Life Goes Better With Coke - Dontchaknow?
"When I was a kid and used to come here, Chamula was isolated and didn't have access to processed food."
"Now, you see the kids drinking Coke and not water. Right now, diabetes is hitting the adults, but it's going to be the kids next. It's going to overwhelm us."
Vicente Vaqueiros doctor, San Juan Chamula clinic
"Coca-Cola is abusive, manipulative."
"They take our pure water, they dye it and they trick you on TV saying that it's the spark of life."
"Then they take the money and go."
Martin Lopez Lopez, local activist
"Coca-Cola pays this money to the federal government, not the local government."
"While the infrastructure that serves the residents of San Cristobal is literally crumbling."
Laura Mebert, social scientist, Kettering University, Michigan
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| [A road-sign marking the way to YITIC, in the Altos de Chiapas (Maria Verza)] |
Coca-Cola arrived in this normally rainiest region of Mexico fifty years ago to set up their factory locally, employing locals and advertising its product in marketing campaigns shared by Pepsi producing billboards in local languages using models in traditional Tzotzil outfits. The locals became so psychologically involved with the sweet chemical drink that they have adopted it in their religious ceremonies practised by the indigenous Tzotzil population. To the extent that many believe the power to heal the ill lies within the purview of the carbonated soda drink.
Cruel irony.
Coca-Cola pays the government a minuscule amount for its right to extract water for the production of its world-famed pseudo-potable product; about ten cents per 1,000 liters. Water runs so short in San Cristobal de las Casas in the southeastern state of Chiapas, some neighbourhoods can count on running water several times a week only. Tanker trucks sell additional water to households. And because of the shortage of potable water, in steps Coca-Cola priced in competition with bottled water.
Chiapas residents drink an average of over two liters of soda daily. This habit born of avoidable circumstances has affected people's health, raising the mortality rate from diabetes 30 percent between 2013 and 2016. The second leading cause of death in the state after heart disease is diabetes, with over 3,000 people dying annually from complications of diabetes. Those complications are not only blindness and vascular problems, but primary links to heart disease.
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| San Pedro Chenalhó (M.V) |
The Coca-Cola bottling plant is owned and operated by a food and beverage giant with the rights throughout much of Latin America. Femsa executives claim their plant impacts minimally on the water supply for the city; their wells are deeper by far than the springs supplying local residents. And Ferma has permits to extract over one million liters of water a day in its decades-old deal with the Mexican government. Its deep wells, of course deplete the water table; little wonder that wells further up run dry....!
But Femsa represents an influential force for the local and federal economy. Four hundred people are employed at the plant, which contributes roughly $200-million annually to the state economy. In that sense, it is like a tax, funded by the locals who consume inordinate amounts of the unhealthy concoction whose manufacture leaves them critically short of water. It is a situation that represents an insane, repetitive raping of a vital natural resource, victimizing those whom it claims to serve.
The rivers running through San Cristobal are found to be rife with infectious pathogens and E.coli, speaking to a general neglect of the area by the federal government; the population ill served by their own municipal authority with a lack of wastewater treatment, raw sewage flowing directly into local waterways. Maria del Carmen Abadia, a resident of the city, witnessed her father die from diabetes complications, sees her mother's health waning, fears for herself. "I'm worried I'll end up blind or without a foot or a hand. I'm very scared", she says.
She should be.
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| Coca-Cola bottlesBigstock |
Labels: Coca-Cola, Health, Mexico
posted by Pieface @ Monday, July 23, 2018
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