Northwest of downtown Miami, in the depressed neighborhood of Overtown, cars, vans and buses line the blocks around 2300 N. Miami Ave. Their license plates represent more states than is usual even for South Florida. There are people everywhere, mostly young and wearing the uniforms of various fringe cultures. Punks, hippies, hippie-fied (crusty) punks, hardcore kids in cargo shorts and dark, hooded sweatshirts under the potent sun. A few wear black fatigues, and black bandanas over their faces. No one is alone; they're always in groups.
Police cars cruise by every five minutes or so, and officers stationed on the roof of a nearby Salvation Army watch through binoculars. Cameramen and local-news talking heads lean against the line of logoed vans across the street, watching people enter, leave and hang out in front of the edifice on the northeast corner of N. Miami and 23rd Street.
It's a storefront with a large, covered and fenced-in yard. Running along 23rd, the chain-link features one of those dark liners to prevent folks from looking in, but it doesn't really matter — most of it is covered in colorful, hand-tailored banners expressing various opinions regarding the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
None has anything nice to say about it.
This is the Convergence Center, a focal point and information outlet for the alphabet soup of political and social activist organizations in town to protest this week's FTAA ministerial meeting.
Conceptualized during the Clinton administration, the Free Trade Area of the Americas intends to expand on NAFTA's tariff-less (and, some say, deeply flawed) trade model, to include every civilized nation in the Western Hemisphere but Cuba. Activists are chiefly concerned with its all-but-complete lack of citizen input; its dearth of language regarding workers' rights; its allowance of power to corporate entities, and its potentially disastrous consequences for the environment.
Ordinary citizens, on the other hand, are chiefly worried about the activists. Though the FTAA has been a work in progress since 1994, the average American only heard about it last week, when the media spotlight swept over Miami's preparations to host the ministerial. The coverage devoted itself almost exclusively to beefed-up security, the massive show of force planned by the state's law enforcement agencies, and fear. In the wake of the 1999 World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle — you know, the ones where the cops and the anti-globalists both fucked up — the country's perception of the protester has shifted from lazy, ignorant, tie-dyed tree-hugger to violent, ignorant, black-clad anarchist. The media helped. 9-11 didn't hurt the process, either.
One of the key words here is "ignorant." Many God-and-country Americans find it both more comforting, and more titillating, to characterize those with contrary views as dumbly chaotic, with no agenda beyond pointless disruption. I'm not going to discount that notion completely. Large-scale protests have become magnets for a minority with nothing more than trouble on their minds. And there are those few extreme collectives who believe violence and vandalism are viable means to their ends.
But two other words come to me as I stand inside 2300 N. Miami Ave., checking out the rules (No Alcohol, No Drugs, Be Aware of Your Tone of Voice and Surroundings, etc.) and security sign-up sheets posted everywhere, and watching volunteers serve food to some of the overwhelmingly diverse crowd inside. The words are "organized" and "informed." They came to me earlier in the week, when I attended a workshop in St. Pete on group-awareness techniques for protest situations, and they will reoccur again and again at demonstrations I witness over the next day and a half.
It's not like the Army or anything — I walk right by the bearded young man standing guard and am inside the Convergence Center for 10 or 15 minutes, before a very tall girl sternly informs me that the press isn't allowed inside and assigns an escort to make sure I don't talk to anybody on my way out. (To be fair, I look a hell of a lot more like the people in here than I do Ron Williams Reporting Live For Action News At Five.) But there's information everywhere, on the walls, on a table buried under pamphlets, on the papers and press releases being handed out by every fifth activist I see. It would seem that the average protester is anything but uninformed.
"I can't really say what the average protester knows, but they're so much more well-informed than [the average citizen]," says Laurel Ripple, a Miami native who helped secure the Convergence Center location. Anti-globalists and corporations have one thing in common these days: when you tell 'em you're press, they both shut up and point you to their Media Representative. "When they become aware of the issues involved, there's no way they can stop themselves from learning more. That's why we're all here, trying to outreach to folks, educate them."
She says the local mainstream media has forgone the issues in favor of glorifying Miami's fortune in being selected to host the ministerial, as well as alienating locals from demonstrators. A big local FM station is apparently regularly running a radio spot that basically informs its listeners that protesters are here to destroy the city.
I ask her if they've encountered what they consider harassment by the, seriously, thousands of law-enforcement officers working the city. She reports that anyone walking the streets who fits what cops have deemed the "profile" for demonstrators is intercepted and compelled to produce identification. According to Ripple, 14 have been confirmed arrested as of our Tuesday afternoon conversation. (More than 160 eventually will be processed.)
"Evidently, walking is no longer a justifiable form of transportation in Miami," she says.
Leaving the Convergence Center, I try to drive downtown and witness the police presence, but am waved off by a squad car partially blocking Biscayne Boulevard. Heading back up that main street in the opposite direction, the presence is subtler than a phalanx of officers in riot gear, but no less mistakable. How many Americans, I wonder, have driven up a street and seen at least one armed cop on every single corner, in front of every entrance to every building, parked in every ninth parallel spot?
At my hotel, another lessee (he looks like he might live at this Super 8 Motel, actually) stands in front of his room, watching Biscayne Boulevard being shut down and listening to the sounds of drums and chanting growing louder.
"Do you know what's going on?" he asks as I walk by.
I explain that a march began in Fort Lauderdale yesterday, walking one mile for every country represented at the FTAA ministerial, in protest of its policies. That they will pass right by us on their way downtown.
"Oh, yeah. I think I heard something 'bout that," he replies, looking a bit like I just told him that space monsters are coming because they've got a party on a chartered yacht to get to down at the marina.
The lead story on the local CBS affiliate's evening news broadcast consists mainly of juxtaposing shots of white dudes in dreadlocks beating on bongos and shots of tense-looking officers in helmets and body armor, shield in one hand, baton in the other.
On Wednesday, I attend demonstrations all over town, staged by groups ranging from the The Dogwood Alliance to Grassroots.org, which holds the FTAA on trial by hearing evidence from activists, speakers and representatives from all over the Americas. (I'm sure you can guess the verdict.) Often, there are more press people than protesters, though certainly not always — the AFL-CIO is a major sponsor of an evening concert and rally at downtown's Bayfront Park Amphitheatre, attended by many thousands. Everywhere there is available information and nothing approaching aggression; almost every organization involved in scheduled demonstrations has distributed and published online provisions stating that everyone who attends implicitly agrees to behave, and they seem to be doing so.
At the tribunal, Coalition of Immokalee Workers representative Julia Perkins dismisses the notion that the protesters' presence arouses fear in the community.
"Once we get out here and make our voices heard, those concerns are easily addressed," she says.
I also speak with several uninvolved Miami residents: cabdrivers, bartenders, professionals. While most of them are acutely aware of what's going on in town, all but one of them decline to state a personal position with regard to the FTAA, citing a lack of information. And none of them are particularly afraid of their city burning down.
"It's very confusing," says a cabbie from Mexico.
"I'm leaning toward 'against,' because I think it'll hurt the workers, but again, I can't really say, because I'm not up on all the issues," says a bartender at tony Bayside Shopping Center, where hundreds of riot police inspect bags and eye the concert happening at the top of the hill.
"Are these the same people from Seattle?" asks a burly young man with a goatee at a small protest at Office Depot. "I'm really surprised [there's no violence]."
"I basically had to tell my management what the FTAA was, and why people were here to protest, why it's bad," says 28-year-old Nicole Klopp, a vegetarian who works for a well-known cruise line. "But they're better informed now that it's here, they're trying to read about it, learn more."
I leave Miami Thursday morning without having seen a single incident of violence, although scores of demonstrators have been arrested on charges ranging from loitering to resisting without violence. There will be conflict between the police and protesters that day, however, during a downtown march to the fence around the hotel hosting the ministerial. Several activists will be injured by pepper spray, tear gas and rubber bullets (including our correspondent Kelly Benjamin — see his story on page xx), and the crowd will build ad-hoc barricades and light small fires in the street to avoid mass arrests. It will never be publicly clear which side escalated the demonstration.
It won't begin to approach the dimensions of what happened in Seattle, though, and when the week ends, the massively inflated police presence will undoubtedly be credited with keeping the protests from becoming a smoldering mess of injured civilians and destroyed property.
Would that really have happened? Most nonviolent Americans would probably say it's better to be safe than sorry. I wonder if they'd still feel that way when they found themselves with a cause they knew well and cared passionately for, in a city with at least one armed cop on every single corner, in front of every entrance to every building, parked in every ninth parallel spot.
Contact Scott Harrell at 813-248-8888, ext. 109, or by e-mail at scott.harrell@ weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 3, 2003.