Coca-Cola denounces boycott

By AFP

COCA-COLA has denounced what it calls a politically motivated boycott of its products by some US and European universities, denying it conspired with paramilitaries to harass workers in Colombia.

“Those who lead the campaign want to do something for workers in Colombia. Unfortunately, they are misinformed about the situation,” said Pablo Largacha, Coca-Cola’s spokesman in the South American country.

He insisted those behind the campaign were “trying to use the brand to push a political agenda”.

Several US, European and Canadian universities suspended sales of Coca-Cola on their campuses because of trade union claims that a Colombian bottler for the world’s largest soft drink company conspired with right-wing paramilitary groups to harass workers.

Largacha dismissed the claims, noting two judicial inquiries found no evidence to support the allegations and no link between the bottler and the 1996 death of a trade unionist that was blamed on right wing paramilitary fighters.

Coca-Cola also stressed it was dismissed as a defendant in an ongoing case before a US court in Miami involving a United Steel Workers of America complaint filed on behalf of Colombia’s National Union of Food Industry Workers, or Sinaltrainal.

The court found in 2003 that it had no jurisdiction in the complaint.

“We are confident that as the case proceeds, the court will find no evidence against our bottlers as well,” the company said in a statement.

Sinaltrainal president Javier Correa said both the lawsuit and the boycott campaign “aim to force Coca-Cola to prevent further bloodshed and to provide safe working conditions”.

In a statement posted on the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke website, Correa decried what he called “a gruesome cycle of murder, kidnappings and torture’” of the union’s leaders, whom he said are “involved in daily life and death struggles at Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia”.