Is there any basis to accusations of Coca-Cola’s having tortured, killed, or otherwise violated the human rights of workers in Latin America? I am a student in college and have heard much mention of these supposed “facts.” I am not sure what to make of them, and am wondering if you could reveal the truth. –Yeh Kahn Yiin, via e-mail
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Second, detailed allegations have been made not about multiple murders but one murder, specifically that of Isidro Gil, a union leader who was gunned down on December 5, 1996, at the entrance to a Coca-Cola plant in the Colombian town of Carepa. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. federal court in 2001, Gil’s union claimed that before the murder the plant manager socialized with paramilitaries and announced publicly that he had told them to destroy the union. After the murder the other members of Gil’s local either quit the union or left town, allegedly after paramilitaries entered the plant and told them to resign or else. The suit mentions several additional killings circumstantially tied to Coke, but information on them is sketchy and I won’t take them up here. Various other charges have been laid against Coke elsewhere; to keep this manageable, though, we’ll stick to murder.
Third, notwithstanding the impression you may get from slogans like “Stop Killer Coke,” no one seriously contends that the Coca-Cola company of Atlanta, Georgia, orchestrated the murder of Isidro Gil or other union members. Coke bottling plants in Colombia, as in most of the world, are independently owned and operated. The argument essentially is that Carepa plant management called in goons and that Coke HQ, or at any rate its wholly owned Colombian subsidiary, had advance warning but did nothing to prevent the violence.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.
