"Sweet Addiction" takes us to a place where what we take for granted is missing: reliable drinking water. What remains are bottles of sweet poison from the fridge. A clear, unagitated story about addiction, responsibility - and the question of who benefits from the business of thirst.
«There must be some reason for my death», his father often said. A Mexican proverb.
For Cecilia Acero, this was hard to bear. It was only when his kidneys failed that he began to change his drinking habits. He was often in a bad mood because of it. When friends came to visit, they said: «Why don't you give him some cola?» His condition got worse and worse until he could hardly move in December 2021. The family realised that it would be his last Christmas. On Christmas Eve, they gave him one last glass of Coca-Cola - now it didn't matter.
This story is about a region in southern Mexico where more Coca-Cola is drunk than anywhere else in the world. Where a bottle of the sugary and caffeinated drink is easier to get than a sip of drinking water. In which Coca-Cola has become so omnipresent through aggressive marketing that the drink has even become part of religious rituals.
On average, every Mexican drinks around 160 litres of soft drinks per year. This is a world record and exceeds consumption in the USA by around 40%.
«We know how to get rid of Coca-Cola», Subcomandante Marcos is reported to have once said. «We will drink it down to the last bottle.»
Vicente Fox, who started as a salesman at Coca-Cola in 1964, was primarily responsible for this. The drink, which he initially supplied himself, was a stimulant for him in the battle against the then even more powerful rival Pepsi.
For breakfast, Fox drank his first of up to twelve bottles of cola a day, with a raw egg in it.
In everyday life, people have to answer one question every day: do they buy a litre bottle of mineral water for 16-19 pesos to quench their thirst? Or a slightly smaller Coke for the same price?
When Amelia García realised that she had to give up fatty foods and cola, she cried. Then she took her fate into her own hands and became part of the diabetic group, a quarter of a century ago. The first part of such a meeting consists of lectures.
Doctor José Maria Gómez draws body cells on a board to explain metabolism and asks the group: «What are the cells connected to?», «Chewing gum», says a woman and laughs. «Wrong», says the doctor: «Silicone, of course» - everyone laughs. Then he asks: «Which foods are bad for us with regard to diabetes?» The women answer almost in chorus: «La Coca.»
Within these elusive liturgical rituals, we discover Coca-Cola bottles. The drink is poured out on the floor around the burning candles, but is also served in cups to all participants in a ritual. What is it doing here?
Church warden Agustín de la Cruz tries to explain it to us. He wears a sheepskin poncho and has bad teeth, like many people in Chamula. De la Cruz loves Coca-Cola, he used to drink ten bottles a day. Then he got stomach pains and often had to vomit. Unlike his wife, however, he has never suffered from diabetes symptoms.
«Coca-Cola is not sacred to us», he says. «The story about burping is also rubbish.»
There are countless reports about the church online. Travel journalists and bloggers have repeatedly written that the indigenous people drink cola to expel evil spirits from their bodies by burping. «Sometimes the foreign tourist guides tell this to make their stories more interesting. And the tourists believe everything», says de la Cruz.
«People just want to drink Coca-Cola», says Jaime Page, who believes that Sheinbaum won't change much. The sentences he speaks into the camera of his computer resonate with bitter anger:
«Sometimes I think we're dealing with ethnocidal politics. It's obviously better if the indigenous people die.»
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Half of Cecilia Acero's family died of diabetes. It struck her paternal grandfather Mario, her maternal grandmother Toñita and, most recently, her father Raúl in 2022, at the age of 68 after six agonising years of dialysis. As Acero talks about it, her voice falters. Tears well up in her eyes, which are framed by large glasses with thick black rims. The 40-year-old anthropologist has dark curls and a friendly face. We meet her in the office of her research institute in the north-west of the colonial city of San Cristóbal, with the Chiapas mountains covered in evergreen pine trees outside the window.
«They say here that Coca-Cola is good for you», says Acero. «It refreshes you, wakes you up and helps with headaches. My father used to think of Coke almost as a medicine.» He played the keyboard in a band at weekends and drank Coca-Cola during breaks, about eight glasses every evening, Acero estimates. A 250-millilitre glass contains 27 grammes of sugar, the equivalent of almost nine sugar cubes. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Swiss Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office and the German Obesity Society, the daily dose should not exceed 50 grammes, otherwise there is a long-term risk of diabetes and serious cardiovascular disease.
In the morning, Raúl was tired and drank his first Coke to energise himself for his work in the administration of a school. For lunch, he often brought a 2-litre bottle for the family to share. But he drank a lot of it himself. By the time he developed swelling on his face, stomach, hands and feet, the symptoms could no longer be denied. It was during this time that Acero began her research into diabetes. She wanted to understand why her grandparents' history of suffering was repeated in her father, why people with type 2 diabetes in Chiapas took little care of their health. Acero told her father to change his diet: «'You'll die bit by bit otherwise and we'll have to look after you.» The addiction to the black, sweet fizzy drink was stronger in the end.
When her father was buried, Cecilia Acero thought about giving up her research. If she was already failing to save a Family member, what was the point? She cancelled some interviews she was conducting for a study on the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on diabetes sufferers. Then colleagues reminded her that she had also started her research to make a social impact. So she carried on. Acero's laptop has a sticker on it that reads: ¡Fuera Coca-Cola! - Coca-Cola, get out!
While the market for soft drinks in western industrialised nations is shrinking (USA, Switzerland) or stagnating (Germany), Mexicans are drinking more of them year after year. Almost two thirds of per capita consumption is accounted for by Coca-Cola Original with the red label. In the state of Chiapas, whose mountainous landscapes in the border region with Guatemala merge into dense tropical forest, people drink significantly more soft drinks. According to a much-cited study, the figure in the highlands is 2.25 litres per capita per day. How can that be? And what are the consequences?
San Cristóbal is popular with visitors from all over the world. The town of around 220,000 inhabitants lies in a valley at an altitude of over 2,100 metres and is surrounded by hills that are barely distinguishable from the clouds that float around them at dusk. In the centre, stone houses in Spanish colonial style are lined up next to each other, their balconies adorned with elaborate wrought iron railings and flowers. Almost everything here is colourful, the facades of the churches, the robes of the indigenous people, the beans sold at the markets. Most of the almost one hundred thousand tourists who visited San Cristóbal in 2024 are unlikely to have noticed the uncanny dominance of Coca-Cola. The corporate design of one of the world's best-known brands has become too deeply engraved in the collective subconscious.
If you walk from the centre towards the outskirts of the city and consciously pay attention, you will see it on every corner. Bulky red trucks are parked by the roadside to deliver pallets of Coca-Cola, as well as juices, water and a brand of milk from Coca-Cola Femsa, Mexico's largest drinks manufacturer, to the 19 Oxxo supermarkets, restaurants and small grocery shops in the city centre. The family-run shops are emblazoned with Coca-Cola billboards, some of the façades are painted red and white and feature the curved lettering designed by Coca-Cola's accountant and first advertiser, Frank Mason Robinson, in Atlanta in 1886. The shops feature red, branded drinks fridges in which soft drinks take up most of the space, especially Coca-Cola, which is available in cans and bottles with a capacity of up to three litres.
The shop owners get the fridges for free on the condition that they are used exclusively for the sale of Coca-Cola products. They have a transmitter so that they can be localised if they are used for private consumption. This should be a temptation in Chiapas, where the monthly income of around 5300 pesos (around 238 euros) is around a third below the national average. Over 75 per cent of the inhabitants of San Cristóbal live below the national poverty line, and in many villages in the highlands the figure is close to 100 per cent. The region's economy is small-scale and informal, based primarily on the cultivation and trade of maize, beans and coffee.
To tell the story of how Coca-Cola made an impact in this rural environment, you might start with a concrete wall a good two metres high in the south of the city. Two pictures, now somewhat washed out by the rain, have been painted on it. Like two pages in a book, they show that there is a before and an after in this story, perhaps also a utopia and a dystopia. On one of the murals, a hill has been painted in bright, friendly colours, with spring water gushing out of it and flowing into a river. A hummingbird, a butterfly and people in harmony with nature can be seen. In the other picture right next to it, the first thing you notice is the iconic Coca-Cola glass bottle with a red factory inside. It stands in a parched landscape painted in dark colours. A man in a top hat sits on a bottling line and counts money, while an emaciated beggar searches for something to eat among a gravestone, rubbish and sacks of fertiliser.
If you had to pinpoint a moment when the tide turned in this story, it would probably be the turn of the year 1993 / 1994. In the early hours of 1 January, a few thousand guerrillas came out of the mountains to occupy San Cristóbal and five other towns in Chiapas. They were Mayan groups, including many women and young people, armed with assault rifles, old carbines and toy rifles. They hid their faces with black ski masks. They occupied the town hall, rioted in administrative buildings, attacked a military base near San Cristóbal and announced their intention to march through to the capital in order to overthrow the government.
The Zapatista Liberation Army (EZLN) was founded in 1983 by a small group of Marxists and indigenous people in the tropical forest of Chiapas. In the tradition of Latin American guerrilla groups, they opposed colonial exploitation and a neoliberal economic model; their goal was a society in which there was access to education, health and work for all and the rights of indigenous peoples were respected. On that first day of 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) between the USA, Canada and Mexico came into force, triggering the Zapatista uprising. They feared that it would drive the indigenous smallholders further into poverty.
One of their leaders, Subcomandante Marcos, who liked to show himself on horseback and with a pipe, who worshipped Che Guevara and Foucault and whose martials and Foucault and who was to become an icon of the globalisation-critical left with his militant and literary allusions and irony-laced communiqués to the world public, told foreign reporters at the time: «The free trade agreement is the death certificate for the indigenous population of Mexico.» The then President Carlos Salinas, on the other hand, was certain that the agreement would take the country from the third world to the first.
Three decades later, it can be said that this political promise has only partially materialised for the people of Chiapas: Although Nafta significantly increased Mexico's trade volume. Industrial jobs were created in the north, but at the same time significantly more jobs were lost in agriculture in the south, which was not competitive within the free trade zone. Wage levels remained low. Instead, the consumer market was flooded with highly processed food from the USA. And that had consequences: While just under 16 per cent of the population were obese in 1992 according to the WHO, the figure rose to 36 per cent by 2022. The Mexicans had hoped for prosperity and ended up with an obesity epidemic.
Because the government immediately sent thousands of soldiers to Chiapas in January 1994 and the air force bombed indigenous villages, the Zapatistas retreated back into the mountains after twelve days, suffering some losses. Two years later, they agreed a law with the government that enshrined the right to indigenous autonomy. However, it was never passed because it would have made it more difficult to grant concessions for the extraction of raw materials on indigenous territory.
The Zapatistas have nevertheless established grassroots democratic structures of self-government in around a thousand villages to this day, in which the Mexican state does not interfere. However, their relationship with Coca-Cola has remained ambivalent over the years. According to reports, the red lorries were the only ones allowed to cross the battle lines during the uprising. The epitome of American cultural imperialism was served at their networking meetings, which left-wing revolutionaries who had travelled from abroad shook their heads at.
Also in 1994, a bottling plant for Coca-Cola went into operation on the western foothills of San Cristóbal. It was an important part of the US company's expansion into Mexico. The year before, it had already bought 30 per cent of the soft drinks division of Mexican drinks manufacturer Femsa for 195 million dollars and floated shares in the subsidiary on the stock exchange. It was just the start of billions of dollars of investment in advertising, sales and company acquisitions to conquer Latin America. The ochre-coloured industrial complex, behind which the extinct Huitepec volcano, overgrown with green fauna, rises into the Chiapas sky, is secured with a massive steel fence. In a press release from 2023, Coca-Cola Femsa described the bottling plant as the most efficient in the world. Whereas it used to take over two litres of water to produce one litre of Coca-Cola, only 1.17 litres are said to be needed for the same process in San Cristóbal. However, these figures, which come from the company itself, do not take into account the fact that soft drinks are not produced under laboratory conditions.
Considering the water footprint, i.e. the consumption and pollution of fresh water along the entire supply chain, 170 to 310 litres flow into the production of 0.5 litres of Coca-Cola, according to calculations by the scientific NGO Water Foot Network. While the company boasts that it only uses 82 per cent of the water resources it is allowed to pump from the ground in San Cristóbal, no water comes out of the pipes in the city's households for most of the day. And when it does, it is better not to drink it. This is probably the biggest contradiction in this story. However, anyone who wants to ask the plant management questions about this is kindly turned away at the entrance gate by an employee in a pink safety waistcoat. We can't go any further here.
The Coca-Cola empire is based on the franchise principle: bottlers buy licences, produce the drinks according to the specifications from the USA and distribute them in regionally limited markets. Coca-Cola has been available in Mexico since 1896 and the first bottling plant was opened in the harbour city of Tampico in 1926. By the time the 1968 Olympic Games were held in Mexico City, with Coca-Cola as the main sponsor, the Latin American country had already become the third most important market after the USA and Germany. Two years later, the newly elected President Luis Echeverría of the socialist unity party PRI threatened the US company with a business ban if it did not disclose its secret recipe, which is now stored in a safe in the World of Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta, to the bottlers in the country. A delegation from Coca-Cola succeeded in dissuading Echeverría from his plan.
Within nine years, he rose to become CEO of Coca-Cola Mexico and established the aggressive sales methods that would soon overtake Pepsi. By the time he left his post in 1979 and returned to his family's cattle ranch, he had increased sales by almost 50 per cent. Two decades later, Fox was to return to the big stage - once again to the benefit of the beverage company. In 2000, he stood for the conservative PAN party in the presidential elections, benefiting not only from the fact that Mexicans were fed up with the PRI's 71 years of authoritarian autocracy and the country's economic emaciation, but also from a campaign donation from Coca-Cola: Coca-Cola.
During his six-year term of office - re-election is prohibited by the constitution - Fox installed a well-oiled revolving door between his government, the ministerial bureaucracy and his former employer, through which over a dozen people were channelled to influence political decisions in Coca-Cola's favour over the years. Cristóbal Jaime Jáquez, who had worked as general director of Coca-Cola Mexico under Fox, was appointed director of the Conagua National Water Commission. He tripled the number of water concessions for Coca-Cola subsidiaries. The bottling plant in San Cristóbal was granted permission to pump 1.3 million litres of water a day - without any significant fees or taxes flowing back to the city or the state.
Water is a sensitive topic in Mexico. All natural resources were declared to be the property of the nation in the 1917 constitution. The right to access to sufficient, clean and easily accessible water was added in 2012. What is still missing, however, are concrete provisions on how it is to be implemented in reality. The state, which was notoriously close to insolvency and paralysed by corruption when the PRI was in power, had not managed to establish a reliable water supply in large parts of the country. During Mexico's economic opening phase, public-private partnerships also failed in this endeavour.
Multinational companies stepped into the breach, acquiring concessions, pumping water out of the ground and bottling it. Following a severe cholera epidemic in 1991 that killed 12,000 people throughout South and Central America, they also capitalised on Mexicans' fears for their health. In just a few years, the world's largest market for bottled water was created. 262 litres of bottled water were consumed per capita in Mexico in 2024, compared to less than half that amount in Switzerland and Germany. According to one estimate, Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Danone together control around 80 per cent of the market with their mineral water brands.
There is actually enough naturally occurring water in the state of Chiapas. Unlike in large parts of the country, where there is currently an extreme drought for the second time in 15 years as a result of El Niño, it has rained consistently during the rainy season in Mexico's southernmost state. The highlands of Chiapas have one of the world's largest groundwater reserves. But the population has none of this. This is because the sources available to them only come from surface water - and this is polluted. San Cristóbal is criss-crossed by ditches full of green algae, putrid sludge and plastic waste. They ensure that household wastewater ends up untreated in the Amarillo and Fogótico rivers, which are an important source of water for the city. Coli and faecal bacteria from human and animal excrement have been repeatedly detected there, as well as heavy metals from the leachate from a nearby landfill.
Plans to build sewage treatment plants in the city have been around for years. They have also failed due to resistance from the local population, who pay nothing for wastewater disposal and are afraid of additional living costs. San Cristóbal has grown enormously over the past 50 years. Because the wetlands on the outskirts of the city, which store and filter water, have disappeared bit by bit, the supply has collapsed. If you drink the tap water or use it for cooking, it can cause diarrhoea, intestinal inflammation or kidney failure, which tourists also have to suffer. In a household survey conducted in 2023, only seven per cent of the population of Chiapas believed that their water was safe to drink.
The situation is even different in the dry season, when not a drop comes out of the taps during the day due to outdated and leaking pipes. Residents say that they get up at night when water does flow from the pipes for an hour or two so that they can collect it in buckets and at least use it for washing, cleaning and personal hygiene. Most households are therefore forced to walk for kilometres to uncontaminated sources or use their small incomes to buy water that is delivered by tankers.
Coca-Cola Femsa, on the other hand, pays almost nothing for the water it pumps out of the ground and bottles with or without added sugar syrup. The two concessions that have been approved for the bottling plant each cost the company a paltry 2600 pesos a year, the equivalent of 117 euros. For the water itself, it has to pay 10 cents per thousand litres. Not that there have been no protests against this unfair system: In 2017, 1,500 people demonstrated in front of the bottling plant, and three years later the mayor of San Cristóbal demanded that Coca-Cola Femsa be stripped of its water concession. But Conagua refused: The deep-water wells would have no impact on the population's surface water supply.
Valentina is still outraged when she thinks about the federal authority's reasoning. Even if the groundwater is not currently being used, it is important as a plan B when the climate crisis hits Chiapas. «The people who make these decisions will be dead. But young people like us and future generations will suffer», says the young woman, who has long brown hair and a small tattoo on her forearm. In fact, more extreme weather events are expected for the region by 2050 due to climate change. The rain has already changed, it comes suddenly and has become more intense, resulting in more frequent flooding. Valentina knows the consequences; she took part in a UN World Biodiversity Conference. She does not want her real name to appear in this text for fear of reprisals. One morning, she sits in the back room of a café in San Cristóbal and discusses with a small group of activists how the power of Coca-Cola Femsa can be broken.
They agree that the city council did the right thing when it twice rejected the company's offer to build a water treatment plant, partly because it remained unclear who would be responsible for its operation and maintenance. «By accepting such a gift, we would have accepted the unfair rules of the game», says Valentina. «It would have seemed as if our protest was outrageous.» You know the PR campaigns of Coca-Cola Femsa. They pay for a community cistern here and a rainwater collection system there to immunise themselves against criticism. For Valentina, however, one story in particular is symptomatic: a few years ago, Coca-Cola Femsa had thousands of trees planted for publicity purposes, which were then not watered and died. The activists are no longer just protesting against the commercialisation of groundwater. They are also trying to show people the long-term costs of their Coca-Cola addiction.
Even during Vicente Fox's presidency, there were increasing signs that something was wrong with the health of Mexicans. Not only was the proportion of obese people on the rise, but the number of diabetics and their mortality rate was also skyrocketing. Scientists discovered that the Mayan population has an increased genetic predisposition to type 2 diabetes. In Chiapas, this was compounded by a particularly unfavourable combination of poverty, malnutrition and obesity. Combined with inadequate medical care - 30 to 40 per cent of diabetics are unaware of their disease and two thirds do not have their blood sugar levels properly adjusted - this made for «the perfect bomb», as Mexican consumer advocate Alejandro Calvillo once put it. Within two decades, diabetes mortality in Chiapas has risen by 219 per cent.
Anthropologist Cecilia Acero was interested in why so few of those affected manage to change their diet - including her father. «Diets have very negative connotations, especially among older people», she says. «They don't want to be seen as ill and hostile to pleasure.» Men in particular find it difficult to accept help. Just how dangerous diabetes can be was demonstrated in the first year of coronavirus, when the official number of diabetes deaths in the state rose significantly compared to the previous year. This is because diabetics were not only more susceptible to coronavirus infection due to their weakened immune system, but were also burdened by negative emotions. «People were afraid, couldn't go to the doctor and were lonely at home. As a result, many people's blood sugar levels went up», says Acero. In fact, stress and anxiety can influence the course of the disease and even trigger it. On the other hand, many Mexicans are under the misconception that lifestyle has no influence on the disease.
Amelia García initially thought the same thing before she became a member of the Club de Diabéticos, which meets in the courtyard of the municipal health centre in San Cristóbal. The 70-year-old woman wears elegant black clothing and gold earrings, her nails are painted blue. With around 20 other senior citizens, García does squats and hip twists, then dances to Y.M.C.A. As the women applaud each other, she laughs a rough, hearty laugh. Her strange thirst began after her sister died of a brain tumour. A doctor measured her blood sugar: 360 milligrams per decilitre, normal is 100. García thought her grief had triggered the diabetes. So she made no changes to her diet. She was used to eating a lot of meat and drinking at least one bottle of Coca-Cola every day. «The perfidious thing was that water couldn't quench my thirst», she says, but «soft drinks could.»
It is quite possible that García had already had diabetes for some time at this point. It usually starts harmlessly, with tiredness or minor infections. The main symptom - hyperglycaemia of the blood caused by a lack of the hormone insulin - often goes unrecognised. If severe thirst and a frequent urge to urinate are added, the disease is already at an advanced stage. Increasingly, organs, the eyes, the nervous system or the tissue of the feet are affected. People can go blind, have a leg amputated or, like Acero's father, lose their kidney function. High blood sugar also leads to deposits in the blood vessels and can trigger a heart attack or stroke.
García's blood sugar level is now stable at 100. She eats lots of vegetables, little meat and only drinks unsweetened beverages. She has also taught her seven children the importance of a healthy diet - none of them have yet developed diabetes. Even her husband, who used to drink eight to ten bottles of Coca-Cola a day, has stopped. Nevertheless, they continue to sell the drink in the shop they run in their home town of Cruztón, which is just outside San Cristóbal. García doesn't have a guilty conscience about it; everyone has to decide for themselves what to drink. Sometimes they get rid of around a hundred bottles at once when the village chief calls a meeting. And sometimes Coca-Cola Femsa distributes free drinks as compensation for the fact that trucks roar through the village every morning from three o'clock to deliver cola to the mountain villages. «The indigenous people drink even more of it», says García.
On a drive into the mountains north of San Cristóbal, we pass through cloud forests, grasslands, cornfields and indigenous women on the side of the road carrying jerry cans attached to their heads back to their villages.cans attached to their heads back to their villages, where there are no water pipes but shops with fridges full of Coca-Cola. Advertising signs say in the language of the indigenous people: Drink your Coca-Cola water. And: Bring back the empty bottle. Even small children can be seen sucking on bottles here.
Marcos Arana has been observing this with concern for a long time. The doctor and director of a training centre that aims to improve health education for indigenous smallholders was given the right to speak by a critical shareholders' association at the annual general meeting of Coca-Cola's parent company in April 2023. In his statement, he wished the current CEO of the Coca-Cola Company, the American James Quincey, a good morning, then addressed a study on breastfeeding behaviour, according to which a third of indigenous children are already drinking Coca-Cola before they have reached the age of one. In the highlands of Chiapas, where in many villages over 40 per cent of adults can neither read nor write, the company's aggressive marketing extends into people's private lives. They can receive small loans or commissions if they sell Coca-Cola in their family networks. It is a strategy that is similar to the practices of organised drug trafficking, Arana emphasises.
Coca-Cola's conquest of the mountain villages began in 1962, when an indigenous community leader named Salvador López Tuxum acquired the first licence to sell the drink for the town of San Juan Chamula. He travelled to San Cristóbal on horseback to collect the bottles. In the same decade, the first billboards appeared showing indigenous people in traditional dress drinking Coca-Cola. Two doctors from the highlands tell us that they remember times when the drink was distributed free of charge in the villages. Until about ten years ago, a bottle of it in the village shops was cheaper than a bottle of bottled water.
In the highland community of Chamula, where we are travelling these days, Coca-Cola managed to pull off a marketing coup - whether intentionally or not. The drink has become part of the religious rituals of the local population, who call themselves Chamulas and belong to the Mayan Tzotzil community. The area was conquered by the Spanish in the 16th century and Christianised by force. The conquistadors built a church in San Juan Chamula and made St John the Baptist their patron saint. He is often depicted on icons with a lamb to emphasise his role as the forerunner of Jesus Christ. In the small town, sheep roam freely and are neither milked nor slaughtered because they are regarded as sacred animals. Only their wool is used to weave clothes and their dung is used to grow maize and vegetables. If a sheep dies, it is buried.
The autonomously administered San Juan Chamula is also a special place in other respects. While many indigenous communities in the state of Chiapas are doing their best to resist the influence of organised crime, Mexico's first indigenous cartel has emerged here in recent years. The Motonetos control the trade in people, weapons, drugs and pornography in the region. USB sticks containing the films, for which underage indigenous women are also sexually abused, are available on the streets of San Cristóbal for the equivalent of 6 euros. At the same time, people are doing their best to resist outside influences. Many Chamulas refuse to go to hospitals. Babies are often born at home according to ancient Mayan wisdom. In the event of illness, indigenous people rely on herbal medicine - or the effects of rituals.
From the outside, the Iglesia de San Juan Bautista looks like any other Catholic church in Mexico. Photography is prohibited inside, which is why many a tourist has spent a day in the cell. The Mayans are said to believe that cameras have the power to steal their souls. The ban now seems to be part of the tourism concept, but it is also intended to protect a very intimate space. Inside, the nave is lit up by a sea of ten thousand candles. They stand in front of statues of saints on tables on the side walls and on the floor, which is lined with pine branches. Their odour mingles with sweet-smelling clouds of smoke from burning incense resin. The candles constantly eat the oxygen out of the warm, heavy air. Fabric panels, chandeliers and flower arrangements hang from the ceiling. A figure of John the Baptist stands against the end wall of the chancel.
All around the floor, groups of indigenous people sit together with shamans, murmuring incantations in Tzotzil. The heads of chickens stick out of bags they have brought with them, seemingly hypnotised by the candles, fumes and prayers. Then one of the healers picks up a chicken, moves it in a circular motion over the burning candles and passes it over the person who is to be healed of a spiritual illness or whose soul is to be freed from demons. He then lowers the chicken to the ground, touches its neck and breaks it. The animal is held until it stops twitching. This act of sacrifice is performed with such sublime clarity that it is almost peaceful.
For centuries, there had been tensions in Chiapas between the Catholic conquerors and the indigenous people, whose religious practices are based on spiritual beliefs and magic. Compromises had to be negotiated time and again, which led to the unique syncretism. In the past, a liquor made from sugar cane, wheat and maize called pox was drunk during the rituals. In the first half of the 20th century, evangelical groups from the USA and England came to the highlands to proselytise the Mayan communities and establish social services. They told the indigenous people that alcohol was unhealthy, satanic and that drunkenness in churches was inappropriate. So, with the blessing of the shamans, regional lemonade was initially introduced into the rituals. The decisive factor was not the carbon dioxide, but the sweet odour of the drink. It served as food for the gods, says de la Cruz. And so the intervention of a few missionaries paved the way for Coca-Cola into indigenous religious practice.
In the 1970s, conflicts broke out between religious groups in the communities, and thousands of Protestant indigenous people were forcibly expelled from places like San Juan Chamula partly because the Catholic leaders did not want to give up their income from the sale of alcohol and Coca-Cola. And so today a kind of second syncretism can be marvelled at in the supermarkets of Chamula. The shops have brazenly copied the colours and logo from the Oxxo stores of the Coca-Cola bottler Femsa; their name: Osso. Inside there is Coca-Cola. And home-distilled sugar cane schnapps.
«It was only when Coca-Cola became part of the rituals that the drink acquired its high social status. Since then, it has been drunk on every occasion, at religious and political events such as weddings», says Jaime Page. When we talk to the doctor, anthropologist and doctoral supervisor of Cecilia Acero about Zoom, he has just returned from a mountain village in San Cristóbal. Page is not only an expert on indigenous culture. He has repeatedly asked them about their drinking behaviour. In one of his studies, the figure of 2.25 litres of soft drinks consumed per capita per day in the highlands of Chiapas was mentioned for the first time. This is where things get adventurous for a moment: Page claims to have obtained the figure from the Coca-Cola Femsa website, where it had been deleted.
The drinks manufacturer denies this. After some back and forth, we are able to meet two PR women in a restaurant in Mexico City. The conversation, during which we eat a mole poblano and drink a Coke, cannot be quoted, but they then send us a statement referring to official statistics showing that 420 pesos are spent per household on drinks, including alcohol. According to this, the per capita consumption of soft drinks is 1.8 litres. Not per day, per month. This blatant difference does not fit in with the impressions on the ground, nor with a press release issued by Coca-Cola Femsa in November 2023, in which the company announced that it had increased its turnover in Latin America fifteenfold since going public in 1993, with Mexico accounting for around half of this. Its share price has more than doubled in the last five years.
Jaime Page's figure, on the other hand, is also being circulated on government websites, which is at least a sign that the impact of soft drinks on the country's health crisis has arrived on the political agenda. When the number of diabetes deaths exceeded the 100,000 brand for the first time in 2016, the government declared a national emergency. Two years earlier, it had already introduced a tax of 5 cents per litre on sugary drinks, but this was comparatively low compared to Chile or the UK because the Coca-Cola Company had co-financed studies for Mexico that cast doubt on the impact of soft drinks on obesity and the effectiveness of the tax. Contrary to the demands of scientists, the revenue from the tax is not used for health prevention.
Therefore, it came as a surprise when current President Claudia Sheinbaum announced policy changes after taking office. She declared access to water to be one of the top priorities of her term in office and presented a national water plan. This provides for all concessions for private companies to be reviewed. Shortly before the editorial deadline, we receive an email from activist Valentina. In it, she criticises the fact that Coca-Cola Femsa is currently trying to obtain an internationally respected certification for responsible water management for the bottling plant in San Cristóbal.
In April 2025, a ban on the sale of soft drinks and sweets in schools came into force. Up to 40 per cent of children and young people in Mexico are now classified as obese, making them the diabetes patients of tomorrow. Coca-Cola bottlers have already withdrawn their sugary drinks from primary schools. Perhaps a sales presence there is no longer necessary. In a viral Tiktok video with 1.4 million likes, a 12-year-old schoolboy somewhere in Mexico can be seen drinking with relish from a litre bottle of Coca-Cola. There are two more litre bottles in the side pockets of his rucksack. «Que me vas a hacer, Claudia», is shown in the video - What are you going to do to me because of this, Claudia (the president).
Cecilia Acero doesn't go that far. «I'm quite angry with Coca-Cola. But nobody is holding a gun to your head to drink the stuff», she says. Since her father developed diabetes, Acero has hardly ever drunk Coca-Cola. When she was offered the drink once on a hot day, she took a sip and found it quite revitalising. Once a year, on the traditional Día de Muertos, people in San Cristóbal, like everywhere else in Mexico, decorate their family altars in the cemeteries or at home with candles and flowers. They then bring the deceased things that they loved throughout their lives. So Acero buys a bottle of Coca-Cola and places it at her father's grave.
