The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [96]
Even as the graffiti attacking the company intensified around town, Panamco provided water and soft drinks to paramilitary protests against guerrillas in the area. According to Mendoza and Galvis, company officials met directly with a member of the AUC inside the plant. Shortly after the city was taken over by paramilitaries, a former union member named Saúl Rincón reached out to Mendoza, offering to set up a meeting with a paramilitary commander to strike a deal—be a quiet union and don’t cause any trouble, they were told, and they’d be spared any violence. After they rejected the offer, sure enough, Galvis saw Rincón inside the company talking with the head of sales a few months later. Eventually, he was arrested and convicted for conspiracy in the murder of a leader of the oil workers’ union in March 2002. As he was sent to prison, he was identified as a member of the Central Bolívar Bloc of the AUC.
Meanwhile, in 2002, the threats against Galvis and other members of the union began to intensify. Galvis contacted the secret police, known as the DAS, which provided him with a security detail—but applied only to him, not to members of his family. Men began harassing his wife on the street, blocking her way and telling her they’d kill her husband. In 2002, when she was pregnant with their second child, says Galvis, a motorcycle blocked her way, shining a light in her face. Riding the bike was the paramilitary commander in Barrancabermeja, who threatened to kill her—and then her husband.
Galvis looks down at his hands, spread out on the glass top of the table, and absently twists his rings. “I felt impotent, because you are totally in their hands,” he says. The threats on his family were the worst, he says. His wife began demanding he leave the union, and when he refused, the stress on their marriage was too much, exacerbating existing problems and forcing the couple apart. “We never could reach an agreement on that. I always said no,” he says.
Galvis isn’t the only one whose family members have been threatened. In the summer of 2002, several men tried to pull Mendoza’s four-year-old daughter, Karen, out of her mother’s arms. The following day, claims Mendoza, he got a call on his cell phone. “You son-of-a-bitch guerrilla, you are really lucky,” the caller menaced. “We were going to kill your girl and return her to you in a plastic bag.” He continued, claims Mendoza, by directly linking his actions with the union. “You are speaking out against what we do in Barrancabermeja and the alliance we have with Coca-Cola. And if you continue to do that we are going to murder one of the members of your family.” Mendoza reported the incident to the authorities, and a human rights organization came back with an offer of asylum in Switzerland, which Mendoza declined.
Nevertheless, he couldn’t sleep for a month after the attempted abduction of his daughter. “This is an innocent life and she is already getting death threats,” he says quietly. “My wife said she got attacked because of what I do. It destroyed our relationship.” Mendoza’s wife eventually left him, as Galvis’s had left Galvis, but Mendoza retained custody of their daughter, who is now ten. He sends her to school with bodyguards and forbids her to go outside. “Sometimes she asks me why she can’t go out and play like a normal girl,” he says. “But it would destroy me as a person