I have never shared this with anyone on Kos, but I am currently I high school senior at Loyola Academy Jesuit high school in Wilmette, IL, a suburb of Chicago. Maybe you guessed by my crass sense of humor - I don't really know. I joined dKos because justice is important to me. For the same reason, I signed up for a class called Justice Seminar. The title of the course is descriptive - it is a social justice class. It also happens to be one of the best things that has ever happened to me.
You see, the class curriculum culminates in a massive end-of-the-year assignment called the Magis Project. But ours isn't your typical research paper - our project entails a campaign for justice within our own school. Three of us had heard about alleged human rights abuses at Coca-Cola bottling plants and we wanted to investigate. Our school happens to have a contract with the Coca-Cola Company, so the issue was important to us. If we did find information that in any way linked Coke to labor rights abuses, we decided that we would demand that Loyola Academy break its contract with the company and cease all sales of Coca-Cola products.
Here is a very brief summary of what we found:
The question I am asked the most when I tell people that we are working to get Coca-Cola removed from the Academy is, quite simply, why? What has this respected international corporation done to draw our ire? Let me take some time to begin explaining.
In Colombia, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) is a rightist paramilitary group that does not act within the boundaries of national or international law. The human rights organizations say that the group is probably responsible for around three quarters of all political murders in Colombia. This brings us to Coca-Cola.
Coca-Cola has several bottling plants in Colombia. They do not directly own these plants, which is a good way for them to distance themselves from human rights abuses that occur at such plants. However, Coca-Cola has contracts with these plants, which are controlled by a corporation called Coca-Cola FEMSA. The Coca-Cola Company is the majority share-holder for FEMSA, so FEMSA is essentially a shadow organization controlled by the larger company.
There has been a long history of human rights abuses against union organizers and participants at these bottling plants. Eight union leaders are confirmed as being murdered by the paramilitary. Hundreds of others have been tortured, "disappeared", and threatened by the paramilitary. They are told to abandon the unions or face death.
Workers have described witnessing meetings between plant management and paramilitary leaders in which the soldiers walked out of the plant with supplies of Coca-Cola. This leads to the accusation that the plant managers have conspired with the paramilitary forces to repress unions. The Coca-Cola Company refuses to allow an independent investigation and there exists a danger to the lives of thousands of workers in Colombia. Therefore, as a Jesuit school professing to support Catholic Social Teaching, it is our duty to refuse to associate with a company complicit in assassinations as well as in continuing the cycle of poverty in Latin America and elsewhere.
After learning this, our next step was clear. We scheduled presentations to our peers and prepared to engage in a campaign to remove Coca-Cola and its trail of human rights abuses from our school. As you may know, colleges such as the University of Michigan and New York University have already taken similar courses of action. The school administration, also to my surprise, has been very receptive and supportive of our ideas. We will be collecting names on a petition calling for a ban on the sale of Coke products at the school. We expect to receive hundreds of signatures that we will deliver to the school administration when we meet to talk more about the issue.
We have been in contact with local media as well. Several local TV stations have shown interest in our story, and together with Loyola PR spokeswoman, we have prepared press releases. It finally feels like we are getting organized.
Also, we created a website which, to my surprise, has experienced an extraordinary spike in traffic, as you can see from the counters at the bottom of the page.
I enabled user comments on the website and, as you can see we have gotten some interesting comments. Many have been supportive. Some have been derogatory. Depending on who you ask, I am either "willing and eager to stand up and fight for the end of human suffering" or a "poor ignorant child" under the influence of "liberal propaganda".
Well, I hope you visit the website and determine for yourselves which one of those descriptions fits me best. This effort began as a simple class project but has expanded to the point where people who have never heard of Loyola Academy have commented on our site. Feel free to leave comments yourselves; I try to address the questions posed to me.
I am interested to hear what fellow Kossacks think about our campaign and whether or not you would be willing to participate in an effort to reform companies like Coca-Cola.