The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [97]
After the initial spate of violence, the threats against the union subsided somewhat, but not before Galvis himself was subject to attack. He was driving home with his bodyguards in August 2003, when he turned the corner to find a man in the middle of the street pointing a pistol at the car. One of his bodyguards opened the door to shoot, and the man started firing. After a few exchanges of gunfire, the assailant drove off on his motorbike, and Galvis reported the incident to the police as an attempt on his life. He heard nothing until 2007 when the attorney general’s office informed him there was an investigation against him for making a false claim. According to police, witnesses reported that an armed robbery was taking place at the time, and the gunman shot at Galvis’s SUV only because his bodyguard pointed a gun at him. “I am being criminally investigated for being a victim,” he says. “It’s a great way for the government to demonstrate internationally that we make things up.”
In Colombia, making false charges is so common there is a name for it, montaje judicial—judicial setup. In the 1990s, the setups against union members and social activists were increasingly elaborate in the means they took to implicate the innocent. The charges against Galvis in Barranca, in fact, were mild compared with those against three union members fifty miles east in the city of Bucaramanga, in which Panamco bottling plant managers were directly involved.
In contrast to the beaten feel of SINALTRAINAL’s headquarters in Bogotá or the gallows humor of Barranca, the union hall in Bucaramanga recalls an armed bunker. The Colombian Central Labor Council—known by the Spanish acronym CUT—occupies the building with several affiliated unions, including two rooms for SINALTRAINAL. Going out for a breakfast of black coffee and arepas (corn meal pockets) with his colleagues, the local president, Nelson Pérez, casually sticks a pistol in the back of his pants. On the way, the union workers pass a non-union laborer in a red Coke shirt pushing a cart stacked with sixteen full crates of Coke bottles up a steep hill. Every muscle in his arms bulges as he strains to get the cart up the hill. “He’ll work a year before his back goes out,” says Álvaro González, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the company. “After that, he’ll end up selling fruit on the street.”
González should know, since, at forty-four, he spends most of his days at the Coke plant loading dock, lifting those fifty-pound crates onto and off of trucks. González’s smooth skin and slightly slanted eyes have given him the nickname “Japonés” among his coworkers. Skinny and smartly dressed in a checkered Tommy Hilfiger shirt, khaki pants, and leather loafers, he hardly looks like a manual laborer. Yet he started at the company at age eighteen as a janitor cleaning toilets, gradually moving up the ranks to syrup maker, he says, sitting down in a virtually barren room at the union hall to tell his story.
In the beginning, González had “syrup in the veins.” Excited to be working for the prestigious American company, he put even the most rabid collector of the Coca-Cola Collectors Club to shame. “I used to have Coca-Cola memorabilia all over my house, because I thought I worked at the best company in the world,” he says. “I had Coca-Cola socks, I had Coca-Cola shirts, I even had underwear with Coca-Cola on it. I never thought that I would think of the company in the way I think about it today.”
When he first started, he says, he was a “spoiled brat”—he came to work early and left late, drank on the job, and no one cared. But everything changed in 1990 when he first joined the union. “As soon as I joined the union and said ‘I think differently,’ my whole life changed.” First, his supervisor tried to talk him out of it, he says, offering him a higher-paid warehouse job if he’d reconsider. After the ELN burned ten Coca-Cola trucks in 1992, González says, his supervisors began actively harassing him, threatening to write him up and punish him whenever they saw him away