On the same day that University Associate Vice President for Finance Peggy Norgren said that Coca-Cola has been acting in "good faith" (The University Responds to The Coke Coalition, 10/26/2005), another letter was publicly released announcing that students on the national commission investigating Coke would be disengaging because of Coca-Cola's uncooperative nature.

Created by Coca-Cola itself, a commission was meant to plan and execute an independent investigation of the current conditions at Coca-Cola's bottling plants in Colombia and India.  It was composed of university administrators, students and labor rights experts. After months of negotiations, Coca-Cola continues its attempts to dictate the terms of the methodology and has refused to settle on any draft investigation presented by the commission.

At a commission meeting in September, Ed Potter, Coca-Cola's global labor relations director asked that the murders of the Colombian union leaders not be investigated because they are not part of the "current" situation. Furthermore, Coca-Cola is struggling to strike up an inadmissibility deal with all parties involved in the Miami lawsuit against Coca-Cola, asking all litigants to agree that anything uncovered by an investigation overseen by the commission will not be used in court. The case relates to the rights of union workers represented by SINALTRAINAL, which has seen nine members murdered in the past 10 years. It is because of Coca-Cola's treatment of the commission that the five students from separate American universities decided to disengage from the commission.

Despite Coca-Cola's unreasonable demands of the commission, Tim Slottow, the University's chief financial officer, deemed Coke's participation in the commission an act of "good faith." In doing so, he ignored the Sept. 30 deadline the University's Dispute Review Board set in May 2005 for Coca-Cola to agree to an independent investigation.

 Even as the University accepts Coca-Cola's actions as "good faith," human rights violations continue in Turkey, Indonesia, Guatemala, Peru, India and Colombia. Nothing has changed; things have only gotten worse.  Furthermore, Coca-Cola successfully hid behind the commission instead of meeting the University's Sept. 30 deadline of agreeing to an independent investigation. What's more, in a letter delivered on the day of the deadline, Coca-Cola lied about distributing fresh water to community members around the closed plant in India, deceitfully citing it as "progress."

In the eyes of the international student movement to hold Coca-Cola accountable, the commission has been delegitimized. Mention of commission will not be accepted as an excuse for a lack of so-called "progress" offered by the University to explain why the contract has not been cut.  The University's Coke Coalition will continue to escalate the campaign after gathering strength from former Coke union worker Luis Adolfo Cardona and the India Resource Center's Amit Srivastava, who visited campus as witnesses to the company's crimes last Tuesday. Currently, Cardona and Srivastava, along with other witnesses, are traveling through the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom to support and spark student movements. More than 55 universities worldwide have already cut contracts. The Coke Coalition is committed to our demand made in solidarity with communities that Coca-Cola damaged: the contract must be cut.

This viewpoint represents the opinion of The Coke Coalition.