The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [92]
On at least one score, the company is right: The situation is complex. Because of the franchise system of bottling established by Asa Candler more than one hundred years before, Coke has devolved responsibility for its labor standards to its independent local bottlers. At the same time, in keeping with the vision of international harmony that is integral to its brand, the company has established a code of ethics for its bottlers, upholding freedom of association and freedom from violence. The question is not only how much Bebidas’s local managers aided paramilitaries in committing the violence against the union but also how much Atlanta knew about it and whether it did anything to stop it.
In its defense, the company says Gil’s murder was investigated by Colombian authorities, who ultimately dismissed charges against the bottler. On paper, at least, the investigation into Gil’s murder is impressive. The Fiscalía’s Human Rights Office opened an investigation just a week after the killing, and over the next few years conducted hundreds of man-hours of interviews with workers, officials, and witnesses in an attempt to bring the killers to justice and determine what role, if any, Coca-Cola’s bottling franchise played in the crime. On the first score—finding the actual killers—it came up spectacularly short. By the time officials determined the identity of “Caliche” as Ariel Gómez, he’d already been killed himself, gunned down in the street a few months after Gil’s murder. Cepillo, meanwhile, was identified as Enrique Vergara, a henchman of El Alemán, who had been involved in some of the country’s most notorious massacres, before disappearing without a trace.
Multiple witnesses attested to the fact that Milan had socialized with known paramilitaries. In addition, witnesses including two security guards and the plant’s head of human resources said that the plant’s chief of production, Rigoberto Marín, was also friendly with paramilitaries and known to hang out with them. According to the security guards, Marín let the paramilitaries into the plant, ordering them not to record the names in the visitors’ book kept at the gate.
By this time, both managers had fled the scene of the crime. Milan had resigned a week before Gil’s murder, citing “the health of my dear mother.” Marín left six months later, resigning for “personal reasons” in a tersely worded letter. Prosecutors with the Human Rights Office didn’t buy it. In September 1999, they issued an arrest warrant not only for Cepillo, but for Marín and Milan as well, declaring them under investigation for murder, terrorism, and kidnapping. The evidence “leaves not the slightest doubt that [Milan] and [Marín] were behind inducing and encouraging the paramilitary group to finish off the union organization at the company,” prosecutors wrote, saying their behaviors “demonstrate there was a preconceived plan . . . leading to the dissolution of the union.”
Both Milan and Marín declared their innocence, claiming that they’d never met with paramilitaries or threatened the union—in fact, they said, they’d been threatened by paramilitaries themselves. Milan said he had even agreed to pay money to the army post up the road in Apartadó, led by General Alejo del Río, for protection. Marín admitted that paramilitaries had entered the plant, but only to buy drinks; if they weren’t recorded in the logbook, it was simply because watchmen were afraid of them. Meanwhile, he claimed that he’d been called to a meeting with a regional paramilitary commander named “Pablo,” and been accused of collaborating with guerrillas himself.
With this new information, the Fiscalía reversed itself, releasing Marín from prison on June 19, 2000, on the grounds that it didn’t have sufficient