- Editor's Note: Tom Hayden, reporting for AlterNet from
the Free Trade Area of the Americas conference in Miami, filed this update
Thursday evening.
-
- The original story follows the update.
-
- UPDATE. MIAMI. 10:30 EST
-
- Thursday. An ugly and bloodier ending to the Miami FTAA
meeting was averted by a sudden decision tonight to end the closed official
events one day early. FTAA co-chairs from the US and Brazil both described
the summit as a step forward though it was widely understood that the agreement
was far less than the American business community and the White House originally
hoped for.
-
- At 5:30 pm, besieged protestors at the convergence center,
threatened by the spectre of mass arrests, put out a televised appeal for
public solidarity. At virtually the same moment, word came from within
the FTAA meeting that an agreement had been reached. At 6:45, the agreement
was announced at a press conference of all the trade ministers, and shortly
afterwards the police encirclement of the convergence center seemed to
be lifted.
-
- "They finished early because there was nothing to
be gained from another day of bad publicity from the streets, and there
was nothing to negotiate beyond an agreement to keep negotiating in the
future," said Washington-based trade expert Mark Weisbrot. A perplexed
Wall Street Journal reporter asked FTAA officials whether "after nine
years you've agreed to keep moving forward but with lesser goals than before."
Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorim, carefully choosing a word in English
said only that the agreement was "enabling."
-
- Enabling what? The beginning of "NAFTA on steroids"
for the whole hemisphere, as global justice advocates fear? Or the further
retreat of the Bush Administration from its pretensions to empire as American
public opinion begins to swing against unilateralism in trade and war.
That is the big question the global justice movement now confronts.
-
- Earlier in the day
-
- MIAMI - Protestors seemed to skirmish with heavily armored
Miami police outside the Riande Hotel Thursday morning, but nothing is
at it seems this week. These "anarchists" were undercover police
officers whose mission was to provoke a confrontation.
-
- The crowd predictably panicked, television cameras moved
in, the police lines parted, and I watched through a nearby hotel window
as two undercover officers disguised as "anarchists," thinking
they were invisible, hugged each other. They excitedly pulled tasers and
other weapons out of their camouflage cargo pants, and slipped away in
an unmarked police van.
-
- On the other side of the impenetrable police barricade,
a young woman with a video camera was bent over, vomiting from pepper spray.
The nonviolent revolutionary Starhawk stood blinded for 10 minutes as friends
washed her eyes. Others knelt paralyzed on the street.
-
- A few hours later, hundreds of peaceful protestors -
and a few shocked reporters - sitting quietly in Bayfront Park on Biscayne
Boulevard were sprayed like unwanted pests by officers who described themselves
as Robo-Cops.
-
- So began a day that could be explained as a planned overreaction
by the City of Miami, the Governor of Florida and his supportive brother
in the White House. Within a few hours, the massive police force was firing
pepper gas and rubber bullets at 120 miles an hour against a small crowd
of surrounded resisters who could have been easily contained.
-
- "Jeb Bush would love to see a riot over FTAA,"
lamented Fred Morris, Florida director of the National Council of Churches,
when I interviewed him the day before. It seemed a little paranoid at the
moment, but Rev. Morris spoke from experience. "They've been bringing
in riot units from all over Florida to patrol streets when nothing was
going on. My wife and I were stopped twice by police this week and they
were very hostile. I can handle that, but somebody younger and more impatient
might get shovy."
-
- We were standing on a downtown street corner where the
local ACLU, Catholic activists and Unitarians held a press conference condemning
First Amendment abuses. Under a newly adopted ordinance, groups of seven
or more people are forbidden to stop on a sidewalk for longer than 29 minutes
without a permit. The Miami City Council decided not to criminalize puppets
but banned materials such as stilts "more than three quarters inch
in its thickest dimension" and "containers of any kind."
-
- Hundreds of downtown businessmen, hearing that "Seattle-type
anarchists" were descending on Miami, lost hundreds of thousands of
dollars by closing their doors for the past week. The few who remained
open - camera stores, small shops, taco stands - did brisk business without
a single incident of property damage (as of 6:00 p.m. Thursday).
-
- A few days ago, police shattered a parked car at Florida
State University when they noticed a "suspicious container" that
turned out to be gray paint for a photo gallery.
-
- Next, the entire downtown was shut down by hundreds of
officers in response to the arrival of a nonviolent march by 200 farm worker
supporters from Ft. Lauderdale, 34 miles away.
-
- Then on Wednesday, police uncovered a nest of alleged
"anarchists" in an abandoned Miami mansion, and led television
crews to a cache of weapons including newly minted chain and bright new
gasoline cans. The evidence smelled, and not of gasoline, but not a single
reporter questioned the incident. The anarchist stash was not exactly weapons
of mass destruction, but enough to justify the police buildup on the eve
of the protests.
-
- With $8.5 million provided from the taxpayer funds meant
for Iraq, the Miami police have splurged on "non-lethal" weapons,
including CS-gas sprays. Gleaming new desert-colored armored personnel
carriers and bright green water-cannon trucks backed the police presence
on the streets.
-
- Newscasters embedded Iraq-style among the police provided
a complementary narrative rationalizing the show of force. For example,
when a young white woman holding her fingers in a V-sign was shot point
blank with a rubber bullet, the local ABC commentator said without the
slightest evidence, "She took a rubber bullet in the stomach, she
must have done something. You wanna play, you gotta pay."
-
- A local NBC commentator seemed to speak for official
Miami when she proudly declared that, despite a few incidents, Miami "was
nothing like Seattle in 1999."
-
- No authority or pundit questioned why the protestor turnout
was less than 15,000 after months of official "intelligence"
warning that 20,000 to 100,000 might blight the city's blissful reputation.
Here in Miami, the AFL-CIO turnout was perhaps 5,000, including steelworkers
wearing T-shirts declaring "FTAA Sucks."
-
- Two hundred forty trade unionists wearing "Wellstone
Lives" T-shirts journeyed all the way from Minnesota. AFL-CIO President
John Sweeney attacked the FTAA fiercely and paid a visit to the protestors'
convergence center. But a comparison with Seattle four years ago, where
50,000 trade unionists marched, was never planned or considered realistic
by the protest coalition.
-
- It may be hard for most Americans to believe this was
all a hoax, and of course the Miami events are not over yet. But the telling
comparison that should be made is not with Seattle 1999, but with the anti-WTO
protests in Cancun, Mexico, just two months ago. There a Mexican police
force with a long record of human rights abuses protected the WTO Ministerial
with no offensive force, no gassing, no beatings and virtually no arrests.
Protestors outside the fences in Cancun were far more aggressive than in
Miami today. It was the first significant de-escalation of state violence
in the history of anti-globalization protests. Miami and U.S. police officials
were there as observers, but chose not to repeat the non-violent peacekeeping
example of Cancun.
-
- Miami Mayor Manny Diaz called the police presence "a
model for homeland defense." Two weeks ago, Miami chief John Timoney
was quoted as saying his strategy would be "a failure" if tear
gas was used. Tonight he actually claimed on CBS that the demonstrators
and not the police used the tear gas.
-
- Anyway, he continued, it was not tear gas but "pepper
spray with a capsule formula."
-
- As to protests scheduled for Friday, "if they engage
in lawful activity, we're gonna arrest them." He didn't notice the
misstatement - if indeed it was one.
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