The Sweetened Drinks Industry Silences a Critic in Colombia
investigate. Coke and Pepsi said they were not involved, and Postobón, the company that filed the complaint about the ad, deferred comment to The National Business Association of Colombia. The association said it had nothing to do with the episodes.
Industry opposition has killed or stalled soda tax proposals around the globe, including in Russia, Germany, Israel and New Zealand. Nevertheless, the idea is gaining momentum; levies have been enacted in 30 countries.
The battles have been particularly intense in emerging markets as the industry seeks to make up for falling soda consumption in wealthier nations. Latin America has surpassed the United States as the world’s biggest soft- drink market, according to the World Health Organization.
The beverage industry asserts that taxes unfairly burden the poor, cause higher unemployment by squeezing industry sales and fail to achieve their goal: reducing obesity.
But public health organizations cite soda taxes as one of the most effective policy tools for cutting consumption of what nutritionists call a “liquid candy” that has contributed to an epidemic of obesity.
Dr. Kathryn Backholer at Deakin University in Australia and other experts said the turning point for beverage tax proponents came in 2014, when Mexico — Coca- Cola’s biggest consumer market by per capita consumption — approved a 10 percent tax.
Elsewhere, soda companies have worked their government connections and economic clout. In internal emails leaked to an American watchdog group last year, Coke executives described strategies for winning over government ministers and other officials in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ecuador, Portugal, and regions of Spain.
In Colombia, where soda is often cheaper than bottled water, sales volume of carbonated drinks has climbed more than 25 percent over the past 15 years. Coke and Pepsi left the big national beverage company, Postobón, in the spotlight. Postobón, a drinks maker and distributor for Pepsi, is part of a huge conglomerate that includes sugar cane growers, sugar mills and the country’s biggest media company, RCN Televisión, which helped disseminate the anti-tax message.
Colombia, a nation of 49 million, was facing the unfamiliar prospect of stability in early 2016. After decades of civil war and narco- terrorism, unemployment was near historical lows, the poverty rate was dropping and many were hopeful about the possibility of lasting peace with the country’s main rebel group, the FARC.
In March 2016, the country’s health minister, Alejandro Gaviria Uribe, proposed a 20 percent tax on sugar- sweetened beverages — the equivalent of about 10 cents on a liter bottle — that became part of a larger tax overhaul backed by Colombia’s president and the Ministry of Finance. “For the first time in our lives, we thought we might become a normal country and be able to deal with issues other than violence,” said Diana Guarnizo, a lawyer with Dejusticia, a rights group that helped promote the soda tax.
The measure was designed to inject $ 340 million a year into Colombia’s underfunded health care system, but Mr. Gaviria had a larger goal: to dampen soda consumption in a country with an obesity rate that had tripled since 1980 to 19 percent of adults.
The issue attracted the attention of Dr. Cerón, whose organization had previously worked on climate change, smoking restrictions and the lack of potable water in poor communities. It formed a coalition of civic organizations called the Alliance for Food Health.
Opinion polls showed that 70 percent of the public embraced the tax. Legislative backing was harder to come by, however: 42 legislators in the 268-seat Congress said they supported the measure.
The debate escalated in August, with Congress still months from a vote, when television stations across the country began airing a public service announcement in support of the tax. The 30-second spot, produced by Dr. Cerón’s group, used data from the W.H.O. Four sweetened drinks a day, the ad said, could deliver up to 47 teaspoons of sugar. Then it showed an overweight couple, a gangrenous foot and what appeared to be a man in cardiac arrest, followed by an admonition. “Better to drink water, milk or teas without sugar,” the narrator said. “Take care of your life. Take it seriously.”
Postobón filed a complaint with the government’s consumer protection agency, claiming that the ad’s use of the teaspoon as a unit of measurement was imprecise and that it unfairly suggested that all sweetened drinks were unhealthy.
Dr. Luis Fernando Gómez, a professor of preventive medicine at Javeriana University in Bogotá who backed the tax measure, said Postobón’s allegations were disingenuous. “Every fact and figure cited in that ad was backed up by mainstream science,” he said.
But the head of the Colombian con- sumer protection agency sided with the industry petitioners. The agency ordered the commercial withdrawn. The ruling went on to bar Educar Consumidores employees f rom speaking publicly about the links between sugar and obesity, an edict so sweeping it included the Health Ministry’s own research on the subject.
“We were completely shut down,” Dr. Cerón said. “Censored.”
Postobón is a unit of one of Colombia’s largest conglomerates, Organización Ardila Lülle. Among its products is a cola called Colombiana and Manzana Postobón, a century- old drink that is something of a national icon. Organización Ardila Lülle remained silent during the soda- tax debate while Postobón, RCN and allies like the National Business Association of Colombia carried the message that the tax would cost jobs, harm independent convenience shop owners and choke the economy.
That fall, at least 90 lobbyists worked to sway legislators, according to a tally of visitor logs obtained by Educar Consumidores. During committee hearings on the measure, lobbyists often sat next to lawmakers, a flagrant violation of congressional rules, said Óscar Ospina Quintero, a legislator from the Green Alliance party. He said: “I remember that, during one of the debates, a senator said to me: ‘In all my years in Congress I’ve never seen a lobbying effort like this.’ ”
In October, Dr. Cerón found a tactic she thought might keep attention on the subject without running afoul of the government’s order silencing her. In a blog item posted on the Alliance for Food Health website, she made fun of an RCN soap opera from the 1980s called “Azúcar,” or Sugar. Scrawled across a poster for the show, she wrote, “It’s one thing to watch Sugar; it’s another to drink it in excess.”
An RCN lawyer demanded she delete the post. She complied, but the network filed a complaint with federal prosecutors who opened a criminal investigation. The case, still pending, carries a possible fine of $300,000.
It was around this time that employees at Educar’s offices began to complain about echoes and other voices on their cellphones. They suspected they might be under surveillance. Others found it hard to use the internet in the office.
Andrés Erazo, Educar’s longtime tech consultant, said he discovered that antivirus software on workplace computers had been disabled. He also found spyware on the office router. According to Mr. Erazo, three cellphones had been compromised by spyware.
One morning in mid-November, Dr. Cerón was startled awake at 5 a.m. by a call to her cellphone. “Shut up, you old wench,” the caller yelled, according to a report she filed with the Fiscal General de la Nación, Colombia’s prosecutorial agency. In early December, Dr. Cerón was walking to the gym when a man, his face obscured by a hooded sweatshirt, accosted her with the same message. “Keep your mouth shut,” he yelled. She reported it to prosecutors.
On the last day of 2016, opponents of the tax were victorious. Using a complex procedural maneuver, congressional leaders killed the soda tax.
“The problem isn’t just sugar,” said Iván Duque, a senator from the right- leaning Democratic Center party and a contender in next year’s presidential race, who was a vocal critic of the tax. “We need a national plan to fight sedentary lifestyles, better product labeling and education efforts that teach people to eat more fruit, fish and vegetables.”
Dr. Cerón and her team got a Pyrrhic victory this month when the country’s Constitutional Court overturned the consumer agency’s decision to silence Educar and ordered the agency to “abstain from censoring any other ad related to public health in the future,” according to the ruling.
“It was a great victory for free speech in Colombia,” Dr. Cerón said. “The only pity is it came too late.”