The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [84]
They came out of the jungle on New Year’s Day, 1994, wearing black ski masks and carrying assault rifles as they took control of the main square of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. For years, San Cris has been a laid-back tourist town, blending Maya and gringo culture in the cafés and street festivals. Now the tourists locked in their hotels had no idea what to make of the hooded revolutionaries in their midst. Finally, their leader identified himself as Subcomandante Marcos. His comrades, he said, were Zapatistas, after the revolutionary peasant leader Emiliano Zapata, and here to demand land and rights for the indigenous people. It was no accident that the revolutionaries appeared on the day the North American Free Trade Agreement was implemented in the United States and Mexico, since Zapatistas saw the free-trade deal as a continuation of the policies that had allowed privatization and sale of their land to ranching, mining, and natural gas interests.
While the Zapatistas stemmed from the Marxist revolutionaries once common in Latin America, they didn’t espouse the traditional communist ideology with a top-down command structure. Instead, they supported autonomous village groups that could stand outside Mexico’s notoriously corrupt political structure. After clashes with the army in which several hundred people—mostly Zapatistas—were killed, the group renounced violence. Soon the tourists came back, and in greater numbers, as the Zapatistas became a cause célèbre among lefty activists. Peace was short-lived, however, as the army raided several Zapatista bases, and paramilitary groups staged massacres in several villages known to sympathize with the rebels.
When Coca-Cola Kid Vicente Fox won the presidential election in 2000, he tried to negotiate with the Zapatistas, compromising on a new law to protect indigenous rights and demilitarize Chiapas. After the law had been weakened, however, Marcos rejected it as a joke and the Zapatistas went back to the jungles, where they’ve remained ever since. Strangely enough, while the Zapatistas have fought exploitation by other foreign multinationals—most recently drug companies they accuse of driving them off their land in search of new medicinal plants—they’ve had no problem with Coke. Even as Marcos has barred drugs and alcohol from rebel-controlled areas, he has encouraged consumption of Coca-Cola, whose trucks have reportedly been the only traffic allowed through the front lines during skirmishes with the army. “We have a way to get rid of Coke,” he once joked. “We will drink every last bottle.”
The revolutionary spirit the Zapatistas kicked off, however, has spurred others to take opposition against the Coca-Cola Company, especially in San Cristóbal, where Coke’s presence on Huitepec, the sacred mountain of the Maya, is too egregious for some to ignore. Since 2006, Zapatista rebels have manned a “peace camp” on Huitepec to guard its forest against cutting by logging interests. The real opposition to Coke, however, has come in the city, where a coalition of neighborhood groups under the acronym COCIDEP (Comité Ciudadano para la Defensa Popular) has protested the water rationing faced by residents of outlying neighborhoods, refusing to pay for water and illegally turning their water back on when the water company shut it off. The group has also argued that Coke’s consumption should be limited, especially during dry season when there is scarcity. “We know Coca-Cola is extracting massive amounts,” says César Morales, one of the group’s leaders, as he sits in the back room of a local café. “They don’t ask for public consent. All of the water is from underground—it’s the same—so when you open one well, it affects the whole community.”
Since Coke FEMSA has negotiated a twenty-year contract directly with the federal government, however, COCIDEP has had no legal say-so to limit the company’s extraction. Frustrated, the group