Wednesday, 19 Nov 2003

MIAMI, Fla.

In the streets of Miami, the police are now out in force to clamp down on the supposedly dangerous citizens here to protest the 34-country Free Trade Area of the Americas. But they haven’t been able to stop political moves taking place inside the FTAA negotiations, where the U.S. and Bush administration agenda is being pushed back and the FTAA is coming apart at the seams.

First thing this morning, I went to a meeting with other advocates, where we received a leaked copy of the new text for the final declaration that will conclude the talks here this week and lay the groundwork for whatever comes next in the FTAA. Today marks the day that the negotiators who do the hard preparatory work hand off their work product to the trade ministers from around the hemisphere who have just arrived, so getting this draft was a critical moment.

What we saw was a pleasant surprise — and, for now at least, an important victory. The U.S. has been forced off its position insisting on a “comprehensive” FTAA — including the investment rules that we believe are a significant assault on environmental protection (as a reminder: these rules give private multinational investors the right to sue governments before international tribunals if the companies believe environmental or other public-interest laws have interfered with their business rights under the agreement).

Now the agreement will be an a la carte set of options — countries can decide whether or not to join in parts of the agreement such as investment, as well as services, intellectual property, and government purchasing. While we’d rather see investment negotiations disappear entirely, we feel fairly confident that the biggest economies in the hemisphere, Brazil and Argentina, will not sign up for that part of the negotiations. In essence, it seems that the agreement is being hollowed out, becoming an empty shell.

So I spent the remainder of my morning tracking down reporters, rushing around the pressroom near the negotiations to hand out the leaked text and explain our take on the state of the talks.

In anticipation of this awkward failure by the Bush administration, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick held a series of press conferences yesterday to announce a number of new one-on-one free-trade negotiations with countries in the Western Hemisphere (what he calls the “can-do” countries, as opposed to the “won’t do”). Zoellick is trying to get countries to chase each other in cutting deals with the U.S. The only problem for Zoellick: Those agreements are with small countries that don’t interest U.S. corporations that much.

Still, the impact of this “bilateral” approach to negotiations isn’t something to sneeze at. So this afternoon I led a workshop for about 30 advocates and protesters on the divide-and-conquer strategy Zoellick is using with other countries. In a room a good distance from the negotiators’ hotels, we discussed the implications of the new trade approach and what we can do to deal with agreements like the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) that are an attempted end run around public scrutiny.

Meanwhile, police continued to mass outside, and some of the stories of police overreaction reached the level of absurdity. A colleague reported that she tried to enter a food court area near the negotiations and was told that she couldn’t enter unless she got rid of her business cards (potential incitement to violence?). When she returned later with a friend carrying several vials of insulin and needles to treat her diabetes, they were asked to turn around because the police determined that she only needed two vials, not the several she was suspiciously carrying.

The police mobilization — including hundreds of officers in full riot gear — is born of the stories of potential violence that the police department here has been selling to the public for the past couple of months.

The other beach town where trade negotiations were held recently — Cancun — took a vastly (and maybe surprisingly) different approach. Police there were not armed with live weapons, and often were completely unarmed. With the exception of taking printed materials away from advocates and protesters, the police acted calmly and quietly. In Miami, we have the screaming sirens of 30-car police caravans.

The police may be able to lock down the town here. But they haven’t been able to protect the trade agenda being promoted by the Bush administration.