The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [89]
Tensions were running high when the union began negotiating a new labor contract in 1996, pushing for an ambitious pay raise of 35 percent within a year, along with increases in maternity leave, disability insurance, and life insurance, and a fund for sporting activities. Finally, there was a clause demanding increased security for workers and prohibitions on managers consorting with paramilitaries. As chief negotiator, the union tapped secretary-general Isidro Gil, the well-liked gatekeeper at the plant.
Born in a small town one hundred miles northeast of Carepa, Gil was the seventh of ten children. Even as a child, he’d been ambitious, always studying and selling the local newspaper on the side. Before he finished high school, he followed his older brother Martín to Urabá, marrying and raising two daughters. When Martín got a job in the administrative office of the Coca-Cola bottling plant, Isidro again followed him, finding work on the production line. After cutting his finger in a workplace accident, he moved to the front gate instead. Gil thrived at the plant, organizing weekend sports tournaments—soccer, volleyball, baseball—and inviting coworkers to fishing trips on the nearby river. Soon he was friends with everyone at the plant—or almost everyone. When he had a motorcycle accident on the way to work, he argued for a workers’ compensation payment from Milan, who refused to grant it.
On the day the company’s reply to the labor petition was due, December 5, Giraldo was talking with Gil at the front gate. The two of them watched nervously as a motorcycle pulled up in the driveway. “We’ll talk in a bit,” Giraldo said, quickly excusing himself and walking back toward the yard. He was only halfway there when the crack of a pistol rang out behind him. He turned just long enough to see Gil fall to the ground. Ice coursing through his veins, Giraldo broke into a run, even as he heard the shots continue to ring out behind him.
The union’s president, Hernán Manco, was working the packaging machine in the courtyard. He watched Gil’s head snap backward as he fell back toward the gatehouse. The killer’s pistol followed him down, firing point-blank into his jerking body. In all, he emptied ten bullets into his body—four more into his face, four into his heart, and one into his groin—as he lay lifeless on his right side, his head inside and feet outside the gate.
After the assassin walked casually back to his motorcycle and rode away, another worker, Adolfo Cardona, ran to the body. Cradling Gil’s head, he watched his friend’s skull come apart in his hands. Back in Carepa, Gil’s brother Martín received the news by phone. He immediately jumped on his own motorcycle and flew off to the plant, leaving so quickly he must have passed the assassins as they drove in the other direction. Arriving at the plant, he threw himself down on his brother’s body, crying and embracing Isidro. He was still there when investigators with the Fiscalía, the Colombian attorney general’s office, arrived to declare him dead.
As the machines stopped and the workers filed out into the yard, the workers stood paralyzed, not knowing if Gil’s murder was a personal vendetta or the beginning of a rampage against the union as a whole. At last it was Gil’s friend Cardona who volunteered to investigate. He was better known as “El Diablo” (The Devil), mostly as an honorary title after his father, who was “El Diablo,” too. But it also suited his headstrong personality.
Pedaling onto the highway on his bicycle, he ran into the paramilitaries almost immediately. “Cepillo wants to see you,” shouted a man pulling up alongside on a motorbike. Cardona started at the name of the known regional paramilitary commander. But he tried not to show fear. “Well, I need to speak to him, too,” he shouted. “Meet him at La Ceiba,” spat the paramilitary, naming a soda shop in the center of town.
Cardona followed the motorcycle into the crowded commercial district, past storefronts overflowing with cookware, CDs, knock-off T-shirts, and