The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [95]
As in Urabá, however, that was about to change. “The threats started in 2001, when the graffiti started appearing inside the plant,” says Juan Carlos Galvis, SINALTRAINAL’s vice president, who works in the city. “Some mentioned me by name, saying Juan Carlos Galvis leave Coca-Cola, written right in the bathrooms.” Short and gregarious, with a sharp nose and intense beady eyes, Galvis arrives at the airport in a gray SUV with dark tinted windows driven by two bodyguards who stay with him at all times as he drives around town. As in Bogotá, the local union hall in Barrancabermeja (locally known as Barranca) is unlabeled and well protected with bulletproof doors, but the atmosphere here is more laid-back, with workers filing in and out, constantly cracking jokes, usually at one another’s expense.
Galvis’s easygoing demeanor fades as he sits down at the head of a long conference table, twisting two rings on his fingers as he talks. After he ignored the threats, he says, he began receiving calls at home, with the voice on the other end calling him a “son of a bitch unionist” and threatening to kill him. The callers knew where his children went to school, they said, and could act at any moment. While they didn’t realize it at first, the union workers were witnessing the beginning of a paramilitary takeover.
As Galvis talks, the metal door clangs open suddenly and the local president of the union, William Mendoza, enters, guffawing loudly at his version of a practical joke. He nonchalantly takes off his button-up shirt and removes a pistol from a shoulder holster, laying it on the table. Mendoza’s nickname is Cabezón (Big Head), he says with a smile, a name needing no further explanation. He’s been with the union eighteen years, working on the loading docks, and can remember back to a time when the plant was owned by a company called Indega, which enjoyed an uneasy truce with the union throughout the 1980s. At its high point in 1993, SINALTRAINAL had nearly two thousand members throughout the country.
That’s when the plant in Barranca was bought by a new company called Panamco, which had been operating in Colombia since 1945, gradually buying up most of the country’s bottling territory as well as expanding throughout other South American countries. Back in Atlanta, Coke CEO Doug Ivester was pursuing his “49 percent solution” to finally get the company’s bottlers under control. Coke acquired a 10 percent share in Panamco in 1993 that it increased to 15 percent by 1995 at a time when it declared Panamco its “anchor bottler” in South America, and 25 percent by 1997.
Over the years, Panamco consolidated seventeen plants in Colombia (leaving out three small bottlers, including Bebidas y Alimientos in Carepa), going heavily into debt in the process. Antiquated machinery and distribution systems at the new plants further drove up costs—to say nothing of the wages and benefits negotiated by the unions. Because Coke set the price of both the syrup that bottlers bought and the prices at which finished beverages could be sold, the company had few options to increase revenue other than to cut labor costs. Some 6,700 Coke workers were laid off nationally from 1992 to 2002, the vast majority at Panamco plants. In 2003, Panamco simply shut eleven of its seventeen plants, cutting contracts with its workers. That same year, it was acquired by Mexico’s Coca-Cola FEMSA to create a new Latin super-anchor bottler.
Even as SINALTRAINAL protested the job cuts, they were in little position to put up much of a fight, as they were increasingly targeted by the paramilitaries, who accused them of collaborating with guerrillas to burn and steal Coke trucks. Mendoza adamantly denies the union’s involvement