The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [99]
When Chile first pulled into the parking lot on that spring day in 1996, he says, he saw González in the pickup motioning to him. “What is happening, Japonés?” he cried. Immediately, an agent walked up to him and grabbed him, slapping cuffs on him and throwing him into the truck. The three were driven to the local police station, where they were put in a jail cell and kept for three days before being arraigned before a judge. They listened in disbelief as the charges were read: terrorism and conspiracy to plant explosives. A witness wearing a mask—a practice at the time to protect identities—fingered them, saying he had seen them bringing bombs into the Coke plant by truck and planting them around the facility. As evidence, the prosecution showed pictures of the two supposed bombs found by the company the year before. Bail was denied, and they were taken to La Modelo, the medium-security federal prison in Bucaramanga.
That was the start of a six-month ordeal for the union leaders. In Colombia, the worst thing you can be is an accused terrorist. The three were mixed in with guerrillas, paramilitaries, and common criminals, all of whom thought they had masterminded a plot to blow up the factory. “We couldn’t trust anyone,” says González. “I would cry every day.” The whole block had only four bathrooms, which the unionists avoided anyway since they were frequently the site of attacks. “If you wanted to use the bathroom, you had to bring a soda pop bottle and a bag into your cell,” says Chile, who shared a four-by-six-foot cell with his best friend, Flores.
At the time, González’s daughter was only four years old, just beginning preschool. He used to bribe guards for admittance to a third-floor courtyard, where she could see him in the afternoons when his wife drove her home. On weekends, the daughters of all three prisoners stood in the street as they threw down notes wrapped around pieces of candy.
Life became more difficult for their families, as the three workers were fired from their jobs and stopped receiving income. When word came out about the accusations, their children were taunted by other children as terrorists, murderers, and worse. Eventually, they had to leave school for the year and began collecting cans on the street or begging for money from other workers at the plant. “Our friends would reject us and we didn’t have any food to eat,” says Chile’s daughter, twenty-year-old Laura Milena García, who has sat throughout the interview listening to her father and his friends talk about their suffering. She, too, breaks down crying, wiping her eyes as her voice falters.
Throughout the interview, Flores sits with his head in his hands for long stretches, periodically lifting up his glasses to wipe both eyes with one big hand as Chile talks for him. In all, the three spent 174 days in La Modelo before the case went to trial in August 1996, just a few months before Gil was shot dead in Carepa. When evidence was finally presented, however, the case started falling apart almost immediately. The only witness provided by the company was the masked one, whose statements about how and where the union members entered the plant were contradicted by dozens of workers and official company documents. Moreover, the masked witness constantly contradicted himself, leading a regional prosecutor to declare that he would need to have been in three different places at the same time to have seen everything he said he had. Prosecutors dismissed his testimony out of hand as completely false, ending the investigation and allowing the three unionists to go free.
Still, according