[Ciepac-i] Chiapas Today 555: Coca Cola, the Antisocial and Psychopathic Corporation (2/3)
 
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:20:59 -0500 (CDT)


"Chiapas Today" Bulletin No. 555
CIEPAC; CHIAPAS, MIXICO

COCA COLA, THE ANTISOCIAL AND PSYCHOPATHIC CORPORATION
PART 2 OF 3
Miguel Pickard - 17-Jan-2008 -  num.555
CIEPAC, San Cristsbal de Las Casas, Chiapas

Labor Problems

Corporate illegalities are rife throughout the economy. Many major
corporations engage in unlawful behavior, and some are habitual
offenders with records that would be the envy of even the most prolific
human criminals. [Bakan, p.75]

The campaign to boycott Coca Cola was motivated primarily by antiunion
activities and murders at the corporation's bottlers. Most of the labor
problems occurred in Colombia. Unions in several countries accused Coca
Cola and the Mexican corporation FEMSA - owner of six bottlers in
Colombia - of contracting with paramilitaries to kill union activists.
The accusations were brought formally in courts in the United States,
where a judge decided that the corporate headquarters - that is, Coca
Cola in Atlanta - was not responsible for the possible criminal
activities of its bottlers around the world. He did, however, accept a
suit against FEMSA for violating the human rights of its workers.

The judge's finding infuriated human rights and labor activists, as the
corporate headquarters maintains "complete control" over its bottlers
[Collingsworth] through its exclusive provision of the concentrated
syrup used to make the soft drink. Especially in the case of the bottler
FEMSA, the corporate headquarters controlled 31.6% of its stock and had
directors on its Board of Directors. Logic would have called for
prosecuting the headquarters along with FEMSA. FEMSA did not respond to
requests for information on this subject.

The relationship between Coca Cola and paramilitary assassins has a long
history. In December 1996, two paramilitaries on a motorcycle drove up
to the Coca Cola bottler in the department of Uraba and shot union
worker Segundo Gil ten times, killing him instantaneously. That night
the union office was vandalized and burned. The following week the
paramilitaries returned to the bottling company and demanded that 60
workers sign a resignation letter to the union. Afterwards the bottler
fired all of the workers, including those who weren't unionized. After
the murder of Gil, his wife spent four years seeking justice and
compensation from Coca Cola. Then, in 2000, she was also murdered by
paramilitaries, leaving her two daughters as orphans.

The killing of Gil and his wife were probably the bloodiest in Coca
Cola's history, but they weren't the only ones. At least nine workers in
different Coca Cola bottling plants, all unionists, have been
assassinated by Colombian paramilitaries since 1989. According to
accusations presented in court, the paramilitaries maintained a presence
at several Coca Cola bottling plants, interfering with workers' rights
to freely affiliate with a union. The lawyers defending the workers'
rights denounced the recurrent and "systematic intimidation, kidnapping,
detention, and assassination of unionists in Colombiaand asserted that
the Coca Cola bottlers contracted withor directed paramilitary forces
that used extreme violence and assassinated, tortured, and illegally
detained orsilenced union leaders in the Food Industry union
(SINALTRAINAL). Javier Correa, president of SINALTRAINAL, said that
"from the beginning Coca Cola was determined not just to eliminate the
union but also to destroy the workers." [Blanding]

Labor rights activists put pressure on Coca Cola headquarters to
undertake an independent investigation of the murders in Colombia. A
spokesperson for the International Fund of Labor Rights asserted that
"there is no doubt that [the headquarters of] Coca Cola knew about and
benefited from the systematic repression of union rights at bottlers in
Colombia." Moreover, the director of the plant in Carepa (where Segundo
Gil died) publicly announced that he had "ordered" the paramilitaries to
destroy the union. [Leech] But the response from Coca Cola was tepid.
After finally announcing in 2003 that the corporation would investigate
labor relations in Colombia, the executive president ordered a halt to
the investigation. In the long run, that decision became a "public
relations nightmare." [Wikipedia]

For years, Coca Cola maneuvered to avoid an independent investigation in
Colombia. It formed several "commissions" to investigate the facts.
These efforts fell apart when the commissions were denounced for
including as members people linked to the corporation. Later, in 2006,
the corporation tried to improve its image by announcing that it had
asked the International Labor Organization (ILO) of the United Nations
to undertake an investigation in Colombia. However, the Australian
newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald reported in June of 2007 that
high-ranking directors in the Coca Cola Company "had repeatedly lied
about its commitment to the ILO to undertake an investigation of
previous and current labor practices in Colombia." Spokespeople for the
ILO declared that the ILO "is not undertaking an investigation, but
rather an evaluation of current labor conditions." [Polaris Institute]

The list of Coca Cola's violations of labor codes and complicity in
ignoring workers' rights is not limited to Colombia. It includes
allowing its major supplier of sweetener in El Salvador to hire children
to work in the dangerous sugar harvest [Thomas, video 3/5]; using
"blacklists" in Argentina to persecute and repress workers struggling
for labor rights (ANRed-L); and engaging in massive firings of workers
in Nicaragua [Giorgio], the United States [Morris], Argentina [ANRed-L],
Pakistan, Guatemala, and Russia, among other countries [Morris, Zacune].

A celebrated case in Mexico in 2005 involved a mechanical engineer who
had worked at FEMSA for more than seven years and was fired because of
his sexual preference. A supervisor even said "no one who is a
homosexual will remain under my management as long as I am a director of
human resources." [Sicilia] It is significant but not surprising that
FEMSA's "code of ethics" says that "no one will be discriminated against
because of gender, civil status, age, religion, race, physical capacity,
political preference, or social class," [FEMSA] but fails to mention
sexual preference as a basis for discrimination that is protected from
dismissal. FEMSA did not respond to requests for information on this
subject.

According to the Anthropological Association in the United States, there
are "academic studies" showing that "the Coca Cola Company" has not been
sufficiently proactive in protecting its workers and their families from
intimidation and violence and has not respected the internationally
recognized right to form unions. Consequently the Association supports
the Colombian union SINALTRAINAL in its call for a boycott of the
corporation and its products until it negotiates in good faith with its
workers." [American Anthropological Association] An academic at American
University endorsed the conclusions of the Anthropological Association:
"Coca Cola has a long history of virulent anti-unionism. It is
calculating in generally timing its [violence against workers] to
periods during which contractual negotiations are going on." [Blanding]

Environmental Problems

Only pragmatic concern for its own interests and the laws of the land
constrain the corporation's predatory instincts, and often that is not
enough to stop it from destroying lives, damaging communities, and
endangering the planet as a whole...the corporation's built-in
compulsion to externalize its costs is at the root of many of the
world's social and environmental ills. That makes the corporation a
profoundly dangerous institution. [Bakan, p.60-61]

At a time when water is increasingly scarce, Coca Cola has been
criticized for the excessive use of water at its bottling plants.
Several estimates have been made regarding how much water is required to
make a liter of the soft drink. Figures from FEMSA in San Cristsbal,
Chiapas indicate that "the optimal amount, or goal, is 2.1;" that is to
say, "it takes 2.1 liters of water for each liter of the soft drink that
is bottledalthough normally the daily or monthly figures are 2.2 to
2.4." [Castro, part 10] Other sources from the same company suggest the
figure is nearly 3.2 liters, but an academic study on the use of water
in the river basin where the plant is located [Garcia] estimates that
5.47 liters of water are used for each liter of Coca Cola produced.
According to Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist in India, nine
liters of water are required to produce one liter of Coca Cola in her
country. [Wikipedia] Other estimates are even higher: "the great
problem," according to Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), "is
that for each liter of Coca Cola, 175 to 200 liters of water are
required." [MinutoUno]

In any case, the environmental impact of bottlers on their surrounding
communities because of their excessive use of water is significant. In
Mexico since 2000, Coca Cola has negotiated 27 water concessions with
the government, 19 to extract water from aquifers and 15 to draw from
rivers, some of which belong to indigenous peoples. Eight concessions
allow for the dumping of industrial waste in public waters. To
facilitate the process of extracting water and dumping waste, the
government of ex-president Vicente Fox, "with the aid of the World Bank,
successfully pushed for the privatization of water as part of a large
scale program to privatize land, in order to allow private companies to
have access to all of the land's resources, including water." [Bell]

To examine the environmental effects of the bottlers, one can look at a
typical example - the Coca Cola plant in San Cristsbal de Las Casas that
belongs to FEMSA. The state of Chiapas, where this plant is located, is
the country's principal water recharge zone, as 50 percent of all of the
rain in Mexico falls there. [Enciso 2005-B]

The FEMSA plant in San Cristsbal is the only Coca Cola bottler in the
state of Chiapas, and one of the most important in the entire southeast
region of the country. It is located at 2,200 meters (7,200 feet) above
sea level in the river basin of San Cristsbal, in the foothills of the
extinct Huitepec volcano, one of the largest sources of water in the
region. The only reason to locate the plant there, relatively far from
the principal population centers of the country and at one of the
highest points in Chiapas, is to access this abundant source of water.
Currently, this plant uses the largest amount of water in the San
Cristsbal river basin. In fact, in 2004 it used more than 107 million
liters of water, sufficient to supply water to 200,000 homes, which is
more than exist in the entire river basin. [Bell]

The San Cristsbal plant(7) supplies soft drinks and bottled water not
only to the state of Chiapas, but also to various regions in the
neighboring states of Tabasco and Oaxaca. In 2004, the bottler's annual
production was 43.8 million liters of soft drinks a year, or 120,000
liters a day. Annual sales are estimated at 438 million pesos, or 40
million dollars, equivalent to the municipality of San Cristsbal's
entire budget for infrastructure for ten years.

Despite FEMSA's considerable income, payment for water rights is
minimal. In 2003 the plant paid the National Water Commission - not even
the municipality of San Cristsbal - only about 320,000 pesos (29 million
U.S. dollars), the equivalent of 0.072 percent of FEMSA's annual sales.
In other words, Coca Cola is getting the water practically free.
However, when water reserves of Huitepec are exhausted, the
municipalities and communities that provided the water will be the ones
who pay the costs. The plant will simply relocate elsewhere.

Such was the case with another Coca Cola plant in El Salvador. After 25
years of making soft drinks in Soyopango and draining the local water
reserve, the plant moved to Nejapa, near the Salvadoran capitol. It
didn't take long for new problems to develop. The mayor of Nejapa
accused the plant of dumping untreated liquid wastes into the local
water supply, causing contamination and the deaths of fish and various
animal species. [Zacune]

How long the aquifer under Huitepec volcano in San Cristsbal will last
has not been acknowledged, at least publicly. But it is a cause for
concern that the company is already taking precautions and looking for
new sources of water in the state of Chiapas.

In order to move into the rural zones, particularly the indigenous
areas, the various Coca Cola bottlers in Mexico (FEMSA is only one of
several) created the Coca Cola Foundation. This philanthropic
institution constructs and equips schools and grants scholarships to
students, in order to facilitate locating bottling plants on nearby
lands with bodies of water. The El Molino spring, which Coca Cola wants
to acquire, is located in the municipality of Huixtan, Chiapas, where
the Foundation renovated and partially equipped a primary school. In the
hills of Matzam near the municipality of Tenejapa, the Foundation
renovated schools in 12 communities. [Enciso, 2005-B] It took the
opportunity to place its logo, as discussed previously, in strategic
locations in the schools.

Along with the predicted water shortage caused by the Coca Cola plant in
the San Cristsbal river basin, there has been a growing problem with
garbage since the plant was established in 1980. This plant introduced
in 2000 a line of containers called "pep," plastic bottles that arrive
in the plant in a compressed form and are then heated and inflated to
use for bottling. The "pep" bottles increase the volume of contamination
since the bottles are not recycled.

If we take into account the figures for production of soft drinks and
bottled water in 2004, 43.8 million liters, and if the size of each
container is on average one liter, 43.8 million containers would be
discarded there in one year (from only one plant). It is the equivalent
of 2,190 tons of plastic garbage that Coca Cola does not collect and
recycle. The "pep" bottles, each containing 50 grams of plastic, are not
biodegradable. In fact they are practically indestructible, especially
if they end up buried in a sanitary landfill.

Another environmental problem that is completely unregulated is the
"toxic sludge" that the bottlers produce. The wastes are the result of
the process of preparing the soft drinks and are apt to contain
excessive levels of various industrial toxins such as lead, cadmium, and
chromium (all carcinogenic). [India Resource Center] The toxic sludge
from the Coca Cola plant in San Cristsbal is buried without any controls
and contaminate the underground stratum of the river basin.

In other places, particularly in India, the toxic sludges have been the
cause of angry protests. Coca Cola, along with Pepsi Cola, try to
distribute these wastes to the farm workers in the states of Kerala and
Varanasi, claiming that they are "fertilizer." [Zacune] In 2003, the
Central Council for Control of Contamination in India evaluated the
sludge of eight Coca Cola bottlers in that country and found high levels
of toxins. The Council demanded that the corporation treat them as
dangerous industrial wastes and take the necessary precautions. Four
years later, at least one of the plants - in the Sinhachawar district in
Balla - has not complied with this legal order and continues dumping the
sludge within the plant and in surrounding areas. [India Resource
Center] The environmental organization Greenpeace has undertaken a
campaign against the Coca Cola plant in Plachimada, Kerala for
contaminating the water and harming the health of the residents. Seven
states in India have partially or completely prohibited the sale of Coca
Cola.

Notes

7. Most of the information on the Coca Cola plant in San Cristsbal comes
from Garcia, especially from pages 202-205.

-- 

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(Civil Association)CIEPAC A.C.,
is a member of the Movement for Democracy and Life (MDV) of Chiapas,
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and of the Mexican Alliance for Self-Determination (AMAP) that is the
Mexican network against the Puebla Panama Plan.
CIEPAC is a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Economic
Justice
<http://www.econjustice.net/> and the Ecumenical
Program on Central America and the Caribbean (EPICA) http://www.epica.org.

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