Corporate Swine, Inc.

The Coca-Cola Company spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually to promote "The Real Thing." The reality surrounding Coca-Cola shows a corporate network that is rife with immorality, corruption and complicity in murder in its Colombian factories. Labor, student, peace and human rights activists have been organizing a worldwide boycott of the killer cola after hundreds of union organizers in Colombia have been murdered by paramilitary death squads for organizing in Coke's bottling plants.

SinalTrainal, the Colombian Food and Drinks workers Union, cites that in in 2003, 184 members of the Colombian trade federation were killed in the streets of Colombia at the hands of paramilitary groups, merely for organizing their coworkers.

Organized labor across America is now standing up against the human rights abuses, supporting a worldwide boycott of all coca-cola products. The International Boycott of Coca Cola started on the 22nd of July 2003. The united Autoworkers Union, the AFL-CIO, The United Hebrew Trades Division of the Jewish Labor Committee, and the World Social Forum are among hundreds of organizations supporting the boycott.

The Coke boycott has been enormously successful around the world. In October 2003, students at the University of Dublin, the largest university in Ireland with more than 20,000 students, passed a binding student referendum to ban all Coke products from student-run facilities. Coke sent executives to Dublin to do extensive groundwork and felt confident that they were going to influence and win a second referendum held on November 18th. With a much larger turnout, Coke lost 54% to 46%. There is a growing movement on campuses and in pubs in Ireland to do the same.

Coke, of course, has been quick to defend its image. CEO Douglas Daft states, "Our Company has been a valuable member of the Colombian community for more than 70 years." They cite that there has been no evidence supporting the specific claims that union organizers were murdered by coca-cola officials, but have no defense against the use of paramilitary death squads against SinalTrainal organizers from their bottling plants. Coke's website states "The painful truth is that it can be a dangerous place for anyone who lives, works and does business here." Knowing that more labor organizers are murdered in Columbia each year than in the rest of the countries around the world combined should be enough to stop Coke from operating in this country, without the need of evidence supporting specific claims about their plants.

In addition to the violence against workers in Colombia, the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke's website, www.killercoke.org, highlights other abuses of Coca-Cola throughout the world. This includes a history of discriminatory practices; aggressive marketing to children of nutritionally worthless and damaging soft drinks; a bad pension policy and cheating workers out of pay; marketing fraud; safety and health problems; overexploitation and pollution of water sources and the distribution of toxic sludge as fertilizer in India; repressive anti-worker policies in many countries; inaction and neglect on health issues in Africa, and anti-competitive practices around the world.

Killer Coke's campaign director Ray Rogers says that the importance of winning this campaign is best summed up by SinalTrainal Vice President Juan Carlos Galvis. Galvis said "If we lose the fight against Coca-Cola, we will first lose our union, next our jobs and then our lives."

Contact CEO Douglas Daft at 404-676-3808 and tell him what you think about Coke's complicity in the murder of workers in Colombia.