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Madisonians at Miami protests report police repression

By James Murrell

Madison residents who participated in the protests against the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) negotiations in Miami in November discussed their experiences at a gathering Dec. 11 on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Speakers gave firsthand and eyewitness accounts of being beaten, pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed, and shot at indiscriminately with rubber bullets and concussion grenades by the Miami police.

These accounts are corroborated by reports on the national news program “Democracy Now!,” one of the few news outlets that actually had reporters on the ground with the protestors, rather than embedded with police units or shooting videos from news helicopters high above. A segment of “Democracy Now!,” featuring a report by Jeremy Scahill, a native of Milwaukee with strong ties to the independent media in Madison, was shown at the meeting.

In the worst violence, which occurred Nov. 20, unarmed protesters who had been peacefully marching in the streets of Miami were forced back, divided, channeled, and chased as far as two miles. According to Scahill’s report, the “police” force was more like a “paramilitary group [with] [t]housands of soldiers dressed in khaki uniforms, with full black body armor and gas masks, marching in unison through the streets, banging batons against their shields, [and] chanting, ‘Back ... back ... back.’ There were armored personnel carriers and helicopters.” (See www.democracynow.org/static/miamimodel.shtml.)

“The forces fired indiscriminately into crowds of unarmed protesters. Scores of people were hit with skin-piercing rubber bullets; thousands were gassed with an array of chemicals. On several occasions, police fired loud concussion grenades into the crowds. Police shocked people with electric tazers. Demonstrators were shot in the back as they retreated. One young guy's apparent crime was holding his fingers in a peace sign in front of the troops. They shot him multiple times, including once in the stomach at point-blank range.”

The group talked about the importance of getting the word out about what really happened in Miami, since the lack of mainstream media coverage has left most people in the United States unaware that the police used brutal violence to stop peaceful protest and dissent. Several attendees who had participated in a number of the anti-globalization protests that have taken place in the United States, beginning with Seattle, said the police repression they witnessed in Miami was the worst they had seen.

Attendees reported that many and various events went on throughout the week, such as informational “teach-ins,” training in nonviolent protest, press conferences, and workshops. The “Convergence Center” was a warehouse space set up to provide facilities and meeting space for the protestors throughout the week. One attendee noted that the Convergence Center, which most of the time had hundreds of people around engaged in various activities, was a model for a society in which voluntary association, cooperation, and mutual aid were the principles operating to provide effective and productive coordination of tasks.

A middle-aged participant in the protests observed that while the bulk of the protestors in the streets at the time of the police actions were in their 20s and 30s, many young children, youths and elderly people were also present. There were many more middle-aged and elderly present in the permitted march coordinated by the AFL-CIO, other unions, and faith-based and nonprofit organizations, he said. Another march that received a permit was organized by Root Cause (www.therootcause.org), a coalition of several organizations led by people of color, including the Immalokee Farmworkers Union and the Miami Workers Center. Several attendees said the highlight of their trip was participating in the Root Cause march,  a 34-mile trek from the Fort Lauderdale area to Miami. Through bilingual speeches and dialogue with local residents along the way, the marchers made important connections between people’s struggles for social justice in the United States and the issues of corporate-backed trade deregulation contained in proposed agreements like the FTAA.

Participants noted that this anti-globalization protest differed from others in the degree of outreach to local residents in the months and weeks preceding the protesters’ arrival in Miami. In particular, groups went into the depressed communities — such as the well-known Overtown area —surrounding the hotel district of downtown Miami. They met with the residents, who are mostly Black and poor, and coordinated some community projects, such as cleaning up a youth center, planting trees and other plants, and having dialogues about how the concerns of residents intersect with the issues of the FTAA and globalization. One attendee lauded this effort, noting that too often the perception or the reality is that protestors “blow into town a few days before the event, make their statements about their issues, [and] then leave town.” He observed that the taste of violent police repression that many of the protestors felt is merely a short sample of the kind of police repression and violence that residents of depressed areas routinely experience year round. Several attendees said sympathetic residents had helped them escape by showing them alternate routes through the neighborhoods when the police attempted to chase them down.

Outreach organizers heard from residents that the police had also gone into the neighborhoods to do their own kind of “outreach” in the weeks preceding the FTAA event. Residents told them that the police had warned that dangerous anarchists were coming to Miami to disrupt their lives, and that these were “rich White kids who would throw urine and feces on anybody who got near them.” Residents reported being told that these “kids,” since they had high-powered lawyers to defend them, felt like they could get away with causing all kinds of trouble. Neighborhood “thugs” were told that if they beat up some of the protestors, the police would look the other way and not arrest or prosecute them.

Protestors observed an orchestrated campaign on the part of the police and local government to condition Miami residents to believe that the coming of protestors meant the arrival of menacing anarchists who would smash store windows and trash businesses. Local Miami TV stations repeatedly showed footage of the isolated incidents of “Black Bloc” protestors in Seattle damaging the property of a large corporate chain store while warning all Miami business owners, large and small, that this could happen to them.

A young UW student described arriving in Miami to gather with about 25 other young, White middle-class students involved with the organization Students Against Sweatshops to picket a chain store known to support sweatshops. “It had to be one of the most harmless, nonthreatening protests I have ever been to,” said the student. But a dozen or more squad cars rolled up, and they were surrounded by what seemed like “hundreds of cops,” he said. Then a large number of steelworkers arrived on the scene and surrounded the police. The police, unable or unwilling to carry out whatever action they had planned, left the scene.

Several of those who described being arrested said they were arrested while walking down the sidewalk, not participating in any protest action at all. They also witnessed this happening to others. In these incidents, people were apprehended, thrown to the ground, and in some instances beaten.

“I was arrested for walking down the street in street clothes. People were getting beaten with clubs. I know of people who had career-threatening nerve damage,” said one attendee. Attendees said they had observed police making up charges as they were filling out arrest forms.

Attendees described an incident in which the police decided to clear the streets of 100 or so people who gathered about a block away from a police station for a solidarity vigil for those who had been arrested and held in jail since the day before. The crowd were ordered to disperse. Many immediately did, but they were still being chased by police as far as five or six blocks away, and another group was backed up against a fence at the end of a dead-end street with nowhere to go. Several uninvolved passersby were swept up and arrested by police.

“I had a naïveté about going down as a ‘peaceful protestor,’ expecting to be treated as such,” said one attendee. “The moment I got there, that misconception was dispelled. I was forced to walk a line while being videotaped by police. Then I knew, ‘I am a target.’”

One person at the meeting who had not participated in the protests wondered whether any of the actions of the protestors had provoked or inflamed the police, even if it were true that the police had initiated the violence. Another person, who also had not participated but who had been following the situation, remarked that “Just the presence of the people trying to voice their dissent with the policies of corporate globalization and militarization was a provocation. With the fact that Miami received $8.5 million in federal funds from the $87 billion Iraq spending bill, it is clear that the powers that be from the Bush administration on down to the Miami Police Department were intent on preventing these people from exercising constitutionally guaranteed rights.”

“Democracy Now! is broadcast in Madison on community-access TV Channel 4, WYOU, daily at 5 p.m.

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