The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [88]
Even as the paramilitary violence was beginning in Urabá, the bottling plant in Carepa was struggling to survive, subsisting on personal loans from its majority shareholder, Richard Kirby, a businessman who split his time between Bogotá and Miami and owned significant interests in several other Coca-Cola bottling franchises in Colombia. Management responded by squeezing workers, forcing them to work sixteen-hour days and firing workers who had more seniority in order to save money on higher salaries and benefits, according to former workers at the plant.
The union at the time reluctantly went along with the changes, trying to eke out concessions where it could. In 1993, however, a new food and beverage union called SINALTRAINAL began to organize workers with a more militant strategy, taking a hard line in negotiations. Particularly vocal were two of the union’s new leaders, José Eleazar Manco and Luis Enrique Giraldo, who pushed management for higher wages and increased job security. By Colombian law, workers can be fired at will—unless they are members of a union executive council, who are protected against dismissal.
At the same time that SINALTRAINAL began making noise at the plant, paramilitary graffiti began appearing around town, and rumors circulated about trade unionists coming under attack in neighboring towns. Then, on April 8, 1994, Manco simply disappeared. Two weeks later, it was Giraldo’s turn. On April 20, 1994, his motorcycle was stopped on the way to work, and he was dragged into the woods and shot. “There was an investigation,” says his brother, Oscar Giraldo, interviewed at SINALTRAINAL’s headquarters in Bogotá, a nondescript building with a double-reinforced door in a residential neighborhood just outside the center of the city. “A couple of reports were written, but not much happened. My mother suffered a lot.” Over the next year, he and other union members started receiving death threats, culminating in the killing of another union leader, Luis Enrique Gómez, who was shot while drinking on his front stoop.
The company was silent about the murders, even as the remaining members of the executive council fled the region. With opposition gone, Bebidas pushed for more concessions from workers. “The company was always sucking the blood of workers, just work, work, work,” says Giraldo, who joined with some of his fellow employees to re-form the executive committee. The situation intensified with the arrival of a new manager at the plant, a man by the name of Ariosto Milan. In a small town where everyone knows everyone, workers say they began seeing Milan socializing with local paramilitaries, including the regional commander known as Cepillo (The Brush), a light-skinned man with jet-black hair and almond-shaped eyes, and his lieutenant Caliche (Saltpeter—the active component in gun powder), who was squat and harsh-faced with dark skin. On several occasions, workers say they saw Milan sharing Cokes with the paras at the kiosk outside the gates of the plant or drinking beers with them in bars around town.
Worse, they say, he began publicly boasting that he would “sweep away the union.” To one worker, he said the only reason the union “hasn’t been destroyed is [that] I haven’t wanted to destroy it yet.” Alarmed by the developments, SINALTRAINAL’s national leadership sent a letter to Bebidas and to Coca-Cola Colombia—a fully owned subsidiary of the Coca-Cola Company—in November 1995 protesting Milan’s associations and urging the company to provide protection