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Watered-Down Version of FTAA Approved Amid Tense Demonstrations

MIAMI, FLORIDA-- Thirty-four trade ministers from various countries of the western hemisphere met in Miami this November in an effort to approve a draft of the Free Trade Area of the Americas treaty (FTAA). Efforts to pass the draft in its proposed form faltered however, and a significantly watered-down version was approved instead. Large-scale public protests accompanied the talks, which many see as an expansion of trade policies harmful to poorer countries. Tens of thousands of activists poured into Miami to voice their opposition and support the local network of organized resistance.

Scores of activists were injured, beaten and arrested in many violent conflicts with police.

WHAT IS THE FTAA?

The FTAA is a proposal for a multi-lateral trade agreement between all of the countries in the Americas minus Cuba. Negotiations were first launched after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) during first Summit of the Americas, also held in Miami. The FTAA takes its current acronym as well as its January 2005 deadline for implementation, from that summit.

In April 2001 the trade ministers reiterated the January 2005 goal for FTAA approval during another Summit of the Americas conferenceÑthis time in Quebec City, Canada. Protests involving at least 70,000 people lent a confrontational background to that meeting. Further meetings have been held at 18-month intervals in Canada, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil and the United States, each of which has met with substantial public displays of resistance.

The draft text of the FTAA has been shifted throughout the meetings, but the essential character of the document remains. The agreement would make sweeping changes in trade policy, eliminating many current trade and investment controls in the region. While the reduction of artificial barriers to trade resembles the provisions of NAFTA, the FTAA would go much farther in both scope and power.

If approved, the resulting free-trade area would create a market of 800 million people in 34 countries with an economic output of about $14 trillion. The agreement would create the largest free trade area in the world, and would affect everything from the price of an orange in Brooklyn to the employment of steelworkers in Brazil. The flow of jobs and money throughout the region in the wake of such an agreement would transfigure the lives of workers and farmers across the western hemisphere.

The spate of recent trade negotiation failures, such as the collapse of the World Trade Organization ministerial conference in Cancun, cast a pall over the current round of FTAA talks before they began. Cancun’s gathering resulted in no agreement, an outcome that left first world countries, especially the US, unsatisfied and frustrated.

Following the failed WTO ministerial in Cancun, US trade representative Robert Zoellick spoke disparagingly of the won’t do nations, such as the members of the newly formed Group of 21, a negotiating block of underdeveloped countries that formed during the talks in Cancun. This group included American nations such as Brazil, and contributed to successfully stalling any agreement or declaration. In response, Zoellick explained that the US would attempt to form bilateral agreements with can-do nations such as the Dominican Republic, Panama, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, as opposed to exclusive dependence on multi-lateral ones such as the FTAA.

Neoliberal leaders of the US have long sought an ideal state characterized by a uniform, rules-based economic order in which multinational corporations can function freely, in the words of Mark Engler, a commentator for Foreign Policy in Focus. In moving towards bi-lateral agreements, the US seems to be abandoning this ideal. Additionally, trade representative Zoellick was not forthcoming with any offers of compromise on key demands of Latin American governments such as the all important US reluctance to reduce its own market protections. As such, Engler was joined number of analysts in predicting that there would be no substantial agreement coming out of the Miami negotiations.

Trade ministers and respective heads of states from the 34 nations participating in the FTAA talks celebrated their approval of the FTAA, but their victory was portrayed as a partial one in local media coverage. WSVN Channel 7, the local FOX affiliate in Miami that covered the protests more than any other local station, explained that the jovial mood of the ministers was unwarrantedÉ [as the] framework that the ministers approved Thursday [November 20] was a major setback to the original goal set here nine years ago of tearing down all trade barriers from Alaska to Argentina.

Indeed, the current draft agreement still includes over 5,000 unresolved issues and items. But the most important alteration of the document is that it now affords member nations the chance to opt out of and/or veto certain provisions of the agreement.

Walden Bello of the group Focus on the Global South explained that the watered-down draft agreement will allow Brazil and [other countries] to withdraw from negotiations on investment, intellectual property, government procurement, services, competition policy, and other areas they do not wish to subject to mandatory liberalization. At the same time, it will allow the US to continue its policies of massive subsidization of its agriculture by not joining negotiations on agriculture.

Critics of the FTAA hailed the softened framework as the beginning of the end of the FTAA. Thea Lee, chief international economist of the AFL-CIO, stated that, The declaration sweeps the hard issues under the rug, and they’ve only got a year to settle them.

Edgardo Lander, a member of Venezuela’s Presidential FTAA Committee, agreed. They wanted a full-scale, comprehensive agreement, and they didn’t get it. They will never get it. Venezuela has long been an opponent of the FTAA. Their trade delegation has described it as a colonial project that seeks to impose itself over the constitution of every sovereign nation.

On this issue, Venezuela has the support of the largest and most powerful Latin American country, Brazil. Although Brazil indeed celebrated the approval of the weakened agreement, it never budged on its most important objections. Meanwhile, outside the halls of power, far from the negotiating tables where the ministers of these countries voiced their opposition, tens of thousands of protestors were supporter them with a massive statement of public resistance.

South Florida is an area that lacks a history of labor organizing, thanks in part to union-busting right to work’ statutes that Florida shares with many other southern states. Miami is also far from urban and campus-based centers of activism and organizing, which no doubt explains a large reason why it was selected as the site for the talks this year and is why it is a finalist to be the location of future permanent FTAA offices. Engler has described Miami’s as the site for the talks as the domestic equivalent of the WTO’s decision to conduct negotiations in the isolated Middle Eastern nation of Qatar.

Nevertheless, recent months have seen an upsurge in local activism that may become a permanent fixture of Miami’s political culture.

Local residents rallied their communities together around the issues. For instance, the Roots Cause coalition brought together grassroots groups such as the Coalition of Immolakee Workers (an immigrant/labor rights group that represents mostly Mexican and Latino migrant workers), the Miami Workers Center, Low Income Families Fighting Together and other organizations. The coalition organized a 34-mile long march from Fort Lauderdale to Miami in order to bring attention to the impact of globalization on people of color in South Florida.

Unions represented another important voice in the week of local marches and teach-ins that culminated in a mass march of at least 20,000 people. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney spoke at several points, as well as a number of other important labor representatives. Unions brought in busloads of workers including machinists, and workers from hotels, restaurants and sugar refineries.

People from all over the United States and Latin America drove, flew and even hopped trains to come down to Miami to be at this big event. A group of MIT graduate students of international trade and development showed up in all-white jumper suits that read FTAA: Health Hazard. Gan Golan, 29, explained that We know what the FTAA will be like, we have NAFTA as an example. And from our graduate studies, we know for a fact that NAFTA has been a disaster in many ways, including how it has contributed to environmental destruction by giving economic incentives to corporations to move their factories to areas with less restrictive environmental protection laws. Golan also said the FTAA would prevent poor countries from being able to manufacture their own cheap and generic drugs, referring to intellectual property rights provisions that the US has long been trying to push into the FTAA in an effort to protect the US-based multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry.

The consistent presence of protest and public resistance has helped to shape the recent outcome of official FTAA negotiations. However, this power has come at the price of severe police coercion enacted against protesters.

In the weeks leading up to, during and after the Miami ministerial, police arrested over 200 activists protesting the FTAA. According to Eowyn Rieke, the media representative for the Wellness Center, protesters suffered over 125 injuries, including serious facial lacerations, bone fractures, exposure to chemical irritants and a host of other ailments. On top of all of the injured protesters that Wellness Center medics treated, the Center itself became a target for police attack.

Rieke, who is a MD family physician and a street medic, said that an unconfirmed report of someone who lost their eye due to the firing of rubber bullet at close range ranked among the worst injuries. The worst confirmed injury was a serious fracture that caused the bones to protrude through the skin, also caused by point blank shooting of rubber bullets. I’m a MD, said Rieke, and I’ve worked in emergency rooms, but this is really some of the worst onslaught of injuries I have ever seen.

According to Chris Giovanis, an audio news reporter for Free Speech Radio in Chicago who has done extensive research on globalization protests, manufacturers of the guns that shoot rubber bullets instruct their clients that they should not be directly shot at people. Instead, the guns are supposed to be bounced off the ground in order to slow down the high velocity that the guns are capable of shooting at, and also to avoid potentially fatal injuries resulting from being shots to the head or chest. This advice was not being followed yesterday, however. Police inflicted over 30 cases of severe rubber bullet injuries, five of which were severe head wounds and/or lacerations.

Rubber bullets were indeed the weapon of choice for police yesterday, although other weapons were used as well. For instance, police lobbed tear gas cannisters at a group of protesters gathered near the fence at Flagler and Biscayne in the early morning hours, and also clubbed protesters with long batons causing five reported cases of severe head injuries.

Daniel, a 21 year-old street medic from San Francisco, said that police were using the wooden batons to club people in a very violent fashion: Instead of swinging below the knees so as to demobilize the protesters, police were deliberately hitting the heads of protesters all day long. I personally treated four cases like these yesterday. Daniel himself was actually targeted as well, despite the fact that he was wearing clearly marked medical insignia all over my clothing which was clearly that of a street medic. He said he was shot 20 times by rubber bullets smeared with a chemical irritant, and showed other protesters many of his bumps and bruises.

The Wellness Center itself, located at Miami Avenue between 5th and 6th streets, was also the victim of a police onslaught. According to Rieke, the demonstrators first started coming towards our center, as they were clearly being chased and attacked out of downtown by the police. Daniel added that there was a decontamination area setup in front of the Center, where victims of chemical attacks by the police were being treated and doused with water by a hose.

When the police arrived in front of the Wellness Center in the midst of their attack against the protesters, they started attacking the Center itself as street medic volunteers scurried to close the doors to the center. Troy, a 32 year-old street medic from Rhode Island, was at the door at the time of the attack. I felt really bad, Troy said, because I had to close the door while injured people were outside. The police seemed ready to attack the center.

Surrounded by a hectic, chaotic scene, protesters struggled to cram themselves into the Center, fearing for their safety a line of fully geared riot cops charged and attacked. Some got into the Center before Troy managed to close the doors, but many others did not.

While the unfortunate protesters who did not get into the Center got batonned and beaten by riot cops, one officer went straight for the entrance. Before Troy could completely seal the doors, the policeman attacked the center by spraying his pepper spray canister into the Center, completely contaminating the whole space.

I was shocked that he sprayed the space, but after I saw him do it, he also sprayed me directly in the face, said Troy, who explained that she had to treat herself by bathing and changing her clothes several times before finally recovering to the point where she could again treat other victims.

Rieke said that the attack by the police was a display of cops completely out of control and in total disregard for the safety and well-being of health care workers and the patients that they are treating.

The attack on the Wellness Center was not the first time that police have deliberated sought to disable a protest’s medical center. In Quebec City in 2001, during another set of demonstrations against the Free Trade Area Agreement of the Americas, the street medic health clinic headed up by Dr. Leo Rosen was also targeted: