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Police Join Protestors, Demonstrators Confront FTAA Ministers
At the FTAA trade ministerial taking place in Quito, Ecuador, police joined protestors in demanding a meeting with trade ministers negotiating the FTAA. In an unprecedented turn of events, 65 demonstrators were able to confront the trade ministers.
This was an update on the FTAA ministerial and protests posted to the Food First mailing list. Check out pictures at http://www.foodfirst.org/progs/global/trade/quito2002/photos.php and http://www.foodfirst.org/progs/global/trade/quito2002/2002-11-01-update.php
Quito, November 1: The protests against the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) --and the police violence that rocked Quito during the day yesterday--ended on a positive note for protesters in the evening, putting the Bush Administration's negotiator, Mr. Robert Zoellick, in an embarrassing and awkward position.
At about 3 PM yesterday, after the worst of the police violence against the tens of thousands of indigenous people, farmers, students and other members of civil society from the across the Americas had taken place, a police platoon, including various officers, rebelled against their own government, and joined with indigenous leaders and other protesters in demanding that the trade ministers from 34 countries meeting to negotiate the FTAA agree to receive a delegation from the protesters carrying a declaration of opposition to the FTAA.
According to sources, this news rocked a government that has seen two previous presidents thrown out of office by the indigenous movement in alliance with rebel security forces. At that point, the Ecuadorian government sent in the army to relive the police, on the one hand, and on the other, began to lean heavily on the trade ministers, and especially on Mr. Zoellick, the U.S. Trade Representative, to accede to the protesters demands.
As the popular movements re-grouped at Arbolito Park in the afternoon, the government extracted a reluctant offer from the ministers to receive a delegation composed of two representatives of the protesters. When the indigenous leaders of the CONIAE, Leonidas Iza and Blanca Chancoso, said no to the offer, the ministers came with an offer of ten. When that was refused they said that 30 people could come, but that too was refused, as was an offer of forty. The protesters finally accepted to send a delegation of 50 people, over the strenuous objections of Mr. Zoellick, to be accompanied by the entire march up to the innermost security perimeter.
At about 6:30 the delegation passed the barricades, escorted by special forces soldiers heavily armed with automatic weapons. Although the agreement was for a delegation of fifty, in fact 65 protesters managed to get into the Swiss Hotel where the historic meeting was to take place. The delegation included the top leadership of Latin America's most powerful social movements, including Iza and Chancoso from the CONIAE, Joao Pedro Stedile of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) of Brazil, Rafael Alegria of the international farmers' movement, the Via Campesina, Juan Tiney of the Latin American Coordination of Rural Movements (CLOC), and many others. Also included were representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who work with these movements, like Peter Rosset of Food First and Nicola Bullard of Focus on the Global South in Thailand.
The delegation entered the basement auditorium of the hotel at the same instant as the 34 trade ministers, led by Mr. Zoellick. As the ministers sat down across the room, facing the protesters, Peter Rosset stood up and addressed Mr. Zoellick. "Excuse me," he said, "are you an American?" As Mr. Zoellick turned to see who was addressing him personally, Peter Rosset continued: "I am an American too, and I am ashamed at how you and the Bush Administration are trying to force Latin American governments to sign a trade agreement that will only bring them misery and poverty, and will bring the same to the American people." As the protesters applauded and some of the Latin American trade ministers smirked, Mr. Zoellick looked very sour, at what was only the beginning of a very uncomfortable meeting for him. To add insult to injury, that night the Ecuadorian TV news stations showed Mr. Zoellick being told off by a fellow American in front of 33 fellow trade ministers.
The next treat for Mr. Zoellick was a speech by parliamentarians from 11 countries, ranging from Canada to Bolivia, in which they called on their respective governments to "reject the FTAA and recall their negotiators at once." While the speech was being read, three congress people actually stood in front of Mr. Zoellick with placards reading "No al ALCA" (No to the FTAA).
A short time later, Mr. Iza, the president of the CONIAE, addressed the ministers. He began by saying, "Señores, I wish to say to you, not to offend, but only to speak the truth, that you cannot understand how the poor live in the Americas, because you were born in golden cribs." He then went one to humbly and movingly lay out exactly why the FTAA would mean "death to the indigenous peoples' of the Americas."
This was followed by the powerful reading of protesters declaration, by Nicaraguan farm worker leader Maria Elena Siquiera. She began by saying "this is not a consultation or a dialog, this is a statement of implacable opposition to the FTAA by all the peoples' of the Americas." The declaration warned that "if you don't listen to our voices and those of millions more across the continent, you will be responsible for putting the very future of the Americas at risk." She concluded by shouting, "Yes to Life! No the FTAA! Another America is Possible!!!"
At that point the ministers expected the delegation to stay for a photo opportunity with them, so they could claim they had "dialoged" with the protesters. But the protesters stood up with the final words of Ms. Siquiera and walked out, leaving the ministers looking like idiots in front of the dozens of news reporters filling the back of the room. Mr. Zoellick was not to be spared his final indignities, either, as Mr. Rosset said to him, in a voice that all could hear, "You know as well as I do that all opinion polls show Americans want no more free trade agreements, and you should be ashamed to go against the wishes of your own people."
Shouts of "shame on you!" came from the protesters. Even some journalists yelled "sell out!" while others said that Mr. Zoellick should be ashamed he doesn't speak Spanish. The whole meeting was translated for him via earphones. A protester spoke to the Latin American ministers, saying "have you no self-respect, that you accept the imposition of this guy who can't even speak our language?" All the media cameras immediately zoomed over to record the miserable expression on Mr. Zoellick's face, as several Lain American ministers tried to hide their smiles and chuckles behind their fists.
"After today's Seattle-like protests," concluded Mr. Rosset, "the U.S. government and the transnational corporations can never again claim that opposition to free trade comes only from a small group of northern environmentalists. It is abundantly clear that people from all walks of life, across all of Latin America, do not want anything to do with the FTAA, the World Trade Organization or any other manifestation of trade liberalization."
This morning the Ecuadorian papers reported on the protests and on the meeting with the ministers. They also noted that this weeks negotiations on agriculture within the FTAA had broken down over the Latin American governments' perception that the recent U.S. Farm Bill, which ups subsidies to corporate farmers, was a major breach of good faith. All in all, then, this was a very good few days for opponents of corporate globalization and trade liberalization.
Quito, November 1: The protests against the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) --and the police violence that rocked Quito during the day yesterday--ended on a positive note for protesters in the evening, putting the Bush Administration's negotiator, Mr. Robert Zoellick, in an embarrassing and awkward position.
At about 3 PM yesterday, after the worst of the police violence against the tens of thousands of indigenous people, farmers, students and other members of civil society from the across the Americas had taken place, a police platoon, including various officers, rebelled against their own government, and joined with indigenous leaders and other protesters in demanding that the trade ministers from 34 countries meeting to negotiate the FTAA agree to receive a delegation from the protesters carrying a declaration of opposition to the FTAA.
According to sources, this news rocked a government that has seen two previous presidents thrown out of office by the indigenous movement in alliance with rebel security forces. At that point, the Ecuadorian government sent in the army to relive the police, on the one hand, and on the other, began to lean heavily on the trade ministers, and especially on Mr. Zoellick, the U.S. Trade Representative, to accede to the protesters demands.
As the popular movements re-grouped at Arbolito Park in the afternoon, the government extracted a reluctant offer from the ministers to receive a delegation composed of two representatives of the protesters. When the indigenous leaders of the CONIAE, Leonidas Iza and Blanca Chancoso, said no to the offer, the ministers came with an offer of ten. When that was refused they said that 30 people could come, but that too was refused, as was an offer of forty. The protesters finally accepted to send a delegation of 50 people, over the strenuous objections of Mr. Zoellick, to be accompanied by the entire march up to the innermost security perimeter.
At about 6:30 the delegation passed the barricades, escorted by special forces soldiers heavily armed with automatic weapons. Although the agreement was for a delegation of fifty, in fact 65 protesters managed to get into the Swiss Hotel where the historic meeting was to take place. The delegation included the top leadership of Latin America's most powerful social movements, including Iza and Chancoso from the CONIAE, Joao Pedro Stedile of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) of Brazil, Rafael Alegria of the international farmers' movement, the Via Campesina, Juan Tiney of the Latin American Coordination of Rural Movements (CLOC), and many others. Also included were representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who work with these movements, like Peter Rosset of Food First and Nicola Bullard of Focus on the Global South in Thailand.
The delegation entered the basement auditorium of the hotel at the same instant as the 34 trade ministers, led by Mr. Zoellick. As the ministers sat down across the room, facing the protesters, Peter Rosset stood up and addressed Mr. Zoellick. "Excuse me," he said, "are you an American?" As Mr. Zoellick turned to see who was addressing him personally, Peter Rosset continued: "I am an American too, and I am ashamed at how you and the Bush Administration are trying to force Latin American governments to sign a trade agreement that will only bring them misery and poverty, and will bring the same to the American people." As the protesters applauded and some of the Latin American trade ministers smirked, Mr. Zoellick looked very sour, at what was only the beginning of a very uncomfortable meeting for him. To add insult to injury, that night the Ecuadorian TV news stations showed Mr. Zoellick being told off by a fellow American in front of 33 fellow trade ministers.
The next treat for Mr. Zoellick was a speech by parliamentarians from 11 countries, ranging from Canada to Bolivia, in which they called on their respective governments to "reject the FTAA and recall their negotiators at once." While the speech was being read, three congress people actually stood in front of Mr. Zoellick with placards reading "No al ALCA" (No to the FTAA).
A short time later, Mr. Iza, the president of the CONIAE, addressed the ministers. He began by saying, "Señores, I wish to say to you, not to offend, but only to speak the truth, that you cannot understand how the poor live in the Americas, because you were born in golden cribs." He then went one to humbly and movingly lay out exactly why the FTAA would mean "death to the indigenous peoples' of the Americas."
This was followed by the powerful reading of protesters declaration, by Nicaraguan farm worker leader Maria Elena Siquiera. She began by saying "this is not a consultation or a dialog, this is a statement of implacable opposition to the FTAA by all the peoples' of the Americas." The declaration warned that "if you don't listen to our voices and those of millions more across the continent, you will be responsible for putting the very future of the Americas at risk." She concluded by shouting, "Yes to Life! No the FTAA! Another America is Possible!!!"
At that point the ministers expected the delegation to stay for a photo opportunity with them, so they could claim they had "dialoged" with the protesters. But the protesters stood up with the final words of Ms. Siquiera and walked out, leaving the ministers looking like idiots in front of the dozens of news reporters filling the back of the room. Mr. Zoellick was not to be spared his final indignities, either, as Mr. Rosset said to him, in a voice that all could hear, "You know as well as I do that all opinion polls show Americans want no more free trade agreements, and you should be ashamed to go against the wishes of your own people."
Shouts of "shame on you!" came from the protesters. Even some journalists yelled "sell out!" while others said that Mr. Zoellick should be ashamed he doesn't speak Spanish. The whole meeting was translated for him via earphones. A protester spoke to the Latin American ministers, saying "have you no self-respect, that you accept the imposition of this guy who can't even speak our language?" All the media cameras immediately zoomed over to record the miserable expression on Mr. Zoellick's face, as several Lain American ministers tried to hide their smiles and chuckles behind their fists.
"After today's Seattle-like protests," concluded Mr. Rosset, "the U.S. government and the transnational corporations can never again claim that opposition to free trade comes only from a small group of northern environmentalists. It is abundantly clear that people from all walks of life, across all of Latin America, do not want anything to do with the FTAA, the World Trade Organization or any other manifestation of trade liberalization."
This morning the Ecuadorian papers reported on the protests and on the meeting with the ministers. They also noted that this weeks negotiations on agriculture within the FTAA had broken down over the Latin American governments' perception that the recent U.S. Farm Bill, which ups subsidies to corporate farmers, was a major breach of good faith. All in all, then, this was a very good few days for opponents of corporate globalization and trade liberalization.
For more information:
http://www.foodfirst.org/progs/global/trad...
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Nature and Politics
Rumble from the Jungle
Ecuadorian Farmers Fight DynCorp's Chemwar on the Amazon
By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn
"Imagine that scene for a moment--you are an Ecuadorian farmer, and suddenly, without notice or warning, a large helicopter approaches, and the frightening noise of the chopper blades invades the quiet. The helicopter comes closer, and sprays a toxic poison on you, your children, your livestock and your food crops. You see your children get sick, your crops die." These are the words of Bishop Jesse de Witt, president of the International Labor Rights Fund, in a letter to Paul V. Lombardi, CEO of DynCorp.
DeWitt's organization has filed suit in US federal court on behalf of 10,000 Ecuadorian peasant farmers and Amazonian Indians charging Lombardi's company with torture, infanticide and wrongful death for its role in the aerial spraying of highly toxic pesticides in the Amazonian jungle, along the border of Ecuador and Colombia. DynCorp's chances of squirming out the suit were dealt a crushing blow in January when federal judge Richard Roberts denied the company's motion to dismiss the case on grounds that their work in Colombia involved matters of national security.
DynCorp, the Reston, Virginia-based all-purpose defense contractor, is rapidly acquiring the kind of reputation for global villainy and malfeasance that used to be Bechtel's calling card in the 60s and 70s. As we reported a few weeks ago, DynCorp has been hit with a RICO suit by a former employee alleging that the company fired him after he reported improprieties by company supervisors in Bosnia to the Army CID. According to the lawsuit, those improprieties included "coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased."
The very origins of the company are somewhat murky. President Harry Truman established DynCorp shortly after the end of World War II, supposedly to provide jobs for veterans and to market surplus military equipment. Certainly, DynCorp has never severed its umbilical relationship to the federal government. The billion-dollar company enjoys contracts with the CIA, Pentagon, State Department, EPA, IRS and DEA. It trains "police forces" in some of the US's most brutal client states, including El Salvador, Panama, Haiti and Bosnia. Many of its top employees were recruited from the Pentagon, the CIA or and State Department. Indeed theories are rife across Latin America, in particular, that DynCorp has always functioned as a cut-out for Pentagon and CIA covert operations.
As Ken Silverstein reports in a profile of DynCorp in his excellent book Private Warriors, beginning in the early 1990s the company went into Latin America big time, often working under State Department contracts. Usually, the pretext was the drug war. But, as is so often the case, the real objective seemed to be a kind of privatized counter-insurgency operation against rebel groups. In Peru, for example, DynCorp was awarded a contract to provide maintenance services on a fleet of helicopters the State Department had loaned to Peruvian anti-drug forces.
But in 1992, one of those helicopters crashed in the jungle. On board were three DynCorp employees, including a man named Robert Hitchman. As Silverstein notes, "Hitchman was not in Peru to repair helicopters". He was a covert-ops specialist, who had worked for the CIA's Air America in the war on Laos and ran former CIA agent Edward Wilson's Libyan operation for Muammar Qaddafy. The State Department said that the plane simply crashed due to "crew fatigue". But Hitchman's son told Silverstein that in fact the plane had been shot down by Shining Path guerillas and that then-Secretary of State James Baker asked him to keep quiet about the true nature of his father's death. Hitchman said that far from fixing planes, his father was flying DEA agents and Peruvians on missions into guerrilla territory to destroy cocaine labs, bomb coca and coordinate the herbicide spraying program. He said his father was also training Peruvian pilots to fly combat missions.
The Peruvian operation turned out to be a kind of test run for DynCorp's much bigger role in Colombia, where DynCorp employees not only fly fumigation planes, but train Colombian soldiers and police to do battle with the FARC and other insurgent groups.
"It's very handy to have an outfit not part of the U.S. armed forces," former US ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette, told the St. Petersburg Times, in December 2000. "Obviously, if somebody gets killed or whatever, you can say it's not a member of the armed forces. Nobody wants to see American military men killed."
Under Plan Colombia, DynCorp was awarded a $600 million contract to fumigate coca fields across Colombia. As of January of this year, the corporation's crop dusters had sprayed more than 14 percent of the entire land area of Colombia.
The suit brought on behalf of the Ecuadorian farmers and tribes is based on an investigation by Acción Ecológica of pesticide drift from DynCorp's Colombian spraying operations. The study found that DynCorp had been using a souped-up version of Monsanto's Round-Up herbicide, called Round-Up Ultra. The effects of Round-Up Ultra are not that much different from Agent Orange, the defoliant used to such malign effect by the US in Southeast Asia. It is an indiscriminate killer, poisoning not only cocoa fields by vegetable crops, wildlife, forests, waterways and people.
"These fumigations are contaminating the Amazon, destroying the forest and killing our people," says Emperatriz Cahuache, president of the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon.
The primary toxin in Round-Up is glyphosate. Both the State Department and DynCorp have said that this is a relatively harmless concoction. But Monsanto itself warns that it should not be used near humans or water sources. But the toxic punch of the herbicides that DynCorp has been using has been amplified by the addition of surfactants. These additives increase the plant killing power of the fumigations and also its lethality to humans.
The Acción Ecológica study uncovered significant pesticide drift in the Sucumbîos region of Ecuador, a patchwork of Amazonian forests and villages populated by the Quechua subsistence farmers. It concluded that the spraying had caused "harm to the health and crops of 100 percent of the population within five kilometers of the border with Colombia." More than 1,100 cases of illness have been documented, including the deaths of at least two children.
Again DynCorp and the State Department appear to have flouted Monsanto's own guidelines. In order to minimize pesticide drift, Monsanto advises that aerial spraying not be done any higher than three meters from the tops of the tallest plants. But in Colombia, DynCorp's planes routinely fly as high as 15 meters above the vegetation, greatly expanding the drift of the poison.
The lead lawyer for the Indians is Cristobal Bonifaz, an Amherst, Massachusetts attorney. Bonifaz used the Alien Tort Claims Act to sue Texaco in 1993 on behalf of another group of Ecuadorian tribes whose land had been despoiled by the oil company's rampages in the rainforest. The DynCorp spraying has contaminated roughly the same area.
"It is a tragedy of major proportions that, in the same region where Texaco devastated the environment and caused untold suffering to the people of the rainforest, a new enemy now comes from the air, poisoning the people, killing their crops and destroying their land," says Bonifaz.
In addition to the Alien Tort Claim, Bonifaz's complaint against DynCorp also charges that the company violated the US Torture Victim Protection Act. It seeks an immediate halt to the spraying and millions in compensatory damages.
The lawsuit had the misfortune to be filed on September 11. While it has largely been ignored by the US press, it did not escape the attention of DynCorp's CEO. Indeed, Lombardi seemed to take a personal interest in the case and took it upon himself to try to bully one of the plaintiffs, the International Human Rights Fund, into pulling out.
On October 25, 2001, Lombardi fired off a letter to each board member of the International Labor Rights Fund, an AFL-CIO affiliated group. Lombardi suggested that the Rights Fund was being used as a front for the Colombian drug cartels. "Considering the worldwide support for the elimination of harmful drugs from our cities and schools, it has been suggested by those who are aware of the lawsuit that the most logical supporters of such an action would be the drug cartels themselves. Notably, consistent with the drug cartel's objectives, the complaint also seeks to permanently enjoin further spraying of coca and opium poppy," Lombardi wrote.
Lombardi didn't stop there. He went on to suggest the in the post-September 11 world the Rights Fund's lawsuit was unpatriotic and might serve to undermine the war on terrorism. "Considering the major international issues with which we are all dealing as a consequence of September 11, none of us need to be sidetracked with frivolous litigation the aim of which is to fulfill a political agenda."
But the Rights Fund didn't back down. Indeed, its chairman, Bishop DeWitt, responded by telling Lombardi that if he didn't stop these strong-arm tactics they would amend the complaint and "charge you personally with knowingly conducting aerial attacks on innocent people".
Here's hoping that one federal judge and 10,000 Ecuadoran Indians can achieve what the Democrats in congress have failed to do: halt the US's chemical war on the Amazon.
On Monday, the 8th of November 2002, you interviewed Peter Rosset of Food
First on your radio program, CounterSpin. Sadly, Rosset's account
contained factual errors, and misleading language. Firstly, there is no
doubt that mainstream media coverage of the protests in Quito were sparse
at best (compare it to Venezuela, for instance).
I traveled to Ecuador in October to cover the first round of the
presidential elections plus the meetings and protests surrounding the Free
Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). During the course of producing a
report on the FTAA protests, I received an unexpected message from my
editor, Kata Mester, the interim producer of Free Speech Radio News,
saying that delegates (plural) who were in Quito reported to her that the
police joined the protest and let 65 protesters into the FTAA ministerial
requiring the government to call out the military.
I was very confused.
When she sent me the source, it was one person and a delegate only in the
loosest sense; it was written by Peter Rosset of Food First; "Police Rebel
and Anti-Free Trade Protests in Quito End on Positive
Note":
http://www.foodfirst.org/progs/global/trade/quito2002/2002-11-01-update.php
I searched for information to confirm Rosset's account for I had heard
nothing, nor had I read nothing quite like it. Rosset's article was the
only source I could find, and the only place it appeared on Indymedia was
on the San Francisco Bay website. I had already read a first hand account
of the protest inside the ministerial by Justin Ruben, which appeared on
ZNet:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=2573
Justin's account said nothing about rebelling, nor the military, and it
did give a different answer: "Clearly hoping to avoid the kind of
confrontations that have occurred in past uprisings here, the government
allowed 40 people from across the hemisphere to come in and meet with the
ministers." In fact, Justin's account explains an odd inconsistency in
Rosset's account. Rosset says the police rebelled but then he gives
details of the negotiation process between the protesters and government:
"the government extracted a reluctant offer from the ministers to receive
a delegation composed of two representatives of the protesters." Who let
them in? The government or the police?
So, I did some fact checking, visiting the very people who negotiated with
the government, who Justin had been working with for weeks on the Enlace
media project. When I asked Doris Trujillo, of CONFEUNASSC-CNC about the
account, she was a little annoyed with the idea that police had let them
into the ministerial. According to Doris Trujillo, days before the
protests the Ecuadorian government invited a few people to address
them--thinking that letting a few people in would prevent the whole
protest from inviting themselves. The organizers said no . . . and
several iterations later they agreed on 50 people (and perhaps 65 or so
made it in, maybe even with police carelessness or intention, I also know
of several people able to simply walk through police lines). The
government hoped for a face saving dialogue, but instead the protests
organizers planned to protest inside without a dialogue.
But there are other problems with Rosset's article that made me and some
of my colleagues in Ecuador suspicious of the content:
1) He refers to himself in the third person;
2) the account of heavy arms is over stated, a police officer in urban
camouflage with a machine gun is a common site on a normal day in Quito; I
was actually surprised to see such little police protection; he uses
inconsistant terms: "police platoon," "security forces," "special forces
soldiers" with relief from the "army" but nothing specific or capitalized,
like the "National Police."
3) Police violence did not "rock" anything, well, they threw rocks, but
sadly this level of police violence is a common occurance (according to
IMC journalists who live in Ecuador);
4) a sentence in the report is actually a quote, word for word, of someone
else who was there;
5) He uses "American" for US citizens, a term offensive to Latin
Americans; and
6) the account was only available in English.
In the Food first email alert, here is the headline: "Police join
protesters at Quito FTAA negotiations, forcing an unprecedented meeting
between protesters and trade delegates." Incidently, this type of meeting
is not unprecedented. At most major trade meetings and economic summit,
the organizers of the meeting usually try some sort of meeting with "civil
society" often under very controlled conditions (like Prague); and in
Qatar last year Robert Zoelllick saw very similar protests inside the WTO
ministerial in Qatar because the monarch legalized peaceful protests
inside the meeting for anyone who was accredited (also about 50 people per
protest). Having covered protests or meetings from Prague, to Calgary, to
Qatar, to Mexico City, my experience made me suspicious of the Food First
article.
Despite recognizing many of these problems when Kata Mester first sent the
article to me, she still wanted to air the report. I felt that using an
unconfirmed report on such two critical issues, rebellion and who let
protesters inside, would be a breach of my personal dignity and ethics.
As the reporter with the byline for the story, I bear the primary
responsibility for any false or misleading reporting. Therefore, I
withdrew my byline. And Kata Mester forced my colleague, new to radio
reporting, Nathan Gove, to include an interview with Peter Rosset. She
put the story on hold until the story included Rosset's account, airing
the story about a week late. I was, until this event, a member of the
FSRN steering committeein a nominaly reporter-run organization. With this sort of
use of power
by the editor, who now holds responsibility for the content?
http://www.fsrn.org/news/20021112_news.html
FAIR did not have a reporter on the ground in Quito the way Free Speech
Radio News did. But FAIR could have checked Rosset's account with other
sources. Even so, by itself the account is vague, says nothing specific
about sources, and lacks details about the physical things police did in
order to "rebel." This should have made FAIR cautious.
The irony is that when leaders of NGOs publish information like this, it
actually discourages the mainstream media from trusting NGOs and activists
as sources of information; and it gives them a specific reason to ignore
protests like this, when in reality, many activists and NGO
representatives are quite accurate. Thus, Peter Rosset was contributing
to the bad coverage he disparaged on CounterSpin. Because of the context
of distrust and bias against social movements in the mainstream media,
activists need to be more accurate than their corporate counterparts and
better communicators--truth is their best weapon (as for anyone).
Peter Rosset via Kata Mester says he has audio proof of his account. I
would like to see it. With such an important "underreported" story,
Rosset has a public duty, anyway, to publish the documentation
(ecuador.indymedia.org is an ideal location for it). Police rebelling
against the system makes for a great story, but it makes for unethical
journalism when it is also not true.
Now that I have told you my story, I hope that you investigate this for
yourself. Here is some contact information to help you start: Cristina
Chimarro (cristinachimarro [at] hotmail.com, cristina_chimarro [at] yahoo.com) of
CONFEUNASSC, Amy Taxin of Reuters, or writer Justin Ruben
(swampjew [at] yahoo.com).
abrazos,
Thatcher Collins
writing from Somerville, Massachusetts and Quito, Ecuador
http://www.fair.org/counterspin/mp3.html
http://www.webactive.com/cspin/cspinarch.html
--starts at 17:00
--problems start at minute 21:30, and especially 23:20.
CC: FSRN Steering Committee (steeringcom [at] fsrn.org)
Food First (foodfirst [at] foodfirst.org)
Peter Rosset (rosset [at] foodfirst.org)
Nathan Gove (gove [at] nature.berkeley.edu)
Michael Albert (sysop [at] zmag.org)
Sheri Herndon (sheri [at] indymedia.org)
National Writers Union (nwu [at] nwu.org)
Institute for Public Accuracy (institute [at] igc.org)
Websites that link to the Food First article:
CC: Eric Squire (ftaa-alert [at] angelfire.com)
IMC SFBay (imc-sf-editorial [at] lists.indymedia.org)
nadir.org (nadir-links [at] mail.nadir.org)
che-lives.com (info [at] ikonboard.com)
NoLogo (Admin [at] NoLogo.org)
CorpWatch (corpwatch [at] corpwatch.org)
WTOWatch -- Institute for Agricultural & Trade Policy (iatp [at] iatp.org)
dh-rezo.org (dh-rezo [at] dh-rezo.org)
kwsnet.com (smithk [at] dnai.com)
drs.org (info [at] drs.org)
thismeanswar.net (devnull [at] thismeanswar.net)
-------------------------------------------------
Dear Mr. Collins:
This is the most scurillious-feeling public attack I have ever been subject
to, surpassing those written by the biotechnology industry. I do not know
who you are, but you have upset me very, very much.
Any reporting of on-the-ground, hectic events, is by its very nature
subjective. That notwithstanding, we stand by the orginal version as
published by Food First. In your public email you misinterpret -- or
intentionally distort, I do not know which -- many, many things we
published. I am on the road now, at a cybercafe in Havana, so I cannot go
through your missive line by line. But I give one example of something
straightforward that you make seem like we made it up, or seem like
something that is too wacked out to believe: what Food First said is that
some police rebelled, and that those individual police officers joined
protest leaders in phoning the government, urging that the protestors be
allowed to meet with the ministers. We posted a photo of those police
officers marching together with protestors. I and others stood by and
listened as they spoke on their cell phones to the government. To me there
is really no doubt, as long as you understand that we were saying that
*some* police broke ranks and joined protestors in pressuring the
government. Justin´s published account in no way contradicts what we said,
though he does not mention it, as I presume he did not witness what
happened, which took place in one small spot in what was a very spatially
dispersed and long protest. In this light, I have no idea what you mean by
statements like:
"Who let them in? The government or the police?"
What happened is that protestors -- at least at one point aided on the
phone by the police we refer to -- negotiated from a position of relative
strength with the government, who in turn negotiated with the ministers, so
that finally the 65 protestors were let in. The police (I'm sure they were
different individuals from the ones who rebelled) and soldiers then opened
the barricades -- at the government's instructions, one would presume --
and escorted the protestors in. So what does your question mean?
Do your other concerns, like using the word "American," or whether or not
Food First, for our own reasons, might decide to publish news stories in
the first or third person, or might not have the funds to translate all our
work into Spanish, really merit a public attack like this? Wouldn´t it be
more sensible to write us an email to say, "would it be possible to use US
instead of American?," or, "I would really like to see first person
reporting on your website," or better yet, "can I help you raise money for
translating?"!!!
I could go on, but I think that what is important is not a subjective
recounting of fluid incidents, or a point-by-point rebuttal of your
accusations, but rather that you chose to attack me, and Food First,
publically, rather than consulting or interviewing me first, IN PRIVATE or
BY EMAIL, or by communicating IN PRIVATE to your editors. Or is it perhaps
that you wish to slam your editors in public as well?
What you did is highly unprofessional and insulting, and frankly I feel
attacked by someone I do not know. How could you possibly send something
like that out? What were you thinking? Why did you do it?
Please do not ever do something like this to anyone or any organization
again.
Thank you,
Peter Rosset
I'm not attacking you. I am critisizing your report, and not for
subjectivity, but rather for ambiguity.
Even if everything you said was exactly correct, it still deserves a much
better rendering that gives it the attention it would therefore deserve.
So please, publish your documentation, or fill in the details (as you have
begun to do in your last letter).
In fact, more issues, somewhat related and more serious, exist.
They revolve around North-South relations within the global economic
justice movement, and the relationship between NGOs and the communities
they serve or represent. The criticisms one doesn't read in a
scurillious-feeling-public-attack are much more upsetting. I may be brash
and out-of-line, but it's better to hear these things from me than to have
these issues undermining your very important work at Food First . . .
and the work of others.
Why am I making this public? Because elites fight or dialogue behind
closed doors, and communities discuss issues out in the open, or within
their community or context. I think a discussion about how information
gets filtered from South to North is very important, and deserves to be
public.
I may be wrong but I am not alone. Except, I feel the need to act now,
before something truly insulting happens.
yours,
Thatcher