The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [91]
“Our country, our resources, have been plundered by multinationals for over forty years now,” says Correa. And yet, far from reining in the power of big business in the country, he says, government has just facilitated the violence against people pressing for changes, branding them as guerrillas. “What the government has done is to say there are no social movements—only terrorists,” says Correa. He himself has received multiple death threats from paramilitaries and has been imprisoned several times as an accused guerrilla, each time found innocent. “My kids say kiddingly that walking with dad is like walking with a time bomb—you never know when something is going to happen,” he says. “But I can’t leave this struggle. The reality of the situation is that it’s better being in a union than being without one.”
In addition to the letter Correa and his fellow union leaders sent to Coca-Cola Colombia in 1995, a year before Gil’s murder, they followed up with requests to discuss the situation after the murder with Bebidas’s lawyer and with its majority shareholder, Richard Kirby. Both told the union they had nothing to say about the situation. Nor did the Coca-Cola Company itself, which later said it learned about the murder days after it occurred, but never provided support for the displaced workers.
Bebidas gave them money only for a plane ticket out of town, telling the workers they couldn’t provide them any pay since it was the fault of the paramilitaries, not of the company, that they had to flee. Soon thereafter, they were all terminated for “abandoning their place of work.” Since the day they had to flee Carepa, Manco and Giraldo have known little peace. “You have to leave your work, your family, your wife, your kids, your mom,” sighs Manco, who has the chiseled good looks of a movie star, now lined and weathered with age. “You are used to a tropical climate, and you come to a city where it’s really cold. You get old, you get tired.” Asked about his family, he rubs his face with the side of one of his big calloused hands. “I wasn’t able to bring my family here,” he says. “We’re separated now. [My wife] went with her family.”
Giraldo has fared little better, living now in a small town outside of Bogotá with his wife and four children and working occasional jobs as a doorman. “If I get enough money to buy some food, I don’t have enough money to pay bus fare,” he sighs. “If I get enough money to buy bus fare, I don’t have enough money to buy food.” Even so, violence has followed him. Five years after leaving Carepa, in 2001, Giraldo was grabbed by two men on a bus and forced to accompany them to a house where they threatened him at gunpoint. They finally let him go, but not before telling him, “The next time we find you, we’ll kill you.” Since then, both workers have lived in constant fear. “We don’t come out of the woodwork much,” says Giraldo. “You don’t know who might be waiting for you.”
Asked if either of them ever drink Coca-Cola, they both laugh, breaking the tension for a brief moment. Manco turns serious again. “No, we do not drink Coca-Cola. Cola-Cola is death,” he says. In the early days of the Coca-Cola Company, when a worker was particularly enthusiastic and loyal to the company, it was said he had “syrup in the veins.” Manco turns that exactly on its head: “Drinking Coca-Cola is like drinking the blood of the workers.”
Even while it remained silent at the time, the Coca-Cola Company has since vehemently denied any involvement in the violence against its workers in Colombia. “Conducting business in the current environment in Colombia is complex,” a company spokesman wrote several years later in a letter to the United Steelworkers Union in the United States. “The loss of life and human rights abuses we read, see, and hear about in some regions of the country are sadly all too frequent and very troubling.” Even so, he continues, “the recent allegations contending