Reply #23: Not illnesses, drinking Pepsi just increases murder.

[Touchdown]

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Transnational_corps/RealThing_CocaCola.html

According to the United Federation of Workers (CUT) in Colombia, last year at least 129 union activists were murdered. By one count, so far this year more than sixty have been assassinated. Numbers twenty-two and ~ twenty-three were the aforementioned co-workers of Gustavo Soler, Drummond employees Valrnore Locarno and Victor Orcasita, president and vice president of me coal miners' union, respectively.
The rich deposits of low-sulfur coal in Cesar province first caught Drummond's attention in the early 1 990s. According to a high-ranking former Colombian military officer, it was in that period that the paramilitaries began aggressive operations in Cesar province, fighting FARC and killing suspected FARC sympathizers. The paras, who have since grown into an efficient fighting force of more than 8,000, now dominate the region.
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Kovalik is one of the lawyers who brought the case against the ~ biggest brand in the world, Coca-Cola, charging that the company and its Colombian subsidiary and bottlers should be held responsible for paramilitary attacks on union leaders and workers. The lawsuit cites one shooting just this past June, a union | negotiator gunned down on the street; but Colombian labor leaders have made these charges against Coca-Cola for years. Sinaltrainal, a food and beverage workers' union, alleges that workers have been killed, threatened and harassed at various bottling plants. One high-ranking labor official says simply, "Everyone knows that Coca-Cola works with the paramilitaries.
One striking case cited in the lawsuit was in Carepa, in the Uraba region, in 1996. The story, pieced together from interviews and thousands of pages of files from the official Colombian investigation, highlights troubling questions about the interplay between a company and the armed participants in the war.
While most Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia are owned by Panamerican Beverages, a large publicly traded company, the Carepa bottler is privately owned by a US family whose patriarch, Richard Kirby, used to be president of Panamerican's subsidiary in Colombia. Kirby now lives in Key Biscayne, Florida, and according to his lawyer, he has only once, long ago, been to his bottling plant in a region plagued by violence.
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On the morning of December 5, the union's negotiator and plant gatekeeper, Isidro Segundo Gil, was shot ten times, right next to the Coca-Cola sign on the wall, after opening the entrance. Fellow workers said they gathered around where he lay face down in a pool of blood, and saw the killers drive off on motorcycles.
Later that day, Cardona says, he was intercepted by the I L I paras. He says he was told he was being taken to see ~ Cepillo, and it was clear he was going to be killed, so .p he decided to run for it. The paramilitaries chased him down on a motorcycle, he recalls, but he managed to get to the police station. "They're going to kill me," he says he told the one police officer on duty, "simply because I belong to the union."
While there have been serious allegations of police complicity with the paramilitaries, there have also been acts of extraordinary bravery: police who take on the militias single-handedly. In this case, as the policeman loaded Cardona into a van, Cardona spotted the paramilitaries waiting at the corner and pointed them out. The police lieutenant replied, "Don't worry, I know who all the sons of bitches are." Cardona and his family were sent to safety.
That night the paramilitaries attacked and torched the union's headquarters.

How's the blood in your beverage? Refreshing?