The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink

by Michael Blanding

The company was silent about the murders, even as the remaining members of the executive council fled the region. With opposition gone, Bebidas pushed for more concessions from workers. “The company was always sucking the blood of workers, just work, work, work,” says Giraldo, who joined with some of his fellow employees to re-form the executive committee. The situation intensified with the arrival of a new manager at the plant, a man by the name of Ariosto Milan. In a small town where everyone knows everyone, workers say they began seeing Milan socializing with local paramilitaries, including the regional commander known as Cepillo (The Brush), a light-skinned man with jet-black hair and almond-shaped eyes, and his lieutenant Caliche (Saltpeter—the active component in gun powder), who was squat and harsh-faced with dark skin. On several occasions, workers say they saw Milan sharing Cokes with the paras at the kiosk outside the gates of the plant or drinking beers with them in bars around town.

  Worse, they say, he began publicly boasting that he would “sweep away the union.” To one worker, he said the only reason the union “hasn’t been destroyed is [that] I haven’t wanted to destroy it yet.” Alarmed by the developments, SINALTRAINAL’s national leadership sent a letter to Bebidas and to Coca-Cola Colombia—a fully owned subsidiary of the Coca-Cola Company—in November 1995 protesting Milan’s associations and urging the company to provide protection for workers. They received no response.

  Tensions were running high when the union began negotiating a new labor contract in 1996, pushing for an ambitious pay raise of 35 percent within a year, along with increases in maternity leave, disability insurance, and life insurance, and a fund for sporting activities. Finally, there was a clause demanding increased security for workers and prohibitions on managers consorting with paramilitaries. As chief negotiator, the union tapped secretary-general Isidro Gil, the well-liked gatekeeper at the plant.

  Born in a small town one hundred miles northeast of Carepa, Gil was the seventh of ten children. Even as a child, he’d been ambitious, always studying and selling the local newspaper on the side. Before he finished high school, he followed his older brother Martín to Urabá, marrying and raising two daughters. When Martín got a job in the administrative office of the Coca-Cola bottling plant, Isidro again followed him, finding work on the production line. After cutting his finger in a workplace accident, he moved to the front gate instead. Gil thrived at the plant, organizing weekend sports tournaments—soccer, volleyball, baseball—and inviting coworkers to fishing trips on the nearby river. Soon he was friends with everyone at the plant—or almost everyone. When he had a motorcycle accident on the way to work, he argued for a workers’ compensation payment from Milan, who refused to grant it.

  On the day the company’s reply to the labor petition was due, December 5, Giraldo was talking with Gil at the front gate. The two of them watched nervously as a motorcycle pulled up in the driveway. “We’ll talk in a bit,” Giraldo said, quickly excusing himself and walking back toward the yard. He was only halfway there when the crack of a pistol rang out behind him. He turned just long enough to see Gil fall to the ground. Ice coursing through his veins, Giraldo broke into a run, even as he heard the shots continue to ring out behind him.

  The union’s president, Hernán Manco, was working the packaging machine in the courtyard. He watched Gil’s head snap backward as he fell back toward the gatehouse. The killer’s pistol followed him down, firing point-blank into his jerking body. In all, he emptied ten bullets into his body—four more into his face, four into his heart, and one into his groin—as he lay lifeless on his right side, his head inside and feet outside the gate.

  After the assassin walked casually back to his motorcycle and rode away, another worker, Adolfo Cardona, ran to the body. Cradling Gil’s head, he watched his friend’s skull come apart in his hands. Back in Carepa, Gil’s brother Martín received the news by phone. He immediately jumped on his own motorcycle and flew off to the plant, leaving so quickly he must have passed the assassins as they drove in the other direction. Arriving at the plant, he threw himself down on his brother’s body, crying and embracing Isidro. He was still there when investigators with the Fiscalía, the Colombian attorney general’s office, arrived to declare him dead.

  As the machines stopped and the workers filed out into the yard, the workers stood paralyzed, not knowing if Gil’s murder was a personal vendetta or the beginning of a rampage against the union as a whole. At last it was Gil’s friend Cardona who volunteered to investigate. He was better known as “El Diablo” (The Devil), mostly as an honorary title after his father, who was “El Diablo,” too. But it also suited his headstrong personality.

  Pedaling onto the highway on his bicycle, he ran into the paramilitaries almost immediately. “Cepillo wants to see you,” shouted a man pulling up alongside on a motorbike. Cardona started at the name of the known regional paramilitary commander. But he tried not to show fear. “Well, I need to speak to him, too,” he shouted. “Meet him at La Ceiba,” spat the paramilitary, naming a soda shop in the center of town.

  Cardona followed the motorcycle into the crowded commercial district, past storefronts overflowing with cookware, CDs, knock-off T-shirts, and plastic kids’ toys imported from Panama. Pedaling up to the shop, he saw seven or eight tough-looking men sitting at the outside tables. In a moment, the local paramilitary lieutenant, a squat, unattractive man named Caliche, drove up. El Diablo went on the offensive. “I need to meet Cepillo,” he said. Caliche shrugged, saying the commander was across town washing up, but would be there shortly.

  As Cardona waited, he says, a white Toyota minibus pulled up. Seeing the face of the driver, Cardona went numb. Around Urabá, that car was known as the “Pathway to Heaven.” People got in and never got out. Oh my God, they are going to kill me, he thought, eyes quickly darting from side to side in an attempt to find some line of escape. That was when he saw the two men who had shot Gil coming out of the shop. “Hey, man, you come with me,” one of them said. Cardona began to move in the direction he indicated, looking to put a little distance between himself and the minibus.

  When he had a little opening, he took it. “Catch me if you can!” he yelled, starting to sprint down the street in the direction of the police station two blocks away. Expecting bullets to hit him any moment, he saw a banana waste truck parked up on the sidewalk next to a billiards hall, and ducked behind it. He watched as Caliche parked his motorcycle on the opposite side of the truck --between him and the police station—sending another man around the back. At that moment, El Diablo ran again, narrowly skirting by Caliche as he tried to grab his shirt. “Son of a bitch!” Cardona screamed, running down the street in a zigzag pattern so he’d be more difficult to shoot. “Why are you running?” yelled a startled friend as he careened past. “Can’t you see, these sons of bitches are going to kill me!” he screamed back as he ran for the safety of the police station.

  Meanwhile at the plant, the union leaders waited in vain for their friend to return. Finally, word came that he had been seen at his house escorted by police, staying just long enough to get a suitcase. (He eventually fled to Bogotá, and later the United States, where he currently lives in asylum in Detroit.) As the unionists took in this information, a company representative emerged to say Bebidas would buy plane tickets for anyone who wanted to leave town tomorrow. As they dispersed to spend a sleepless night, the paramilitaries were busy breaking into the union hall in a cramped neighborhood across town. They grabbed the typewriter and petty cash before burning the hall to the ground.

  The next day, a friend appeared at the hiding place of union president Hernán Manco, to summon him to La Ceiba before he could go to the airport. He went to the soda shop resigned to die. As he climbed the stairs, the gate rattled shut behind him. Sitting at a table in the dark bar was Cepillo. “That kid was murdered at the plant because of you,” said Cepillo. “The burning of the union hall was because of you. Tomorrow we are going to have a meeting at the plant,” he continued. “Anyone who doesn’t want
to resign, well, we’re not responsible for what happens.” Addressing Manco directly, he added, “Since you are the president of the union, I don’t ever want to see you again.”

  Manco didn’t need to hear more. He and Giraldo headed to the airport to fly to Bogotá along with several other executive committee members. The rest of the workers assembled at the plant the next day to find the yard full of paramilitaries, including Caliche. They passed out prepared resignation letters, and one by one the workers signed them. In all, forty-five members signed letters or fled town. The union was finished.

  The destruction of the union in Carepa wasn’t an isolated occurrence—at least not in the minds of the union leaders. “From the beginning Coca-Cola took a stand to not only eliminate the union but to destroy its workers,” says Javier Correa, SINALTRAINAL’s national president, speaking in the union’s Bogotá headquarters. Short and serious with short-cropped dark hair, he talks in almost a monotone, a stoic expression on his pock-marked face. As unions go, SINALTRAINAL is unapologetically militant, pushing for wholesale changes in the state laws to protect people and the environment.

  “Our country, our resources, have been plundered by multinationals for over forty years now,” says Correa. And yet, far from reining in the power of big business in the country, he says, government has just facilitated the violence against people pressing for changes, branding them as guerrillas. “What the government has done is to say there are no social movements—only terrorists,” says Correa. He himself has received multiple death threats from paramilitaries and has been imprisoned several times as an accused guerrilla, each time found innocent. “My kids say kiddingly that walking with dad is like walking with a time bomb—you never know when something is going to happen,” he says. “But I can’t leave this struggle. The reality of the situation is that it’s better being in a union than being without one.”

  In addition to the letter Correa and his fellow union leaders sent to Coca-Cola Colombia in 1995, a year before Gil’s murder, they followed up with requests to discuss the situation after the murder with Bebidas’s lawyer and with its majority shareholder, Richard Kirby. Both told the union they had nothing to say about the situation. Nor did the Coca-Cola Company itself, which later said it learned about the murder days after it occurred, but never provided support for the displaced workers.

  Bebidas gave them money only for a plane ticket out of town, telling the workers they couldn’t provide them any pay since it was the fault of the paramilitaries, not of the company, that they had to flee. Soon thereafter, they were all terminated for “abandoning their place of work.” Since the day they had to flee Carepa, Manco and Giraldo have known little peace. “You have to leave your work, your family, your wife, your kids, your mom,” sighs Manco, who has the chiseled good looks of a movie star, now lined and weathered with age. “You are used to a tropical climate, and you come to a city where it’s really cold. You get old, you get tired.” Asked about his family, he rubs his face with the side of one of his big calloused hands. “I wasn’t able to bring my family here,” he says. “We’re separated now. [My wife] went with her family.”

  Giraldo has fared little better, living now in a small town outside of Bogotá with his wife and four children and working occasional jobs as a doorman. “If I get enough money to buy some food, I don’t have enough money to pay bus fare,” he sighs. “If I get enough money to buy bus fare, I don’t have enough money to buy food.” Even so, violence has followed him. Five years after leaving Carepa, in 2001, Giraldo was grabbed by two men on a bus and forced to accompany them to a house where they threatened him at gunpoint. They finally let him go, but not before telling him, “The next time we find you, we’ll kill you.” Since then, both workers have lived in constant fear. “We don’t come out of the woodwork much,” says Giraldo. “You don’t know who might be waiting for you.”

  Asked if either of them ever drink Coca-Cola, they both laugh, breaking the tension for a brief moment. Manco turns serious again. “No, we do not drink Coca-Cola. Cola-Cola is death,” he says. In the early days of the Coca-Cola Company, when a worker was particularly enthusiastic and loyal to the company, it was said he had “syrup in the veins.” Manco turns that exactly on its head: “Drinking Coca-Cola is like drinking the blood of the workers.”

  Even while it remained silent at the time, the Coca-Cola Company has since vehemently denied any involvement in the violence against its workers in Colombia. “Conducting business in the current environment in Colombia is complex,” a company spokesman wrote several years later in a letter to the United Steelworkers Union in the United States. “The loss of life and human rights abuses we read, see, and hear about in some regions of the country are sadly all too frequent and very troubling.” Even so, he continues, “the recent allegations contending that the Coca-Cola Company has resorted to illegal and reprehensible tactics in the conduct of its business in Colombia are untrue. Accordingly, the Coca-Cola Company adamantly denies these serious violations regarding human rights violations in Colombia, and does not condone such practices anywhere in the Coca-Cola system.”

  On at least one score, the company is right: The situation is complex. Because of the franchise system of bottling established by Asa Candler more than one hundred years before, Coke has devolved responsibility for its labor standards to its independent local bottlers. At the same time, in keeping with the vision of international harmony that is integral to its brand, the company has established a code of ethics for its bottlers, upholding freedom of association and freedom from violence. The question is not only how much Bebidas’s local managers aided paramilitaries in committing the violence against the union but also how much Atlanta knew about it and whether it did anything to stop it.

  In its defense, the company says Gil’s murder was investigated by Colombian authorities, who ultimately dismissed charges against the bottler. On paper, at least, the investigation into Gil’s murder is impressive. The Fiscalía’s Human Rights Office opened an investigation just a week after the killing, and over the next few years conducted hundreds of man-hours of interviews with workers, officials, and witnesses in an attempt to bring the killers to justice and determine what role, if any, Coca-Cola’s bottling franchise played in the crime. On the first score—finding the actual killers—it came up spectacularly short. By the time officials determined the identity of “Caliche” as Ariel Gómez, he’d already been killed himself, gunned down in the street a few months after Gil’s murder. Cepillo, meanwhile, was identified as Enrique Vergara, a henchman of El Alemán, who had been involved in some of the country’s most notorious massacres, before disappearing without a trace.

  Multiple witnesses attested to the fact that Milan had socialized with known paramilitaries. In addition, witnesses including two security guards and the plant’s head of human resources said that the plant’s chief of production, Rigoberto Marín, was also friendly with paramilitaries and known to hang out with them. According to the security guards, Marín let the paramilitaries into the plant, ordering them not to record the names in the visitors’ book kept at the gate.

  By this time, both managers had fled the scene of the crime. Milan had resigned a week before Gil’s murder, citing “the health of my dear mother.” Marín left six months later, resigning for “personal reasons” in a tersely worded letter. Prosecutors with the Human Rights Office didn’t buy it. In September 1999, they issued an arrest warrant not only for Cepillo, but for Marín and Milan as well, declaring them under investigation for murder, terrorism, and kidnapping. The evidence “leaves not the slightest doubt that [Milan] and [Marín] were behind inducing and encouraging the paramilitary group to finish off the union organization at the company,” prosecutors wrote, saying their behaviors “demonstrate there was a preconceived plan . . . leading to the dissolution of the union.”

  Both Milan and Marín declared their innocence, claiming that they’d never met with paramilitaries or threatened the union—in fact, they said, they�
�d been threatened by paramilitaries themselves. Milan said he had even agreed to pay money to the army post up the road in Apartadó, led by General Alejo del Río, for protection. Marín admitted that paramilitaries had entered the plant, but only to buy drinks; if they weren’t recorded in the logbook, it was simply because watchmen were afraid of them. Meanwhile, he claimed that he’d been called to a meeting with a regional paramilitary commander named “Pablo,” and been accused of collaborating with guerrillas himself.

  With this new information, the Fiscalía reversed itself, releasing Marín from prison on June 19, 2000, on the grounds that it didn’t have sufficient evidence to prove he was behind the violence. Six months later, prosecutors closed the investigation into Gil’s death. The outcome was deeply disturbing to Gil’s surviving family and union colleagues. But it is typical of the Colombian justice system, says Dora Lucy, an attorney with the Bogotá-based José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective, which has worked to combat impunity for paramilitaries. “There are a great number of cases where there will be all this conclusive evidence, but then the Fiscalía will say there’s not enough, so we are going to have to close the case.”

  Of the more than 2,600 reported murders of trade unionists in the past twenty years, there have been fewer than a hundred convictions—most of those in the past few years. Much of that impunity can be traced to the political pressure prosecutors face. Right around the time of the Gil verdict, the power of the guerrillas was at its height, spawning a public backlash against any measures that seemed soft on terrorism. At the time, the attorney general’s office was increasingly exposing ties between the army and paramilitary forces. In July 2001, the Fiscalía even arrested General Alejo del Río—the man Milan says he turned to for help—and accused him of colluding with paramilitaries for years in joint military operations.