This article was originally published on a previous blog, huevos a la mexicana, several months ago.  However, I spotted a box of Boing! the other day and thought I’d republish the story here, in light of the wave of politically themed posts as of late.  I have a soft spot for Boing! – hopefully you will as well once you’ve finished this brief history, and you’ll go out questing for a box somewhere.

Boing! is a Mexican fruit juice that comes in a box adorned with a serious, flexing tamarind, a somber strawberry, or a wickedly grinning grape.  The story of Boing! is a fascinating, inspiring, classically American (and I mean American in the true, wider, continental sense) tale of social struggle. There are striking workers and strikebreakers! Leaders from the 1968 student movement! U.S Corporations screwing over the local population and everyone’s health! Workers cheering after a long, hard fight! Rich, villainous capitalist bosses and their wives!

Read on, friends.

The Cooperativa Pascual, which produces Boing, is an anomaly in the 20th century history of corporate dominance and exploitation. What follows is its story.

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Cue the cheery black and white film about the beginning of Pascual. It starts out innocent and wholesome, with popsicles. Rafael Víctor Jiménez, grand founder of Pascual and soon-to-be Corporate Villain, started out by making popsicles and big jugs of flavored water and eventually moved on to refrescos (soft drinks) from fresh fruits, using the catchy slogan “fruit in your refresco.” (To me it sounds like an indie pop band or a complaint someone might make—“um, sir, there’s fruit in my refresco.”)

In the 1940’s Sr. Jiménez adopted Pato Pascual as the signature logo of the company and put out both the Pato Pascual and Lulu refrescos. (Lulu is a wide-eyed, black-haired girl with a tiny, pursed, cherry-red mouth. She’s described on the Pascual site, in classically Mexican form, as “innocent and flirty.”)

There is a striking Pato Pascual/Pato Donald resemblance. I won’t go into that lawsuit in this post. Read more about it–in Spanish–here.

In the 1960’s business took off, and Jiménez opened plants in the United States and Japan. In 1967, he introduced Boing, a series of juices in triangular packages. Soon after, he acquired a contract with the Swiss company Tetra Pak, which would be the exclusive bottler of Boing juices, and he bought the Mexico City Canada Dry plant and rights to the production and sale of Canada Dry.

As so often happens with capitalism, the more the company expands, and the more money it makes, the more it screws over its workers. (See: sweatshop labor, outsourcing, concentration of wealth, history of the modern world.) Such was the case with Pascual. Workers were working longer hours to produce more beverages at faster rates. Accidents in the workplace increased, working conditions worsened, but fortunately for Jiménez, most of the workers were peasants from the countryside who were unaware of their rights.

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 López Portillo issued a decree ordering an emergency increase in workers’ salaries. Jiménez ignored it.

So, organized by C. Demetrio Vallejo (a renowned leader of railroad workers, and co-founder of the Partido Mexicano de Los Trabajadores, or Mexican Worker’s Party) and Heberto Castillo (a leader of the 1968 student movement), a group of Pascual workers went to the offices of the Mexican Worker’s Party for help in demanding their pay increase.

When Jiménez 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.

On May 31st, Jiménez entered the plant with an army of strikebreakers, bodyguards and hired guns. When striking workers protested, Jiménez and his right-hand man ran over a worker and then, just for the added impact, shot him in the head. This initiated three minutes of shooting that killed another worker and left seventeen injured.

The Pascual workers, now backed by widespread public support and outrage, radicalized their tactics. They took over the offices of the Junta Federal de Conciliación y Arbitraje (a government organization mediating between workers and businesses), where they demanded and were issued a new, collective work contract. At this time the Committee For The Struggle of The Women, Wives, and Relatives of Pascual Workers was formed.

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 proposal was accepted and the workers were given ownership of the plants and materials of the Refresquería Pascual. They did not, however, have the capital they needed to get started. The authorities had promised them credit, but alas, the bank that conducted the study to determine the credit they’d receive declared that:

1) They would need the exorbitant sum of 300,000,000 pesos to get both plants started working.
2) The workers could not be given credit to run the company because they were incapable of running it.
3) The bank would give the company credit if…the company was run by the bank. Nifty!

The workers rejected this plan. They were given a grant of 1,450,000 pesos by the STUNAM (the worker’s union of the Universidad Autónoma de México) and the public organized major fundraisers in their favor. Artists sold their paintings and donated them to the cooperative. People made private donations and took to the streets to raise money.

The workers used this money to repair machines and purchase all of the necessary permits. They then discovered that ol’ Jiménez was up in Aguascalientes producing and marketing Boing despite the fact that the brand now belonged to the cooperative.

So in late May, 1985, the workers saw off eight trucks on a mission to win back and stock up on Boing.

Days later (cue the Hollywood score!) the trucks returned to the southern plant in Mexico city to cheers, tears, standing ovations, and applause.

In an assembly, 176 of the 1,100 workers were chosen to begin selling Boing in order to earn the remaining capital needed to start operating the factories. They were paid no salary, only given twenty pesos to cover transportation costs.

Six months later, on the 27th of November 1985, the southern plant officially began working. All workers received the same salary, and in May of 1986 the Pascual Cooperative officially began making a profit.

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 cooperative educates workers about operating and administering a business, and also about the nature of working in a cooperative. An internal company newspaper is dedicated entirely to educating workers about the latter.

Meanwhile, with the support of the Movimiento Revolucionario del Magisterio (the revolutionary teachers’ movement) the company offers courses in basic literacy, as well as primary, secondary, and high school classes.

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, and it’s got the (cue the villainous widows!) Jiménez women on its side.

It seems, you see, that when the government gave the Cooperativa Pascual the rights to the Pascual company, its plants, and its machines in 1985, it did not give the cooperative the actual rights to the estates, the land on which the factories sit. That land is owned by Rafael Jiménez’ wife, Victoria Valdez Cacho, and his daughter Olivia Jiménez Valdez Zamudi, and they want it back. In 1989, they filed a suit to demand the factories be handed over or the company pay 800 million pesos of rent. They won this suit in 2003, but the government overruled it, declaring that the property would be expropriated to the Cooperativa Pascual.

The Mexican government argued that in the Mexican constitution the public good—in this case millions of jobs and the preservation of an exemplary, Mexican-owned company in the face of aggressive international corporations—overrides private interests and therefore, they would give the estates to Pascual and pay Jiménez’ widow their cost.

The Jiménez women were not thrilled about this and filed a motion with the (right-wing) Mexican supreme court, which overturned the government’s decision in 2006, declaring that Pascual would have to hand over the factories. Strangely enough, around the same time the Mexican government gave the rights to several strategic wells and water sources to the Coca-Cola company.

The Supreme Court decision was met with outrage among Mexican intellectuals, who argued that the neo-liberal defense of private property over public good violated the Mexican constitution. Elena Poniatowska, one of the country’s most revered intellectuals, wrote this article in La Jornada lamenting the lack of action to support Pascual.

The decision is still being debated between Pascual and the Supreme Court, with Mexico City’s PRD mayor arguing to reinstate the expropriation and return the estates to Pascual.

So what can you do, loyal and concerned readers? Buy Boing!

I, for one, toast a glass of Boing Tamarindo to the hope that Pascual survives in this increasingly homogenous globalized world.