Things Go South in Miami

Things Go South in Miami

I don’t know exactly how one would define the term “police state,” simply because I don’t know of any modern state that does not rely in part on police violence and intimidation to maintain control. I do know that from the moment I set foot in Miami to the moment I caught my ride out of town, I was being watched by cops. Cops cruising by every gas station we stopped at after crossing the Florida border; cops dressed as protestors filming us at the Welcome Center; cops in helicopters watching day and night with spotlights and infrared sensors; cops hanging out at the bus station, the train station, on overpasses, and every street corner downtown. Cops in patrol cars staking out our campsite all night. “If I never see another cop again in my whole life,” sighed a friend, “it’ll be too soon.” Granted, such a sentiment would be appropos to any occasion, but in Miami, the two and a half thousand riot cops and four thousand other agents of Law and Order made themselves so omnipresent they became part of the climate. Welcome to the Tropic of Cancer.

I came to Miami hoping to see anti-capitalist resistance in the U.S. rebounded from its recent docility, and bolstered by a new generation of anti-war activists galvanized by the realization that their democracy doesn’t give a shit how many protestors take to the streets. I left Miami awash in conflicting emotions, happy that people fought back, but brutalized along with everyone else by the massive police repression.

Between all the things I saw, and all the things my friends saw, I don’t know where to begin. There were police everywhere, in cars, on foot, on horses, bicycles, motorcycles, and in the three to seven helicopters maintaining a constant presence overhead. They were never far away from the unpermitted marches that began Thursday morning, and they herded us towards the “Green Zone,” which was intended as a permitted place of assembly, free of confrontational tactics, so as to remain safe for those who could not risk arrest or brutality. Obviously, they wanted to strain the groundbreaking alliance between the mainstream labor unions and the more radical groups involved in the demonstration. So far as I know, they were unsuccessful, and had no alibi when they attacked the Green Zone later in the day.

When one group of direct actionists made it to the fence just outside the Green Zone and started tearing it down, police tossed two concussion grenades into the crowd and started firing tear gas. Some demonstrators tossed the gas canisters back at police. Clearly threatened by the independence of that concept known as Reality, the corporate media later explained that it was the protestors who gassed the cops, even as they played the footage that clearly showed the gas canisters being fired by police in a Public Relations maneuver plainly reliant on viewers to exercise the necessary dose of doublethink.

Police in Miami had a full arsenal of less-lethal weaponry, and as Thursday wore on, they began using just about every toy they had. Many people were pepper-sprayed in the face, and police arrested or interfered with medics treating pepper-spray victims. Police also raided a first aid center set up by activists on Miami Avenue. A number of protestors were bruised and bloodied by rubber bullets—some were shot several times in the back as they fled from advancing police. Other protesters were attacked with tazers, and some had to flee for their lives as cop cars drove through a crowd of demonstrators at high speeds. One activist filming scenes of police brutality was approached by a masked undercover cop, who pulled a gun in his face and stole his camera. Another person asked police: “Why are you doing this???” “Because we can,” responded a cop. And he was right. Their badges were removed, their name tags covered over. The police had no accountability, and the full support of the media and the political establishment.

One of my friends was in a group of people being herded by bike cops. When the group had been pushed onto a side street out of the public eye, the cops all ditched their bikes and waded into the crowd, beating people with batons. Another friend was in an affinity group with someone who saw undercover cops, dressed and masked like protestors, pull up short in an unmarked SUV, jump out, and start beating two random activists, whom they pulled into the car and drove away with. She started running when the beating started, and still choked up with tears when telling the story three days later. According to several accounts, the police used this particularly traumatizing sort of random, out-of-nowhere assault, and I personally almost got arrested during one such swoop. Protestors lucky enough to be arrested by uniformed officers using marked vehicles were handcuffed and put into white prisoner vans, inside draconian metal lockboxes within the vans that looked like they were inspired by some dystopian science fiction movie.

What scared many people is that the police were using these tactics against anyone and everyone, from students to seventy year old unionists, the peaceful and combatative alike. What scared me is that we had essentially military troops suppressing a demonstration. While most of hired thugs that day were officially employees of various police departments, they had military Armored Personnel Carriers (tanks without the big artillery piece), helicopters, and some of the cops toted MP5 submachine guns, or assault rifles with sniper scopes. And in every case I saw, these lethally armed deputies were not at the front of a police line, where they would be if their purpose were pyschological intimidation, but skulking in the back, as though someone in charge thought their weaponry might actually be useful.

But despite it all, we stayed in the streets. Many of those who retired to the Welcome Center after the dissolution of the morning march ran back downtown when the news came in that a group of protestors were closed in and being gassed by police on Biscayne Boulevard. In the early afternoon, the police line had advanced to within a block south of the Wellness Center, where the injured were being given first aid. Unfortunately, demonstrators did not begin holding back the cops soon enough, and that close to the Wellness Center, they had to avoid a fight; so when the cops pointed their tear gas guns at face level at the crowd from twenty feet away (they would have killed some people for sure if they had fired then), the crowd fell back. We were eventually pushed into an impoverished, predominantly black neighbourhood, where cops expressly hoped the activists would be mugged or assaulted. A lot of the demonstrators left piles of rubble in the street, pointlessly building barricades they didn’t even defend, and a few locals expressed disgust with the demonstrators’ lack of respect for their communities, but overall the interaction between protestors and locals was one of solidarity, contrary to police hopes. Locals flashed the peace sign, or a raised, clenched fist to the fugitive marchers, and some struck up Civil Rights-era protest songs. And no small number of fleeing protestors were harboured or assisted by local residents, who vocally condemned the cops’ brutality, which they lived under every day.

When the roar of the helicopters died down, many of us asked why Miami was different from New York City, or DC, or any other demonstration in which marchers were herded, corralled, and penned in by a veritable Iron Maiden of cops, strong-arming everyone into obedience, and winning recognition in the morning’s papers for protecting the peace.

I believe that Power will never be happy with any victory short of absolute control, because in the game of domination, every conquest extends the boundaries and brings the next set of enemies that much closer. The people who benefit from the Free Trade Area of the Americas, or from G8 summits, are already filthy rich, and they already rule the world. But it is not enough. When police in New York throng every street and determine the character and outcome of the demonstration through sheer force, in a sense they have triumphed, but they still lack total control. They need to extend control to the next level: they need to colonize our minds. Just as governments that call themselves democratic allow their subjects to voluntarily affirm their oppressors, police would prefer people who choose to be obedient over people who must be forced into obedience.

With 2,500 riot police, $8.5 million from the Iraq reconstruction bill, and cart blanche from a compliant media and exhortative political establishment to do whatever nasty shit he wanted, Police Chief Timoney could easily have surrounded the unpermitted marches and direct action convergence zones with a layer of pork so thick no one would have dared throw a rock or bust out the spray paint, and certainly no one would have gotten to the security fence, much less to the Intercontinental Hotel. But Timoney didn’t do that. The unpermitted march was allowed to roam over much of the city, and even reach the fence at one point.

No, instead, people who looked like radicals were harassed and arrested starting weeks prior to the mobilization. Activists driving into town were pulled over and ticketed before even reaching Miami. Around town, patently obvious undercovers drove by in SUVs filming us. On Wednesday night, helicopters hovered over the Welcome Center with their spotlights sweeping over us. Phalanxes of militarized goons from unknown departments flexed their muscles and showed off their toys of torture. Cops on overpasses and under bridges jeered and threatened, but let us pass. The cops relinquished several opportunities to arrest us en masse and keep us off the streets, and most of those arrested before Thursday were quickly released. The cops did not want to force us off the streets. They wanted us to be on the streets, but too crushed and afraid to do anything. They wanted us to police ourselves.

And I reluctantly admit that to an extent, they succeeded. The unpermitted march from the Welcome Center, masked up and fierce, headed for the fence, but forestalled conflict by futilely trying to outmaneuver lines of cops rather than breaking through them. Later in the day people carried out the gesture of building barricades out of rubble, police barriers, and burning dumpsters, but didn’t even linger in their retreat from advancing riot cops, who only had to brandish tear gas guns to cause a near-panicked rout. We were in the streets, fighting for what we knew was right, yet desperately looking for an escape—and understandably so, because the authorities had made terrorizing us their purpose in life for those weeks in November, and nobody does terrorism like Uncle Sam. Miami was the outcome of a concerted police campaign to break our will to resist, then give us small opportunities to take a stand, to see whether we had been cowed. The enforced acquiescance of previous anti-capitalist protests was not enough. The authorities were battling against our very hopes and passions. They wanted us to despair.

On Thursday night, with reports of cops swooping down KGB-style and nabbing smaller groups of protestors off the streets, I found myself running and hiding from a gang of gun-toting thugs known as “the police,” who would surely arrest, and possibly torture me if they caught me, simply because of what I believed. The fact that we were fugitives was so plain that some bystanders offered to hide me or give me some of their clothes so I could pass for a local. It was a curious experience, and one I would recommend to anyone suffering from chronic liberalism. I had not done anything that traditionally would be described as “illegal,” but there I was, cutting through abandoned lots, hiding in bushes, keeping eyes peeled for cops (plainclothes, dressed like other protestors, or in uniform), crawling around on my belly, ducking against a wall when helicopter spotlights swept over, and finally making my way up a tree to avoid detection.

I stayed in the tree until things seemed a little calmed down, painfully aware that I was waiting out the worst of the crackdown while the Beast was dulling its teeth and sating its appetite on my friends and companeros out in the streets. Hours passed, my water bottle was bottoming out, and the fury of the authorities continued, determined perhaps to keep us in hiding all night. Downtown, ranks of riot cops marched in their formations. Mounted cops rode on patrol. (What do you call a posse of white men with weapons and masks riding around on horses?) Convoys of police cruisers and prisoner vans sped to and fro along the highways. Helicopters stomped overhead, each thrash of the rotor like a boot in my face. I knew the foliage would protect me from the helicopters’ searchlights, and I only hoped that to their infrared scanners, radicals looked like everyone else.

The helicopter sound was interminable, but as the twilight waned and the night unfolded, the wind in the leaves whispered all the louder. My sheltering tree stretched and pronounced itself. It was a subtropical breed unknown to me, with waxy leaves and wispy dreadlocks hanging from the smooth branches, which grew together and apart acephalously, like blood veins or ant tunnels. It must have been two hundred years old. In the way of one whose mind wanders when he doesn’t want to focus on an enveloping and frightening reality, I focused on this tree, and the wind blowing through its leaves. It was somehow timeless, both ancient and nascent, flexible and still, changing so as to always remain the same. As the helicopters guzzled tank after tank of fuel to whip up their pitiful wind and maintain a menacing perch, I knew that some things would outlast all their edifices, weapons, and systems of control. When I was calm enough to be able to evade the cops again, to slip past all their gadgets and barriers with my own simple abilities, I climbed down and stole back into the turbulent night.

In the end, over 250 people were arrested, over 100 injured, and 12 hospitalized. We soon started hearing reports of protestors, particularly people of color and transgender folks, being tortured and sexually assaulted in jail. Two activists of color were put in a cage and pepper-sprayed while in police custody, and a latino man was beaten on the head with a night stick, and hospitalized with possible brain damage. When activists peacefully protested outside the jail the next day, the police ordered them to disperse, and even as they did so charged, beating and arresting several dozen. The law enforcement of numerous cities sent observers to learn from the police tactics, and the Mayor of Miami called the police strategy a “model,” and praised it highly.

Let there be no doubt after Miami that the nebulous class of plutocrats and their cronies will not tolerate a peaceful resolution to the conflict that pits them against the rest of the world. In the absence of resistance they will extend their control to assimilate every last bubble of autonomy and independence, from pre-capitalist pockets of the globe to the deepest recesses of our hearts and minds. And if we put up a fight, they will not hesitate to beat us, bomb us, brutalize us, and exercise whatever kind of violence or strangulation they deem expedient. But also let there be no doubt that it is worth it. When the rubble of their world is the fertilizer in our gardens, we will know: it was worth it.