Tom Hayden reports from the WTO ministerial conference in Cancun each day.
[More below]
CANCUN, Sept. 10. – A South Korean farmer, Kun Hai Lee, committed ritual suicide during the WTO's opening day to protest the organization's agricultural policies.
Witnesses said Lee stood in front of police lines, declared that "the WTO kills farmers," and then slashed himself to death with a blade. His suicide came on South Korea's Day of the Dead.
Few at the demonstration realized what had occurred until later in the day. As word slowly spread of the suicide, supporters of Kun Hai Lee vowed to protest his martyrdom throughout the coming week, possibly starting with a tent city at the barricades where the death occurred.
The WTO Secretariat issued a one-paragraph statement of "regret" at the death that they described as resulting from a "self-inflicted" wound. Lee's supporters condemned the WTO for the callous description of his death as self-inflicted, which absolved the organization of any responsibility in his death or the fate of thousands of farmers suffering from its policies.
Lee was known for a previous hunger strike outside the WTO Secretariat in Geneva. A decade ago, three South Korean farmers attempted to immolate themselves, and one died, in anti-WTO protests.
Lee's suicide marked the tragic end of a day of loud and sometimes violent protest. Earlier in the day, twenty global justice activists peacefully disrupted today's opening ceremony, sealing their mouths with masking tape to represent the voiceless, but left before they were arrested. Carrying bilingual placards proclaiming "WTO anti-development," "WTO obsolete," and "WTO undemocratic," they visibly ruffled the feathers of the trade organization's director-general, Supachai Panitchpakdi of Thailand.
Hours later, thousands of campesinos, marching from Cancun's barrio towards the posh hotel zone where the WTO is headquartered, were blocked by a wire-mesh fence and heavily armed police. Immediately, more militant members of direct action affinity groups from the so-called Black Bloc swarmed the fence to unsuccessfully tear it down.
Black Bloc describes itself as a tactic rather than an organization – a loose and changing collection of anarchist groups who come together for a specific action. The militants appeared to include Mexican students, Europeans with black flags, Koreans and a few from the U.S. As they raged against the fence, 25 members of Seattle's Infernal Noise Brigade, dressed in black peasant costumes and armed with painted wooden rifles, played drums and chanted. Chac, the Mayan rain god, blessed the dehydrated throng with a twenty-minute shower.
The protesters threw rocks and water bags and attacked the line of police with sticks and poles. They even hurled themselves against the shielded police phalanx, bouncing back into the crowd, then charging again. They were successful in shaking and bending – but not breaking – the police fence at the intersection of Kukulcan and Bonampak boulevards, placed as a barrier to the hotel zone. As a result, traffic was blocked for several hours across the city. "Why aren't there wire-cutters?" asked one frustrated militant. Several protesters suffered head wounds during the confrontation, but there were no immediate reports of injuries from the police side.
The confrontation, in clear view of the world's media, demonstrated the deep divisions that continue to bedevil the anti-WTO movement.
While a minority believes in storming the barricades physically and symbolically, larger coalitions prefer peaceful confrontations highlighting the grievances of local community-based movements, such as the farmers who belong to Via Campesina. Wednesday's public rift came after a promising late-night meeting between Via Campesina and Black Bloc members. According to Via Campesina leader, Rafael Alegria Moncada, the Black Bloc agreed not to "intervene" at the fence and remain in the rear ranks of the march. In addition, Alegria negotiated a three kilometer extension of the march with the police, allowing the campesinos to enter the hotel zone that was previously off-limits. The Via Campesina wanted to march "on" the convention center itself, but the three kilometer proposal was seen as at least a partial victory.
Both agreements collapsed when Black Bloc groups began attacking the fence. After a three-hour standoff, the Via Campesina contingent pulled back. It was their last scheduled effort to mount a march, and many began boarding buses to return to their villages this evening. About 2,000 remain encamped at the Casa de la Cultura outside the hotel zone.
Alegria was disappointed but philosophical about the day's outcome. He told AlterNet, "Our objectives were not achieved unfortunately. But what can you say, the others were young people, who came to fight, and it does no good to criticize them". He planned to meet with the remaining Via Campesina contingent tonight to explore their options for the remainder of the week.
Other organizers of the week's protests, including members of Public Citizen and Global Exchange, were seething at the disruption of the campesino march. "Who gives them the right to interfere and impose their agenda on indigenous people?" one prominent activist asked. "Was this what the campesinos took a two-day bus trip for?" asked another. Months of planning and thousands of dollars had been invested in the march, designed to show the human face of the Mexican countryside to the media and WTO delegates.
On the one hand, the small group using Black Bloc tactics succeeded in creating a media spectacle questioning the legitimacy of a beseiged WTO hiding behind military protection. On the other hand, the episode divided the movement and diluted any message being sent by the global South.
But it would be a mistake to conclude that the protests are "marginalized," as a recent New York Times editorial suggested. At this point, Cancun 2003 certainly does not compare to Seattle 1999, Washington DC 2000, Prague 2000, Genoa 2001, Quebec 2001, Lazarc (France) 2000, or the anti-war protests of this spring, all events that drew tens of thousands people taking unprecedented mass action. While Cancun is not as isolated as Qatar or the upper Canadian Rockies (where WTO and G-7 meetings have been held in the past), it is difficult terrain for protests, both from a tactical and logistical point of view. Yet as many as 10, 000 indigenous people have streamed in from the Mexican countryside to join global non-governmental organizations in a broadening alliance against the trade agreements that leave them out.
In addition, the impact of the movement gathered here has greater influence than ever before. For example, five years ago, Argentina was a poster-child for corporate globalization before its economic collapse. In response, social movements began blocking roads, taking over factories, besieging banks, and forming popular neighborhood assemblies to reclaim their lives. Unexpectedly, this year they elected a populist president, Nestor Kirchner, who, on the eve of the WTO's conference opening, dropped a bombshell by refusing to pay a $3 billion loan to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Heeding the social movement, Kirchner refused the IMF's demands that he slash social programs, increase middle class taxes, allow foreign-owned utilities to raise rates, and banks to foreclose on homeowners without savings.
It was a dream come true for the anti-globalization movement – all because of an election that the cynics dismissed as meaningless. The Argentina developments followed on the heels of the election of Lula in Brazil, and other populist victories across Latin America.
In an another victory for the movement, on the day the Cancun conference opened, the European Union's high court ruled that European states can ban genetically-modified foods for health reasons, delivering yet another blow to U.S. chemical companies, agribusiness, and the WTO.
The mass protests against the WTO will continue in Cancun and beyond. But what we are seeing behind today's headlines is the growing strength of global justice ideas, which are moving from the outside margins of protest to the mainstream of public opinion in many countries. A poll of Americans released Wednesday found that a majority believe the Bush administration is overemphasizing military approaches and should stress economic reform and diplomacy.
Paradoxically, the movement could encounter more isolation and division right as it reaches the moment of critical mass, just as the anti-Vietnam and civil rights movements fell apart in the '70s as their message gained acceptance and their leaders were canonized in a new establishment consensus.
It is far too early to predict this next phase of the global justice movement, except to say that it will need an internal review and course-correction if it is to keep up with the history it has helped unleash.
source: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16755 10sep03
Tom Hayden reports from the WTO ministerial conference in Cancun each day.
[More below]
CANCUN, Sept. 10 – Thousands of campesinos will march on the convention center today when the WTO officially starts its proceedings with a speech by Mexican president Vicente Fox. Anti-WTO protestors may also attempt a creative disruption of the formal ministerial event, which they say is refusing to acknowledge the increasingly harmful impact of WTO regulations on wages and the environment over the decade since the organization was launched.
At least 5,000 campesinos are camped on the grounds of Casa de la Cultura in downtown Cancun. Displaced by cheap corn imported from subsidized U.S. agribusiness, they have traveled with their families on buses from across southeast Mexico. They string their hammocks between trees, cook their meals together, and hold rallies under banners in Spanish that proclaim, "Indigenous People Are the Hope of Humanity." The makeshift rural village includes outdoor stalls hawking Che Guevara t-shirts and a Greenpeace truck mounted with solar electric panels.
The march will cross "Avenida Nader" accompanied by several large puppets ("without strings," they joke), but is expected to be blocked by Mexican federal and local police, in coordination with the FBI, before entering the luxurious First World where WTO delegates meet, stroll, and sunbathe behind well-armed protection.
Today's march is a prelude to larger ones that will be launched Thursday through Saturday, the day when WTO delegates will be under maximum pressure to accept agreements further privatizing Third World economies. Thus, the protest strategy depends on demonstrating broad opposition in the streets to draft trade agreements that many Third World delegates are already reluctant to sign.
On Tuesday, the protest campaign began modestly amidst some confusion, with hundreds of people marching up to the police barricade, where they performed a Mayan ritual before returning to the campsite. The protest was intentionally low-key to avoid mass arrests and detentions.
As always, the protestors gather, study maps, construct puppets and placards, undergo civil disobedience training, and strategize at a "convergence center." The format symbolizes the coming together of the many diverse strands of the struggle, in notable opposition to a centralized hierarchy.
The demands put forward by the protesters combine detailed denunciations of privatization with colorful representations of Mayan deities. A puppet of Caac, the rain god, thunders against the privatization of water. Yum Kaax, the corn goddess, opposes the dumping of cheap corn laced with GMOs. Kukulkan, the god of intellect, rebukes the theft of indigenous culture by corporate patents. Ixchel, the medicine goddess, curses the pharmaceutical manufacturers.
The police, over-reacting to the protests, constructed numerous traffic barriers and checkpoints that tied up traffic all the way to Cancun's international airport. Although the police seem to have been instructed to avoid repressive tactics, the overwhelming police presence in itself could slow or disrupt the passage of delegates to the conference.
One immediate side effect yesterday was to undercut attendance at an international panel for global justice activists sponsored by the San Francisco-based International Forum on Globalization (IFG). Rumors immediately circulated that police were preventing attendees from attending, until it was discovered that the police reaction to the morning's march several kilometers away had temporarily closed the roads. The lack of movement coordination had caused the glitch.
The Forum featured critical analysis from several leading thinkers of the global justice movement. Walden Bello, head of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, spoke of growing internal divisions within the WTO due to the unilateralist policies of the Bush administration. Bello said the U.S. is suffering an economic crisis brought on by over-extension, and is seeking "protectionism for the U.S. and free trade for the rest of the world." He cited the U.S. effort to use the trade process to secure protection for pharmaceutical corporations in the face of popular demand for generic medicines. In addition, Bello noted, the U.S. trade representative is telling countries that they must support American "strategic interests" if they want trade consideration.
Martin Khor of Malaysia, director of the Third World Network, described the unraveling of the so-called Doha development agenda of 18 months ago, and the subsequent disillusionment of Third World countries, which now realize that the U.S. and the EU "don't want to give anything up." Twenty developing countries, including Brazil and China, recently organized to demand that U.S. agribusiness subsidies be phased out, coupled with greater support for small farmers in developing countries.
Lori Wallach, leader of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, released findings that reveal the "devastating" results of nine years of the WTO. Her analysis concluded that:
The Wallach and others advocate a strategy to "shrink" the WTO to a traditional trade agenda while derailing its ambition to become a world governing body for multinational corporations. The insistence of the U.S. and the WTO on imposing a market fundamentalism on developing countries, she notes, is a purely conservative corporate agenda, not a trade strategy. A strategy of "shrinking" the WTO would increase the movement's alliances with developing countries while also lessening the WTO's usefulness to corporations.
At present, however, corporate lobbyists are well-represented in the WTO through low-visibility lobbies like the Council of the Americas, the U.S. Coalition of Services Industries, the Business Roundtable, and the U.S. Council on International Business. The roster of interlocked companies belonging to at least three of these four lobbying associations includes:
American Express, American International Group, AOL Time-Warner, AT&T, Bell South Int'l, Boeing, Caterpillar, Citibank, Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, Coca Cola, Colgate Palmolive, Corning, Eastman Kodak, Eli Lilly, Exxon Mobil, FleetBoston, Ford, Halliburton, IBM, JP Morgan Chase, Merck, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Pepsi, Pfizer, Procter and Gamble, Raytheon, Shell, UPS, Verizon, and Visa.
source: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16752 11sep03
CANCUN, Sept. 8. – "The Real Cancun" is a pretty trashy film, with hard-partying American college kids being awakened by mariachi musicians against the vista of a Hilton hotel designed like the nearby Mayan ruins. In one scene, its hero, Alan, tells his drinking partner, "People like what they can't have. So, if you want a girl to really like you, just blow her off."
I cannot recall if George Bush ever got loaded in Cancun, but he seems to be following Alan's advice. Having blown off the United Nations over Iraq, he now hopes that the Security Council will be charmed by his request for money and troops. And the world-class cad that he is, Bush is also freezing the status of the poor in the global economy.
Bush has been spending more in Iraq than on the United Nations' global anti-poverty initiatives. If $60 billion this year is a conservative estimate for Iraq, that's twice what it would take to retire the debt of the developing nations, and three times the cost of eliminating extreme hunger, meeting the AIDS crisis, or stopping soil erosion.
In comparison, the U.S. contribution to the UN global anti-poverty program is 0.13 percent of our gross economic product, about one-tenth the percentage spent during the Kennedy Administration in 1962. In the meantime, child labor (10 to 14 year olds) is 14 percent of the Brazilian workforce, 13 percent in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador, 12 percent in Nicaragua, and 11 percent in Bolivia.
While waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Administration has managed to lose most of Europe and Latin America. Bush (and Monsanto's) battle to impose genetically-altered crops on Europe has lost American agri-business $1 billion during the past five years. And $190 billion in U.S. farm subsidies has inflamed discontent from Brazil to Mexico.
Meanwhile, the neo-conservative dream of a permanent American empire is turning out to be short-lived. In the longer view, of course, America (and the West) are rooted in a history of colonialism, crusades and the slave trade spanning five centuries. The settling of America was an extension of empire, then of manifest destiny, then of global dominance in the past fifty years. But the recent advocacy of an American empire began just more than a decade ago, with the fall of the Soviet Union. Then came the WTO and talk of a New World Order. Today that imperial thinking is being seriously challenged once again.
Just as U.S. military unilateralism has failed at the UN, U.S. economic unilateralism is being resisted in the WTO. Like Alan in the movie, Bush is not likely to get the girl. Instead, the sole superpower is looking lonely in Cancun, besieged by forces within and without.
U.S. trade negotiators are working overtime to produce "momentum" from the Cancun talks, but with little success.
Cancun itself, a lavish symbol of distorted development and narco- trafficking, has elected a Green Party mayor to begin regulating the flow of foreign investment. Nevertheless, the U.S. wants to "liberalize" the tourism sector, while the European Union hopes to eliminate the need to obtain permits for hotels, restaurants and tourist operations. Cancun's water supply was privatized by an Enron subsidiary in the mid-Nineties. The water, according to environmental specialists, is dirtier than before but costs consumers four times as much. There is also a push to open rich genetic diversity and forests surrounding Cancun to corporate prospectors under privatization provisions of the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS).
In hopes of salvaging a victory in Cancun, the U.S. recently ended its opposition to a plan for poor countries to obtain generic medicines to treat HIV and a handful of other life-threatening diseases. But that deal, in response to global grassroots pressure, is far from nailed down, and will be overshadowed by other conflicts this week.
The flashpoint at this summit is the disintegration of rural economies after a decade of NAFTA and rising U.S. subsidies. Earlier this year, a Los Angeles Times article titled, "Free Trade Proves Devastating for Mexican Farmers," described angry protestors who rode on horseback through the elegant doors of the nation's capital, while farmers carrying firebombs and machetes abducted government officials to prevent the seizure of their land for a $2.3 billion international airport northeast of Mexico City. After unprecedented absenteeism in Mexico's July 6 elections, Vicente Fox, the hero of Nineties neo-liberalism, has conceded his government's failure to heed a "widespread social call for deeper and more dynamic change."
But the wave of grassroots uprisings is not limited to Mexico.
Even under a friendlier political climate, Brazil's landless movement (MSN), which represents 1.5 million members, has resumed its direct action campaign to obtain unoccupied land, and birthed a new campaign known as "the roofless movement" among the urban homeless.
In post-apartheid South Africa, movements among "the poors" are struggling to reconnect electricity and water supplies in slums where at least one million people were cut off due to lack of funds. Their anger even extends to the governing African National Congress which, they assert, has voluntarily imposed its own neo-liberal program to please investors, including cutting taxes on the rich, eliminating currency exchange controls, and tolerating job losses of 100,000 per year.
A huge question hovering over Cancun this week is whether the Zapatistas will challenge the WTO Ministerial meeting or deem it irrelevent. The social movement triggered by the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas has filtered throughout Mexico in the past decade. Recently the Zapatistas terminated all contact with government negotiators and political parties, choosing to directly implement a broader self-government in some 40 "autonomous municipalities" outside state or corporate control.
But with or without the Zapatistas, the Mexican security forces are "creating an overbearing climate of fear and tension" in this resort town, according to Global Exchange's Deborah James. One police commissioner has vowed to "trade an eye for an eye," while officials have set aside bullfighting and football stadiums for mass detentions. A secretive "watch list" has been prepared by Mexican officials, no doubt with FBI assistance, and as a result certain anti- globalization activists have been forced to move from their hotels.
This week, it's a surreal Cancun on display. A Cancun where spin doctors prepare feel-good press releases in barricaded enclaves of affluence. As the American empire shudders, as the WTO searches for consensus to disguise the inner divides, as progressive coalitions and parties flounder under neo- liberalism, the community-based social movements push forward, making local history in this interim – holding to a vision larger than any can presently fulfill. The future is uncertain, but they are not going back to either the Monroe Doctrine or the military dictatorships from which Latin America has emerged.
They are demonized still as "globalphobics" by WTO promoters, mere maladjusted parochialists resisting the modern world. In truth, many of the local residents and workers protesting the WTO here knew little about the organization until they heard of its impending arrival. But they already knew about privatization and the selling of their resources. Now they are connecting the dots between their water bills and the globalization apparatus of power that controls their lives.
One of them, Jose Saldivar, coordinates the "Committee of Bienvenidos" which welcomes delegates from social movements around the world. He says his friends are not globalphobic at all, especially those who sweep the streets, clean the hotels, and wash the dishes for thousands of sunburned and drunken tourists each year. They are "alternmundistas," Saldivar says, people who believe that an alternative world is possible.
This week thousands of protesters will show the powers-that-be that people do indeed want what they can't have, and do not like being blown off.
source: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16746 11sep03
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