FTAA dissent faces clampdown in Miami
Compiled by Eamon Martin
Nov. 18 (AGR)— Tens of thousands of protesters are expected
to converge on the city of Miami, Florida this week to protest a round
of controversial meetings that could result in the creation of the
world’s largest free trade zone.
As the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) summit meetings have
approached, local police, public officials, and media have come under
fire by activists and civil liberties advocates for manufacturing
an escalating climate of suspicion, fear, and harassment against protesters.
Estimates on how many protesters will travel to South Florida vary
from 20,000 to 100,000 for the FTAA summit, which lasts from Nov.
17 through Nov. 21.
Launched in Miami in 1994, the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas
is intended to collapse trade regulations in every country in the
Western hemisphere except Cuba by 2005. Opponents, who range from
unionists to environmentalists, human rights activists to anarchists,
argue that it does much more than what is being discussed in public.
The FTAA follows the model of it’s predecessor, the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which in writing, by international accord,
significantly weakened the power of the sovereign peoples of the United
States, Mexico, and Canada to have a say in managing their social
and environmental welfare. Like NAFTA, the FTAA is designed to grease
the way for corporations to move and work freely from nation to nation
within the Americas, without having to be responsive or accountable
to national laws and regulations enacted to protect the environment
and working populations.
As a consequence, outraged and concerned citizens throughout the hemisphere
have spent countless amounts of time and energy educating and mobilizing
to defeat these initiatives. Fearing an extension of NAFTA, many of
them are arriving in Miami to protest and disrupt the FTAA meetings,
to prevent the loss of their pensions, their jobs from moving to where
wages are lower, the privatization of their public services like water,
and the acceleration of deforestation. This movement – clearly
a “peoples’ movement” if ever there was one —
charges that the FTAA, putting profits before life, and the wants
of a few over the needs of the many, would further strengthen the
powerful influence of corporations over public policy by subordinating
elected governments to the first-serve status the agreement shall
grant to the companies.
Among the throngs of demonstrators, more than 1,000 retirees packed
into two-dozen buses are expected to arrive in Miami from through
out Florida on Thursday to register their objections to the FTAA.
“We care about our children and grandchildren, the kind of world
they’re going to live in,” said Erma B. Bennett, who lives
in Coral Gables and heads a local senior citizens’ organization.
Like others who oppose the FTAA, Bennett’s concerns stem from
a NAFTA provision that allows corporations to sue the United States,
a provision that could be part of the Americas pact.
“As the expression goes, it’s the devil in the details that
the corporations can sue the government and the taxpayer will pay
the bill,” she said.
Retirees are also worried that a declining employment base in the
United States could deprive federal programs such as Social Security
and Medicare of funds. If people lose their jobs and are not paying
into the programs, those social safety nets also could come to an
end.
“Who’s going to pay Social Security if there’s no jobs
here in the United States?” asked Charles Taylor, 65, of Tamarac,
FL, a former Ford employee who now works with the local retiree arm
of the United Auto Workers Union.
Police have been preparing for months — training, purchasing
new equipment, even playing mock war games. The far-reaching, influential,
and largely secretive FTAA discussions have attracted so much international
public opposition that the federal government has spared no expense
to insure the meetings are held undisturbed. Two weeks ago, the US
Congress tucked an $8.5 million allotment into a mammoth bill —
ostensibly promoted for Iraq’s reconstruction — to provide
maximum security for the Miami talks.
Demonstrators will be greeted by more than 40 local, state and federal
agencies that are contributing forces to the FTAA security effort.
Police say they’ve extensively prepared to guard the summit site,
the port, major intersections and highways, and multinational corporations.
At least two schools have canceled classes for the week, the civil
and federal courthouses have closed, and some businesses will relocate
temporarily or shut their doors. Bank of America has closed its four
downtown banking centers and the postal service is temporarily removing
some downtown mailboxes.
Last Thursday, Miami City commissioners unanimously approved a hotly
contested law that gave police sweeping authority to more easily arrest
protesters, who predict the measure will allow authorities to trample
on their free speech rights. Police Chief John Timoney pushed for
the measure, saying it was needed to protect his officers and the
public. The law was passed as the first of thousands of activists
began to trickle into Miami, during a week in which activists have
already complained of police harassment.
Others have been rounded up, including Daniel Grace, 20, and a 17-year-old
companion, both from California, who were arrested on Oct. 29 for
“loitering and prowling” by North Miami Beach police, who
characterized them as “suspected anarchists.”
Protest organizers say police have stopped activists dozens of times
in the past few weeks. Legal experts have been gathering complaints
about police, said David Meieran, an activist from Pittsburgh.
Three weeks ago, an officer approached a group of activists as they
were preparing to leave Bayfront Park after a meeting, Meieran said.
He said the officer asked if they had been handing out fliers and
photographed the license plates of several activists’ vehicles
before leaving. Meieran said he also was stopped and asked to supply
identification last week.
“It’s an unacceptable level of harassment,” he said.
“Basically, we’re being profiled.”
During the Republican National Convention in August, 2000, in Philadelphia,
391 people were arrested and held under high bails —some as much
as $100,000. The police, headed by Timoney, now Miami’s police
chief, raided a warehouse in which dozens of puppeteers were arrested
on the eve of the convention. Nearly every single charge has since
been dropped.
“Everybody here is looking for justice and for respect,’’
Esther Sylvain, a nurse and member of the Service Employees International
Union, says as she staples anti-FTAA posters to cardboard polls, and
then wraps them in bundles to be distributed at a march.
Already, everyday people are being stopped and searched by police
officers on Miami’s streets. Private security officers on duty
at every Metromover station are checking every car as trains pull
in.
About three-dozen police officers are searching the backpacks of people
entering the Bayside Marketplace. Anyone who doesn’t agree to
be searched is turned away.
“Anybody with a backpack gets checked,’’ says Police
Capt. Mark Overton.
On Tuesday night, while government representatives began negotiating
terms of the FTAA at the posh and heavily guarded Inter-Continental
Hotel, dozens of protesters met at the nearby First United Methodist
Church of Miami for a ‘’teach-in’’ about the pitfalls
of “free trade.”
“There is much said about food security. We don’t want food
security, we want food sovereignty,’’ said Juan Tini, a
Guatemalan labor leader.
He said NAFTA caused corn prices in neighboring Mexico to plummet
because it allowed an influx of cheaper American-subsidized corn,
and that small farmers in other Latin American nations would be similarly
hurt if free trade zones were extended. “Say no to FTAA, say
yes to life,’’ Tini said.
Sources: Miami Herald, Reuters, South
Florida Sun-Sentinel
CIA on Iraq: ‘we could lose
this situation’
By Julian Borger and Rory McCarthy
Washington, DC, Nov. 13— The White House yesterday
drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in
Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the
guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an “appraisal of situation” commissioned
by CIA director, George Tenet, and written by CIA station chief
in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among
the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents’
strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was
speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far
greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to
believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report
described it as a “bleak assessment that the resistance is
broad, strong and getting stronger”.
“It says we are going to lose the situation unless there
is a rapid and dramatic change of course,” the source said.
“There are thousands in the resistance -- not just a core
of Ba’athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every
day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support,
shelter, and all that.”
Although the report was an internal CIA document, it was widely
circulated within the administration. Even more unusually, it
carried an endorsement by Paul Bremer, the civilian head of the
US-run occupation of Iraq — a possible sign that he was seeking
to bypass his superiors in the Pentagon and send a message directly
to President George Bush on how bad the situation has become.
Proof of the strength of the insurgents and their ability to strike
anywhere in Iraq was provided in another devastating suicide bombing
yesterday.
This time the target was the Italian military police barracks
in the south-eastern city of Nasariya.
At least 17 Italians and eight Iraqis were killed, striking a
blow at one of the few nations prepared to send troops to help
the US and Britain contain the rising violence.
Following crisis talks in Washington yesterday, Bremer flew back
to Baghdad armed with proposals to bolster the US-backed Iraqi
governing council with more powers and more resources in an attempt
to speed up elections.
Under one of the proposals, the council could be expanded or transformed
into a full provisional government backed by an interim constitution.
That would represent a radical reversal of earlier US policy which
was to put off the transfer of real power to an Iraqi government
until after elections, which in turn would have to await a comprehensive
new constitution.
The new blueprint, which reverses that methodological progression
and which is closer to what was done in post-war Afghanistan,
emerged from an urgently arranged series of meetings between the
president, his top national security advisers, and Bremer, as
the security situation in Iraq continued to deteriorate rapidly.
In scenes last night reminiscent of the height of the war, US
forces went back on the offensive with air strikes and armored
assaults on a suspected guerrilla stronghold near Baghdad. Guerrilla
attacks, meanwhile, have become more frequent, bolder and bloodier.
In public at least, the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has
insisted that the attacks are the work of a few remnants of Saddam
Hussein’s Ba’athist party and a handful of Islamic jihadists
from other Arab countries.
It is understood that Bremer’s administration is concerned
about the impact of the decision by US forces to escalate their
offensive against the insurgents, anxious that bombing and heavy-handed
raids will increase popular support for the insurgency.
Bremer refused to provide details of the new US plan, but US and
British officials said he was carrying proposals from Bush aimed
at bolstering the interim Iraqi leadership in the hope of winning
the confidence of Iraqis and paving the way for elections penciled
in for the end of next year. But, according to some US officials,
elections could be held in four to six months.
The UN security council has given the Iraqi governing council
until Dec. 15 to come up with a constitutional blueprint and organizing
elections.
The council, deeply divided by internal disputes, has shown little
sign of meeting that deadline, but the new US proposals would
put it under pressure to accelerate its work and the transfer
of power.
One of the options discussed in the White House yesterday was
replacing the governing council with a new body.
The council was hand-picked by Washington after the war, largely
from returning exiles, but it has since disappointed US officials
by its slow progress. Many of its 24 members fail to turn up to
its meetings, and the CIA report said the council had little support
among the Iraqi population.
However, the secretary of state, Colin Powel,l insisted: “We
are committed to the governing council and are prepared to help
them in any way we can.”
“We’re looking at all sorts of ideas, and we do want
to accelerate the work of reform,” Powell said.
“We want to accelerate the work of putting a legal basis
under the new Iraqi government and we are doing everything we
can to get the governing council equipped with everything they
need.”
Source: Guardian (UK)
NAFTA pollution harming children,
border study says
By Steven Chase
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Nov. 11-- Pollution from North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) truck traffic is making children
living on the Mexico-United States border sick and may be killing
some, suggests a study released yesterday by the environmental watchdog
for the North American free trade agreement.
The report, commissioned by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation
is the first time a study has measured the impact of air pollution
on poor children living along the Mexico-United States border.
More than 36,000 children suffering breathing problems were rushed
to emergency wards in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez between
1997 and 2001, the study found.
“It’s quite a lot and that’s only at two of the hospitals
in Ciudad Juarez. There are others and so this may well be only
be the tip of the iceberg,” said Vic Shantora, a CEC staffer.
One-third of the 696 infants, between one month and one-year-old,
who died during the study’s five-year period in Ciudad Juarez
were “related to respiratory illness,” the investigation
found.
It also discovered “significant associations” between
particulate matter — particles in the air emitted from sources
such as diesel trucks — and child deaths in Ciudad Juarez.
More than one million trucks cross the Mexico-United States border
between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas, thanks to NAFTA.
The trade deal has led to a jump in the amount of trade carried
by trucks through border cities.
Shantora said “generally you can conclude” that truck
traffic from NAFTA is helping make the children in question sick,
adding that another study is being conducted to get more details.
He suggested other NAFTA border crossings could be suffering the
same levels of pollution. “It’s safe to say if we’re
finding this kind of an effect in the Juarez-El Paso area that other
border regions…also have air quality concerns and so it’s
plausible you could see similar effects there.”
The CEC report suggests Mexico needs tougher air quality rules because
existing smog standards were only breached 14 times in the five-year-period.
“Children were being rushed to the hospital on days when there
was no air quality alarms sounding,” Dr. Matiana Ramirez Aguilar,
a study investigator, said.
Environmental critics say the study raises a red flag about the
growing pollution problem across North America stemming from rising
NAFTA trade. “The current strategy for globalization of trade
means more and more trucks on the road,” said Sierra Club of
Canada executive director Elizabeth May. “The air pollution
alarms that are ringing in Mexico at the border crossings are also
ringing in Canada.”
May called on the three NAFTA countries to impose tougher pollution
controls on trucks and over time work to shift trade from road to
rail service.
“This is the goal of NAFTA, to increase truck traffic between
Canada, the United States and Mexico and I think we should be looking
very seriously at shifting to rail and different kinds of engines.”
Source: (Toronto) Globe & Mail
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