The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [86]
And some critics of the company see an even more sinister attempt at water privatization in Coke’s school-building operations. COMPITCH’s Juan Ignacio Domínguez alleges that Coca-Cola FEMSA has put its schools in communities with the richest water resources, even while it bypasses communities with greater needs that don’t have access to aquifers. “There are two communities where Coke proposed to bring a high school, and communities nearby don’t even have middle schools,” he says.
In Huixtán, according to a former town councilor, the company came back just a few weeks after the inauguration of the school in 2002 to request authorization for a small bottling plant in the village. The offer sparked intense debate, with a majority of residents afraid the company would deplete its water. When put to a vote, some 80 percent voted against the authorization. According to Domínguez, however, Coke had already requested the rights from two private landowners. When the town council found out, it protested, forbidding the sale. “They said, The water is public,” says Domínguez. “You have to ask everyone, and Coca-Cola didn’t want to go through that process.”
It’s nearly impossible to verify the story, which might be just another version of the European communist rumors of children’s hair turning white or the atomic bomb factory at the bottling plant. If nothing else, however, it shows the deep distrust some people in the area have of the multinational’s motives, even while it is ostensibly doing something positive for the community. Rumors such as these, however, have failed to turn the majority of people in Chiapas—much less Mexico—against Coca-Cola, which continues to see record growth throughout the country.
Just a few hundred miles south, however, another boycott has taken root, based on a more serious set of disputed facts. Conjuring the deadly history of Coke’s bottling plant workers in Guatemala, the campaign has rocked the company all the way to its headquarters in Atlanta.
SEVEN
“Syrup in the Veins”
Clouds shroud the windows of the fifty-seat turboprop flying to Apartadó, the capital of the Colombian region of Urabá on the Caribbean coast. As it rises to clear the crest of the mountains, suddenly sunshine breaks in through the clouds, revealing the dark green ridges of the surrounding Andes. It’s easy to see how the guerrillas who first appeared here in the 1960s were able to avoid capture for so long in this forested fortress. As the plane finally begins to descend, the color changes from forest green to a tropical shade of lime and suddenly acre after acre of banana plantations stretch in all directions.
The airport itself is surrounded by towers and fences topped with barbed wire. Just past the open-air parking lot, a bright red billboard sports the familiar hourglass silhouette of a Coke bottle. Printed over it are the words “El Lado Coca-Cola de Urabá”—The Coca-Cola Side of Urabá—a riff off Coke’s latest advertising slogan, “The Coca-Cola Side of Life.” Spurting out of the mouth of the bottle is a riot of birds, butterflies, and flowers, surrounded by multicolored splatters of paint. It’s an unfortunate irony that, in the present context, they look like nothing so much as splatters of blood.
On the road into Carepa, miles upon miles of banana trees speed past, their leaves splayed lazily in the sun. After twenty minutes, the town appears, choked with dust and clogged with a dozen cafés of concrete and corrugated steel, each advertising with a sign for Coca-Cola or its Colombian rival Postobón (distributed by PepsiCo). The Coca-Cola plant is a few hundred meters past the town center on a desolate stretch of highway.
Owned by a bottling company called Bebidas y Alimientos de Urabá, it was built relatively recently by Coke standards, beginning operations in 1979, around the same time that the banana processing plants run by United Fruit Company (which later became Chiquita) set up shop in the area. While the company initially