Soft Drink, Hard Times

• Share

Activists launched a consumer boycott of Coca-Cola products to protest killings, kidnappings and torture of union members working at the company's Colombian bottling plants. The campaign, titled "Unthinkable, Undrinkable," has been endorsed by labor activists in Europe, the U.S. and Australia. Organizers claim plant managers called on ultra-right paramilitary death squads to bully and assassinate workers from Colombia's Sinaltrainal food industry union, silencing demands for better working conditions.

They allege that nine Coca-Cola bottling employees have been murdered over the past 12 years. Union leaders accuse bosses of allowing paramilitaries access to the plants to scrawl graffiti on the walls and intimidate workers. "We're living in anguish and terror," says Sinaltrainal president Luis Javier Correa, himself the target of death threats. "Coca-Cola has an ethical and moral commitment to its workers and we're trying to make it accountable."

Coca-Cola denied any responsibility for the violence. "We and our bottling partners operate in accordance with local laws, and contribute to the communities we serve," the company said in a statement. The assassination of union members is not uncommon in Colombia: according to cut, the country's umbrella union, 42 members of labor movements have been killed so far this year, most by suspected paramilitaries.