Published on Wednesday, October 15, 2003 by Long
Island (NY)
Newsday
by Victor Tan Chen
Somehow,
the protesters had gotten in. When they slipped
through the police-manned barricades on one end of
Cancun's hotel zone, they must have seemed like just
another bunch of tourists - split into small groups,
their bandannas and piercings discreetly tucked away.
But
instead of heading for the Mexican resort town's white
beaches or raucous bars, they made a beeline for its
convention center, where the World Trade Organization
was holding its fifth ministerial conference last
month.
These
Mexican and foreign activists had come here to protest
the WTO, which they said was dominated by the
interests of rich nations. For two days thousands of
them had been held at bay by 8-foot-tall fences and a
black-helmeted sea of Mexican federal police. But on
that particular Friday night, 85 activists had slipped
through the cracks - and now they were yelling their
anti-WTO slogans within earshot of the beast itself.
Cancun
was no "Battle of Seattle" - the 1999 WTO ministerial
that ended in failure when tens of thousands of
protesters swarmed the convention center. This time,
the protesters were kept miles away.
But they
still managed to make their presence known -
literally, as I witnessed the night of Sept. 12, but
also symbolically, in the spirit of resistance that
pervaded the trade talks. Outside, protesters chanted
in the streets; inside, representatives from
nongovernmental organizations disrupted press
conferences with demonstrations, while delegates from
developing nations banded together in defiance. And
once again, the talks fell apart.
Why did
they fail? The simple answer is that rich countries
weren't willing to cut their agricultural subsidies to
the degree they had committed to in earlier
negotiations, and poor countries in turn rejected
proposals to expand the WTO's oversight into new
areas.
But the
broader reason is that the secretive, inflexible
culture of the WTO finally unraveled. In Seattle, the
WTO became notorious for its "green rooms" - private
meetings outside of the main room where rich nations
would buttonhole poor nations alone or in small groups
and pressure them to make concessions. In Cancun,
despite assurances to the contrary, the "green rooms"
continued, but a group of 21 developing nations - led
by Brazil, China and India - joined together in an
unprecedented coalition (known as the G21) and fought
for their collective interests.
Faced
with a genuine outpouring of democracy, the rich
nations hunkered down, and the talks collapsed. Only a
month later, it's still unclear whether the WTO will
recover. What is clear is that the old style of
negotiations - whereby the world's industrial powers
dictated from above, and the world's poor scrambled
for the crumbs - is no longer viable, now that the
poor are organized and resisting.
The
presence of activists in the street emboldened the
defiant delegates inside. What's more, it provided an
example of the very democracy and diversity that the
WTO has scorned. For all the talk of
"anti-globalization," these protesters represented a
wide range of nationalities (from Mexicans to
Americans to Italians to Koreans) and interests (from
labor unions to environmentalists to human-rights
activists to pagans) - a "movement of movements," to
use Naomi Klein's term, or a movement for "global
justice," to use their own. For all the fears of
rampaging "anarchists," the vast majority of
demonstrators (anarchists included) staged peaceful
protests.
That
September night in Cancun, these activists were
showing the world that there were two kinds of
globalization: the globalization of the WTO and the
globalization of that "other superpower," the people
in protest. The activists brought no weapons to the
convention center, only a pair of plants - one banana,
one almond - that they intended to plant nearby. The
Mexican security forces, surprised to find protesters
inside the zone, quickly trapped them between
barricades.
A meeting
was called, and the protesters sat down on the asphalt
of Boulevard Kulkulcan and talked strategy. Activists
raised their hands and a facilitator called upon them.
After each person spoke, another person would
translate between Spanish and English. Eventually, the
group came to a decision: They would not stay the
night, but would accept an offer to leave in return
for safe passage downtown, without arrest, in
chartered buses.
"I think
it was very good that we had patience," one activist
said as the meeting ended. "Because then everyone sees
that we don't make decisions in the same way as they
make decisions." The activists cheered. That had been
their point all along.
Victor
Tan Chen, a former Newsday reporter, is a Harvard
researcher and editor of
inthefray.com, a Web magazine on issues of
identity and community.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
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