***** November 16, 2003 Them Against the World, Part 2 By AUSTIN BUNN
. . . What Miami wants, Fithian says, is crisis. This week, representatives from the 34 countries in the Americas (minus Cuba) will meet at the Intercontinental Hotel to broker the world's furthest-reaching free-trade agreement, known among critics as ''Nafta on steroids.'' The premise of the Free Trade Area of the Americas is to expand 1993's Nafta agreement from the three original countries (the United States, Canada and Mexico) all the way through South America. To Fithian and others, the Free Trade Area of the Americas is a corporate land grab created by a nondemocratic institution that is stamping out indigenous culture and threatening the environment as it goes. While delegates will hammer out details inside, hundreds of different N.G.O.'s and social-justice groups and thousands of union members will march and rally outside, on the other side of what will assuredly be a heavily guarded metal fence, on Nov. 20.
Fithian will join them, but she doesn't care too much about the march. It doesn't need her. It needs numbers. Direct action -- to physically ''shut it down'' -- is her calling. Blocking the Miami airport, preventing delegates from getting inside the conference center, ripping a hole in the protective fence -- these things need her. Anticorporate globalization protests like this one will attract everyone from agitprop puppeteers to Quakers to rowdy anarchists who would love to see a Starbucks on fire. Fithian stands in a willful, but not reckless, middle ground. She is peace-oriented but not passive. Destruction of ''illegitimate'' barriers is fine with her as long as it's nonviolent (a line that can be hazy) and not a senseless publicity stunt (also hazy).
So you don't go to Fithian when you want to carry a placard. You go to her when you want to make sure there are enough bolt cutters to go around. The tradition of direct action is civil disobedience staged at the ''point of power'': civil rights era sit-ins on segregated Woolworth's stools or Act Up ''die-ins'' during speeches by Food and Drug Administration officials. But since the enemies in the global social-justice movement are transnational corporations (''like on the 14th floor of some office building,'' said one activist) and the abstractions of liberalized trade policy, trade meetings like this one provide the most tangible target. For a handful of days, activists like Fithian work to create ''dilemmas'': situations that might force the police, the delegates and the media into recognizing their dissent. ''When people ask me, 'What do you do?' I say I create crisis,'' she says, ''because crisis is that edge where change is possible.''
Miami offers real stakes. The city is bidding to become the hemispheric headquarters for the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and ''if we create enough brouhaha,'' Fithian maintains, ''we might be able to undermine that city's ability to host it, and that would be a big win.'' Miami officials are taking no chances; they recently received an $8.5 million federal boost from the massive Iraq war bill to plan security for the trade meeting. . . .
On Nov. 30, 1999, thousands of street protesters, trained and organized days in advance, divided and occupied 13 intersections around the Seattle conference center, where delegates to the World Trade Organization were trying to meet. When the police tried to disperse them with tear gas and pepper spray, they were joined by others from a much larger, separate march of 50,000 unionists, who broke free and joined the civil disobedience.
A small number of ''black bloc'' anarchists -dressed in black and kerchiefs to hide their faces -- notoriously smashed windows all over downtown Seattle, obscuring the more peaceful efforts. About 500 people were arrested, including Fithian, and amid the chaos, the W.T.O. talks collapsed.
That may very well have happened anyway; representatives from the developing countries simply refused to participate in a negotiating process they considered rigged against them in the first place. But within the anti-corporate globalization community, Seattle was a tremendous victory, a watershed, the metaphor for the movement. The direct action ''took this institution out of the dark and put it on the front burner,'' says David Solnit, a Bay Area organizer and carpenter. ''All of a sudden, people knew there was a W.T.O. Who could say that in 1998?''
In the eyes of many activists, the greater success of the battle of Seattle was the validation of their decentralized, leaderless model. Loosely inherited from the anarchists who fought in the Spanish Civil War, ''affinity groups'' committed to holding specific sectors and consensus-based ''spokescouncils'' directed the affinity groups. When the police swept one group away, another took its place. ''No centralized leader could have coordinated the scene in the midst of the chaos,'' a Bay Area activist named Starhawk wrote in a widely circulated essay titled ''How We Shut Down the W.T.O.'' ''Our model of organization and decision-making was so foreign to their'' -- the police's -- ''picture of what constitutes leadership that they literally could not see what was going on in front of them.''
But each mobilization since Seattle -- from the marches against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on April 16, 2000, to the W.T.O. protest in Cancun this September -- has had to contend with a critical lack of surprise. Fences, a heavy police presence and pre-emptive arrests have all become standard procedures. Six hundred activists were rounded up the day before the ''A16'' protest against the I.M.F. and World Bank, and on July 20, 2001, in Genoa, Italy, where 100,000 activists gathered to protest the G-8 summit, 200 officers raided a school that was serving as a dormitory and alternative media center, arresting 92 people. The first morning of a W.T.O. mini-ministerial protest in Montreal in July, 342 activists were rounded up many blocks from the site of the march, in the designated nonviolent ''green zone.''
Just as the global social-justice movement entered the conversation, the terms of the conversation changed irrevocably. The post-Sept. 11 Patriot Act has given government agencies wide latitude in preventing terrorism, such that the notion of pre-emptive arrests gets promoted as a prudent safeguard. Rallies and marches, even huge ones, can be ignored. In February, when somewhere between 6 and 10 million people worldwide marched against the invasion of Iraq -- the largest synchronized global dissent in history -- President Bush casually dismissed it, saying, ''You know, size of protest, it's like deciding, Well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group.''
The possibility of shutting down a summit meeting, as it was shut down in Seattle, seems to be increasingly remote. Still, Fithian says, direct action ''has the most possibility for change in the quickest amount of time.'' Given the new reality of heavily prepared security forces, how do activists do something that doesn't end up merely highlighting their own powerlessness? . . .
The W.T.O. protests in Cancun were, in a way, a real test for Fithian and the global social-justice organizing model. Cancun offered no local taproot of activists, an unpredictable crowd size and an unfamiliar police force. As the last warm-up before Miami, Cancun needed to look like escalation. But with so many unknowns, it was at risk of disintegrating into noise. . . .
The paradox is that, in Cancun, it was the union of Korean farmers -- the most traditional, patriarchal and hierarchical group there -- that ended up impressing almost everybody. Nearly all men, they dressed in red-and-white outfits, marched to a drumbeat and carried a giant dragon that they used to ram the fence at Kilometer Zero. ''They are totally hard core,'' a ''black bloc'' anarchist named Randy told me with awe. (And this guy actually ''rode the rails'' to Cancun, hoboing it all the way from Pittsburgh.) Even anarchists could appreciate the Koreans' crisp lines and top-down precision.
The horror of actual crisis, the suicide of a 55-year-old South Korean farmer named Lee Kyung Hae at the fence, took everyone by surprise. But the total numbers in Cancun were low, around 8,000 protesters total -- more than 6,000 Mexican farmers, 1,000 Mexican students and the rest internationals -- not enough to take much of a political charge from Lee's death. As we milled around at the barricade for a second day in the crushing heat, an activist from Montana turned to me and said, ''Sometimes the march is the most demoralizing thing.'' . . .
For the Americans I spoke to, there was a genuine sense of disappointment in the crowd size. ''Before I came, I wanted to see 100,000 people here from 60 countries and the airport shut down,'' said Nick Wright, a 30-year-old Bay Area construction worker and activist who had flown in. ''The worst-case scenario was just 5,000 people showing up. Essentially, that's what happened.''
Before I went to Cancun, I had been warned that it would be ''different'' and not representative of the anticorporate globalization movement -- that many protesters were staying home for fear of being detained at the border or that they simply planned on making Miami in November and not Cancun. At the same time, the global social-justice movement has two strains: the ''global north,'' which is largely white and fighting on the level of policies and argument, and the ''global south,'' which is anything but white and fighting on the level of livelihood. Cancun was a chance to see the mixing that is the inevitable future of the movement.
But hardly anyone in the mobilization actually lived in Cancun: the students came from Mexico City, 48 hours away by bus; the farmers, from farther; and the American and Korean activists, beyond that. So the integration could only be provisional. If part of the premise of the global movement is that it allows activists to ''radicalize'' a new community no matter where the institutions go, it makes a terrible kind of logic that the institutions would choose places where there is no community, places like Cancun's hotel zone. Beyond that, there is a fundamental trickiness to bringing together a farmer who lives on a few dollars a day and an activist who can afford the $400 flight to join him. . . .
In the end, for the activists, this is what winning looked like: about midway through the week of protests in Cancun, word spread for people to converge in front of the W.T.O. conference center as the delegates were leaving for the day. Getting that far into the hotel zone required passing as tourists, so activists sneaked in wearing trashy Cancun T-shirts and carrying plastic, yardlong margarita glasses like college students on spring break. On a whistle call, a group of about 75 activists -- internationals like Fithian and Mexican students -- rushed into the middle of the road outside the conference center. Some sat down, others danced while the news photographers took pictures, tourists looked on confusedly and the traffic stopped dead. After days stuck haplessly under the surveillance of the police, the action was vindication, a quick, nonviolent redistribution of control.
The next day, the South Koreans fashioned a massive rope, and the crowd used it to rupture a section of the barricade. But nobody went through, which, it turned out, was the strategy. ''This is what I call the art of action -- you need a beginning, middle and an end,'' says Fithian, who helped plan the fence maneuver. ''If we had attempted to march to the conference center, that would have been a losing strategy. The cops were there, with guns. People would have been hurt, and the 'story' in the press would have been a melee. So how do you end it? The police thought their job was to close the road down. Our job was to open it.''
But was this anything more than symbolic fodder for the countless photographers, journalists, filmmakers and documentarians vulturing around the hole in the fence? The next day, when it became clear the W.T.O. meeting would collapse, jubilation erupted among the activists. A block of 21 countries, including Brazil and China, had refused to negotiate until the United States and Europe agreed to drop their ''trade distorting'' agricultural subsidies (neither did; the talks fell apart), and one rebel delegate told one N.G.O. that ''it was because of the protests that they could stand strong,'' Fithian says. But the diplomatic standoff had been announced before the W.T.O. meeting even began, just as another one looms this week for the Free Trade Area of the Americas. In Cancun, it wasn't that the protesters had created the predicament; it seemed more as if they had merely entered one, assembled there and made some resounding noise. . . .
Austin Bunn is a frequent contributor to the magazine. He last wrote about vigilante border patrols.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/16/magazine/16WTO.html> *****
-- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>