The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [80]
In an interview with American anthropologist Laura Jordan, the current owner of the concession to distribute Coca-Cola in Chamula and the surrounding area, Carlos López Gómez, enthused about the popularity of soft drinks for the local people. “[It is] part of daily life,” he said. “Like drinking water—every day. Instead of water, they learn to want soda. They want Coca-Cola.”5 A Chamula city councillor for the minority party, the PRD, elaborates further. “Indigenous people, the number-one thing they consume is Coca-Cola, and the number two thing is Pepsi,” says Cristóbal López Pérez. So nervous was he about speaking about the beverage, he insisted on arranging the interview in the back room of a local human rights organization. Sitting at a cramped table wearing a cowboy hat and zip-up cardigan over a collared shirt, he paints a picture of cradle-to-grave consumption of which U.S. marketers could only dream.
“When a child is born, they give soda. When a woman is married, they give soda. When someone dies, they give soda,” he says. The amount is directly related to the wealth of the family, ranging from three or four boxes up to one hundred depending on the occasion. No event, however, matches election time, when all candidates buy astounding amounts of Coke for their supporters. For López’s council election, he bought five trailers, each with 180 boxes, totaling more than 20,000 bottles for just one candidate. On election day, he says, people bring straps to the polling booth to cart home the expected case of soda. “Whoever gives Coca-Cola has more of a possibility of winning,” he says. “If you give another kind of soda, it’s not as good.”
No one is obligated to buy soda, says López, but not buying it is the easiest way to acquire social stigma in the village. Families who serve the locally made corn beverage pozol at parties are looked down upon. “People say, ‘They shouldn’t have invited me. I can make that at home.’” López is one of the few people in the village who is critical of all of the soda consumption, which he blames for the poor health of the community. “There are many headaches, people have gastritis, they have sugar in the blood [diabetes],” he says. “We are just beginning to realize that this is not nourishing for our bodies, that it is making us sick.” Asked if he’s tried to broach the subject with his neighbors, he sighs. “It is not possible to change people today or tomorrow. I don’t know when this is going to end. To change the mentality of people is very difficult.”
Health problems in the villages of Chiapas have been exacerbated by recent changes in patterns of physical activities by the peasant population. As mining and oil interests have taken up arable land, men from the villages have increasingly gone to the United States to find work, leaving behind women and children to live a more sedentary lifestyle—using their money transfers from America to buy more junk food. Local indigenous health coalition COMPITCH has done surveys of communities in the highlands and jungles of Chiapas, finding that problems with obesity and diabetes are greater in communities closer to the roadways plied by delivery trucks for Coca-Cola and other processed foods. “We can’t blame Coca-Cola,” says the group’s Juan Ignacio Dominguez, “but we can situate Coca-Cola as a detonating component. When we put together all these social factors, Coca-Cola is the last drip that makes the cup overflow.” He shakes his head. “There is something that makes Coca-Cola really formidable for us. Maybe it has to do with the sugar,” he says, laughing. “We are a very sweet culture.”
In fact, he may not be far off. Research by the Chiapas-based medical NGO Defensoría del Derecho a la Salud (Health Rights Defense) has found the taste for sugar is established at a very early age, with most women in indigenous villages serving their children soft drinks even below the age of three. “These three years in many ways define the future of the child, and it is when malnutrition and diabetes can be prevented,