Estimated reading time: 15 minutes
Mexico is in the throes of an epidemic of violence. Tabloid newspapers breathlessly recount tales of grotesque murders and infighting between criminal factions, while more sober news outlets publish sanctimonious columns and finger-wagging op-eds decrying “corruption” and the decay of bourgeois “democracy”. But not a meter away, in the same newsstand, another violence is being sold out of a red-and-white minifridge. This violence — sweet and cold — is far more deadly to the citizens of Mexico than anything perpetuated by the narcotics trade.
Mexico registered the 7th most cases of diabetes in the world in 2021, per the International Diabetes Foundation. According to the World Health Organization, more than 110,000 people died as a cause of diabetes mellitus in 2021, making it the third-most-common cause of death in the country, behind only COVID-19 and ischaemic heart disease. According to statistics from the World Bank and the WHO, the homicide rate per 100,000 people in Mexico is 28, while 71 out of every 100,000 people die from diabetes mellitus.
The Beginning
The sun is setting in the town of San Juan Chamula, in the soaring mountains of Chiapas, Mexico. The streets hum with tourists during the day, but now the sidewalks are empty, and stillness hangs in the air. Souvenir sellers are packing up their wares, and a local man wearing a polo shirt and a battered baseball cap steps around them to enter a local store. A few minutes later he exits with a soft drink in his hand, and a gentle hiss and clink echo softly in the avenue. He takes a long drink and lights a cigarette. The point of light at the end of the Pall Mall reflects in the glass bottle, mirroring the fiery orange of the sky overhead. The swooping white script of the bottle’s logo is barely visible in the dying evening light.
Coca-Cola is ubiquitous in Mexico. Tables, chairs, store signs, billboards, upscale restaurants and street stalls — the red-and-white logo is seemingly everywhere. In a country awash in soft drinks, the state of Chiapas reigns supreme. According to a study by the Centro de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias sobre Chiapas y la Frontera Sur (CIMSUR), the average per capita consumption of soft drinks in Mexico is 160 liters per year, while the average resident of Chiapas drinks 821 liters per year, or an average of 2.5 liters consumed per person per day, making the southern state the global leader in soft drink consumption.
The iconic soft drink first arrived in Mexico in 1929, but didn’t spread to Chiapas until the mid 1950s. The lush southern state has always been among the poorest in Mexico, and in the middle of the 20th century most of Chiapas’ rural population lived in isolated towns, connected only by dirt tracks or beaten pathways through forests and across ridges and hollows. Before the spread of soft drinks, fruit-infused waters, pozol, and pox were the most popular refreshments in Chiapas. Pozol is a fermented drink made from corn mash, and pox (pronounced “posh”) is a distilled alcohol made from sugarcane and corn. The former is typically taken as a refreshment at meals or while working outside, while the latter is featured in parties, religious ceremonies and other special events.
The Spread
The small church is hazy with smoke. A carpet of herbs is neatly arranged on the floor. Flickering candles ring the small nave. Before the candles stand bottles of Coca-Cola, opened. The faithful pray, take a sip from a bottle, and pass it to their friend. The Coke is chased with a small glass of pox thrown back quickly.
As The Coca-Cola Company transformed itself from purveyor of a bottled curiosity into a global symbol of United States imperial culture and extractivist power, the government of Mexico saw in it an opportunity to advance its political interests while turning a hefty profit. The ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) had consolidated political power within governmental structures, but attempts to expand into rural zones were hampered by the difficulty of travel and the insular nature of rural towns themselves. Often members of a single family ruled in remote towns, positioning themselves in the role of cacique — the only intermediary between the people and the local landowning class, or the bourgeois government in the state capital.
The PRI granted Coca-Cola concessions to cacique families, in exchange for political loyalty to the federal Mexican regime. Many cacique families had held power for generations — often long before the solidification of the Mexican federal state under Benito Juárez and its subsequent expansion under Porfirio Díaz and Álvaro Obregón — and were long-accustomed to ruling impoverished populations with domineering cruelty. In addition to owning the local general store and controlling the routes in and out of remote towns, caciques also ran the local pox and pozol trade. These already-existing business concerns provided a ready-made structure for the spread of Coca-Cola throughout the Chiapas countryside.
Coca-Cola entered Chiapas with a bang. Upon receiving access to a new zone of consumers, Coca-Cola’s marketing and distribution experts went to work expanding the company to every corner of the area. From the most exclusive restaurants in San Cristobal de las Casas and Tuxtla Gutiérrez to the most humble abode, nowhere was safe from the ravages of the soft-drink behemoth. Even religious ceremonies famously incorporate Coca-Cola into their rituals — impulsed largely by Christian missionaries preaching the evils of alcohol consumption to Indigenous communities. The missionaries — displaying the classic mix of arrogance and ignorance typical of moralizing U.S. social adventurism in underdeveloped countries — demonized pox and pozol and encouraged local religious officiants to replace alcohol with Coca-Cola. A local pest replaced by a massive and invasive parasite.
The company employed outward-facing inclusivity to enter already-existing structures and relationships, monetize them, and reap enormous profit — a strategy more frequently associated with the 2020s than the 1950s. Coca-Cola tailored its trademark blitzkrieg marketing strategy specifically to the local Indigenous population of Chiapas. Billboards featured Indigenous models, stores carried advertisement posters with copy written in Tzotzil, and publicity campaigns featured Coca-Cola being used to celebrate a family gathering, to pay a debt, to say thank you, or to be a good host. Coca-Cola was pasted into existing social situations, creating a social dependency on the brand throughout the state.
As the century progressed, Coca-Cola concessions grew ever more numerous. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the federal government encouraged local power leaders to supplant the white landowning ladino class. Literacy programs and ever more Coca-Cola sponsorships fostered the creation of a local bourgeois class. In addition to peddling soft-drinks, these local bourgeois centralized agricultural production into local monopolies. Capitalist exploitation changed form; while imperious white elites speaking Spanish (castellano, as the language is called by many Chiapanecans) were phased out in favor of familiar faces that spoke the local language, the structure of theft and destruction remained the same.
The strategy of political alignment was also employed by Coca-Cola’s biggest rival, Pepsi-Cola. The two brands separated along political lines. While the former allied itself with the PRI, the latter integrated with the rival Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) party. In a mafia-esque fashion, both brands pressured concession-holders to distribute their products exclusively, and threatened to withhold shipments to sellers who refused.
Concession holders distributed the new soft drinks at town parties they sponsored, local sporting events, and schools. They created demand which could then be sated at the local store, also owned by the concession holder or one of their family members. Soft drink prices in remote villages were set much lower in urban locales. Pathways were hacked through the forests by machete to make way for the product. Trucks from the bottling plant often left crates of Coca-Cola by the side of the highway, where they were picked up by distributors on horseback and taken to their destination along trails and unpaved cart paths.
The new drink proved a hit with consumers and caciques alike, filling the coffers of the latter and allowing the PRI, through the addictive properties of the sugary poison of Coca-Cola, to infiltrate the previously-impenetrable Chiapas countryside.
Endemic
“Detrás de cada botella con el sello de Hecho en México, hay una comunidad entera que hace que todo suceda” (Behind every bottle bearing the Made in Mexico seal, there is an entire community that makes everything happen.)
Coca-Cola FEMSA
The inroads made by Coca-Cola and its concession holders in Chiapas have led to a flood of cheap junk food. Using networks established to distribute Coca-Cola (those aforementioned trails cut through the forest by machete), potato chips, candy, and a host of drinks high in sugars and salts have inundated rural Chiapanecan communities, with mortal consequences.
The soft drink’s presence in Chiapas has also restricted local agriculture. In mid-1994, Coca-Cola FEMSA, a Mexican Coca-Cola subsidiary that owns and operates a bottling plant in Chiapas (and also the entire OXXO convenience store chain), inaugurated a new plant outside San Cristobal de las Casas. Soon after, nearby wells began to run dry, as the massive water requirements of the bottling plant began to deplete aquifers. Small farmers cannot access sufficient water to irrigate their crops, forced instead to rely on seasonal rains that grow more unpredictable with every passing year.
Coca-Cola FEMSA has robbed previously self-sufficient agricultural communities of the means for their own survival, forcing many to travel to the state or federal capital, or the United States, in search of work. The little water that remains is not potable, so many residents buy drinking water from Coca-Cola. As usual, the Mexican government’s response to this crisis has been arrogantly detached from reality. In his term as president at the beginning of the 21st century, Vicente Fox placed the former director general of Coca-Cola in Mexico at the head of the Comisión Nacional del Agua. From 2000-2006, a former Coca-Cola executive directly controlled every drop of water in Mexico.
The vast majority of the violence Coca-Cola wreaks upon Chiapas is not dispatched at supersonic speeds from the barrel of an automatic rifle (although the company is no stranger to such tactics). Neither does it manifest as kidnapping or torture (unless the company or one of its numerous global subsidiaries fears union pressure). Coca-Cola is a plague upon the state of Chiapas. Coca-Cola sells a little bit of death in every can of its insidiously addictive beverages.
Even government statistics confirm the extent of the crisis. According to a study undertaken by El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, one-quarter of the state’s population suffers from obesity. In 2022 the Instituto Nacionál de Estatística y Geografía (INEGI) reported 7,617 deaths as a result of heart failure. In 2023 INEGI registered 4,531 direct deaths caused by diabetes mellitus, compared with 631 homicides registered in the same period. In a country that once elected a former Coca-Cola executive as president, the effects of Coca-Cola on Chiapas are too severe to be ignored.
How does diabetes so easily lead to death in Chiapas? The Mexican government has refused to provide adequate healthcare facilities and sufficient supplies of medicine to rural communities. The Zapatista militant left movement, which has controlled much of rural Chiapas since their 1994 offensive, has prioritized the construction of clinics, dentists’ offices and other healthcare facilities since the beginning of their movement, filling in some of the gaps left by the Mexican state. While the popular success of Zapatista healthcare initiatives has in turn has led to grudging healthcare investment from the state and federal governments, many communities in government-controlled territory are still miles away from the healthcare they need. Once the people have fulfilled their role as consumers by handing over their hard-earned money to Coca-Cola, the bourgeois Mexican government leaves them to die.
Conclusion
Fighting and bickering within the narcotics trade is a longtime favorite target of bourgeois media. Loud, brash characters brandish firearms carelessly, creating mountains of dead in a never-ending pursuit of riches and glory, according to countless TV shows, movies, investigative articles, and documentaries. But what of the death toll accumulated by the vicious drive of capital to infest every corner of the earth — a death toll that exponentially supersedes the deaths caused by criminal activity in one of the most violent countries in the world?
Coca-Cola requires death. The company’s drinks are a contagion, a blight upon the land and the people living on it. Diabetes and heart failure are an acceptable cost to the company and its subsidiaries. Let them die, that we might be rich — the unspoken sentiment hanging in the air in every board meeting. Suffer, that we may profit — the terrible truth between the connections in every corporate Zoom meeting. The Coca-Cola Company and all its minions and facilitators around the world murder tens of thousands by selling a poison product. They have reduced millions more to a beaten, rageful capitulation, kicked into submission by the patent-leather boots of Coca-Cola corporate leaders. The victims must not dare to question the great whims and fancies of multinational capital. They must kneel, obediently, while their blood turns sweet, and the sugar kills them from the inside out.
The Coca-Cola advertising machine — still one of the best marketing departments in the world — churns out a daily batch of lies and excuses. The website for Coca-Cola FEMSA proudly touts the company’s “sustainable management of water” and the “benefits of recycling” while making no mention of the negative health consequences resulting from consumption of their product. The website of The Coca-Cola Company provides a blurb that states that consumption of sugary beverages does not lead to diabetes, citing a 2005 study from the National Institute of Health. In a 2018 article in the New York Times, Coca-Cola FEMSA spokesperson José Ramón Martínez suggested that Mexican people are genetically predisposed to develop diabetes, a theory that has long been disproved, following a long tradition of racist so-called justifications for exploitation and violence.
Just as settler colonists plied Indigenous populations with alcohol in an attempt to subjugate them, so too does the settler colonial company ply death in a bottle to Indigenous communities in Chiapas. Diabetes, heart problems, obesity, and tooth decay have all become as much a part of the landscape as the 355 mL glass Coca-Cola bottle. Despite marches, numerous expository articles in local media, false promises by The Coca-Cola Company and its subsidiaries to reduce waste, and a flood of corporate buzzword-based propaganda highlighting the company’s dedication to the planet and the community, the wave of deaths continue. Coca-Cola’s invasion of Chiapas is yet another episode in a long tradition of addictive substances foisted onto local populations by imperial capitalists desperate for a profit. Chiapas and the rest of the world suffering from junk food addiction will never know freedom until The Coca-Cola Company, all its subsidiaries and local partners, and every other junk food producer and seller are cleared from the land, and the people wrest control of their own health and nutrition from the iron grip of invading imperial merchants of death.
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