Miami Vice
By Tom Hayden, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
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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