It is hard to imagine that in Mexico, a small town with a population of only 180,000, 140 million liters of cola are consumed every year. On average, each person drinks nearly 800 liters per year, which means that each person drinks about 2.2 liters per day.
In the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico, there is a magical town – San Cristobal de las Casas, which is a paradise for all those who love cola, known as “Coke Town”.
People in this small town use cola to replace almost all their daily drinking water. Even diabetics can’t refuse it, as if Coke is flowing in their blood. It can be said that the residents of this small town live on Coke, and Coke can be seen anywhere in the town. The daily life of the residents is inseparable from cola, and they also built a cola church for this purpose. The local children could not escape the “Coke attack”. Not only were they taught by their parents to drink more Coke, but they were also told that they could expel demons by drinking Coke to hiccup.
1.coke is everywhere
Even built a cola church
When you walk into the small town of San Cristobal de las Casas, it’s like entering a cola world. Unlike other places where Coke is usually only available in stores, here Coke can be found anywhere in town.
All kinds of Coke billboards can be seen everywhere on the streets of the town. These billboards will be constantly changed according to time, but they are always the same, and they are all advertising Coke. The eye-catching trucks on the road are often trucks filled with boxes of Coke. Walking into any store on the street, the most eye-catching thing will be the piles of Coke—the merchants here have never worried about the sales of Coke. On the contrary, if there is no Coke store, it will be difficult to sustain in the local area. Even during the COVID-19 epidemic, the small vaccination gifts provided by local doctors to vaccinated people were also a Coke.
As a mass product, cola is ubiquitous in the small town of Cristobal de las Casa, and the daily life of local residents is inseparable from cola.
When town residents eat breakfast, a bottle of Coke is usually placed on the table as a tool to refresh their minds in the morning; workers also drink a bottle of Coke to relieve fatigue during the interval between installing Coke billboards in the morning; adults play games with their children at home in the afternoon , using Coke bottles as interactive toys; even at dinner parties with various relatives, they don’t drink, but hold up Coke and drink freely. What is even more shocking is that in the Mexican drug lord prison, those prisoners who can only go to the commissary once a week will also choose to buy Coke in the first place!
In addition, Coke also has a very high status in local sacrificial activities. In order to show respect to the ancestors, people replaced spirits with beloved cola as a sacrificial offering to ancestors; when the sacrifice reached its climax, people would gather together to drink cola happily. There is a Coke church in the local area, which displays countless Coke bottles. They have always believed that drinking Coke can expel demons—”Drinking it, you will realize the connection with the demon, and when you hiccup, you will expel the evil from your body and realize the cleansing of the soul. The more you hiccup, the stronger your soul will be” clean”.
Frankly speaking, the life of the town residents has been completely “controlled” by Coke. But the situation here is not an exception, because Mexico, where the town belongs, is a veritable “Kingdom of Cola”. As the world’s largest consumer of cola, more than 80% of people in Mexico drink cola every day, and cola can be seen in many fields in the country.
For example, Coca-Cola once sponsored the 1968 Mexico Olympic Games and twice sponsored the Mexico World Cup. Among them, it has to be mentioned that the 70th president of Mexico, Fox, was also the president of Coca-Cola Mexico. A large part of the Fox president’s first donation in the campaign came from Coca-Cola, and during his presidency, although the country’s economic growth was not rapid, Coca-Cola’s business has grown tremendously.
Gangster organizations in Mexico also make money by selling smuggled Coke. In some places, the Coke market is completely controlled by gangsters. Gangsters use their convoys to transport Coke from neighboring cities and sell it to residents at extremely high prices. And those residents who are addicted to drinking Coke can only grit their teeth and accept such high-priced Coke.
2.A cola factory is born
Coke finally became everyday drinking water
More than 100 years ago, Coke first appeared in the public eye, and it quickly won the love of everyone and became popular all over the world. But there are still a variety of drinks that go hand in hand with cola, providing people with different choices. But in the cola town in Mexico, cola has replaced almost all daily drinking water. The reason for this has to start more than 20 years ago.
In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect, and the Coca-Cola Company decided to build a new Coke factory in Mexico in order to expand the Mexican market. After many negotiations, the Coca-Cola Company finally chose to build a new Coke processing plant in the town of San Cristobal de Las Casas, the area with the most rain in Mexico. At that time, this small town was one of the poorest areas in Mexico and urgently needed economic development. The capital and the government hit it off and reached an agreement. The local government allowed the Coca-Cola Company to open a factory here and allowed them to pump more than 1,300 tons of groundwater every day. ; Coca-Cola also recruited a large number of employees locally, which solved the employment problem of many people.
But no one expected that this seemingly benign decision would change the lives of local residents forever.
This factory, which has brought economic benefits to the local area of 200 million US dollars, pumps a huge amount of groundwater every day, making the wells dry up in the small town that was originally rich in water resources, and people can no longer get daily water through the wells. What’s more serious is that the Coke Company not only consumes a lot of water resources, but also pollutes the local rivers more seriously with the waste water produced during production. This also caused the water produced by the taps to contain excessive chlorine, making it completely unusable. At this time, the rainfall in the town was also greatly reduced. It can be said that overnight, the town lost all sources of daily drinking water.
Clean water is the guarantee of residents’ normal life. If people want to obtain clean water, they can only choose to buy pure water. A 1.5-liter bottle of water here costs 18 pesos (approximately RMB 7), not to mention that those water trucks only come a few times a week. If a family’s daily water needs can only be met by purchasing pure water, it must be very expensive. Big expense. Under such circumstances, the residents had no choice but to turn to the local cola processing factory – because the local cola sold reduces the transportation cost, a bottle of cola with the same weight of 1.5 liters costs only 14 pesos (about 5 yuan), Even cheaper than pure water.
The former president of Mexico, as the president of the Coca-Cola Group at the time, continued to vigorously promote Coca-Cola in the country during his six years in power, which also brought Coca-Cola’s sales to a peak. Under the ubiquitous advertising and marketing, under the advantage of lower than the price of pure water, Coke successfully replaced pure water and became the daily drinking water of small town residents.
3.way out of coke
just drink the last bottle
Many people have the experience of being told by their parents to “drink less Coke”, and it is true. YouTube videos and BBC documentaries have shown that excessive intake of cola can cause a health crisis: first, cola contains caffeine, which is addictive and difficult to quit; Too much phosphorus will lead to a large amount of calcium loss, resulting in osteoporosis. In addition, there is excessive sugar in cola, which is the biggest killer of health hazards-if people drink cola for a long time, it will cause diabetes. Diabetes is a chronic disease that requires long-term treatment once it develops. If not properly controlled, it may lead to other serious complications.
For diabetes, townspeople had hoped that hospital treatment would stabilize the condition, according to The Associated Press and The New York Times. But when they came to the hospital, they received another bad news – because there were too many diabetic patients, the hospital did not have enough medical resources to help everyone. Many patients can only resign themselves to their fate and rely on their own immunity to race against the disease. Once they lose, they will lose their lives.
The Mexican government is not completely ignorant of this situation, but they don’t want to and have no way to deal with it.
The entire Coke Group has been completely tied to the government. The income of the Coke Group is a major income of the government. They cannot restrict the sale of Coke in the domestic market by cutting off their arms. The attitude of the government’s indifference pushed the people into the abyss of illness. Many patients who were tortured by the illness chose to ask the witch shaman in order to find a solution. When medicine could not help, they chose a kind of faith as a support to gain spiritual comfort.
What people didn’t expect is that those witches are actually people whose hearts have been corrupted by the interests of Coke, and their other identity is Coke dealers. In order to improve their performance, these sorceresses do everything possible, not only exaggerating the “efficacy” of cola, but also never mentioning the harm of cola to people. They claimed that “you can burp the disease out of your body by drinking Coke”, and once again sold Coke to diabetics. Those poor people who can’t go to the regular hospital for help, and they are so convinced of it-they have suspected that quarrels and complaints made them sick, but they never doubted the Coke they drank every day, nor did they suspect that It is this trust that makes their diabetes worse.
According to relevant statistics, in 2012, more than 24,000 people in Mexico died of diabetes, and many others were killed by complications caused by diabetes. In 2013, the Mexican government finally realized that the sale of Coke could no longer be left alone, and in January 2014 announced a 10% tax on sugary drinks. Even so, the price of cola is still lower than that of pure water, and people have already developed the habit of “keeping cola in their hands” after drinking cola for a long time. From 2013 to 2016, in the state of Chiapas alone, where the small town of San Cristobal de las Casas is located, the death rate from diabetes increased by 30% in three years, and diabetes is now second only to heart disease in this state. The second leading cause of death in the region, more than 3,000 people die from diabetes each year in the region.
This is not the final result. It is even more regrettable that the Associated Press and the New York Times also pointed out that Coke has also affected the health of local children.
Overwhelming Coke slogans, adults drinking Coke at family gatherings, Coke churches standing in small towns… The wonderful taste of Coke itself has a huge appeal to children. If adults have no self-control over Coke, how can children control themselves and refuse this fizzy, sweet drink?
Children who have been with cola since childhood not only have their teeth damaged by cola, but their bodies have also become bulky and obese, and they have been “favored” by diabetes at a young age. Vicente Vaqueiros, a doctor who has faced countless diabetic patients, said helplessly, “Diabetes really overwhelms us.” In 2017, some local residents organized a protest. They came to the front of the Coke factory with their faces covered, holding a cross in their hands, which read “Coke is killing us”, and they demanded that the Coke factory be closed, but in the end they returned without success. Some people even joked in despair that the best way to solve the Coke problem is to “drink the last bottle of Coke in Mexico”.
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