Art Unmasks Grave Abuse from Coca-Cola in Guatemala and Beyond
Now this is art with a bold and valiant objective. ArtThreat.net reports that Cinema Politica is taking on Goliath. The release and scheduled international tour of a documentary that sheds light on grave injustices committed by the soft-drink giant in developing nations (Guatemala one of them) , has led to Coca-Cola lawyers breathing down their backs. The good news: David isn’t backing off.
What can make a giant tremble? When a penniless student group gets a threat from New York lawyers – in this case, Coca-Cola’s lawyers – on account the students want to show a film condemning human rights abuses, the optics suggest that the giant has something to hide. ‘Screening truth to power’, it seems, has its consequences.
Earlier this month, Coke threatened legal action to prevent the screening of a new documentary film The Coca-Cola Case. The $141 billion company (with annual revenues of $28 billion) threatened a small non-profit media-arts group called Cinema Politica which shows documentary films for free at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec and through a network of independent locals across Canada, in the United States, and in Europe and Latin America…
What may have the soft drink giant so jittery is that the film is slated to be shown at 24 network locals from Halifax to Stockholm in an upcoming international tour co-sponsored by one of the film’s producers, the respected National Film Board of Canada. Seventeen of those screenings are located on campuses. Coca-Cola is well known for the agreements made with universities for the exclusive sale of Coke products…
According to the documentary and according to lawsuits brought against the corporate leviathan, its rise to global corporate soda-pop kingship has been part and parcel of a systematic campaign of kidnapping, intimidation, torture and even murder in its aggressive hostility towards workers and unions in some regions.
The film focuses on Coke’s business strategies in Colombia, Guatemala and Turkey, by following two human rights lawyers and their accusations of human rights abuses in a lawsuit before the U.S Federal Court. In Colombia, for example (and this according to Business Week, no less) in 1996, a group of armed men kidnapped a union leader representing workers at a Coke bottling plant, torched the union offices and shot and killed Isidro Segundo Gil, a member of the union’s executive board. Then they camped outside the bottling plant for two months demanding workers resign from the union.
Not surprisingly, the union folks allege that Coke was involved. The company denies the charges. It is admittedly hard to imagine why in the real world a paramilitary group would randomly attack the union without Coke’s backing. And, since then, again according to Business Week, eight other unionists have been murdered, 65 have received death threats, and 50 have been forced into hiding…
Read the entire article by clicking here.
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