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has joined a local boycott of the company, urging its members to drink fruit juices and traditional indigenous beverages such as pozol. While boycotts of Coke may have worked for New York Jews in the 1960s or southern blacks in the 1980s, however, none of them had to contend with the cultural integration that Coke has achieved in Mexico. “We have Coca-Cola in our blood, and in our heart,” sighs Gustavo Castro, a leftist intellectual with bushy hair and a beard who has helped lead the boycott through his group Otros Mundos (Other Worlds). “You can talk about politics, but you put the idea of Coca-Cola on the table and it creates huge controversy. It’s so deeply a part of Mexican culture that we can’t question it.”

In Castro’s brightly colored office hang posters for various campaigns around water usage and health, including a sign poking fun at Coke with the slogan “Always Gastritis!” In theory, says Castro, a boycott could do real damage to the company. Castro and his colleagues have calculated that the communities around San Cristóbal spend some $50 million annually on Coke products. Getting people to make the connection between Coke and the affect on health and the environment, however, has been difficult. The boycott has fallen far short of its relatively modest goal to register ten thousand people.

Part of the problem with boycotting Coke is the lack of alternatives to the drink, especially in an area where local water supplies are commonly contaminated. Castro’s group tried to strike a deal with a Mexico City juice company whose beverage Boing! sells for 15 pesos for 1 liter (versus 10 or 11 pesos for a 2-liter Coke), but they were unable to come to an agreement that would bring prices down to a competitive level.

With the boycott in Chiapas failing to gather much steam, and the municipal government checkmated by federal law, at least one civil society organization is looking ahead to the future—the next generation. “The adults aren’t salvageable,” says Teresa Zepeda Torres, director of Alianza Cívica, which has campaigned to raise awareness of water issues. “The young people and adolescents are the ones who are going to have the problems, and they are the remedy for this, so it’s more important to talk with them.”

Zepeda’s office in San Cris is covered with brightly colored posters made by young people as part of a contest to draw attention to environmental issues. Even as they embrace campaigns against pollution and water conservation, however, Zepeda says that Coke consumption is difficult to broach. “We are trying to teach children what it does to their health—that it’s why they are so chubby,” she says. “When I talk about natural resources and the water cycle, the children are very receptive. They propose things. When I talk about Coca-Cola, however, that complicates things.”

Perhaps, in part, that’s because of the pouring-rights contracts that expose them to Coke products in schools. In Mexico, Coke has gone far beyond the advertising and exercise programs, to concentrate its CSR efforts on building schools themselves. In 1999, the Coca-Cola Foundation put $10 million toward creating the Coca-Cola Foundation/Mexico, which has partnered with government to build, at last count, eight day schools and four boarding schools throughout Chiapas. Of course, the foundation isn’t actually building the schools but rather putting up money toward their construction—generally 20 to 30 percent of their total cost. For a $180,000 boarding school, Coke donated $55,000; for a $680,000 secondary school, it put up $155,000.

As in the United States, that investment has often gone hand in hand with supporting the Coca-Cola Company’s goal to sell more soft drinks to kids. For one school in Huixtán, a dozen miles east of San Cris, the bottler prevailed upon the community store next door to exclusively sell Coca-Cola drinks, with a bright sign painted right next to the school. In other cases, it has splashed Coke logos all over school basketball courts behind the schools. In one, the backboards and foul circles are covered in