Fragments of the Future:
The FTAA in Miami
By Rebecca Solnit
The future was being modeled on both sides of the
massive steel fence erected around the Intercontinental Hotel in
downtown Miami last Thursday. Inside, delegates from every nation in
the western hemisphere but Cuba watered down some portions of the
Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement and postponed
deciding on others in an attempt to prevent a failure as stark as
that of the World Trade Organization ministerial in Cancun two
months before. Outside, an army of 2,500 police in full armor used a
broad arsenal of weapons against thousands of demonstrators and
their constitutional rights. "Not every day do you get tear-gassed,
pepper-sprayed, and hit in the face," said Starhawk, a prominent
figure in the global anticapitalism movement,, who experienced all
three Thursday.
Since the Seattle surprise of 1999, it has become
standard procedure to erect a miniature police state around
globalization summits, and it's hard not to read these rights-free
zones as prefigurations of what full-blown corporate globalization
might bring. After all, this form of globalization would essentially
suspend local, regional, and national rights of self-determination
over labor, environmental, and agricultural conditions in the name
of the dubious benefits of the free market, benefits that would be
enforced by unaccountable transnational authorities acting primarily
to protect the rights of capital. At a labor forum held the day
before the major actions, Dave Bevard, a laid-off union metalworker,
referred to this new world order as "government of the corporations,
by the corporations, for the corporations."
The corporate agenda of NAFTA and related
globalization treaties is demonstrated most famously by the case of
MTBE, a gasoline additive that causes severe damage to human health
and the environment. When California phased it out, the Canadian
corporation Methanex filed a lawsuit demanding nearly a billion
dollars in compensation from the US government for profit lost
because of the ban. Under NAFTA rules, corporations have an absolute
right to profit with which local laws must not interfere. Poisoning
the well is no longer a crime; stopping the free flow of poison is.
The FTAA, modeled after NAFTA, was originally
intended to create a borderless trade zone that would encompass the
whole hemisphere (except, of course, for Cuba). That globalization
is an economic disaster for many existing industries is so apparent
that, while paying lip service to a borderless economy, both
Presidents Clinton and Bush have attempted to protect the US steel
industry from cheap foreign imports, though neither has done
anything about the export of former union jobs to the
maquilladoras of Mexico (and now those jobs are fleeing Mexico
for yet cheaper venues in the infamous "race to the bottom," while
more and more white-collar US jobs, from programming to data
processing, are also being exported).
And it's the fact that even the richest nations --
the United States and the European Union -- won't live up to their
own rhetoric of capitalism without borders that trips up the
globalization agendas they pursue. Both maintain high agricultural
subsidies that undermine the ability of poorer nations to generate
export-crop income or in some cases -- as with corn in Mexico --
even to compete successfully domestically. NAFTA, which will be a
decade old this New Year's, devastated hundreds of thousands of
Mexican subsistence farmers. Florida's citrus industry would be
devastated by tariff-free Brazilian imports, and small Kentucky
tobacco farmers are going out of business because of
developing-world imports of the crop. The question now is not
whether globalized commodities are profitable but who profits, and
the answer is usually the already rich, while the rest get poorer.
The Clinton administration genuinely believed in
the corporate internationalism that the word ‘globalization' stands
for, and the FTAA talks were first launched by Clinton nine years
ago. If there's one thing to be grateful to the Bush junta for, it's
their commitment to a narrowly defined national self-interest that
makes their pursuit of globalization pretty indistinguishable from
old-fashioned colonialism: you open your borders to our products and
principles, perhaps after a little arm-twisting, and then we'll
pretty much do whatever we want. This is much the same
screw-the-world-community policy that made Bush and Co. disregard
the UN Security Council and world opinion to pursue the current war
in Iraq with only a few allies. The solution to the collapse in
Cancun and stalemate in Miami will be pursuit of a similarly
splintering agenda -- bilateral trade agreements, mostly with
nations the US can bully. As the WTO was collapsing, the US was
already turning to the FTAA, and as it becomes evident that the FTAA
would flop, the US has stepped up its pursuit of bilateral trade
agreements with Latin American, southern African and other nations.
Cancun was a watershed victory because more than
twenty nations in the global south, led by Brazil, stood up to the
US and the EU, urged on by the activists and non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), which were part of the continuum of
conversation there. In Miami there was no such continuum and no
exhilarating victory, but there is room enough for those who oppose
corporate globalization to continue resisting it. The FTAA
conference dissolved a day early, having only achieved what has been
dubbed "FTAA lite." This version allows member nations to withdraw
from specific aspects of the FTAA agreement and otherwise weakens
its impact. Brazil, the economic giant in the south, had objected to
two provisions: protection of foreign investment and intellectual
property rules; FTAA lite let Brazil win on those fronts. As Lori
Wallach of the NGO Public Citizen put it, "All that was agreed was
to scale back the FTAA's scope and punt all of the hard decisions to
an undefined future venue so as to not make Miami the Waterloo of
the FTAA."
The war at home
It's popular to say that corporate globalization
is war by other means, but what went down in Miami during the FTAA
skipped the part about other means. And though it was most
directly--thanks to clubs, pellet guns, rubber bullets, tear gas,
pepper spray and other weapons--an assault on the bodies of
protestors, it was first an assault against the right of the people
peaceably to assemble and other first amendment rights, a dramatic
example of how hallowed American rights are being dismantled in the
name of the war on terrorism.
For months beforehand, Police Chief John Timoney
-- engineer of the coup against constitutional rights at the 2000
Republican National Convention when he headed Philadelphia's police
force -- had portrayed protestors as terrorists and the gathering in
Miami as a siege of the city. Much of the money for militarizing
Miami came, appropriately enough, from an $8.5 million rider tacked
onto the $87 million spending bill for the war in Iraq. Miami will
pay directly, however, both in revenue lost from shutting the city
down and, presumably, for activists' police brutality and
civil-rights-violation lawsuits.
Perhaps the silliest example of the paranoiac
reaction to the arrival of protestors was the removal of all
coconuts from downtown Miami palm trees, lest activists throw them
at the authorities -- whether after first shaking or scaling the
trees was not made clear. Every outdoor trash can had also
apparently been removed from downtown; second-guessing terrorists is
an exercise whose creativity knows no bounds.
One of the most explicit ways the FTAA policing
was modeled after "the war on terror" abroad was the police decision
to "embed" reporters. While a number of reporters--looking dorky in
their borrowed helmets--joined the Miami cops, protestors invited
the press to join the other side as well, and many did. (Some got
tear-gassed, and reported on it.)
Many activists in the streets said that one of the
functions of this Miami police mobilization was to adjust the
American public to the militarization of public space and public
life, to a John-Ashcroft-style America. It may also have been an
attempt to condition police to functioning as a military force
against the civil society they're supposed to serve. The city of
Miami and a few nearby communities passed emergency laws banning
basic civil liberties such as the right of assembly, laws that could
easily be challenged -- but not before the FTAA was over. Activists
were already talking about what kind of police state will take hold
of Manhattan during the Republican Convention next year. And civil
libertarians are taking note of the way dissent of every kind is
being reconfigured as terrorism.
The war of the possible worlds
Thursday, November 20, was like a day out of the
science fiction movies I grew up on, the ones where the world we
know is in ruins and guerrilla war rages in the rubble. Central
Miami had been totally shut down. Stores and offices were closed,
nothing was being bought or sold, no one was driving, the Metromover
elevated rail system was locked up, few went to work that day. The
FTAA negotiators from the 34 nations of the western hemisphere were
sequestered in the tower of the Intercontinental Hotel, and
occasionally I'd see some of the hotel people, tiny on the roof of
that skyscraper, watching the turbulence below. We must have looked
like ants. Helicopters droned overhead, reportedly using high-tech
surveillance equipment to pinpoint activists for arrest or assault
by ground forces.
Thursday morning the city was abandoned but for
those 2,500 cops and an approximately equivalent number of
activists. We've seen the world Miami was that day in movies that
range from The Terminator to Tank Girl to Terry
Gilliam's Brazil. Maybe the earliest and most somber version
can be found in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, in which
humanity has diverged into two species: the bestial subterranean
Morlocks who prey on the pretty lamblike Eloi. We had moments of
being Tank Girl and moments of being lambs to the slaughter. Friday
afternoon, Eddie Yuen, who's written about the antiglobalization
movement since Seattle, commented to me that at these
antiglobalization summits, "There are laboratories of dissent and
laboratories of repression, and right now the laboratories of
repression are dominant."
The police -- except for a squadron of bare-kneed
bicycle cops -- were in full riot gear: black helmets with visors,
black body armor that protected limbs, crotches and torso, combat
boots. All seemed to carry long wooden clubs and many had the rifles
that fire "sublethal" rubber bullets, beanbags and other projectiles
capable of causing severe injury -- and even death. Four years
before, in Seattle, I had seen the dystopian future: it was a Darth
Vader cop guarding the ruins of a shattered Starbucks; now there
were 2,500 of them and they weren't guarding, they were marching. As
Starhawk commented, "It wasn't the worst I've ever seen, compared to
Israel and Palestine, and Genoa [where Italian police engaged in
bloody assault and torture against 300,000 activists come to protest
the G8 summit in the summer of 2001]. But there was a quality of
sheer brute calculated fascism that's hard to equal."
Some activists were picked off or hassled long
before they got to the site of the early-morning demonstration. More
police were waiting for us when we got there, ranks of cops, two or
three thick, blocking off streets, clubs clutched ready for action.
Periodically they would move in and herd us in yet another
direction, and they never let us get near the steel fence that
steelworkers shouting against the FTAA had marched past the
afternoon before. Sometimes they would come out clubbing and
shooting. Local television claimed that activists threw smoke bombs
at the police, but what they videotaped was activists lobbing back
the tear-gas canisters that had been fired at us.
At midmorning, when it looked like they might
surround us and engage in wholesale arrests, I escorted a noncitizen
out of the last possible exit from the scene. Another member of our
group, a professor with a bandage around his head -- he'd been
clubbed from behind and bled profusely -- joined us, and we stayed
on the sidelines until the permitted march of perhaps 10,000 union
members came by at noon on its way through the abandoned city and
then back to the safety zone of a rented arena.
As the unions dispersed, the violence resurfaced.
Puffs of tear-gas rose up from the crowd in the distance. The
helicopters roared overhead, the only machine sound on that day when
cars had been shut out of the central city but for the occasional
police vans and buses bringing reinforcements or hauling away the
arrested. What looked like an amphibious tank rolled around in front
of the steel fence. Snatch squads moved into the crowd to seize
individuals. A few vultures had circled the skyscrapers in the
morning, and by mid-afternoon there must have been fifty of them, a
flock of black carrion-eaters soaring sometimes above, sometimes
below the level of the helicopters.
The police rushed the crowd again, becoming so
violent that the activists splintered into small groups fleeing
north into Overtown, an African-American neighborhood of lush vacant
lots, boarded-up buildings, affable people out on the streets, and
evident destitution. Sirens screamed past us and small groups were
pounced upon or hunted further from downtown. My group was carrying
a number of huge puppets that had been used in the morning's
procession and, weary, we came to stop under a row of street trees
where we wouldn't be so visible to the helicopters hovering low for
surveillance. Just this kind of hiding and being hunted made it
clear that what was going on was warfare of a sort. This day, more
than a hundred would be injured, twelve hospitalized, and more than
200 arrested.
Later that night people would be pulled out of
their cars at gunpoint or stopped on the street for no particular
reason -- not just the young but ministers, middle-aged NGO workers,
anyone and everyone. And the next day, more than fifty more
activists were arrested in a peaceful vigil outside the jail, where
many of the previously arrested languished. "They were surrounded by
riot police and ordered to disperse," reported organizers. "As they
did, police opened fire and blocked the streets preventing many from
leaving. We are now receiving reports from people being released or
calling from jail that there is excessive brutality, sexual assault
and torture going on inside. People of color, queer and transgender
prisoners are particularly being targeted." Sunday many of those
arrested were released.
The visionary slogan of the antiglobalization
movement is "Another world is possible." This time around some of
the steelworkers had the slogan emblazoned across the backs of their
royal-blue union t-shirts. What we don't talk about so much is that
many worlds are possible, and some of them are hell.
Fragments
Seattle in 1999 has become a genesis story in
which the revolution began as Eden. There were tens of thousands of
us blockading the WTO, the story goes, and we were all as one:
"turtles and teamsters," is the cliché. Actually, there were about
fifty thousand in the big labor-organized parade, and ten thousand
or less -- few union members among them -- shut down the streets
around the WTO meeting on November 30, 1999. The various groups
coexisted nicely but few articulated a profound common ground for us
all (though the globalization issue has pushed activists from labor
to the Sierra Club to develop a broader, more encompassing analysis
and to reach for broader coalitions).
After the Black Bloc of young anarchist activists
first made its presence known by smashing up the windows of Niketown,
Starbucks and a few other downtown Seattle corporate entities, some
of those who supported the blockade sparked internal squabbles when
they decried the property destruction. The Seattle police were
brutal, attacking activists, passersby, nearby neighborhoods, and
even an older woman on the way to her chemotherapy appointment.
Seattle was no Eden but a miracle all the same, and a huge surprise
for the world -- both that direct action could be so effective and
that globalization was not going to go forward unimpeded. Four years
later the tank of corporate capitalism that seemed to be inexorably
advancing on the world is idling its engines or going in circles,
and it could yet end up in a ditch.
Cancun was another miracle, notable for the fluid
circulation of passion and politics between the developing nations
that stood up to the United States and the European Union, the NGO
activists who were both inside at the Ministerial and outside in the
streets, and the street activists, who included Yucatan and Korean
farmers and a fair representation of the rest of the world from
Canada to Africa. As in Seattle, the activists stiffened the resolve
of the poor nations, and the poor nations stood up for themselves
against the agendas of the rich ones.
The street activists in Miami were overwhelmingly
white Americans, and there was no such porousness: the
Intercontinental Hotel was for all intents and purposes hermetically
sealed. NGOs had no role in the FTAA talks or even access to the
hotel. AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney went to visit the
Convergence Center, the warehouse north of downtown where the direct
action was organized and decried the police violence (which never
targeted the union people). But the protests felt fragmentary:
beforehand, the direct action contingent had had to negotiate long
and hard even to get the unions to consent to letting them--as if
they owned the day--demonstrate on the same day. Though we joined
the labor march, they didn't join us, and the teach-ins held at the
Doubletree Hotel and other venues around town seemed to separate out
more circumspect activists from the stuff in the street.
Uprisings, protest, civil disobedience--the stuff
in the street--still matter, even though they don't change the world
every time. Sometimes it's just an exercise of democracy and
bravado, exercise in the sense of maintaining the strength and
ability to intervene at a time when it will count. A month ago,
Bolivians in the streets and roads of their own nation forced the
resignation of their millionaire president, who was trying to export
the impoverished nation's resources. An insurgent spirit and direct
action are radicalizing Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and
Venezuela. The surprise in Miami isn't that so little was agreed to
but, with the revolt against neoliberalism well underway in South
America, that anything was.
Rebecca Solnit's most recent book is River of
Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West,
though her 1994
Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American
West has the most civil disobedience in it.