Ushered in by Kerala’s present “reform”-minded government, the plant duly got a license from the local council, known as the Perumatty Grama panchayat. Under India’s constitution the panchayats have total discretion in such matters. Coca-Cola bought a property of some 40 acres held by a couple of large landowners, built a plant, sank six bore wells, and commenced operations.

Within six months the villagers saw the level of their water drop sharply, even run dry. The water they did draw was awful. It gave some people diarrhea and bouts of dizziness. To wash in it was to get skin rashes,a burning feel on the skin. It left their hair greasy and sticky. The women found that rice and dal did not get cooked but became hard. A thousand families have been directly affected, and well water affected up to a three or four kilometers from the plant.

The locals, mostly indigenous adivasis and dalits had never had much, after allocation of a bit of land from the true, earth-shaking reforms of Kerala’s Communist government, democratically elected in 1956. And they had had plenty of good water. On April 22, 2002 the locals commenced peaceful agitation and shut the plant down. Responding to popular pressure, the panchayat rescinded its license to Coca-Cola on August 7,2003. Four days later the local Medical Officer ruled that water in wells near the plant was unfit for human use, a judgement reached by various testing labs months earlier.

Today, in a region known as the rice bowl of Kerala, women in Plachimada have to walk a 4-kilometer round trip to get drinkable water, toting the big vessels on hip or their head. Even better-off folk face ruin. One man said he’d been farming eight acres of rice paddy, hiring 20 workers, but now, with no water for the paddy, he survives on the charity of his son-in-law.

The old village wells had formerly gone down to 150 to 200 feet. The company’s bore wells go down to 750 to 1000 feet. As the water table dropped, all manner of toxic matter began to rise too, leaching up to higher levels as the soil dried out.

When the plant was running at full tilt 85 truck loads rolled out of the plant gates, each load consisting of 550 to 600 cases, 24 bottles to the case, all containing Plachimada’s prime asset, water, now enhanced in cash value by Cola’s infusions of its syrups.

Also trundling through the gates came 36 lorries a day, each with six 50-gallon drums of sludge from the plant’s filtering and bottle cleaning processes, said sludge resembling buff-colored puke in its visual aspect, a white-to-yellow granular sauce blended with a darker garnish of blended fabric, insulating material and other fibrous matter, plus a sulphuric acid smell very unpleasing to the nostrils.

Coca Cola was “giving back” to Plachimada, the give-back taking the form of the toxic sludge, along with profuse daily donations of foul wastewater.

The company told the locals the sludge was good for the land and dumped loads of it in the surrounding fields and on the banks of the irrigation canal, heralding it as free fertilizer. Aside from stinking so badly it made old folk and children sick, people coming in contact with it got rashes and kindred infections and the crops which it was supposed to nourish died.
Lab analysis by the Kerala State Pollution Control Board has shown dangerous levels of cadmium in the sludge. Another report done at Exeter University in England at the request of the BBC Radio 4 (whose reporter John Waite visited Plachimada and broadcast his report in July of 2003) found in water in a well near the plant not only impermissible amounts of cadmium but lead at levels that “could have devastating consequences”, particularly for pregnant women. The Exeter lab also found the sludge useless as fertiliser, a finding which did not faze Coca-Cola’s Indian vice-president Sunil Gupta who swore the sludge was “absolutely safe” and “good for crops”.

“What is the use of the Coca-Cola Company,” cried Phulwanti Mhase of Kudus village, in Maharashtra state, where women wash clothes in dirty puddles after Hindustan Coca-Cola built a plant there. “These are outsiders. They take our water, filter it and then resell it to us at a price.”

Phulwanti is cited (in a very useful pamphlet put out by the All India Democratic Women’s Association) as issuing this brisk précis of Marx’s Capital from the vantage point of her teashop from which can be descried the outlines of the plant, which churns out sodas including a mineral water called Kinley. Phulwanti has one bottle of Kinley in her store for people passing through, remarking, “I get angry. This is our water and they sell it to us for 12 rupees, which is what a tribal woman would make for eight hours’ work.”

Taking a leaf out of the self-realization catechism, Coca-Cola flaunts its slogan in Hindi, “Jo chahe ho jahe”, meaning “Whatever you want, happens” , translated by the local women as “Jo Coke chahe ho jahe”, “Whatever Coke wants, happens.”

But not in Plachimada.”

So- peaceful resistance against coke can be minimally effective, but only after your water is ruined, and only if there isn’t already a bustling trade in murder to take advantage of.

That’s my summary based on the things I’ve read and quoted here- obviously not all the facts or opinions involved. I personally don’t imagine a gang of creul, coniving Mr.Burns puppeting paramilitaries and governments around the world. But it does seem very clear that very bad decisions have been made in india, colombia and nicaragua that put the companies bottom line, and the cultural priorities of the wealthy, above the health, safety and well-being of other, equally valuable, human beings and economies.

“A lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Florida accuses the Coca-Cola Company, its Colombian subsidiary and business affiliates of using paramilitary death squads to murder, torture, kidnap and threaten union leaders at the multinational soft drink manufacturer’s Colombian bottling plants. The suit was filed on July 20 by the United Steelworkers of America and the International Labor Rights Fund on behalf of SINALTRAINAL, the Colombian union that represents workers at Coca-Cola’s Colombian bottling plants; the estate of a murdered union leader; and five other unionists who worked for Coca-Cola and were threatened, kidnapped or tortured by paramilitaries.”

The article goes on, and it’s good- there are claims being made on both sides, and the real evidence will have to be presented in court. But a few pieces stand out:
“According to Terry Collingsworth of the Washington DC-based International Labor Rights Fund and co-counsel for the plaintiffs, “There is no question that Coke knew about, and benefits from, the systematic repression of trade union rights at its bottling plants in Colombia, and this case will make the company accountable.” The plaintiffs are seeking compensation and an end to the human rights abuses committed against Coca-Cola’s employees and union members.”

Among the suit’s many claims is a 1996 incident in which Ariosto Milan Mosquera, plant manager at Bebidas y Alimentos’ bottling facility in Carepa, Colombia, made public pronouncements that “he had given an order to the paramilitaries to carry out the task of destroying the union.” Union members claim that Mosquera often socialized with paramilitary fighters and even provided them with Coca-Cola products for their fiestas. Shortly after Mosquera’s pronouncement, local members of SINALTRAINAL began receiving threats from the paramilitaries.

On September 27, 1996, SINALTRAINAL sent a letter to the Colombian headquarters of both Bebidas y Alimentos and Coca-Cola Colombia informing them of Mosquera’s threats against the union and requesting that they intervene to prevent further human rights abuses against employees and union leaders.

Two and a half months later, on the morning of December 5, 1996, Bebidas y Alimentos employee and local SINALTRAINAL executive board member Isidro Segundo Gil was killed by paramilitaries inside the Carepa bottling plant. The remaining union board members were also threatened with death if they did not leave town. And then, on December 7, the paramilitaries entered the plant and told employees they had three choices: resign from the union, leave Carepa, or be killed. The suit claims the workers were then led into the manager’s office to sign union resignation forms prepared by the company. The union had been successfully busted. ”

and

“the targeting of labor leaders was not limited to the Carepa plant. According to the complaint, union officials at several other Coca-Cola bottling plants were also being threatened and harassed. In 1996, at Panamco’s Bucaramanga plant, local members of SINALTRAINAL went on a 120-hour strike to protest the company’s elimination of employee medical insurance.

After the strike ended, the suit claims, “the chief of security for the Bucaramanga plant, Jose Alejo Aponte, told authorities that he found a bomb in the plant.” He then accused five members of the local SINALTRAINAL executive board of planting the bomb. The five union leaders, three of whom are plaintiffs in this case, were then imprisoned for six months based on charges brought by, according to official documents, “COCA COLA EMBOTELLADORA SANTANDER.”

The union leaders were released six months later when, according to the suit, the regional prosecutor “concluded not only that the Plaintiffs had nothing to do with placing a bomb in the plant as charged, but that there in fact was never a bomb in the plant as the company had claimed.”

http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia73.htm

I guess I wonder whether a company which is seriously benifiting financially from the political situation in a “foreign’ country might find it easier to turn a blind eye, or to throw up their hands and claim helplessness rather then to do what’s hard but obviously right.

I don’t know what people have been saying around Berkeley, but I think it’s cool that people are talking about this and getting angry on behalf of the murdered workers whether coke employees were directly responsible or not. Both Coke and the murderous paramilitaries deserve to be publicly shamed for this brutal and inhamune chain of behaviors and practices, and drawing them into the public eye with campus-wide boycotts seems a good way to start.