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Ed Potter, Coca-Cola director of global labor relations and workplace accountability, defended hi

When Associated Students UCLA representatives speak at their monthly board meetings, the room is usually relatively quiet.

But at the ASUCLA board of directors’ meeting this past Friday, it was hard to hear their voices over the shouts and cheers of about 20 students demonstrating outside Kerckhoff Hall and the muffled murmurs of another 50 or so students gathered on both sides of Kerckhoff Stateroom.

Representatives from Coca-Cola presented information at the meeting, stating the company’s position in a debate over Coca-Cola’s alleged human rights violations abroad.

ASUCLA officials said they wanted to use the meeting to understand both sides of the dispute, and eventually come to a decision on whether to continue selling Coca-Cola products on campus, though no decision was made Friday and no specific date for the decision has been set.

The push to ban Coca-Cola from campus is the latest example of ASUCLA reconsidering its sale of a product for social reasons. Past actions include the removal of Taco Bell in October 2004 over alleged labor abuses by Taco Bell’s tomato suppliers in Florida and the ban on cigarette sales from all ASUCLA facilities in the early 1990s. Taco Bell returned to campus this fall.

The commotion at the meeting was caused by Coke-Free Campus, a student coalition protesting the sale of Coca-Cola products on campus because they maintain the company is violating human rights.

The student organization met with board members at the board’s last meeting on March 10 to present their allegations of Coca-Cola’s engagement in inhumane practices against its workers at Colombian bottling plants.

At the last meeting, they claimed The Coca-Cola Company had allowed its workers in Colombia to be murdered, detained and tortured without investigation by their employers.

Ed Potter, the director of global labor relations and workplace accountability for Coca-Cola, said that before believing the accusations, ASUCLA should understand the historical context of the situation in Columbia.

Colombia has been undergoing civil conflict between the left-wing guerrillas and the right-wing paramilitaries for over six decades, killing over 20,000 Colombian citizens a year, said Pablo Largacha, the director of public affairs and communications for Coca-Cola and a native of Colombia.

“A boycott is not an adequate way to stop the problem of violence in Colombia,” Largacha said. “What we need now is to take a more active, constructive role. We cannot do it alone. We need the help of companies, organizations, the International Labor Organization.”

Potter pointed out that Coca-Cola is one of those companies that is trying to help Colombia.

“Coca-Cola has denounced the violence in Colombia on many occasions,” Potter said. “In July 2006, the International Business Leaders Forum is conducting a forum to look at what businesses can do to alleviate the violence, and Coca-Cola will be there.”

The International Labor Organization will be conducting an investigation of Coca-Cola’s Colombian workers’ rights practices, scheduled to begin this summer and conclude in September, Potter added.

Student representatives from Coke-Free Campus stood to one side of the room, holding up the printed faces of Colombian workers who had died over the past few years.

Posters of killed Colombian workers, laying on the ground with the Coca-Cola logo trickling like blood out of their bodies, were held up outside against the windows of the building.

Largacha said the deaths of these workers were not the fault of The Coca-Cola company, pointing to one of the printed images of a man’s face.

“This man, Isidro Gil, was a bodyguard at the entrance to his bottling plant. Paramilitary thugs killed him to get inside the plant and threatened the workers inside,” he said. “But there was nothing the bottling management could do to stop them.”

During a question-and-answer session after the presentation, Alexis Montes, a fourth-year history and political science student and a member of Coke-Free Campus, said because nine Colombian workers have died, Coca-Cola does not defend its workers.

“Coca-Cola fails to uphold a human rights standard a university like this should uphold,” he said.

But members of Coke-Free Campus were not the only students present at the ASUCLA meeting to participate in the discussion. A group of members from Bruin Republicans was also in attendance.

Faith Christiansen, chairwoman for Bruin Republicans, said Coke-Free Campus’ accusations were unfounded and proposals were not realistic.

“The claims of the Coke-Free Campus coalition are unsound and unproven and their policies, if drawn out, would be disastrous,” she said.