The battle after Seattle

About 2,500 police officers had shown up in downtown Miami, hailing from more than forty local, state, and federal agencies. With their black helmets, chest armor, and body shields, they looked like twenty-first-century Roman legionnaires, staring down the barbarian hordes from beneath their polycarbonate visors. Their adversaries were some 15,000 strong: protesters, mostly labor union members, with smatterings of dreadlocked anarchists, backpack-toting students, and gray-haired retirees, who had come to Miami to demonstrate during the week’s negotiations over a hemisphere-wide trade pact known as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). As activists ended their protest march on that sunny Thursday afternoon, police began their own. Slowly but relentlessly, they pushed the crowd back with wooden batons, firing rubber bullets and drenching the crowds in pepper spray as they advanced. A police spokesperson said the melee — what seemed more like a rout — started with a few protesters hurling rocks. By the end of the next day, 231 people had been arrested, and dozens injured, including a handful of police officers.

Two months earlier, at the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) summit in Cancún, Mexico, there were thousands of police as well, though they did not march, nor fire any bullets. They did not have to. Eight-foot-tall chain-link fences had been erected all along the road leading into the Mexican resort town’s “hotel zone,” where trade ministers from around the globe were meeting. The protesters, their placards, and their puppets stayed on one side; the riot cops stayed on the other. Activists ripped down the first security perimeter on two occasions that week, but for the most part the crowd of several thousand was kept where police wanted them — miles away from the trade negotiations.

Four years after the landmark protests in Seattle that shut down a WTO ministerial meeting and landed the “anti-globalization” movement on the map, activism against free trade and corporate power has not gotten any easier. Authorities have responded to the mass mobilizations at every international summit by moving their events to far-off locales, where social movements are weak and trucking in large numbers of activists is next to impossible. Police have learned from the failures of Seattle, cordoning off key city blocks in advance and using a combination of tall fences and non-lethal firepower to keep protesters in line. And though last year’s demonstrations against the Iraq War helped bring back the nation’s taste for popular protest, American activists in the past two years have had to deal with an unfavorable political climate ever since September 11, when pundits started likening anti-globalization to terrorism and anti-Americanism.

“There’s a lot of reasons we got lucky in Seattle,” says Gan Golan, a Boston-based activist who participated in the so-called “Battle in Seattle” and spent last summer helping organize the anti-WTO protests in Cancún. “We’re seeing incredible advances in [police] tactics. They’re learning their lessons, and we’re learning ours.”

While it’s likely Golan and his friends will never shut down another WTO ministerial again, there are signs that their movement is adapting to new realities. One difference is in the ways activists now identify themselves. Rejecting the “anti-globalization” label that critics foisted on them four years ago, many have settled on a more proactive name for their work: “global justice.” They have broadened both their ranks and issues to widen appeal. And they have made strides in addressing the question that has vexed them in newspaper editorial columns for years: What does their movement stand for? “I think what you see here,” says Walden Bello, director of the Focus on the Global South, “is what The New York Times said: There are only two global superpowers at this point — one is the United States, and the other is global civil society.”

Rather than offering a single solution, global justice activists have staked their movement’s future on the two things that critics have continually called its “weaknesses”: the “incoherent” diversity of its membership, and its “ineffective” style of democratic organizing. “I think now the politics is one of, ‘Diversity is healthy,’” says David Solnit, an activist from Oakland, California. Solnit quotes a saying of the Zapatistas, the Mexican indigenous rights movement: “One no, many yeses.” “We all have a similar enemy, but we all create an alternative ourselves in a thousand different ways,” he says. That means not just diverse agendas, but diverse tactics; not just demanding more accountability from political leaders, but achieving a radically democratic way of life. “The globalization from above is corporate capitalism and people who want to control the world,” Solnit says. “From below, it’s those of us who want to reorganize society and empower people and restructure the world.” At the World Social Forum, the annual gathering of activists and intellectuals dedicated to global justice, that spirit has its own slogan: “Another world is possible.”

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