Certainly if one plans to go out and protest a corporation or regime they should possess a basic knowledge of what, in fact, they are protesting.
That said, a columnist who is criticizing the protest and the issues involved must present facts and figures to support their position if they are to be taken seriously. This is even more the case if the intention of the columnist is to ridicule the protesters for their lack of understanding of the issue.
While the columnist in question writes for a college newspaper, the UCLA Daily Bruin, his column was picked up by FrontPage along with various blogs looking to jump all over 'libruls' whenever they can. (Of course, FrontPage will print anything that seems to belittle student progressives, and fact checking is clearly a concept with which they are completely unfamiliar)
First what was said in the column. Alec Mouhibian's third paragraph:
Economically, Coke has no incentive to have employees murdered by guerrillas. No workers, no Coke: no-brainer. Legally, they have been acquitted of any responsibility by two judicial inquiries. So why the persecution? I tried to find out on Friday.
His first statement makes clear the amount of research Mouhibian undertook. That would be none. The charges of murder and violence relate to union leaders and members, hardly unusual in the history of corporations. The no-brainer comment speaks much more to the author than his silly conclusion. Secondly,as we shall see, Coca-Cola was not acquitted but was dropped from an ongoing lawsuit and could be brought before the courts again. So that is just plainly wrong.
And how does he try and find the grounds for the persecution of Coke? By looking into the history of Coca-Cola in Colombia? No, That just wouldn't be in the spirit of journalism today in the United States. Now I don't want to argue that confronting the students on their knowledge was a bad idea but - and this is a big but - it certainly is no way to get to the bottom of the charges against Coke. It is just lazy and juvenile "gotch ya" journalism.
Mouhibian terms the student protesters as "a stampede of high horses gathered to whinny in protest." Obviously Mouhibian has had some experience working in a Third World bottling plant otherwise this might considered a needless ad hominem attack. Unfortunately he doesn't include any of his personal experiences in his column. In its place he supplies his Russert-like gotcha quotes. For example:
Villagrana [student protester] admitted "(Coke isn't) the one doing the killing. ... The paramilitary in Colombia is the one causing all these deaths, massacres and tortures." Two minutes later, she was chanting: "Cherry, diet or vanilla: Coca-Cola is a killa."
She admitted Coke was giving Colombians jobs they otherwise would not have. Two minutes later, she was chanting: "We support workers, we don't support Coke."
Just because Coca-Cola personal don't actually pull the trigger does not mean they are not involved. I would be very surprised to learn that a Coca-Cola executive was roaming around Colombian shantytowns rubbing out union leaders. It has to do with encouraging the elimination of unions and aligning themselves with the groups that do the killings, ie the paramilitaries (as we shall see, the new union at Coke bottling plants in Colombia, SICO, has some strong ties to the far right in the country).
The second part here is an age-old argument that is used to justify whatever exploitation goes on, and frankly I'm really sick of it. Should a person dying of thirst thank the one with gallons of water for giving him a few drops to stay alive? It's a simple point really; supplying jobs does not give one the right to exploit workers in whichever way the employer sees fit. There were decades of union battles to ensure this wasn't the case.
Moreover, there is absolutely no guarantee that there would not be other jobs to replace the ones lost by a disappearance of Coke or some other multinational. Multinationals have been entering Latin America for some time now and unemployment has not fallen. I don't imagine if Coke were to leave Colombia, Colombians would collectively throw up their hands and say, that's it, there can be no more employment.
Of course there is no way to know if Mouhibian was being selective in choosing comments from students that portrayed not having a clue as to what Coke had been up to. Perhaps many students did rattle off some of the very serious charges levied against Coke that have never been satisfactorily refuted (Given the quality of the column I suspect that Mouhibian was in fact very selective). Nevertheless it isn't particularly surprising that some idealist young students would not have a grasp of the issues. That, though should not be norm. I would hope that most are familiar with Coke's record in Colombia and in other parts of the third world. And if not, they most definitely should be taken to task over it. That, however, does not justify in any way Mouhibian's claim that the student's lack of knowledge somehow provides exculpatory evidence regarding Coke's conduct in Colombia or the Third World.
But Mouhibain does cite one Colombian:
... a young Colombian refugee emotionally testified to the heroism of the Coca-Cola Company in her native land. She begged Coke to stay and hold its own, as the thousands of jobs it and other corporations provide help those who would otherwise probably end up joining the paramilitaries...
Gotta love that switch in tone from "whinny in protest" to "emotionally testified to the heroism." No, no bias there. We have no way to verify this source. Unsurprisingly the columnist does not supply us with any information regarding who this young Colombian is. And, of course, no one is arguing for the banning of corporations in Colombia; rather that they stop encouraging and aiding paramilitaries in eliminating unfriendly unions (Additionally unemployed workers would be far more likely to join FARC than the paramilitaries but making sense isn't Mouhibain's strong suit) Furthermore, the passage can hardly be considered compelling evidence of Coke' altruism, as anyone could supply quotes from actual Colombians claiming the exact opposite. For example (and I will actually identify who the person is):
Until they do, say activists, the violence against Coke's workers will continue. "It's very difficult for me to convince my family that they have to live with the worries, and that they will one day maybe have to receive bad news," says SINALTRAINAL's [union leader] Correa. "My kids say that walking with Dad is like walking with a time bomb. But I can't leave this struggle seeing these violations happening all around me. The reality of the situation is that it's better being with a union than without one."
I've wasted enough time on this foolish column. I prefer to deal with actual issue so let's outline some of the main charges against Coca-Cola in Colombia. One of the main charges involves the union SINALTRAINAL, which was forced out of Coke's bottling plant in Colombia.
On the morning of December 5, 1996, union leader Isidro Segundo Gil was standing at the gate of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa, Colombia, when two paramilitaries drove up on a motorcycle and shot him dead. A week later, unionists say, paramilitaries lined up all the workers inside the plant and forced them to sign a letter resigning from the beverage union SINALTRAINAL, spelling the end of the union at the plant.
Violence against union members is a fact of life in Colombia, where nearly 4,000 have been killed by paramilitaries in the past two decades. But Gil's murder was different, say his union brothers; two months earlier, they observed the plant manager meeting with a paramilitary commander in the company cafeteria. And just a week before he was killed Gil had been negotiating with the company over a new contract. Workers see these events as an example of the collusion of bottling executives with the paramilitaries. "From the beginning, Coca-Cola took a stand to not only eliminate the union but to destroy its workers," said SINALTRAINAL president Javier Correa in a recent speaking appearance in the United States.
Some of the history:
In all, eight union members and a friendly plant manager were killed between 1989 and 2002. Even today, union leaders routinely receive death threats and attempts on their lives. In 2003 paramilitaries kidnapped and tortured the 15-year-old son of one union leader and killed the brother-in-law of SINALTRAINAL's vice president. This past January, says Correa, managers at the Coca-Cola plant in Bogota attempted to get workers to sign a statement saying Coke did not violate human rights; a week later the leader of the union received a death threat against himself and his family.
"Coke has a long history of being a virulently antiunion company," says Lesley Gill, an anthropology professor at American University who has twice been to Colombia to document the violence. "It has been calculated and targeted, and it usually takes place during periods of contract negotiations." A 2004 investigation directed by New York City Councilman Hiram Monserrate documented 179 "major human rights violations" against Coke workers, along with numerous allegations that "paramilitary violence against workers was done with the knowledge of and likely under the direction of company managers." The violence has taken a toll on the union. In the past decade, SINALTRAINAL's Coke membership has fallen from about 1,400 to less than 400.
So Mouhibain talked to a few protesters while Hiram Monserrate actually documented almost 200 cases. Tough choice who to believe.
Of course, given the circumstances in Colombia, violence in some areas is commonplace. But that doesn't mean that every killing can be written off as part of the civil war. Coke strongly denies any involvement, noting that they have been exonerated in Colombian courts. That however, doesn't say much:
However, charging those courts as ineffective--only five paramilitaries have been found guilty of murder, despite 4,000 killings--SINALTRAINAL reached out in 2001 to the International Labor Rights Fund, a Washington-based solidarity organization. Using a US law called the Alien Tort Claims Act, the ILRF and the United Steelworkers filed suit against Coke and its bottlers in Miami later that year.
Mouhibian claimed that Coke was acquitted. This was not the case:
In 2003 a judge ruled that Coca-Cola couldn't be held responsible for the actions of its bottlers and dropped it from the case, even while allowing the case against the bottlers to go forward. ILRF lawyer Terry Collingsworth finds that decision preposterous, noting that Coke has ownership shares in its Colombian bottlers and highly detailed bottling agreements. "I'm 100 percent sure that if Coca-Cola in Atlanta ordered them to change their uniform color from red to blue, they would do it," says Collingsworth. "They could stop these activities in a minute."
KillerCoke.org reports:
The lawsuits are based on months of research and interviews with union members and leaders who personally observed the pattern of collaboration between Coca-Cola plant managers and the paramilitaries. These "allegations" have also been substantiated by many independent journalists and investigators for respected human rights organizations.
SINALRAINAL was replaced by SICO in Coke's bottler plants in Colombia. A letter from Manuel Perez, former unionist now living in exile gives a good indication of whose interests are really being represented by SICO.
"As a former trade unionist in Colombia, now living in exile, perhaps I can shed some light on the TUC's [Trade Union Congress in England] silence about the Colombian workers of SINALTRAINAL, which Mark Thomas (29 March) criticizes. The International union of Food Workers (IUF), which the TUC has to follow in this type of situation, strongly criticized the call to boycott Coca-Cola. The Colombian delegate to the IUF is president of a union called SICO. He was expelled by his previous union, representing brewery workers, for espousing extreme right-wing views. The new union was set up in Carepa, Antioquia, at the local Coca-Cola bottling plant, after five SINATRAINAL members had been murdered, many more forcibly displaced and the union offices burned down by paramilitaries. Ever since, SICO has coexisted peacefully with the paramilitary forces that control this part of Colombia."
In April 2005 there was a Coke shareholders' meeting when the company faced several charges:
That was just the beginning of a ninety-minute slugfest that the Financial Times later said "felt more like a student protest rally" than a stockholders' meeting. One after another, students, labor activists and environmentalists blasted Coke's international human rights record. Many focused on Colombia, where Coke has been accused of conspiring with paramilitary death squads to torture and kill union activists. Others highlighted India, where Coke has allegedly polluted and depleted water supplies. Still others called the company to task for causing obesity through aggressive marketing to children.
One of the main demands of Coke has been an independent investigation, hardly unreasonable given the gravity of the charges. Coke has responded by funding their own investigation (see here http://killercoke.org/pr060417.htm for the latest regarding so called independent investigations and the role of the ILO). This can not be taken as a serious inquiry into Coke's conduct. Then more charges against Coke surfaced, including:
... new evidence of Coke's antilabor tactics emerged in Indonesia, where, according to USAS, workers were intimidated when they attempted to unionize; and in Turkey, where more than 100 union members were fired and then clubbed and tear-gassed by police during a protest. This past November the ILRF filed another lawsuit against Coca-Cola, based on the claims of the Turkish workers.
To the Daily Bruin's credit they published a response to Mouhiban's article that included this:
I suppose it is that same philanthropic zeal that induced a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Kerala, India, to pass toxic sludge as "free fertilizer" to the townspeople, according to CorpWatch.
The sludge was found to contain dangerously high levels of cadmium – a carcinogen – and lead, which causes mental derangement and both severe anemia and mental retardation in children. Interestingly, the sludge was also found to have no value as fertilizer....
The bounty of Coca-Cola doesn't end there. Coca-Cola has also started to poison the common groundwater source, according to Indiaresource.org, a project of Global Resistance. Global Resistance works to support grassroot struggles against globalization.
In past two years the company has spent 2.4 billion dollars on advertising partly in part in an attempt to cleans its image. Imagine if, say half of that had gone to raising wages in Colombia and India - the two areas most controversial in terms of thier operations. That would certainly placate union demands and go much farther in silencing critics. Now why couldn't they do something like that?
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