Belching Out the Devil by Mark Thomas Page B

engineering his wrongful imprisonment.
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    Luis Eduardo started work for the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Bucaramanga in 1988, working his way up from a cleaner to the position he currently holds, assistant to José Domingo Florez, his best friend who drives a huge red Coke truck. Luis Eduardo is the crate shifter and stacker for the truck. This tale has a familiar start. Initially there was respect for the union
but that changed in the mid-1990s when the manager of the plant accused the trade unionists of being ‘guerillas’ and employees’ medical insurance was suddenly cancelled. This provoked a strike, led in part by Luis Eduardo. Then events took an altogether more conspiratorial turn. After the strike the head of security at the Coke plant, José Alejo Aponte, contacted the police accusing Luis Eduardo, Domingo Flores and Álvaro González Pérez, another trade union organiser, of planting a bomb in the bottling plant. The three men went to prison in March 1996 to await trial and spent the next six months there. 1
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    â€˜Coca-Cola employees publicly accused us, before the authorities, that we were terrorists,’ says Luis Eduardo illuminated by the glow of the fish tank. As proof of the terrorist plot, ‘The boss of security in the firm, he took a packet, a metal box, put it beneath his arm and he ran around the plant saying that it was a bomb, it was a bomb!’ Luis Eduardo shakes his head in wonderment that any sane individual might walk around holding a real bomb under their arm. And, more than this, that the authorities might credulously believe the word of a man who claims he has a bomb tucked under his armpit. Not content with finding a fictitious bomb the company then said it had actually gone off. Where was the damage then? Ah, those cunning terrorists had cleaned it up afterwards. Obviously following a new insurrectionary trend: tidy terrorists, terrorists your mother could like - they may blow up buildings but they always leave some potpourri in a bowl by the smouldering rubble.
    â€˜The company [security manager] says that the bomb exploded but there was never any damage inside the company,’ says an incredulous Luis Eduardo.

    Indeed the Regional Prosecutor shared his view, finding that not only were the men innocent of plotting to plant a bomb but that no such bomb existed in the first place. 2
    â€˜We managed to prove our innocence and Coca-Cola had to return us to our jobs,’ says Luis Eduardo
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    But by then the damage had been done, as they had spent six months in prison awaiting trial. Domingo Flores, Luis Eduardo’s best friend arrested alongside him, claims he was tortured by the police. And if it was tough for the men it was even worse for the families.
    â€˜For the kids it was really hard,’ says Esmeralda, her arm draped casually around Mayela as they sit on the sofa.
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    Luis Eduardo nods in the direction of Laura, ‘My youngest daughter - I had to remove her from the school because her friends said to her that her father was a delinquent and a terrorist.’
    â€˜Because it was all on the TV news and in the newspapers,’ adds Esmeralda. So the nine-year-old Laura would demonstrate outside the prison gates, banner in hand, demanding the release of her father. ‘The girls would visit their dad once a month,’ she continues, but the official visits were not enough. ‘They wanted to see him, they’d wait outside the prison and he would see us through the window and throw us a note.’
    â€˜In prison in order to communicate with your family, you have to write a note,’ Luis Eduardo explains, so he would wrap the note around a sweet or something he could hurl through the bars of the open cell window, over the wall. Nothing too personal was ever put in it in case it fell into unintended hands. The contents would read, ‘I am OK. Don’t worry, the lawyer came and it’s going