One Coke Over the Line

Aside from post-finals 30 packs of Milwaukee’s Best, the most popular beverage on campus is undoubtedly the Coca-Cola that flows like wine during exam period. But if campaigners at this week’s World Social Forum in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, India have their way, more people might be looking elsewhere for their caffeine fix. Delegates at the forum, a left-leaning alternative to the World Economic Forum taking place at Davos, Switzerland, are looking to globalize a series of smaller boycotts against the soft-drink giant.

Throughout India, Coke bottling plants have been found to be siphoning off dangerous amounts of ground water, polluting what ground water does remain with untreated chemicals, and in one case, stealing government subsidized electricity intended for farmers. On top of that, recent tests have found traces of pesticide in Indian bottles of Coke. Indian Parliament has begun to investigate the source and the effects of the pesticides and has banned Coke from its cafeteria.

So far Indian activists—or as Coke’s P.R. people have called them, “a handful of extremist protesters”—have had some limited success in protesting Coke, but they are hoping the Bombay forum will provide a chance to join forces with a union boycott of Coke led by Sinaltrainal, Colombia’s largest food and bottling union, the AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union. The protesters allege collusion between Coca-Cola and a right-wing paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, which the U.S. State Department classifies as a terrorist organization, in the intimidation and assassination of union members in Coke bottling plants in Colombia.

On Dec. 5, 1996, paramilitary troops entered a Coke bottling plant in Carepa, Colombia and murdered for Isidro Gil, a Sinaltrainal leader spearheading the fight for a new contract. Hours later, a paramilitary squad set fire to the Sinaltrainal offices in Carepa, and two days later gunmen entered the plant again and forced workers to terminate their union membership under threat of death. These stories are sickeningly commonplace in Colombia, the most dangerous place in the world for union members with 1,800 confirmed murdered over the last 12 years, and only five of those murders resulting in convictions.

Two years ago, Sinaltrainal filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against Coke and two of its bottlers, Miami-based Panamerican Beverages and the American-owned Bebidas y Alimentos of Colombia for the murder of Gil and eight other Sinaltrainal members since the early ’90s. Last year that court found that the suit could continue against the bottling plants—but not Coke, because it does not own the plants. The decision is under appeal.

In a released statement Coca-Cola has said that the allegations are “completely false…nothing more than a shameless effort to generate publicity.” The bottlers also deny any involvement in the killings, although one wonders why random paramilitary groups would go around the country murdering union leaders against the wishes of the companies they are seeking contracts from. Union leaders such as Adolfo Munera, who just a week after winning a case in Colombia’s highest court forcing a Coke bottler to re-hire him after he was cleared of bogus criminal charges used to fire him in 1997, have been murdered. Coke has made no signs of breaking their close ties with its Colombian bottling plants.

With help from the 80,000 activists in Mumbai this week, the combined boycotts could get the international support they need to be effective against transnational corporations such as Coca-Cola. Coke contracts have come under fire at Columbia, NYU, University of Vermont and University of California, Berkeley to name a few, and contracts have already been terminated at Bard College, Lake Forest College and at bars and colleges in Ireland. So far, Harvard’s involvement has been limited to bringing Colombian workers to campus to speak about the repression but Madeleine S. Elfenbein ’04, a member of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) says that the campaign could be coming to Harvard soon.

“My friend Lenore, a USAS staffer, recently got back from Colombia where she met with union leaders and saw for herself how bad the repression is—one of the people she talked to was killed later that night,” Elfenbein said.

The impact of campus boycotts would certainly be felt by Coke, both in the long and short term. “The [college student] age group is one of the most important markets to beverage companies, because whatever habits you form now aren’t likely to change in the future,” Harvard University Dining Services spokesperson Alexandra McNitt said. At UC Berkeley alone Coke pays $1 million per year for exclusive vending rights on campus. McNitt said she couldn’t reveal any specifics about the contract Harvard has with Coke for dining halls, but if Berkeley is any indication, Coke is willing to pay for a captive college audience.

Simply protesting injustice can at times sound a bit like the line from “Karma Police” by Radiohead: “We’ve given all we can but we’re still on the payroll.” People protest greed and human rights violations while still wearing the clothes, buying the soft drinks and driving the cars that fuel the system they are protesting. International boycotts, the only real weapon against transnational corporations worth billions of dollars, may be the next step in keeping tabs on corporate abuses. Coke may not be to our generation what California table grapes were to our parents’, but at least it’s a start.

Joe Flood '04 is an English concentrator in Mather House. His column appears regularly.