During the past 40 years, right wing, paramilitary groups have been on an ideological mission to destroy social movements. These death squads often work in collaboration with U.S. Officials, who support the Colombian military and, in some instances, with managers at plants manufacturing products for corporations, such as the Coca Cola Company.
Since 1989, eight union leaders from the Coca Cola plants in Colombia have been murdered by paramilitary forces and dozens of other workers have been intimidated, tortured and kidnapped. Inside the Carepa bottling plant, Luis Cardona witnessed members of the paramilitary murder union leader Isidro Gil in broad daylight. They returned the following day and forced all of the plantÍs workers to resign from their union. The documents that the workers signed used Coca Cola letterhead. The union workers were later replaced with part time workers who received no benefits.
The most recent murder attempt occurred on August 22, 2003, when two men on motorcycles fired shots on worker leader Juan Carlos Galvis at the plant in Barrancabermeja.
There is substantial evidence that managers of several bottling plants have ordered these types of assaults to occur and made regular payments to leaders of the paramilitary groups who were carrying out the attacks.
As a result of Coca Cola's massive extraction processes of water of the common groundwater in India, there has been a severe shortage of water. The processes involve digging deeper than the well water, which is causing the wells to run dry. The people of India are forced to use muddy water from the bottom of their wells that tastes and smells strange. The Central Ground Water Board in India has confirmed that there has been a significant depletion of the water table.
The groundwater and soil around Coca Cola's bottling facilities is being polluted because Coke has been indiscriminately discharging their solid waste, which is produced through the filtering of the water. Much of this solid waste is also being packaged and sold to the Indian farmers as "fertilizer". Not only is the solid waste useless as fertilizer but it kills the soil so nothing can grow there.
Companies like Coca Cola have been promoting the sales of bottled water by making consumers think it is cleaner than tap water. The truth is that the water used for the bottles is just filtered tap water. In fact, at Coke's water bottling facilities, it is only required that the filters be changed once every four years, while in most town water treatment plants, the filters are required to be changed/checked every eight to twelve hours.
