The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [83]
From the looks of things, the company isn’t just taking—it’s also leaving a foul-smelling stream that flows from one side of the plant. In the central Mexican state of Tlaxcala, the outspoken mayor of the town of Apizaco, Reyes Rúiz, accused Coke of polluting the land with a milky effluent that killed trees in a river a short way from the plant. In addition, as in San Cristóbal, he has accused Coke of decreasing the local aquifer and drying up farmland. FEMSA has denied the charges, pointing out that it stays within the 450 million gallons allowed by the National Water Commission, and that the plant accounts for less than 1 percent of the total water usage in the region. “We comply with the law,” Marco Antonio Dehesa, project engineer with Coca-Cola FEMSA, repeatedly told researchers with the American nonprofit Grassroots International.
For all of the water that it takes from communities such as Apizaco and San Cristóbal, however, Coca-Cola FEMSA pays them nothing for the privilege. That’s because the company has negotiated contracts for the water extraction directly with the federal government in Mexico City, thanks to a law passed with the help of a former Coke executive who happened to be Mexico’s president. Whatever influence Coke has had with U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Carter, Coke FEMSA surpassed it in the unprecedented access to the halls of power it had through former Mexican president Vicente Fox. Back in the 1970s, Fox was director general of Coca-Cola Mexico, a division of the Coca-Cola Export Corporation that is fully owned by the Coca-Cola Company; during his tenure, he boosted Coke’s sales to topple Pepsi as the nation’s best-selling soft drink.
“Working at Coca-Cola was my second university education,” Fox told The New York Times in 1999. “I learned strategy, marketing, financial management, optimization of resources. I learned not to accept anything but winning.” Nicknamed “The Coca-Cola Kid” during his campaign, Fox used focus groups and heavy television advertising he learned from his Coke days to win. He also drew heavily upon his former Coke connections, including hiring a former Coke executive as his finance director who raised millions from Coke bottlers and other businesses to put him on top. After he became president in 2000, Fox had no compunction about helping out his former employer. He appointed another former Coke director general, Cristóbal Jaime Jáquez, national water commissioner; together, they pushed privatization of much of the country’s water network and sold extraction rights directly to big agribusiness and other corporations.
Coca-Cola FEMSA, the anchor bottler in Mexico and the owner of the Chiapas plant, was one of the big winners of the new policy, according to an investigative news report in 2003. In all, FEMSA negotiated twenty-seven concessions to extract water from aquifers and rivers, along with another eight concessions to dump waste in public waters. For all of these, it paid a reported $29,000 in U.S. dollars—a pittance compared with its $650 million in annual profits. According to San Cristóbal’s former right-wing mayor, Victoria Olvera, the company has continued to pay next to nothing for the community’s water, with an outlay of only 1.75 million pesos ($150,000) annually—or as little as three-hundredths of a cent per liter—to the federal government. “Nothing for the municipality. Nothing,” Olvera told anthropologist Jordan. “They say, ‘We generate employment. ’ But there is not as much employment as the damage they cause us, and they could be doing us so much good if they could pay that tax.”
Even more than its effect on health of the local community, resentment over water use has turned many in the environs of San Cristóbal against the company, making it a symbol of greed in an environment already hostile to American capitalism. Like France in the 1950s,