The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [82]
The largest mountain in the hills encircling San Cris (as the municipality is known), Huitepec collects water from the rains that blow through the valley, then percolates the water through the volcanic soil and limestone into a huge underground aquifer that serves as the major municipal water source. The apparent abundance, however, is an illusion—hiding a chronic shortage of water that plagues the surrounding communities. “During the dry season there is huge water scarcity here,” says Erin Araujo, an American graduate student who has studied the water table, pausing for breath in a clearing near the top of the mountain. “Most people get their water only from the municipal water supply, and during the dry season all of the rain that replenishes the aquifer has dried up.” At those times, residents of San Cristóbal are rationed—some limited to only a few hours of water a day in outlying communities, even as residents in the city center are allowed twenty-four-hour, seven-day access.
Even more egregious to some residents is the presence of a Coca-Cola bottling plant on the other side of the mountain, which always seems to have enough water for its beverages. Coke’s presence at the foot of Huitepec dates back to the late 1980s, when it first established a bodega here. Soon Coca-Cola FEMSA moved its bottling operations to San Cristóbal from the state capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, to take advantage of the more abundant water supply there. By 1994, the plant was churning out five thousand cases a day, ramping up production year after year. By 2004, it had doubled that to ten thousand cases a day, serving not only the entire state of Chiapas, but also part of the neighboring state of Tabasco. By 2008, it was serving part of Oaxaca as well.
According to government statistics, the company has the right to extract up to 500 million liters a year from the aquifer—an amount translating to 1.37 million liters a day. Coca-Cola FEMSA denied a request for an interview, asking that questions be transmitted through the Coca-Cola Company, which in turn directed them back to Coca-Cola FEMSA. A company spokesperson, however, defended the company’s water usage to Laura Jordan, an American anthropologist who wrote her thesis on Coke and corporate social responsibility in the Highlands in 2008. The plant’s human resources director, Graciela Flores, told Jordan the company takes no more than 2 percent of the total water consumed by “all of San Cristóbal”—at the same time providing a number of well-paying jobs to the community.
Those who live in the vicinity of the plant, however, see things differently. On the other side of the mountain, the Coke plant squats in a massive gray installation beneath Huitepec’s bulk. On the rutted dirt road behind it, an elderly woman named María de la Asunción Gómez Carpio sells fried snacks to school kids. “The water here used to be very abundant, but all of the springs here dried up since the plant came here twenty years ago,” she says. Now she says residents in her neighborhood, which sits on one of the richest aquifers in Mexico, get water brought in by tanker trucks called pipas—pipes—at the cost of $240 pesos ($22) a month.
Asked about employment the company provides to locals, she laughs. “No, they don’t give employment to people with low education; you have to be educated to work there.” Meanwhile, she says, the company has refused requests for assistance in repairing the road behind the plant. “They provide no benefit. On the contrary, they take from us.” The story is repeated by several other residents in the vicinity of the plant, including Rosa María Reazola Estevané, who lives in a nice house at the top of the