The infamous 349 Incident.
Philippines by 1992 was a famished shithole. It was still recovering from the windfall of economic disaster done by Ferdinand Marcos and his family and cronies six years after his ouster albeit with the incompetent housewife Corazon Aquino who is yet just another part of the corrupt national oligarchical feudal elite who happens to own the largest hacienda in the Orient at the helm. The eruption of Pinatubo the year before, the largest volcanic eruption in the world since Krakatoa in 1883, only made things turn for the worse. The tragedy gravely disrupted economic activity across the country, with crops failing and commerce ground to a halt, and with most Filipinos living in serious poverty, future was made all the more further uncertain. Families living near American military bases in Luzon are selling their children without hesitation to get a shot out of poverty, for those poor children to be done unspeakable things by American servicemen; as America closed all its bases in the country at the aftermath of Pinatubo, Filipino families lost their last shot out of poverty as American servicemen also left the country. The whole country is then at its worst, its people apparently poorer than ever before.
Enter Pepsi Cola.
It was the height of the Cola Wars of the 1990’s. Pepsi already had a presence in the Philippines since the 1940’s, but it could never beat the huge market share enjoyed by Coca Cola. However, Pepsi was successful elsewhere, though it became so by a shrewd albeit short-term marketing of printing a set of numbers on bottle caps in what is basically a lottery, offering a huge sum of money for the winners decided by whoever got the right combination of numbers behind the bottle cap they possess on television.
To beat Coca Cola’s market share, Pepsi adopted this marketing strategy in the Philippines, allocating 2 million pesos for the event called Pepsi Number Fever.
Millions of caps were printed and sold to the general public, in a gamble to increase Pepsi’s share in the Philippine soda market and topple Coca Cola.
And the Filipinos, destitute by generations of economic deprivations by external powers as well as from their own people who were nevertheless influenced and installed by those same external powers more or less, fell for it, hook, line and sinker.
People bought Pepsi soda bottles by the droves. Some stole Pepsi bottle caps from others in the hopes of winning the prize, while others murdered people and take away their bottle caps. There were even reports of looting in stores and even some of Pepsi’s very own outsourced distribution facilities to steal whole cases of Pepsi soda bottles. Though the police were there, they were powerless to stop waves of people so desperate to leave poverty that they are willing to do what they can to do it, crime be damned.
It was an economic anarchy.
Then the main event.
The night of May 25, 1992, it was announced on TV that the winning number combination was 349. The method of winning was strictly controlled and rid of cheating, as confirmation security codes were also printed alongside the numbers behind the bottle caps. But there was a minor problem that would lead to a far greater calamity. The computer printing those numbers and security codes experienced an error, leading to the release of 800,000 bottle caps with the winning number combination 349 printed behind them. The next day, hundreds of thousands of people possessing such bottle caps stormed Pepsi’s distribution and manufacturing facilities across the country.
Since Pepsi could not cope with such a major problem, it announced to stop the whole enterprise altogether, prematurely ending the promotional event. No one won this failure of a lottery.
And all hell broke loose.
In an event akin to the EDSA Revolution of 1986, millions took to the streets boycotting Pepsi, while many others chose violence, resorted to riots and even deadly acts of terrorism with some carrying firearms and explosives. The whole mayhem led to the deaths of at least five persons, all of them due to bombs and grenades thrown during the ensuing chaos, although hundreds to thousands more might also have been killed and wounded. The whole mess lasted almost a year until 1993, when legal action was taken by actors. Suits and complaints were filed by the thousands, and it was not until 2006 when the issue was settled somehow, with the Supreme Court exonerating Pepsi for the tragedy, therefore disgusting the people even more from the brand while their lot hasn’t improved much afterwards.
It didn’t help that the name Pepsi was associated with a celebrity of a chick whose controversial death likely caused by rape by three of the country’s most esteemed celebrities was still fresh in the minds of millions of Filipinos.
It seemed the only way for the Filipinos to get themselves out of poverty is to migrate outside the country however they could. While overseas Filipino workers had been present since the economic disaster of the Marcoses and company in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the entirety of 2000’s was the era when the Filipinos went by the droves to work overseas. Many of them decided to leave Philippines entirely altogether, migrating in Anglophone countries and getting foreign citizenships, forever abandoning the country they saw as forever hopeless.
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