Will the FTAA Kill Democracy?

By David Moberg, Salon. Posted April 23, 2001.

QUEBEC -- The capital's old walled city on a rocky bluff above the St. Lawrence River has long been a magnet for tourists, but the tourist attraction this weekend was a new wall. It's a two-and-a-half-mile, 10-foot-high chain-link fence that slashes through the old city and surrounds the Summit of the Americas, a gathering of 34 heads of state in the Western Hemisphere (excluding only Fidel Castro of Cuba).

The leaders came here to negotiate the Free Trade Area of the Americas -- an agreement that would lift protections and tariffs on imports and exports among just about every country between Canada and Argentina, creating the world's largest free-trade zone. Wrapping up on Sunday a meeting that was more pomp than circumstance, they agreed to proceed with FTAA negotiations on schedule -- not at the accelerated pace President Bush had hoped for -- and to require that countries participating in future summits be democratic. But the real focus this weekend was on how well the anti-globalization movement has aged since its dramatic debut in Seattle less than two years ago.

The protesters, mainly from Canada but also from the United States and many Central and Latin American countries, streamed into Quebec by the thousands last week. They headed straight to the fence, demonstrating and posting signs, artwork and even bras on the fence with messages like "Solidarity," "Justice for everyone," "Act for a better earth," "Capital is violent" and "Prison for corrupt politicians." The protesters posed for pictures in front of the fence, making sure that some of the 6,000-man police force, attired in Darth Vader helmets, gas masks and other riot gear, were visible in the background. Greg Murphy, a 31-year-old English teacher who lives near the fence -- dubbed by many the "Wall of Shame" -- was out for a nightly stroll and observed, "When you see that wall up, it's a message that 'we don't care what you have to say.' It makes you feel unwanted. I'm against violent protest, but I'd rather have one or two skirmishes than this."

The wall itself became the focal point for ongoing skirmishes starting on Friday, the opening day, when about 7,500 protesters, mainly young people, marched from Laval University, divided into those going to the "green zone," where the risk of arrest would be low, and those heading for the "yellow" and "red" zone, where there would be a "diversity of tactics" and a higher chance of arrest. Within a few minutes of arriving at the yellow-red zone, a few protesters began lobbing objects across the fence, starting with toilet paper rolls, then moving on to plastic bottles and golf balls. Within 15 minutes, militants at the front had managed to pull down the hated wall, and about 100 people crossed over to the other side, breaching the police security lines. Ten minutes later, the police launched their first tear gas attacks, and the battle was on.

Protesters launched miscellaneous projectiles as police sought to immobilize them with the tear gas canisters, which the protesters in turn often threw back at the police. Most of the crowd seemed supportive of tearing down the wall, even confronting the police physically, but did not take part personally, simply ebbing back and forth as the stinging gas drove the majority who came without gas masks and goggles to retreat periodically. The police relied more on gas than beatings or arrests, but they also employed water cannons and plastic and rubber bullets.

To the critics of the FTAA, the battle is not over trade -- nearly everyone on both sides of the fence voices support for more trade -- but the terms of trade and, most important, the rules of investment that are increasingly at the heart of "trade" agreements. The real issue, according to the Peoples' Summit of the Americas, a shadow gathering of citizen, environmental, labor and peasant groups from the Americas that met during the week before the official summit, is whether democracy and human rights will be trampled as an FTAA protects the rights of corporations and the mobility of capital. "The primacy of human rights should be the signpost for any agreement," argued Nicole Filion, a spokeswoman for the Hemispheric Social Alliance that sponsored the Peoples' Summit.

The wall became a symbol of how the summit leaders are pushing ahead with negotiations, which are due to be completed by Jan. 1, 2005, without listening to the concerns of a vast number of citizens who have growing doubts about agreements like NAFTA. With the exception of a few mainstream nongovernmental organizations, the only guests behind the chain-link fence were corporate executives, who paid from $50,000 to $1.5 million to sponsor the event and hobnob with the political leaders. Corporate advisors are intimately involved in all aspects of the negotiations, but there isn't a single labor advisory group. The draft negotiating text has even been kept from most members of legislative bodies throughout the hemisphere as well as the public, but about 500 corporate executives have had security clearance to see it, according to the Toronto Globe and Mail. At Canada's urging, the summit finally voted to release the draft, but as the Peoples' Summit was meeting, a copy of the investment chapter was leaked, confirming that the FTAA was shaping up to be much like NAFTA, potentially granting even broader rights than NAFTA does to corporations.

Unlike the Seattle World Trade Organization protests of November 1999, where a disciplined group of nonviolent protesters used civil disobedience tactics to shut down the opening of the talks, the confrontation in Quebec was aimed at the fence and the police. The largely black-clad and masked militants, loosely identified as anarchists or the "black bloc," made very few attacks on property, though many businesses had prepared for them by covering windows with plywood. Indeed, many residents of the neighborhoods near the protest were openly sympathetic, offering protesters water to wash the tear gas out of their eyes.

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