The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [98]
Without warning, González breaks down and starts crying. He grabs for a roll of toilet paper on the table, dabbing at his eyes. “This is just so difficult to talk about,” he says. “They made our life impossible. To talk about this I live it again.” The montaje judicial that made González’s life a living hell started in the spring of 1994, just a year after the Coca-Cola Company had acquired a minority ownership in the company.
That morning, he says, federal agents from DAS showed up at work and ordered González and two fellow members of the union executive council to strip naked in the locker room and lie on the floor. As the head of security Alejo Aponte looked on, they rummaged through their lockers, telling them there had been a reported bomb threat.
Over the next two years, according to González, the harassment increased. One day in May 1995, Aponte called a company-wide meeting to show workers a device he said was a bomb, which he said he found underneath the carbonation tank. He showed workers another spot where a bomb allegedly did detonate, even though González says there was no visible damage at the spot.
Finally, on March 6, 1996, seven months before Isidro Gil was to be killed in Carepa, the last part of the plan was sprung. González was having lunch at the company cafeteria at the end of his shift when his fellow worker and union leader Domingo Flores returned from his job as a delivery driver. Just as he came up to the gate and called to his friend, four men came up behind Flores and jumped on top of him, wrestling his arms behind him. González watched helplessly from the other side of the fence while Flores screamed—“They are going to disappear me, they are going to kill me!”
At the time, forced disappearances were also common in the Magdalena Medio, and the executive committee of the union had been holding trainings to prepare for them. That was fresh in Flores’s mind when he was grabbed, he says when interviewed a few hours later in the same room. Arriving right from work, he is still wearing the dark green pants and red Coke shirt that bunches over his belly, a feature that has given him the union nickname Gordito—that is, “Fatty” (which in Spanish is more of a term of endearment than in English). Square rimless glasses sit on his dark, round face. Almost immediately, tears well up behind them as he talks, trickling down rough cheeks after he refuses the roll of toilet paper.
“I told them they were going to have to kill me, that I wouldn’t be taken alive,” he says. “That’s when they started beating me.” The agents tried to handcuff him but could get a cuff around only one wrist; it bit into his skin as they dragged him along the parking lot, spilling blood. As Flores was being dragged toward a waiting pickup truck, González says he ran to the manager, who went out to talk to the uniformed agents, and motioned for González to join him. As soon as he left the plant, however, González, too, was jumped from behind by two men and pushed roughly against the fence. Standing there afraid, González felt a hot trickle of piss run down his leg and into his shoe. As the men dragged him across the parking lot to the truck, he stamped his damp sock in a futile attempt to get it out. Thrown into the pickup along with Flores, González shouted at the top of his lungs for anyone who could hear him to call a human rights group. “Shut up!” Flores yelled at him. “You are just making it harder on us.” “Fuck that.” González hissed. “We haven’t done anything wrong. If they want to kill us, they can kill us right here.”
As the two sat arguing, another delivery driver and fellow union leader, Luis Eduardo García, pulled into the parking lot. García has worked at the company for thirty years, starting as a driver in 1978. For the last twenty years, he and Flores have been best friends. Both fifty-three, they share the same delivery route and even share an e-mail address. The two are an odd couple, García skinny where Flores is chubby, and fiery where Flores is gentle. When he began working at the company,