s stalling had left eight workers dead—a legacy in Guatemala that would come to haunt the company again in more recent years.
For the time being, however, the company was able to breathe a sigh of relief when it put the Guatemala incident behind it, and could focus again on expanding the company. When Roberto Goizueta took over the Coca-Cola Company in August 1980, he targeted international growth as a critical part of his plan to increase shareholder value and make Coke, as he would later say, “the number one beverage on Earth.” The yardstick he chose to measure that growth was “per-caps”—the number of drinks per capita claimed by Coca-Cola in a country in a given year. He salivated as he looked at the numbers. Per-caps in Latin America at the time were just a third of those in the United States; those in Europe, less