Coca-Cola Moves into Mezcal

Little Earl, who maintains a certain interest in our local drink, took a twenty-peso tour of the new mezcal distillery located on the road to Tlacolula de Matamoros, on the Cristobal Colón highway, about half an hour from Oaxaca City. Tlacolula lures tourists to its huge weekly market where you can buy live turkeys, oxen yokes, seasonal vegetables, rice drinks, enamel pots, and artisan work ranging from carved fantastic animals to embroidered blouses. Occasional musicians entertain while shoppers stroll areas dedicated to fresh produce, shoes, socks, and plastic buckets. Along the main street, small shops sell mezcal. It’s artisan mezcal: an artisan liquor cooked in clay containers, from home-grown agave.

Zignum Mezcal label D.R. 2010 Zignum Me

When Little Earl entered the Casa Armando Guillermo Prieto (Casa AGP) distillery, whose security little Earl describes as “tough as any airport”, they waived their metal detecting wand over him and discovered his digital camera. “No sir,” the security guard said. “It is the policy of Coca-Cola to not allow photographs.” Coca- Cola? Who knew? His cell phone in the other pocket suffered the same temporary confiscation.
S.A. de C.V. stands for “Sociedad Anónima de Capital Variable”. It describes a company whose capital partners are anonymous and of variable investment. Most foreign investments in Mexico are designated S.A. de C.V. CIMSA S.A. de C.V.-Coca Cola, a consortium of businesses “100% Mexican” produces Casa AGP mezcal. I also saw it written in inverse order, as Coca-Cola-CIMSA.
CIMSA was founded in 1925 and currently operates through three self-described “Strategic Business Units”: Soft drinks; BEDLA (Bebidas de los Angeles) which sells purified water; and Casa AGP, the newest unit, oriented toward commercialization of mezcal, to sell inside Mexico about 20% of product, with 80% destined for foreign consumption. To put the enterprise in perspective, the same Group that bottles Coke in Cuernavaca built the mezcal plant in Oaxaca. It also built the international airport in Cuernavaca.
Casa AGP inaugurated its Oaxaca distillery in August, 2008 in a village named Lanacci. Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, Senator Adolfo Toledo Infanzón, Secretary of Tourism Beatriz Rodríguez Casasnovas, and Secretary of Economy Enrique Sada Fernández among other officials, all carefully pre-selected, attended. Head honcho Colombo Álvarez asserted then, that in five years Oaxaca mezcal would be positioned in the international European and Asian markets. In the first year the product would arrive in Spain, the USA, China, Korea and Thailand. Subsequently, they would sell in Germany, Russia and Italy. He was right on.

Ulises Ruiz inaugurates mezcal plant “Casa Armando Guillermo Prieto” D.R. Photo 2008 El Piñero

Director General José Luis Magaña stated that more than US$ 48,000,000 was invested in plant construction. Purita Guillermo Prieto Rivera, an owner of CIMSA-Coca Cola in sites such as Toluca, Cuernavaca and Ciudad Altamirano, (her surnames “Guillermo Prieto” indicate her Casa AGP connection) and Antonio Gómezlince, also of Grupo CIMSA, stated Casa AGP’s goal: immediate production of 15,000 liters daily, at one-third of full capacity. Casa AGP presently (February, 2010) bottles about 20,000 liters daily.
CIMSA is sister to GEMSA, another corporation listed along with Coca-Cola; the precise relationships of the players remains hidden. CIMSA Group, according to their own advertising, is expansionary, bringing into production new products and brands. The fancy gold label on its mezcal bottles displays its brand-name: Zignum, Made in Mexico. “Casa Armando Guillermo Prieto,” it reads, “brings to your palate a mystic drink made with art, quality, technology and the warmth of its people.” Umm.
And an output of 45,000 liters daily for the global market? That’s not art, it’s agro-industry. Casa AGP, in partnership with Coca-Cola and with an investment minimum of 60 million dollars, manufactures mezcal inside an industrial complex. AGP Wine & Spirits Group, the international trade name, distills its product with technical standards, very different from artisan mezcal; the average artisan palenque bottles 2– 3,000 liters per month, cooking agave plants over wood burning fires. Each bottle off the AGP line, in contrast, precisely mirrors the others; following a chemical test for each vat, slight artificial adjustments are added as necessary, to produce consistent “flavor, pain, color, and aroma.” By vat, I mean stainless steel drums. Despite the photo prohibition, Coca-Cola doesn’t keep the gleaming, vast manufacturing process a secret: on the Zignum website flash the bright stainless-steel drums, the rows of assembly-line bottles. Intermixed in Zignum’s on-site film runs the art and warmth part: scenes from other mezcal localities. You can also check YouTube...
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Nancy Davies @'NarcoNews'
 
Apologies that this information is from some months ago, but with all the news on the web and the business practices that maintain secrecy of involvement, is little wonder I took so long to find, with the recent resolution by the UN declaring Water and Sanitation Basic Human Rights, http://www.truth-out.org/un-declares-water-and-sanitation-basic-human-rights61817 , the disappearance of valuable water supplies in areas of multinational exploitation takes on new meaning. Can the people in these regions ever be truly compensated by business for the destruction of such life-sustaining water supplies?