Then in the 1980's, the Mexican economic crisis hit and saw a rapid and devastating devaluation of the peso. In March of 1982 President Jose Lopez Portillo issued a decree ordering an emergency increase in workers' salaries. Jimenez ignored it... a group of Pascual workers went to the offices of the Mexican Worker's Party for help in demanding their pay increase.
"When Jimenez discovered this, he promptly fired 150 workers. This did not sit well with the rest of the Pascual employees, who went on strike in the southern Pascual plant (the company has two plants, on the north and south sides of Mexico City) on the 18th of May 1982..."
"The struggle continued throughout the next two years, with the strong support of many civic organizations and the pueblo in general. The workers organized, studied, and solicited legal and financial advice, and in August of 1984, in a meeting with president Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado, they demanded that the property of the Pascual company be turned over to the workers, who would agree to work as a cooperative...
"The cooperative now occupies 15 percent of Mexico's soft drink market and employs more than two million people between factory workers, distributors, fruit growers, and cane producers. It has won a series of awards in both the Americas and in Europe for the quality of its products, the working conditions in its factories, and its treatment of workers...
"The Pascual Cooperative also produces increasingly rare non-synthetic soft drinks. While Coke, Pepsi, and the vast majority of other soda companies rely entirely on high fructose corn syrup (which is not only proven to lead to diabetes and obesity but also contributes to the environmentally and economically destructive dependence on cheap corn) Pascual sweetens its beverages with sugar, and, even more radically, fruit.
"Seems like a bright sunny story of a cooperative that isn't laying off workers and opening up Cambodian sweatshops, right? Ah, but here's the tragic ending: it's going bankrupt. Coke is not so thrilled about the ingression of an entirely Mexican-owned cooperative on the extremely lucrative Mexican beverage market...