133

Eight:
Miami

Run, Marisa, run. Go. Go. Go. Faster. Keep running.

There is no other line of thought in my brain. The panic stretches so wide it exiles all but the nonessential. Run. Run. I am clutching my sign, my backpack is jogging hard against me, and it will be simply a matter of luck if I don’t slam into another runner. Sirens shriek. I am surrounded by choppy swells of black, a surging swarm of sprinters veering at manic angles. Cops at the jagged edges of the beast, prowling. Run. I’m not sure why, but I must keep running, can’t be left behind. Go. Faster. Move. Can’t see much in front: just bobbing heads. Behind: generous crescents of white around the eyes, pink Os of mouths.

Can’t—get—quite—enough—oxygen.

“Run!” someone is screaming, as if we weren’t already, as if hundreds of pairs of lungs weren’t already aflame. “Run!” Rape! Fire! Murder! they may as well be howling. Panic stabs through the crowd, and the pace picks up. Somewhere in the conjoined brain of this terrorized animal the primal impulse to flee has been slumbering; once aroused it is overwhelming, irresistible, familiar. A cheer arises from my left. On a window glints the strident black of a fresh-scrawled anarchy sign. Running through the streets of Miami with the Black Bloc: not what I pictured when I contemplated going to Miami to protest the FTAA.

The Free Trade Area of the Americas: The more I learned about it, the more I felt compelled to come demonstrate. The FTAA proposes to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the entire western hemisphere—with the exception of Cuba, of course. Yet NAFTA has already proven itself a lame donkey: as is invariably the case with free-trade policies, disabling a nation’s capacity to protect and regulate its own economy has a nasty tendency to benefit the very wealthiest and punish the poor. I arrive in Miami in late November 2003. In the near decade since NAFTA was passed in 1994, an estimated 765,000 jobs have been lost in the U.S. Most of these jobs have turned up, unsurprisingly, in Mexico, where labor is far cheaper. Yet the number of Mexicans earning less than the Mexican minimum wage has increased by over a million since 1994. In the profit-driven race to the bottom that is corporate globalization, these jobs migrated to the underpaying border factories known as maquiladoras. Like NAFTA’s infamous Chapter 11, the FTAA’s rules on investment would moreover allow corporations to sue governments for future profits lost. Under Chapter 11, the American corporation Metalclad was awarded $16.7 million by the Mexican government after the toxic waste dump it planned to construct in Guadalcázar, San Luis Potosí, was banned. The message? Lower your standards, or pay up.

134

When I was new to this country, commercials were my best teachers, my earliest friends. They educated me effectively, smilingly, on the mores of my new culture. But over the past few years, my attitude toward the parade of friendly faced commodities has changed. In India, I glimpsed the underbelly of the consumer culture generated by massive transnational corporations that run roughshod over local cultures and environments, “improving” them, trampling them. Through my research and interviews, through my own observations, I came to recognize this glittery “monoculture” as the carrot. Invisible to the average consumer is the stick: a system of global economic policies that benefit the world’s superpower—and its wealthy friends—while placing a stranglehold on the global south. Those who can afford it chase after the carrot. The rest are subjected to the stick. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization: during my travels, I saw the effects of the policies devised by these global financial and trade institutions. Created for the purpose of regulating the world economy, their antidemocratic governance now facilitates corporate colonialism. Their functionaries come from the halls and chambers of the global north, of the affluent. Most of them cut their teeth on trade or finance. Having been the beneficiaries of free-market capitalism, they share an ideology that worships the market as virtually infallible. And they wield the stick.

135

The FTAA is one more example of privileging the market over democracy, putting profits ahead of people. It covers services— everything from education to hospitals to water utilities. In competition with some of the mightiest transnational corporations in the world, Latin America’s poorer nations wouldn’t stand a chance. And a host of U.S. industries would be flattened by tariff-free Latin American imports. In short, the FTAA is a nightmare for the environment, human rights, and labor. Yet there is no process for public input—no hearings, no referendums, no plan to accommodate the voices of the communities the FTAA would affect and claims to represent. NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) are being offered what amounts to a suggestion box, while privileged advisory roles go to corporate representatives. Direct action is the last available tool in the box. Millions of those who will be most affected by the FTAA can’t go to Miami to voice their dissent. But I can.

“Hey! Hey!” I turn my head. It’s a young woman running next to me, one of the other few smudges of color amid the sea of black. Behind her the city flies by: right angles, concrete, flat pastels. She smiles, hair buoyant around her face. “I’m Jenny. What’s your name?”

Hardly the time for chitchat. But then again I don’t know anyone here, and am happy to make a friend. I manage to huff my name out.

“You with the Black Bloc?” She is lean and muscular, and looks like a born marathon runner. Maybe she’ll carry me if I collapse.

“No, with Code Orange from California. In the FCAA.” The Free Carnival Area of the Americas. An arts-and-celebration-themed cluster of nine affinity groups. I’d give my left pinkie finger to be among them now. “You?”

“Food Not Bombs.” The good folk who reliably dish us up three steaming hot meals a day. Always vegetarian (if not vegan), frequently the product of diligent dumpster-diving.

“Cool. How’d you end up here?” I am matching my pace to hers.

136

“Wrong place at the wrong time, or something like that. I was supposed to be meeting a friend on the corner a few blocks back. You?”

“Also by mistake.”

Today is November 20, the first day of the summit. I arrived at the Convergence Center at a pitch-black 5:45 a.m. with the rest of Code Orange. But when they set out with the FCAA, I stayed behind to do some media “wrangling.” Just as the Bush administration had “embedded” journalists with army units in Iraq, we were assigning local reporters to various clusters. When I was done, I hopped a ride with some friendly North Carolinians. “That looks like the FCAA,” offered one of them—a scoundrel I will not soon forgive—and I leapt out and skipped toward the three colorful signs at the rear guard of the Black Bloc. A loose affiliation of revolutionary anarchists that evolved out of the squatter protests in Germany in the eighties, the Black Bloc is infamous for its belligerent tactics and property destruction. Black Bloc protesters wear masks to symbolically elevate the community over the individual, and see smashing windows and burning dump-sters as an effective means of challenging the violence endemic to corporations— by garnering media attention and by demonstrating that these institutions are not impervious. They are the militants of the global justice movement.

Less than a minute after the North Carolinians dropped me off, the police started closing in and someone gave the order to run.

“Stop! Whoa, people, slow down, slow down!” Yells from the front end. Bless my stars, are we actually being asked to stop running?

“Stop!” A chorus, now. I brake rapidly, so rapidly that someone hurtles into me from behind and I careen forward. Jenny catches and steadies me. I turn and scowl darkly at the perpetrator, who is panting out profuse apologies from behind her black bandanna.

“What’s going on?” I drop my backpack and sign, lean over with my hands on my knees.

“No clue.” People are milling about, lighting cigarettes, sipping from water bottles, sparking up casual conversations. As if the world wasn’t about to cave in on us thirty seconds ago.

“Can you see anything?” Jenny is at least half a foot taller than me.

“No. Just a buttload of black. And beyond that some cops.” Squinting. “Scratch that. Looks like the entire Miami-Dade police force showed up.”

137

We settle on the sidewalk to catch our breath. I peer about, anxious for clues. “Hey, anyone know what’s going on?”

“Unclear,” says a guy standing next to us on the sidewalk. He’s leaning on a hockey stick and pauses to drag heavily from a cigarette through the hole in his ski mask. “Word is we’re surrounded by the pigs. There’s a spokes going on in the middle.”

“Yeah? I’m going to go listen in.” I look at Jenny, ask her if she wants to come. She smiles and shakes her head. “I’m happier on the edges.”

I pick up my backpack and sign and push my way through the thickening bodies toward what I imagine is the center. There, that must be it: definitely a circle, an urgent huddle half crouched, half standing. I walk up to the edge. “What’s the situation?” I whisper to the person on my right.

“It sucks.” The bandanna is pulled down to reveal a woman: very young, freckled, amply pierced. “Two circles of cops around us. It’s dire, dude.”

The voices from the circle are rising. “Listen, people, enough talk. We’ve got to make a decision. There’s a fucking million pigs out there in full-on riot gear. And no doubt more are coming.”

“If we start talking to the pigs, it’s over.”

“What choice do we have, Spar? We’re surrounded. We’re more than surrounded.”

“I say fuck ’em. I say we make a run for it. What are they going to do if the entire fucking group starts running? What can they do?”

“What can they do? Have you seen how many pigs there are out there? They fucking hate us and now they’ve got us, dude. They’re going to let loose their rubber bullets and their tear gas and close in. They’re going to arrest every fucking last one of us. That’s what they’re going to do.”

“Okay, right on, Nemo. Then you tell me how the fuck we’re going to meet up with everyone else. There’s no way they’re going to let us get to Government Center.” Government Center is downtown, about as close to the FTAA talks as the public can get. It’s the convergence point for today’s direct action.

“Excuse me”—a woman’s voice, now—“I’d like to talk. From what I can tell, Spar, it seems like most of us want to negotiate with the cops. Can we try to consense on this?”

“Sure.” Spar throws his hands up, dismissive. “If you all want to just roll over and lick their boots, go fucking right ahead.”

“Who wants to talk with the cops?” A ripple of hands rising.

“Stand asides?” Two hands.

“Blocks?” Spar mutters an inventive string of obscenities but his hand stays down.

“All right. Who wants to police liaise? We need at least two.”

“I’ll do it.” Nemo, moving from crouching to standing.

“Cool. Nemo, and we need one more.”

No volunteers.

“Come on people, who’s willing to liaise?”

Silence.

“I will.” I step forward. I’ve liaised before. The circle of faces turns my way.

“Who are you?”

“Marisa. With Code Orange from San Francisco.” Their suspicion is justified. No one here knows me, and infiltrators are common. Besides, I’m not in black—which would, on second thought, render me far too obvious to be an infiltrator.

“Code Orange, got it.”

“Yeah, she’s cool, I recognize her.”

“I’m happy to do it if people feel comfortable,” I say. “Keeping in mind that I don’t belong to this bloc and don’t represent any affinity groups here.” A round of nods.

“Okay, Nemo and Marisa. Looks like we got our liaisons.”

Nemo turns to me, juts his chin out. “Let’s do it.”

We walk out of the circle together. He offers his hand and smiles. “Nemo, as you may have heard.” No more than twenty, delicate-limbed, with the kind of pristine good looks that would put your average adolescent girl in a mortal swoon. “Good to meet you.” Pulling his black bandanna back up over his mouth.

An eager trail of press swarms around us out of nowhere as we walk. Pretty funny, come to think of it, because I’m press too. Well, press of a different sort: I’m writing a daily series, from an activist’s perspective, for Salon.com. Not only listening and transmitting, this time, but speaking too—and amplified at that. I remind myself to start scribbling notes as soon as I get the chance.

139

“There they are.” Nemo is looking ahead. I follow his gaze. I’ve never seen so many cops. Two solid lines of them. In front, the city cops on bicycles. Behind, the riot police. Heavily armed, slim swatches of skin shining wanly from under their marshmallow-suit body armor and helmets. They barely look human. We keep walking, Nemo slightly ahead. At the first line we pause. I look into the faces, into pair after pair of cold eyes. Behind the hostility: fear.

The Bush administration is not taking the FTAA protests lightly. Around $8.5 million of an $87 billion War on Terror package has gone toward “protecting” the city of Miami from us. Over forty law enforcement agencies are included in this effort. The money has also funded a host of new weapons—not just the same old tear gas and rubber bullets (yawn) but also fancy new gizmos like Taser stun guns, electric shields, and mobile water cannons. Miami police chief John Timoney—who has already earned himself a nasty reputation for his treatment of protesters at the Republican National Convention in 2000—calls us “knuckleheads,” saying we have come here to “terrorize” Miami. He vows to “hunt [us] like a hawk picking mice off a field.” In our honor, all of downtown Miami has been shut down, enclosed by a massive ten-to twelve-foot steel fence. By the time we reach the day of action, Miami police have already infringed liberally on both First and Fourth Amendment rights. Free trade, it appears, easily trounces freedom. This response indicates not only how much is at stake for Bush Inc. but also how much we scare them. A couple of thousand of us are exercising our First Amendment rights on the streets this morning. In response, 2,500 cops have been deployed. It seems a good three-quarters of them are looking at Nemo and me right now.

We stare back. Who knows what they have been told about us? As I study the closed faces, I struggle to remain open, to remember they are just doing what they believe they should, the best they can, same as me.

“We’re here to negotiate,” says Nemo finally. “Where’s the captain?”

“Here.” One of them pulls away from the line and approaches. He stands before us with his feet apart, hand massaging his baton. Middle-aged, red-faced, belly pressing at his buttons. I see him baking on the deck of a cruise ship while his wife pages through People magazine.

“Captain Serry. At your service.” Cameras snap. I offer my hand. “Nice to meet you.” Hi there, I’m the one-woman welcome committee of the Black Bloc. Care for some hors d’oeuvres? Perhaps a hockey stick or two?

“The pleasure’s mine, young lady.” He cracks a grin. There’s a reason he’s a captain. Maybe that reason has to do with his humanity. He holds out his hand to Nemo, and Nemo shakes it.

“We’d like to get to Government Center,” Nemo says.

“Well now, young man, that may be so, but negotiation goes both ways, if you know what I mean.”

“Uh-huh.” Nemo is clipped, painfully conscious of his loyalties. “What do you want us to do?”

“Well, I see a whole slew of sticks and spray cans out there among your people. You get them put away, we’ll see what we can do.”

“You’ll let us go to Government Center?”

“I said, ‘You put them away, we’ll see what we can do.’”

“Captain,” I pipe up, “I thought you said negotiation is a two-way process. How about we commit to getting the sticks and cans put away if you commit to letting us move to Government Center?”

“We’re not doing a single thing unless you let us get there,” says Nemo. I look at him. What is this: good cop, bad cop?

Serry takes our measure. “We’re not going to just let you people loose on the streets. Sorry, no deal. How about this: you put the sticks and cans away, we’ll escort you there.”

Nemo and I excuse ourselves for a brief consultation, waving the paparazzi away. I say we go with it. “You really think we can trust the pigs?” “I don’t think we have much choice right now. Either we do this or we sit here all day.” He nods. We turn back.

“Okay, Captain, you’re on.”

“I see a single stick or can out, and we go right in and arrest every one of you.” Serry needs no foil. He’s got the whole routine down to a one-man act.

“They’ll be put away.”

“All right. Go to it then.”

We head back into the Bloc, split up, and distribute the message. I holler out our agreement in phrases, the group around me yelling back in repetitions. Sticks and cans are duly stowed in black backpacks. We assure the cops that our part has been done, and the checkered group—Black Bloc, police, media, green-capped legal observers— slowly starts moving. Conscious of my role, I head to the front where Serry can see me.

“Fucking pigs.”

“Pawns, man, pawns blindly defending the same fucked-up system that fucks them.”

“Hey, look at that one. Isn’t he the dude from the Village People?” Baying laughter. I look behind me. It’s three teenagers, skinny and scored with acne.

“Funny, man, funny. What about that one—the scrawny one? Must be a bad bad cop. No donuts for him.”

“You know the only reason cops are cops is because they couldn’t follow the recipes at Burger King.” More howls.

The police are well within earshot. None of them are responding, but I watch as the back of one neck steadily reddens. I turn around. It’s not my role here, but I can’t help myself.

“You guys, you’re only pissing them off right now. If anything goes wrong and they decide to arrest us, you’re going to be feeling it. And the more you heckle, the more they’re going to want to arrest.” They’re just teenagers, I know, but I’d be hard-pressed to dream up a more counterproductive approach. The cops aren’t the enemy. The cops are doing their job. A nasty job, granted, but are we so blinded by anger that we simply demonize the nearest target?

They stare at me, this colorfully clad upstart giving them a thorough dressing-down. One kicks at the ground, eyes me askance.

“Whatever, dude,” he grunts. “They chose to be fucking tools of the system. They’re gonna do what they’re trained to do.”

I’m well aware of the class issues here. Most cops are blue-collar. Most of the direct-action contingency comes from the kind of background that affords us the time and resources to travel to protests.

“No, dude, she has a point. I don’t want to get beat up and sit in jail. I gotta finish up the semester.”

“Me too, dude. Let the pigs alone, I say.”

When we are a few blocks from Government Center, Serry halts the motley caravan. “There’s been a confrontation,” he tells us. “I can’t let you move any further.” Simultaneously, we learn via walkie-talkie that most groups have already left Government Center. For the next hour we sit in lengthy negotiations. “I see your people pissing in bottles,” Serry says to me at one point. “Even one of those gets thrown at my men, and we go right in and arrest.” I gape at him. These cops must have been subjected to some mighty persuasive propaganda about us deviant radicals. “Captain, we’ve been sitting in this intersection for an hour, and you’re not letting anyone leave. Where else are they going to piss?”

Eventually Serry lets us disperse. Several members of the Black Bloc come up to thank me, pulling bandannas down and ski masks up as we talk. Before this morning, I haven’t engaged much with the Black Bloc. Convinced as I am that enduringly peaceful ends require peaceful means, I don’t agree with their tactics. But this has been a helpful reeducation. The Bloc is mostly young, and—contrary to my expectations—relatively gender-balanced. While I believe their militancy alienates others and generally does more harm than good, I understand, and share, their anger. And I am amazed and encouraged by the degree of conscience and empathy that inspires an eighteen-year-old to come here. I spot Nemo squatting on the sidewalk and head over. “Thanks for all the good times,” he says, grinning, and we hug.

I cross the police line with all the elation of an escaped prisoner— Free! Free at last!—and head off in anxious search of Code Orange. The city is crammed with uneasy police. I am repeatedly prevented from crossing certain streets and frostily informed that I’ll have to “go around”—seven blocks around—for “security purposes.” One cop follows me from the Black Bloc and stands directly in front of me snapping photos as I try to reason with another captain. “For the FBI file, eh?” I pout for the camera. He is not amused.

Downtown Miami looks like it took a flying leap into the Twilight Zone. I walk rapidly, inundated with an amorphous, drenching fear. Where are the people? Swept up by extraterrestrials? Stores are closed, windows boarded up. The only vehicles in the streets are police vans. Helicopters whine above like gargantuan mutated mosquitoes. In this world, humans have been replaced by the robotic constructs of a dystopian future, and they march the streets in mechanized formation. I keep my head down, staying on the sidewalks and crossing only when the light is green. It’s eleven in the morning and already the heat grips like a fever.

143

As the street numbers grow smaller, I spot people ahead: clumps of protesters surrounded by more riot cops, clubs at the ready. The air tastes brittle, curdled by tear gas. I walk up to the edges and scan the scattered crowd. There, there on my right—the huge sun-puppet—it’s Code Orange! I break into a run, hollering their names, then leaping into the circle and bouncing between them, half-delirious with relief. The response is disappointing. My friends look exhausted, notably deflated from earlier this morning. They lean heavily on each other and the giant puppet sticks. “Where have you been?”

“Oh, you know, chilling with the Black Bloc, marathon training, that kind of thing. How was your morning?”

“Not pretty.” David is flushed and grim, red-rimmed eyes set hard on the line of cops. “This city is under siege. We’ve been herded around like sheep. And Joshua got clubbed in the back of the head.” I gasp. Joshua is also a writer, a poet. Brilliant, droll, and about as belligerent as a bunny rabbit. “He seems all right for now. He bled a lot, but the medics bandaged him up.”

It’s noon, time for the permitted AFL-CIO march. We pick up our puppets and flags and advance toward the gathering point. It is a relief to merge with the swell of bodies, to move through the streets without feeling like a hunted animal. There are twenty thousand marching. Later, we will learn that over a dozen buses were prevented from reaching the site of the march, that some people trying to join the march and rally were pepper-sprayed or thrown to the ground, weapons to their heads, without cause or explanation. But for now we are in the thick of it, riding the flow, buoyed by the movement and clamor. We fall in with a group of steelworkers. “Nice puppet,” one says, pointing at the sun and giving me a thumbs-up. “Thanks. Nice slogan.” Their T-shirts waste no words: “FTAA Sucks.” The local union director bellows tirelessly through the bullhorn and we chant along, puppets bobbing. It’s contagious, this energy, and soon I am high on it, racing about in a happy tizzy, greeting friends, snapping photos. A huge inflated globe, riding above the crowd, reading “Make Trade Fair.” A Mexican contingency, marching with an oversized Mexican flag and signs reading “No al ALCA.” United for Peace and Justice, the national antiwar coalition that organized the February 15th demonstrations, banner held high. A local environmental group, molded cardboard dolphins dipping and swooping through the throng. The Coalition of Immokalee workers, a local immigrant and workers’ rights group that organized a three-day march leading up to today, calling for uno centavo más—one more cent per pound— for the tomatoes they pick.

144

Labor, environmentalists, immigrants, farmworkers, people of color, people of faith, the antiwar constituency: a very diverse group is making its presence felt today. The FTAA protests are proving to be a successful exercise in solidarity between movements. Yesterday, John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, visited our Convergence Center. The AFL-CIO had initially requested that the direct-action contingency not organize for the first day of the talks, when the unions would have their permitted march. After months of discussion, an agreement was reached: we would schedule the direct action early in the morning, to avoid compromising their march. Sweeney stood in the center of the roasting warehouse, mopping his forehead. “We’re delighted to be marching together tomorrow,” he said, to riotous cheers. “I stand with you here in solidarity.”

Despite our unity, both police and local journalists insist on constructing an artificial divide, repeatedly differentiating “good protesters” from “bad protesters.” The labor movement, according to Timoney, is “credible”; we are of course the “suspect” ones, the “violent troublemakers with no message.” And it is after the permitted march ends—cut short just as it reaches the point closest to the FTAA talks —that we “troublemakers” of conscience feel the brunt of Timoney’s wrath.

“What’s that?” Joshua pushes his glasses up on his nose, squints down the street. We are gathered outside the Arena, where the AFL-CIO rally has begun.

“Jesus. It’s a tank.”

“Oh. My. God.”

The War on Terror has arrived home.

In the middle distance, blossoms of tear gas. Above, surveillance helicopters swarming. Ten yards away, a shriek as someone collapses. “Infiltrator! It’s an infiltrator with a taser!” People are screaming and pointing. The infiltrator dashes away, wielding his stun gun in front of him. More screams as snatch squads move in, yanking people out of the crowd at random.

“Let’s go.” David is already moving.

“Where?” This from Tracy, recently doused with a faceful of tear gas. She holds a Maalox-and-water-soaked bandanna to her eyes, which are red and puffy and leaking.

“It doesn’t matter. We need to move. Now.”

I glance up at the tower of the Intercontinental Hotel, where the talks are being held. This mayhem must be visible to the delegates. What are they thinking? In September, the WTO talks in Cancún collapsed. Buttressed by activists and nongovernmental organizations, the nascent G22—group of twenty-two developing nations—refused to negotiate until agricultural subsidies and protections for wealthy countries were substantively addressed. Led by Brazil, the G22 took an unprecedented stand against the U.S. and E.U. Stalemate resulted. What will happen today? What is being deliberated right now inside those rarefied rooms? Is any part of our message audible, or do the delegates hear only the thunderous static of the Bush administration, the mainstream media, the corporations?

We are running, now, running again through a city that has shrunk to a gray blur, a blur broken by shards of dialogue and color, oblique flashes against the concrete and keening sirens. We knew what was coming today, and we prepared. We reviewed street tactics with the FCAA outside the Convergence Center yesterday, practicing linking and locking our arms to hold intersections, rehearsing jumping and running together as a coordinated group. But nothing could have primed me for this. This is a police state, and those of us who are exercising our freedoms of speech and assembly are being treated like criminals. Someone calls my name and I turn to see Carwil jogging along with his affinity group. The lump just above his left eye is the size of a ping-pong ball. “Rubber bullet,” he explains, as we hug and part. I race to catch up with Code Orange. We keep running, north toward the Convergence Center, pausing occasionally to catch our breath under cover of palm trees. There is a host of small groups tearing through the streets, some being followed by police, others getting ambushed.

“We’ve gotten word that the Convergence Center isn’t safe,” pants David. We are squatting on the sidewalk under trees, puppets propped against the side of a building. “What do we want to do?”

“Get rid of the puppets,” says Nora. A Canadian here on a work visa, she’s been especially vigilant about avoiding arrest, which would surely lead to her deportation. “They’re slowing us down, and announcing that we’re the bad protesters.” She suggests dumping them. But others disagree: the puppets might get ruined, and our friends in the Coalition of Immokalee workers could use them again. We debate different options for a few minutes.

“Maybe we could leave them with someone who lives here,” suggests Tracy, dabbing at her eyes. “Then we can pick them up tomorrow.” We are in Overtown, not far from the Convergence Center. Overtown is African American and poor. Residents living near the Convergence Center have been friendly, despite having been warned about us by the police. We consense on this option, and decide to do our best to get back to our hotel. A small delegation sets out, knocking on the doors of the nearest homes. The second person we ask agrees—“Sure thing. They givin’ y’all a hard time today, huh?”—and we push the puppets over the fence into his yard. Next, to the bus station. Calmer now, we slow our pace to a brisk walk.

“Look at this!” Joshua stops in his tracks outside a shop window.

“My lord.” The television inside the shop is showing footage from the helicopters above. Journalists “embedded” with the police are filming us, and we watch wordless as protesters scuttle antlike through the urban grid. I stand stock-still. Television before me, playing the hunt in real time. Helicopters above me, simultaneously hunting and recording, constructing and filming the spectacle. And what of me— am I the hunted or the spectator? The subject or the audience? Am I creating or consuming this spectacle—and does it make any difference, really, as long as it keeps people glued to their sets? Survivor: The War on Terror Goes Domestic—the ultimate reality show. It is so riveting that for a minute I forget we need to move.

The level of cooperation between police and media in Miami is unprecedented. Media treatment of the global justice movement is invariably heavily biased. “If it bleeds, it leads” journalism unerringly homes in on the single smashed Starbucks window, ignoring the thousands of peaceful protesters—and, for that matter, the reasons they choose to protest. None of this is surprising, given corporate domination of the mainstream media: in the U.S, the five major broadcast networks control 75 percent of the prime-time viewing audience; worldwide, eight corporations control over 70 percent of the media. If we in the global justice movement were portrayed accurately, viewers might grow suspicious of the corporations, the institutions, the entire system. They might question their own level of consumption, or—worse still—the content of their consumption. With profits on the line, the mainstream media inevitably portray us as clueless, even dangerous, radicals. But Miami takes this one-sided narrative to a whole new level.

147

As Ilyse Hogue and Patrick Reinsborough of the smartMeme Project write in “Lessons from Miami: Information Warfare in the Age of Empire,” the police operation in Miami is about far more than controlling the streets: it’s military-style propaganda, pure and simple, aimed at controlling public perception of the talks and the protesters. Borrowing liberally from PR lessons learned in Iraq, TV correspondents in Miami are “embedded” with the police, and they appear on camera in flak jackets and helmets (to fend off us perilous protesters). Other than rare and brief “on the streets” snippets, interviews are limited to police spokespeople. Footage is eerily disjointed from voice-overs describing the circumstances, and the voiceovers themselves shift frequently and without clear identification between anchor, embedded reporter, and police spokesperson. “So far, we’re winning!” crows an anchor from Fox affiliate Channel 7, to footage of squads of riot police pushing protesters from downtown with colossal force.

Timoney is repeatedly interviewed, and his descriptions of police tactics are simply untrue. He claims the police never use tear gas and arrest only “violent” protesters, and that peaceful demonstration is permitted. The protests are overwhelmingly nonviolent, but the anchors credit the “massive, well-prepared police force” instead of the explicitly nonviolent nature of the organizing. As for the print media, the Miami Herald Publishing Company not only runs editorials backing the FTAA, it actually donates $217,000 worth of advertising space in support of the FTAA and a full $62,500 in cash to subsidize the summit.

Half an hour later, we reach the bus station, which is brimming with agitated activists. We locate our bus and drop exhausted into the seats. Back to the nightclub fashions and art deco facades of Miami Beach. Back to devour what the Miami papers have to say about today. Back to discover that the FTAA talks adjourned this afternoon, a day early, and that the delegates agreed to leave the harder decisions —the real decisions—unresolved, indefinitely postponed. We go out to dinner at a nearby restaurant and order pitchers of margaritas.

The “FTAA Lite,” as the agreement comes to be known, allows member nations to withdraw from any trade requirements they find unsavory. Brazil, South America’s economic heavyweight, objected to the FTAA’s rules on investment and intellectual property; the U.S. refused to relinquish domestic farm subsidies. The resulting compromise carries about half a calorie, but the U.S. government has avoided a humiliating repetition of Cancún. For us, it is a victory—of sorts. A dubious one. What goes down in Miami sets a new standard in domestic repression. As the tallies later reveal, on this day—November 20—over two hundred people are arrested. More than a hundred are injured. Twelve are hospitalized. One prisoner, a Mexican man, is beaten so badly during arrest that he is put in the ICU with a brain hemorrhage.

Later that night, the streets are still filled with police. Cars are halted at whim, guns aimed at drivers, passengers made to get out with their hands up. The next day, at a peaceful jail support action, fifty of two hundred demonstrators are arrested. The police open negotiations only to break their word, issue a three-minute dispersal order, and close in, arresting everyone inadvertently caught in their net. Six helicopters and 680 riot police are present for the occasion.

The militarized response to the FTAA protests will become known as the “Miami Model.” “This is the model by which the citizens of Miami, and of this country, get used to seeing tanks in the street,” says Global Exchange and Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin when I run into her the next day. “Viewers get used to a military state.”

I am driving through downtown Miami with a friend that night, our truckbed full of recovered giant puppets, when we are pulled over. Police cars are still clustered on corners like feeding larvae. A Miami– Dade County deputy sheriff leans into my window.

“License and registration.”

“Yes, Officer.” I’m starting to feel frightened when I see the police, even though I’ve done nothing wrong.

He peers at the documents, then back at us. Unsmiling. Blank. Trying, perhaps, to connect these two innocuous-looking young women with what he’s been told about us. With the face-off in the streets.

“So, you having fun?”

“Not really.” I am trying to see him as more than a cardboard cutout, more than a uniform with lethal toys. “How about you?”

“It’s been an intense time.” A flicker of human feeling plays over his pale face. Faint but there.

“No kidding.” I am suddenly furious with him, livid at what he and his cohorts have put us through. Enraged that my friends have gotten hurt, that others are in the hospital, that we have been treated like reprobates for caring so much. And then sadness lunges, liquefies me, and I struggle not to dissolve into tears right there in front of him. I know nothing about this man. I don’t know what he thinks, values, believes in. Or what his wife believes. Maybe they argue. Maybe she says, “Listen, honey, those protesters, they have a point.” Who knows? Yet here we are on opposite shores, soaked to the bone with suspicion.

I watch him in silence. He examines the registration, nods and grunts, lets us go. They trail us for a while before losing interest.

I am in Miami for six days. Between organizing and writing, I probably get a total of about twenty-five hours sleep the entire time. Joshua and I are sharing a cab to the airport, both of us half-asleep, when the driver decides he’s in the mood to chat.

“So, was it a good holiday?” He eyes us benevolently from the rearview mirror. He is black, somewhere in his forties, easy-featured. Speech tipsy with a swig of French. From Senegal, probably. Or maybe Niger.

I rouse myself with herculean effort from the sun-warmed leather comfort of the backseat. Outside the window, another immaculate day. Row upon row of squat cookie-cutter houses, paper-thin against a nondescript sky. “Not so great, actually. Sort of challenging.” I am enervated and bleak. Did our efforts really make any difference? Was Miami simply a glimpse into this country’s Orwellian future?

The cab driver smiles benignly back at us. “Too many lovers’ squabbles?”

Joshua and I look at each other and cackle. Lovers. Squabbling. Both seem worlds away. Back on the planet where people go on honeymoons and fight over things like broken toasters. As a rule, I don’t date other activists. Something happens to my sexuality while organizing direct action: overwhelmed by all the urgency, it curls up, hides in a dusty corner from my stentorian left brain. I’m not sure I could handle being in a relationship with someone equally impassioned and committed. I need calm, stability, grounding. I think of my boyfriend, Jonathan, who will be meeting us at the airport, who will take me home and feed me and run me a bath, and I feel a little better.

“No, nothing like that. Actually we were here to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Did you hear about the demonstrations?”

“Ah, yes. Certainly.” His face tightens into solemnity. “I have been following this with great interest.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I am from Haiti.” Haiti. Of course. We’re in Florida. “I have been listening to the local Haitian reports on the radio.”

I ask him what they are saying.

“They are saying what Haitians already know. What most of the world already knows. Haiti produces denim jeans and baseball equipment for this country, but Haitians themselves cannot afford to buy it.” I am nodding, awake now. “The FTAA will make the rich richer and the poor poorer.” He brakes at a light and turns to look at us. Stern, resolute. “This is not fair.”

No. It’s not fair. No, no, no. No. We said no. Hell no. Not this time. Not next time, either. There are multitudes out there suffocating under the pulverizing leviathan of free trade. People, yes, and beyond: we have not only toxic levels of flame retardant in breast milk but also whales with tumors, and radioactive soil contamination, and rainforests and polar icecaps and entire ecosystems staggering toward oblivion. We are officially in the midst of the fastest mass extinction in the planet’s history. And still we are working ourselves to the bone for the consolation prizes, enduringly mesmerized by the siren jingles of a monstrous economy that is slowly but surely killing the vessel upon which we depend. That is robbing four-fifths of humanity, injuring our children, slaying our great-grandchildren before they even get a taste of fresh water, a breath of uncontaminated air. DID YOU HEAR US? WE SAID NO. This week I met people from Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru. All around the world many are already resisting. Many more are forging alternatives through their own lives, work, and communities. There are millions who stand with us but could not join us. We are ourselves one small strand in an intricate and exquisite weave.

“Thank you.” I look around the car to where his name is posted, just above his head. “Thank you, Marc. For saying that.”

The light changes. Someone behind us honks and Marc turns back to the road. “Human life is important,” he pronounces quietly, gently, as the car gradually picks up speed. He knits his brow at me in the rearview mirror. “It must be valued everywhere.”