Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Colombian hunger strikers force Coca-Cola climbdown No More Death Squads Boycott CocaCola

Socialist Resistance no15  |  page 15-16

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

good measure). Drinking Dasani could make you ill but it's unlikely to kill you. In Colombia, however, working for Coca-Cola and trying to organise or even be a member of a trade union can quite literally kill you. Since 1989 eight union leaders (all members of the Colombian trade union Sinaltrainal) at Colombian Coca-Cola bottling plants have been murdered by paramilitaries.

Countless more Sinaltrainal members have been subjected to assault, kidnap or torture in attempts to destroy union organisation in the bottling plants.

Last September Coca-Cola FEMSA (the company owning most Colombian Coca-Cola bottling plants and which is 46% owned by Coca-Cola) announced it was ending bottle production at 11 of its 16 bottling plants. Over 500 workers were "persuaded" to resign their employment contracts in favour of a redundancy payment. Most Sinaltrainal activists refused.

An existing agreement between Sinaltrainal and Coca-Cola FEMSA required the company to relocate any worker who refused to accept redundancy to other positions within the bottling plants or to other plants. Instead Coca-Cola FEMSA announced its intention to dismiss 91 workers, most of whom were known Sinaltrainal activists. Events came to a head when 30 Sinaltrainal members started simultaneous hunger strikes on Monday 15 March outside bottling plants in protest against the sackings.

Despite persistent harassment the hunger strikers and Sinaltrainal appear to have forced a climbdown by CocaCola FEMSA. The company has agreed there will be no reprisals against the hunger strikers and that existing sanctions will be revoked. The hunger strikers were also granted two weeks paid leave once they had ended their strike, to recuperate. Also, Coca-Cola FEMSA have said they will pay for an advertisement in a national climbdown in the face of international support for the hunger strikers.

Sinaltrainal and the Colombian TUC have called for a boycott of Coca-Cola products worldwide in protest at collusion between Coca-Cola and the Colombian paramilitaries against Sinaltrainal members. More trade union activists are murdered annually in Colombia than anywhere else in the world and on that basis alone the international labour movement needs to keep the political spotlight firmly focused on Colombia. • Online sources www.colombiasoli darity.org.uk www.killercoke.org

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16 sockstre tance April 2004

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