Coca-Cola Apologizes to Mexican Indigenous Community After Running Racially Offensive Ad Rafa Fernandez De Castro - Fusion
go to original December 7, 2015

Mexican Coca-Cola Ad Sends White Kids to Save Indigenous Community (AJ+)

Coca-Cola has issued an apology and pulled an online ad that many Mexicans criticized for being patronizing towards the country’s indigenous communities.

The ad showed a group of young, white Mexicans traveling to an indigenous town in the southern state of Oaxaca to “help” wide-eyed locals by giving them bottles of Coke and a giant Christmas tree. It has since been removed from the company’s YouTube page. (See original video below)

The Coke campaign, set in an indigenous community known as the Mixes, encouraged people to “end prejudice” and to share the hashtag #OpenYourHeart. But it backfired. Badly.

Furious Mexicans took to Twitter and Facebook criticizing the ad’s take on race, culture and colonialism.

Some Mixes responded by releasing a video in which they slammed the company in their native language, claiming that many in their community already suffer from diabetes from drinking too much soda. “To remain united we must protect our dignity, health and culture,” says one woman who appears in the video.

Read the rest at Fusion

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