Don’t kill Coke

The IDS ran a story on Feb.13 about the campus group No Sweat! and its goal to persuade IU not to renew an exclusive contract with Coke in 2009. According to No Sweat!, Coca-Cola has murdered and intimidated its workers at a Colombian bottling plant for some time now. \nIt’s a popular argument, but it doesn’t have much behind it. A 2001 lawsuit to this effect, filed in Miami against Coke, ended with the decision to dismiss any charges of Coca-Cola’s wrongdoing. In 2001, the court even exonerated the specific bottling plant, the one Coke has contracted. If that wasn’t enough, an independent investigation by the Colombian prosecutor general found “no evidence” of any wrongdoing on Coke’s part. Later, the union responsible for these workers, SINALTRAINBEC, even issued a public statement admitting that “not a single indication of this (murder of unionists by Coca-Cola) is true.”\nAll this information is readily available in court documents.\nYou’d think that in the face of such information, people would be content to let the issue go. But the movement has gained popularity, and no matter how anachronistic, people still believe it. The truth is that there’s an ongoing civil war in Columbia, and it’s taking place in the bottling plant’s backyard. That’s all. \nBut the national Web site for the Killer Coke movement reads like it was written by someone on acid, peppered with biased lingo about the inherent evil of large corporations. No Sweat!’s Web site can’t even produce any evidence of Coke’s misdeeds; all it can do is make weak references to “da man” or link to pages with similarly flimsy logic. In trying to find reputable sources of evidence for Coke’s malfeasance, I only found recognition of accusations and doubts about their validity. And I couldn’t find any mention of accusations after the rulings came out.\nSo, we’re left with two options. The first is that Coke is stifling all the major media, buying off the American and Colombian Justice Departments, arranging murders so clandestine they produce no evidence and coercing the very unions they supposedly antagonize into issuing phony press releases exonerating Coke of any misdeeds. The second is that a bunch of bored, self-righteous students don’t want to let their moral crusade become a casualty of reason. Which sounds more probable to you? \nBut dozens of colleges around the nation are boycotting Coke because of activist influence. This is the downside to collective action, where the paranoia and mindless group-think of a few individuals create pressure on the decisions of administrators. No one rushes to Coke’s defense because there’s no glamour there, but now, this issue has transcended the sale of soft drinks. Now, it’s about IU needing to grow a backbone and resist pressure from deluded conspiracy theorists so caught up in the limelight that they can’t even see reason any more. IU needs to tell No Sweat! to wake up and cut the charade. I think we all could drink to that.