The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [93]
Of the more than 2,600 reported murders of trade unionists in the past twenty years, there have been fewer than a hundred convictions—most of those in the past few years. Much of that impunity can be traced to the political pressure prosecutors face. Right around the time of the Gil verdict, the power of the guerrillas was at its height, spawning a public backlash against any measures that seemed soft on terrorism. At the time, the attorney general’s office was increasingly exposing ties between the army and paramilitary forces. In July 2001, the Fiscalía even arrested General Alejo del Río—the man Milan says he turned to for help—and accused him of colluding with paramilitaries for years in joint military operations.
That same month, however, a new attorney general, Luis Camilo Osorio, sacked the head of the Human Rights Unit and purged prosecutors he said were overzealous in prosecuting paramilitaries. He overturned del Río’s detention, freeing him a month later. “Osorio did severe damage to the Fiscalía, and they have never really recovered from that,” says Adam Isacson, director of programs for the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank focusing on Colombia among other countries.
In addition to the allegations of ties to paramilitaries by the managers at the Carepa plant, there is other troubling evidence that Coke had a more than cozy relationship with paramilitary groups. Longtime National Public Radio reporter Steven Dudley—author of the definitive study of Colombia’s civil war, Walking Ghosts—has reported that paramilitaries have deliberately set up their bases near Coca-Cola bottling plants. And in 1999, Colombia’s respected magazine Cambio—the Colombian equivalent of Time—reported that officials with Coke bottler Panamco actually met with AUC head Carlos Castaño in August 1998 to negotiate free passage for Coke products in the Magdalena Medio, Colombia’s largest river.
At the time, paramilitaries under Ramón Isaza were demanding a tax for transporting Coke in the region; when Panamco refused to pay, they prohibited trucks from making deliveries for four months. In response, Panamco officials reached out to paramilitaries through a human rights group to arrange the secret meeting. Sitting down at an AUC camp outside the Colombian city of Montería, Castaño reportedly chastised Isaza for holding up the Coke trucks. “Ramón, we can’t turn into mercenaries against the multinationals,” he said. “Our objective is the guerrilla.” Isaza nodded without saying anything, but acquiesced to lifting the ban, after which the executives and paramilitaries shared a meal of chicken, rice, and Cokes.
On the one hand, the incident speaks well of Coke’s bottler that it held out against paying paramilitaries, who were then committing some of their most violent massacres under the orders of Castaño and Isaza. On the other, it’s shocking that the executives were secretly negotiating with a group that the Colombian government had declared illegal and the United States has since declared a foreign terrorist organization. “You didn’t hear about any other U.S. corporations meeting with Carlos Castaño,” says Isacson. “The question is, What did Coke in Atlanta know? Your bottlers are meeting with narcotraffickers to move your product, did this bother you at all?”
True, the company was caught between two conflicting groups in a complicated civil war that it had no role in creating. It’s possible that Coke’s executives—whether in Colombia or in Atlanta