Coke Con Azúcar August 29, 2021
“I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.”
When I hold my can of Coke, I draw disapproving glances from perfect strangers and friends alike. Even without sugar, I feel like I am displaying a blood diamond for my own selfish pleasure, some wicked thing that is responsible for so much suffering in Mexico, and in San Cristóbal in particular. I drain the bubbly crude in haste, lest someone slap it from my hands, raising the black-aluminum “Sin Azúcar” label as a scarlet letter for my “Sin.”
The Coca-Cola Company dominates the industrial food industry of Mexico, both in terms of profits and effects on society. It is often noted that the nation did not have a youth-obesity problem until Coke began filling its products with cheap high-fructose corn syrup. Thanks to its ubiquitous advertising presence, as well as a shrewd public investment strategy, Coke’s successes bleed into culture and politics and even religion.
Indeed, President Vicente Fox was a Coke executive long before he was head of state. Fox took power as president just as a trade war was waging between Mexico and the United States over sugar. Mexico wanted a tariff on fructose, but the World Trade Organization ruled it to be in violation of NAFTA. Thus, northern corn sugar effectively replaced southern cane sugar as Coke’s sweetener.
For centuries, the hacienda system of debtor-peons had made the cane industry of the south profitable with cheap exports through a brand of indentured servitude. Money flowed from the backs of the extremely poor, who were mestizo-indigenous, and who also happen to be the primary consumers of Coke.
The Tzotzil Maya equate the beverage with Pox as a mystical curative. It has become a key to subsistence as well as spirituality. The bottles are offered as wedding dowries. They stand beside candles at worship services in indigenous Catholic Churches. They are used to settle financial disputes, and they are reserved for most valued guests. Coke is dispensed as a spiritual elixir against all malady. And yet, these bottles—the madonna-shaped glass is especially coveted—help to make diabetes the second leading cause of death in Chiapas. Number one is the disease of a bloated heart and fat-clogged circulatory system, which is also attributable to a diet of sugar, whether sucrose or fructose or glucose. Coke may explain why people start losing their teeth by age 40, as Chiapanecos consume, per capita, 2.2 Liters of Coke per day, more than just about anyplace else on earth. In the rural towns, Coke can sell for as little as 9 pesos for a bottle, which is as cheap as bottled water. It is also more accessible.
Coke has nearly achieved the status of empire in these parts, replacing religious symbols, usurping rituals, all while literally draining the life-blood. Homeowners in San Cristóbal are losing their water to the insatiable demands of the local Coca-Cola bottling plant, which syphons directly from the city aquifer without imposed limits. As wells continue to go dry, many are left with nothing but the filthy river. It is beyond ironic that Chiapas and neighboring Tabasco are the wettest states in the nation; yet, if a poor Chiapaneco is desperate with thirst, his only option may be a sacramental Coke from the company store. And that, to paraphrase a famous advertising jingle, is the real goddamned thing.