Reprint of Village Voice piece on brad Will

http://villagevoice.com/news/0646,ferguson,75024,2.html
The Inconvenient Death of Brad Will
Mexican police gun down a counterculture hero
by Sarah Ferguson
November 14th, 2006 11:51 AM

The last time I saw independent journalist and activist Brad
Will was in September in an East Village yoga studio. I
turned my head and found him lying on the mat next to me in
the darkened room, his pale, flat stomach rising and falling
serenely with the rhythm of his breathing. So on October 27,
when I saw the photos posted on the Internet showing the
36-year-old Will's mortally wounded body laid out on a
street in Oaxaca, Mexico, I cringed. There was that same
pale, flat stomach now punctured by a bullet.

Around the world, activists and friends who knew Will -- and
many people who didn't -- were having the same visceral
reaction. Within hours of his shooting by plainclothes
gunmen firing on a group of striking demonstrators, images
of his murder ricocheted around the Web. There were photos
of Will's limp body being carried through the streets by
frantic demonstrators screaming for help. Equally shocking
were the pictures posted by El Universal and other Mexican
media showing his alleged killers firing brazenly into the
crowd, as if aiming at the cameras. The same gunmen who shot
Will also wounded a photographer for the Mexico City daily
Milenio, who was at Will's side.

When images of the shooters aired on Mexican TV, viewers
began phoning in to identify the gunmen. They have since
been confirmed in the media as the police chief and two
officers from Santa Lucia del Camino, the municipality where
Will was shot, along with the town councillor for the state
governing party, his chief of security, and the former head
of a neighboring barrio.

Then came the most horrifying evidence of all: Will's final
videotape, uploaded on the Web the next day. In his zeal to
capture the state-backed repression of the popular uprising
that has rocked Oaxaca for the last five months, Will
succeeded in recording his own murder.

Armed with an HD camera he had picked up on eBay, Will went
to Oaxaca to document the broad-based movement of striking
teachers, peasants, urban residents, and left-wing forces
that had seized control of government offices and taken over
the central square to demand the removal of governor Ulises
Ruiz.

But by becoming the first American journalist killed in the
unrest, Will became a pretext for Mexican president Vicente
Fox to send in 4,000 federal police officers to put down the
revolt, which Fox characterized as "radical groups, out of
control," who "had put at risk the peace of the citizenry."
Since then at least two more protesters have died in the
heavy clashes with federal police, who stormed the
barricades with tear gas and water cannons, and more than 80
demonstrators have been arrested as the federales continue
to vie for control of the city.

Looking back at the trajectory of Will's life, it's not
surprising that he would land in the center of this Mexican
standoff. Will was always drawn to global flash points where
the battle lines are drawn in stark black and white.

Over the course of his restless 36 years, he seemed to hit
every activist node: squatting in the East Village, staging
tree-sits in the Northwest with Earth First, and hopping
freight trains to anarchist gatherings. He braved tear gas
and rubber bullets during the anti-globalization battles in
Seattle, Quebec, Prague, and Genoa (where a demonstrator was
shot dead in the street by police). In 2004, I remember him
being everywhere during street protests surrounding the
Republican National Convention in New York, video camera in
hand. He reveled in these clashes, always returning with
tales of glory, folk songs about resisting the police, and
reports of the free food and fun he'd had along the way.

When the heady Seattle-style direct-action movement in the
U.S. toned down following 9-11, Will took his video camera
south, following the wave of popular uprisings in Bolivia,
Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, and finally Mexico.
Friends say he was consumed with overlooked social struggles
around the world.

"He was one of the most dedicated activists I ever worked
with," says Brooke Lehman, one of the owners of the radical
Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side, who met Will
in 1998. "You could pretty much guarantee if there was a
cause or an action, Will would be there. He felt a
tremendous responsibility to do media where other media
outlets wouldn't go, or were afraid to go."

Yet in the wake of his shooting, even his most diehard
anarchist friends are struggling to reconcile the worth of
his activism with the risks he took on the day of his death.
What propelled him to join that group of rock-throwing
demonstrators as they chased down these firing gunmen
through the outskirts of Oaxaca City? Was he incredibly
brave, or just naive? Or perhaps too high on adrenaline to
fully weigh the risks he was taking?

There had been other occasions that made people wonder --
like the time Will stood on the roof of his East Village
squat as a wrecking crane slammed into the building. Last
year he was arrested and nearly killed by military police
while trying to film the forced eviction of an urban
squatters camp in Goiânia, in central Brazil.

"Brad was one of these young activists I met coming to New
York in the early '90s who were very brave and high-minded,
and also willing to take risks and make sacrifices that kind
of startled me," says Seth Tobocman, publisher of the
radical zine World War 3 Illustrated. "He was schooled in
the Earth First[!] philosophy of putting your life on the
line. Part of the training is that these 400-year-old trees
are harder to replace than a human being. Your life is less
important than the environment you're saving."

And that philosophy, Tobocman believes, informed Will's life
to the end. "He went to shoot pictures of paramilitaries and
police shooting into a crowd of people. I don't think there
was a mistake here. He was doing what somebody should do,
and he decided that person should be him."

The youngest of four children, Will was born in Evanston,
Illinois, and grew up in Kenilworth, an affluent Chicago
suburb on Lake Michigan. Friends say his parents were fairly
conservative and didn't always understand their son's
activist lifestyle. Still, they were close.

"Brad told me his mom kept a picture of him dressed up as a
giant sunflower during one of the garden protests [in NYC]
on her coffee table. He was really happy about that," says
Dyan Neary, a former girlfriend and close friend, who first
met Will in 2001 when he was doing video tech work for the
left-leaning cable broadcast Democracy Now.

The affection of Will's family is apparent in the scores of
photos posted online by the family (at http://bradwill.org/
), which show the young Will as a shy Boy Scout, posing
proudly with sailing trophies as a young teen, beaming as a
college grad in cap and gown, and looking surprisingly
clean-shaven at his brother's graduation. There are also
pictures of him smiling during numerous family ski trips and
vacations to Hawaii, New Zealand, and Baja -- images that
suggest a world of privilege very different from the
low-rent, dumpster-diving lifestyle Will embodied in New
York City.

In an interview earlier this year with El Libertario, an
anarchist paper in Venezuela, Will bemoaned his sheltered
upbringing in a largely white and conservative town. "The
community was completely closed, my parents were on the
right, it was a struggle to open my life," he told the
newspaper. "I didn't know much about the truth of the world,
but little by little I forced my eyes open, without the help
of anyone."

Will said he started questioning the government and the
media during the first Gulf war, while he was studying
literature at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. He became
intrigued with ideas of anarchism and ecology. But his real
political awakening happened when he went to study poetry
with Allen Ginsberg and other radical artists at the Naropa
Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in 1993.

Will managed to attend classes without paying tuition. "We
basically squatted school," says Jenny Smith with a laugh.
Smith, a writer and massage therapy student from Brooklyn,
met Will at Naropa when she was 18.

"Ginsberg really loved Brad," Smith recalls. Friends say
Ginsberg gave Will several original, handwritten poems that
he brought with him to New York, later lost when the
building he was living in burned down.

Another influential professor was Peter Lamborn Wilson,
a/k/a Hakim Bey, who was then urging activists to create
"temporary autonomous zones" -- liberated spaces outside of
social norms and government control. Smith remembers one of
Will's first-ever protests: a mock gay wedding to protest
the evangelical Promise Keepers, who were holding an outdoor
luncheon at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "Brad was
the groom, Peter Lamborn Wilson was presiding, and the bride
was our friend Pasq, who was like the gayest man in all of
Colorado," she says.

"This was at a time when gay marriage wasn't even on the
cultural radar," Smith notes. Yet the heterosexual Will
bravely locked lips with Pasq long enough to shock the
Promise Keepers.

Through Wilson, Will learned about Dreamtime Village, a
radical arts commune in rural Wisconsin devoted to new
theories of permaculture and hypermedia. There, Will hooked
in to the circuit of nomadic punks, anarchists, and
"freaks," including a zine artist known as Fly, who
introduced him to the world of Lower East Side squatting.
"He was so, so young and full of wonder, he didn't even know
what a squat was," Fly recalls. Yet Will was immediately
enthralled by the idea of fixing up an abandoned building
and living rent-free.

Will arrived in New York in 1994 and stayed briefly in an
extended rent-strike building on Avenue B with artist Loyan
Beausoleil, whom he'd met at Dreamtime. Beausoleil remembers
him back then as a "really sweet, earnest guy." For years
afterward, she says, Will would spontaneously show up
outside her door to help carry wood up six flights for her
wood-burning stove. "He would just be out there at 7:30 in
the morning. I didn't even have to tell him when the
delivery was coming."

In 1995, Will moved into the East 5th Street squat, a big
hulk of a building occupied by a mostly young crew of punks,
artists, and travelers, as well as a few seasoned street
denizens. Back then the place was still raw, with little
running water, caved-in floors, and electricity cadged from
a light pole on the street. But Will fixed up an apartment
and was soon engaged in all the protests and eviction
battles going on in the neighborhood. He was there for the
birth of the Lower East Side pirate radio station, Steal
This Radio, staging clandestine broadcasts from squats
around the neighborhood to avoid detection by the FCC.

Will is probably best remembered in the neighborhood for his
heroics on his East 5th Street roof, after a fire in
February 1997 ripped through the building, prompting the
city to move immediately to tear it down. Determined to
stave off the destruction of what private engineers had told
residents was a still salvageable building, Will somehow
snuck through the lines of riot police and got back inside.
I recall him waving his arms frantically from the roof as
the wrecking crane slammed into the cornice, sending a
cascade of bricks to the street.

There's an interesting twist to the 5th Street saga: It
turned out his space heater supposedly started the fire.
Everyone hailed him as a hero for climbing up on the roof to
face down the demolition. But, in fact, he was being blamed
by the other squatters for costing them their homes.

Tobocman says Will's stunt on the roof ultimately made up
for the tragedy, because the fact that the city was knocking
down the building with a person still inside helped the
squatters win a $120,000 settlement. More importantly, it
set a precedent by establishing that squatters in city
buildings have the right to due process, that they can't
just be tossed out of their homes. That's one of the reasons
that 11 former squats were later legalized by the Bloomberg
administration.

"I almost feel like he wanted to die up there, he felt so
guilty about what happened," commented one friend, who asked
not to be named.

But others say there was no death wish in Will, just an
inordinate lack of fear.

That same summer Will hopped trains out West to take part in
forest blockades in Northern California, and later a
tree-sit in Oregon.

Afterward he came back to New York and trained activists
here in the Earth First tactics he'd learned -- whether it
was chaining themselves down in defense of community gardens
or setting up metal tripods to block traffic during Reclaim
the Streets demonstrations.

In early 2000, Will and a group of activists camped through
most of the winter in a giant frog they'd fortified with
welded "lock boxes" to defend a Puerto Rican community
garden slated for condominiums. After getting arrested
during the protests that shut down the World Trade
Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, Will got swept up
in the anti-globalization crusade, traveling to all the big
demonstrations in Prague, Quebec City, Genoa, Zurich,
Sweden, and Barcelona.

An interview he did with Fly for her book PEOPs begins: "I
was in Europe for 6 months and I was in 4 riots," then goes
on to describe a seemingly endless running battle with
police, braving tear gas, chucking cobblestones, and
lighting up flaming barricades.

By 2004, Will's mug shot was flashed on Nightline as one of
the top 50 "leading anarchists" in America, based on a
trumped-up police report released just prior to that year's
Republican National Convention. And he was good friends with
Jeffrey Luers, a/k/a "Free," the eco-activist sentenced to
23 years for torching SUVs in Oregon.

Yet looking back through Will's dogged dispatches, which
used to arrive via e-mail under a variety of pseudonyms --
"b.rad," "b.strong," or sometimes just "unknown" -- one
senses real passion and searching behind Will's frenzied
pace of living.

That seemed particularly true after 9-11, when Will began
documenting protests and social struggles in Latin America.
His former girlfriend Dyan Neary, who traveled extensively
with Will between 2002 and 2003, says his experiences in
Latin America drove him to define himself more seriously as
a journalist -- albeit a partisan one.

In Ecuador, Will helped Neary sneak a video camera into a
women's prison to make a film about all the children who
were growing up inside the jail.

Using money they collected at benefits in New York, Will and
Neary financed numerous mutual-aid projects, such as helping
set up a pirate radio station in Fortaleza, Brazil, and
helping fund a free school for poor kids in Lima, Peru.
After spending a month camping out with landless peasants in
Brazil in 2003, they even donated one of their video cameras
to them.

"For us, it was all about mutual aid," explains Neary. "We
weren't into being imperialist activists or top-down NGOs.
They didn't need us to tell them how to organize or create
community; they were already doing that themselves. We gave
people money to help give them a voice, or just to fund what
they were doing. And because we were staying with them and
learning and experiencing so much."

But by 2005, friends were beginning to wonder whether Will
was taking these experiences too far.

In February 2005, Will was nearly killed during the forced
eviction of 12,000 squatters from an urban encampment in an
abandoned industrial area of central Brazil. He was beaten
and arrested by Brazilian military police and had his camera
seized during the brutal raid, which killed at least two
people and injured scores of others.

His report of the police storming the encampment is
shockingly visceral -- written in the punctuation-free,
stream-of-consciousness style that used to infuriate his
editors at Indymedia, the left-wing alternative-media
website where he worked:

it was pandemonium -- everyone was running and screaming --
as i ran i saw them coming from my flank -- and aiming to
shoot again not more than thirty feet away -- then all hell
broke loose -- suddenly there was gas, rubber bullets,
concussion grenades on all sides -- immediately i recognized
the sound of real bullets -- i tried twice to stop and film
but only for seconds until bullets flew near by

Yet after he was released, Will was e-mailing back home
asking friends to ship him another camera so he could
document the aftermath.

"A lot of us were really concerned for his safety," recalls
Lehman. "We even had a meeting about it. We wanted him to
come home."

Neary says Will found the experience in Brazil chastening;
she says he felt only his American passport kept him from
being killed. "For the first time he realized he was not
invincible," she says.

Will came home, but he didn't slow down. He immediately
began hustling up lighting and stagehand jobs to buy a new
camera and finance more travels. "Over the past year or so,
Brad worked his ass off -- sometimes 60 hours a week or
more," recalls Brandon Jourdan, a filmmaker and former
roommate who worked with Will at Indymedia.

"Some of his friends thought he was working too much,"
recalls Jourdan. "But he was working toward a goal. He
wanted to build support for the social movements in Latin
America because he really saw the need to make connections
between what's going on there and what's happening here."

In January he traveled to the Yucatan to document the first
leg of the Zapatistas' so-called Other Campaign to challenge
Mexico's electoral system, following Subcomandante Marcos
and his supporters as they toured the region.

Will then boarded a plane south to Venezuela to attend the
World Social Forum, where he shot footage of Hugo Chávez
rallying his adoring left-wing fans. But he also trekked out
to the northwest border with Colombia to document indigenous
peoples protesting the Chávez government for allowing
foreign companies to mine their land.

"Brad was not a cheerleader for leftist governments," says
Jourdan. "He understood the leftist movements in Latin
America were an improvement over the right-wing neoliberal
order that's been imposed on these countries, but his core
belief was in grassroots movements from the bottom up.

"What inspired him about these social movements was that
they were not dependent on these single-leader figures like
Chávez or Evo Morales. He saw the Zapatistas and the
movement of landless peasants [in Brazil] as harbingers of
real democracy and social justice."

But it wasn't until Oaxaca in the fall of 2006 that Will
saw, at last, the potential for a revolution.

The revolt began on June 14, when state police stormed the
encampment set up by teachers in the tourist city's main
square who were demanding better wages and increased school
funding. According to local radio reports, the cops fired
concussion grenades and rifles, killing three and wounding
more than 100. But the teachers regrouped and retook the
zocalo, hurling tear gas canisters back at police lines and
charging them with commandeering buses.

The crackdown became a flash point for discontent over
Oaxaca's governor, Ulises Ruiz, who protesters believe was
fraudulently elected, and his political machine, the
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Soon, the teachers
were joined by all sorts of leftists, trade unionists,
neighborhood block committees, students, and indigenous and
peasant groups, who took up the call for the governor's
resignation.

The Ruiz opposition united as APPO, the Popular Assembly of
the People of Oaxaca, and seized control of government
buildings, forcing Ruiz and his bureaucracy to retreat to
hotels on the outskirts of the city. Radio and TV stations
were also seized as APPO pledged to make the state
"ungovernable." Protesters and local residents occupied
police stations and began erecting nightly barricades and
lighting bonfires on the streets and highways.

Although ignored by mainstream media in the U.S., the revolt
in Oaxaca was being hailed by leftists here and abroad as
the next Paris Commune or a sequel to the Zapatista uprising
in Chiapas.

Will's roommates, who shared a small rent-controlled
apartment with him in South Williamsburg, recall him staying
up late to monitor APPO's pirate radio broadcasts over the
Internet.

Remembers Brandon Jourdan: "He was excited by the fact that
activists had staked out their own autonomous area. He was
drawn to that. He wanted to document the fact that people
were organizing and trying to take control of their own
lives from this corrupt political machine."

By late September, Oaxaca was reaching a tipping point.
Peasant and indigenous councils affiliated with APPO had
seized control of local governments in most of the state.
Yet as APPO upped the ante, so did the police and
paramilitary forces loyal to the PRI. Since August,
plainclothes police and so-called Priistas had been staging
drive-by attacks on the more than 2,000 barricades
maintained by protesters across the capital to prevent
incursion by state police. At least 10 demonstrators had
been killed in the city, including the husband of a teacher
shot during a peaceful march.

Friends in Mexico warned Will that the situation in Oaxaca
was getting out of hand, way too risky for an American with
only halfway decent Spanish skills.

Al Giordano, publisher of the Narco News Bulletin, a radical
website devoted to news of the drug war and Latin America,
posted excerpts of an e-mail exchange he had with Will just
before he left. Will had been seeking contacts in Oaxaca
from Giordano, whom he had known since their days doing
pirate radio broadcasts on the Lower East Side's Steal This
Radio in the mid '90s.

On September 26, Will wrote:

hey al

it brad from nyc -- it would be great to get yr narco
contacts in oaxaca -- i am headed there and want to connect
with as many folks as posible -- are you in df? -- i should
be stopping though there and it would be great to go out for
a drink

solid

brad

Giordano says he pleaded with Will not to go to Oaxaca City:

Our Oaxaca team is firmly embedded. There are a chingo of
other internacionales roaming around there looking for the
big story, but the situation is very delicate, the APPO
doesn't trust anyone it hasn't known for years, and they
keep telling me not to send newcomers, because the situation
is so fucking tense . . . If you are coming to Mexico, I
would much more recommend your hanging around DF-Atenco and
reporting that story which is about to begin. The APPO is
(understandably) very distrustful of people it doesn't
already know. And we have enough hands on deck there to
continue breaking the story. But what is about to happen in
Atenco-DF needs more hands on deck.

Will responded the same night, undeterred:

hey

thanks for the quick get back -- i have a hd professional
camera -- i have heard reports about the level of distrust
in oax and it is disconcerting -- i think i will still go

He flew to Mexico City, where he spent a night at the Centro
de Medios (Free Media Center). Activists there also tried to
discourage Will from going to Oaxaca City, suggesting he'd
be better off covering the struggles of APPO in the
countryside, where there were fewer journalists on the
ground and also fewer risks.

But Will was determined to be on the front line of the
battle unfolding in the provincial capital. He moved into an
apartment with three radical teachers from California who
were also reporting for Indymedia, and began acting as a
human rights observer for CIPO, a rights group whose members
say they have been the targets of police repression. He also
befriended a British journalist and a Spaniard doing human
rights work, who took Will for reporting runs on his scooter.

Will began camping out in the zocalo where APPO had its
central encampment in the city and was helping man the
barricades at night. He immediately threw himself into the
thick of things, as evidenced in his last online dispatch,
on October 17, which he posted on the NYC Indymedia site. It
tells the story of marching to visit the body of a compañero
gunned down by police at a neighborhood barricade:

went inside and saw him -- havent seen too many bodies in my
life -- eats you up -- a stack of nameless corpses in the
corner -- about the number who had died -- no refrigeration
-- the smell -- they had to open his skull to pull the
bullet out

Will seems to have been propelled by the drama of the events
he was witnessing:

what can you say about this movement -- this revolutionary
moment -- you know it is building, growing, shaping -- you
can feel it -- trying desperately for a direct democracy . .
. whats next nobodies sure -- it is a point of light pressed
through glass -- ready to burn or show the way -- it is
clear that this is more than a strike, more than expulsion
of a governor, more than a blockade, more than a coalition
of fragments -- it is a genuine peoples revolt

Neary says she spoke to him just days before his shooting:
"He told me that he was a little scared, but that he felt
this was a crucible, that it was inspiring, but definitely
that things were getting sketchy. Still, he knew he had to
be there."

According to Jourdan, Will seemed more worried about getting
his camera settings straight than the violence escalating
around him. Jourdan says Will phoned him up the night before
he died, seeking technical advice. He'd just gotten a
request for footage from Telesur, a Caracas television
station that broadcasts throughout Latin America, and he
wanted to know how to convert his video footage to PAL, a
broadcast format used outside of the U.S.

"He was concerned about the growing intervention by the
Priistas," Jourdan recalls, using the Spanish nickname for
supporters of the state's ruling PRI. "And he was worried
about federal police pushing in. He said he thought at any
time stuff could shift."

Things did shift. Will's last video tells the story.

It opens with Will conducting interviews with local
residents and activists defending the barricade outside the
university's radio station, which had come under fire by
unidentified gunmen that morning. A man on the barricade
says a group of 100 or more Priistas firing rifles had
attacked the barricade and forced the demonstrators to
retreat from the street. They regrouped and drove out the
Priistas, though one of their compañeros was later grabbed
and beaten up.

"We are the townspeople here who are fighting for our
rights!" exclaims one local woman. "We don't want to live in
a state of repression, of attacks and assassinations, and
compromises," she shouts, gesturing up the street, where an
SUV is ablaze.

Walking up the street, Will pans over the billowing clouds
of smoke coming from the truck, which reportedly belonged to
one of the Priistas but had been set aflame by the
demonstrators after they chased the gunmen away.

Shots ring out, and Will takes shelter beneath a tractor
trailer while trying to zoom in on the shooters. Looking out
between the wheels, he zeroes in on a small traffic island,
where a man in a white shirt is firing a pistol from behind
a tree, surrounded by several other men in civilian clothes.
It's a surreal scene. At one point a man on a bicycle pedals
slowly past the intersection, as if nothing were going on.

And then the Priistas retreat down a side street, with the
shadow of Will's camera tracking them. "White shirt," Will
says, identifying the shooter for the group of young men in
hoodies and bandannas as they pursue their attackers through
the barrio with their own rudimentary weapons: sticks,
rocks, slingshots, and homemade rocket launchers used to set
off flares -- generally used by the APPO members to warn of
an attack.

"Where, where?" a demonstrator asks.

"Over there, on the corner," Will answers.

"Vamanos, vamanos! [Let's go!]" the young men shout. The
gunmen appear to retreat inside a two-story house from which
they continue firing. A young man rushes up and tries to
bash through the flimsy metal garage door with a stick. It's
crazy; he could be shot at any second. Yet Will has
positioned himself at the side of the door, as if ready to
storm in. He and the other demonstrators are forced back by
a hail of gunfire. Then the demonstrators back a dump truck
down the street to serve as cover. Eventually they crash the
truck though the garage door of the house, which is
reportedly owned by one of the shooters.

More shots ring out, and a demonstrator fires a flare down
the road, which witnesses say was reportedly to ward off a
different group of shooters on the ground. Will is standing
on the side of the street behind a group of demonstrators,
trying to capture the exchange, when he gets hit.

The sound of a single shot is followed by that of his final,
pitched cry of pain.

The footage swirls as Will falls, but the camera, dangling
from his neck strap, continues to record the frantic scene
as the demonstrators run with his body amid another hail of
gunfire. "Vamanos! Vamanos!" they shout. Finally the camera
is set down on a ledge but stays on to record a few more
rounds of gunfire, then it goes black.

Press photos show his fellow protesters struggling to revive
him. In an interview with Free Speech Radio News, one of the
demonstrators described how they carried Will's body past
the barricades to a VW Beetle, but it ran out of gas on the
way to the hospital.

"We tried to wave down a cab and some passing cars, but no
one wanted to stop because of the violence that day," said
the man, who declined to give his name for fear of
reprisals. So they carried Will's body several more blocks,
amid a sudden downpour, until a truck finally stopped and
took Will to the Red Cross. According to the man, Will had
been squeezing the man's finger to let him know he was still
alive. "He died in my arms, about four or five blocks before
we got to the hospital," the man said.

The U.S. embassy and news accounts initially reported that
Will had been caught in a "shoot-out" between police and
protesters. Indeed, the PRI-controlled pirate radio station
Citizen Radio called Will an "armed terrorist" and claimed
that Will had been firing back at the shooters.

While that claim is absurd, it now appears that there may
have indeed been some level of crossfire between APPO and
the gunmen. APPO has always declared itself a nonviolent
movement, whose weapons -- rocks, sticks, Molotov cocktails
-- are used only in self-defense. Yet pictures published in
El Universal and La Crónica de Hoy identify at least three
men with pistols as APPO supporters.

According to Gustavo Bilchis, a freelance photographer who
says he was nearby when Will was shot, some of the
demonstrators did pull out guns after the Priistas had
opened fire on them.

"At that point, people were feeling, 'They are shooting at
us, so we need a gun to protect ourselves.' But always they
wait until the PRI shoots first," Bilchis said. He added
that it was clear to him that Will was brought down by a PRI
gunshot.

Now many are wondering whether Will was targeted as a
foreign journalist. A tall and lanky gringo, Will would have
been an easy mark, and it's significant that the Milenio
photographer was shot right next to him.

Will's tape shows him being taken down by an isolated shot,
as he's standing in back of about a dozen other protesters.
Will was also hit on the side of the torso, perhaps in the
barrage of gunfire that followed. According to La Jornada,
the coroner removed two AR-15 rifle bullets from his body.
Witnesses have said the shot that first hit Will appeared to
come from the roof or second floor of the house where the
gunmen were hiding.

Nevertheless Oaxaca attorney general Lizbeth Cana put the
blame for his death on APPO, whom she has compared to an
"urban guerrilla group."

Similarly, when asked at a news conference whether he was
concerned about a possible human rights violation committed
against an American journalist working on foreign soil, a
U.S. State Department official told reporters: "I have no
indications of that," adding, "Well, you know, it is
unfortunate anytime you have peaceful political protests
that get out of hand that result in violence."

Officials at the U.S. embassy say they are pressing for a
"swift and thorough" investigation into the circumstances of
Will's death. But at this stage the investigation is being
conducted by the state attorney general -- who is, of
course, a member of the same party as the alleged killers.

On November 4, two local PRI officials were formally charged
with Will's murder. But three others are now reportedly on
the lam, including municipal policemen Juan Carlos Soriano
and Juan Carlos Sumano, and PRI militant Pedro Carmona, who
was initially identified as the person who fired the shot
that killed Will.

Meanwhile, activists on the ground in Oaxaca say there are
calls on PRI radio to "shoot foreign journalists with
cameras" if you see them. At least two independent
journalists have been beaten up by police since Will's
death, and a photographer for a local Mexican weekly was
roughed up and detained for 48 hours, according to the
watchdog group Reporters Without Borders.

It now appears that Will may have been doing more than
simply filming the assaults on demonstrators by gunmen.
Other activists say that in the days before his death, he
was following members of PRI and police in the streets in
order to gather evidence against them. That seems to be what
he is doing right before he gets shot, if you watch his
footage closely. "White shirt," he calls out to the other
demonstrators, identifying a shooter. "Over there."

If so, he may have crossed the line from journalist to APPO
sympathizer in a way that made him a target.

What would have made Will cross that line? Even as he
becomes a martyr to the Oaxacan uprising he celebrated,
close friends who loved him are still struggling to
understand what he was doing that day -- and why.

"Brad was a journalist in the way Orwell and Hemingway were,
in terms of getting in there and being partisan," argues
Seth Tobocman, referring to the writers' support for the
anti-fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. "He wasn't
there as a neutral party. He was there because the causes he
covered meant something to him."

"I think his death should be a wake-up call," Tobocman
continues. "People like Brad and Rachel Corrie were taking
risks for a lot of us, and they get victimized because there
aren't a lot of people doing it. If more people did what
Brad did, maybe he wouldn't have died."

But others say Will's death should be a warning to other
activists who plunge headfirst into foreign hot spots
without fully understanding the context and the cost.

"I think he romanticized the risk and felt kind of
invincible because of being a foreigner with a camera
there," says Matt Power, a contributing editor at Harper's,
who credits Will with schooling him in his first direct
action: climbing a City Hall tree in a sunflower costume to
protest former mayor Rudy Giuliani's destruction of
community gardens. Power also hopped freights with Will:
They once got arrested together while riding a boxcar from
Pennsylvania to Virginia one Fourth of July weekend,
watching the fireworks erupt across the American
countryside. "We got busted when Will got cocky and went to
talk to the engineers," Power says with a laugh.

Yet as much as he praises his friend as an "elder statesman"
of activists, Power sees Will's death as in some ways
inevitable: "Always before in his life he'd get in trouble,
and then come up smelling like roses -- from eluding police
during Critical Mass rides to all these other protest
actions that he did, and I think it finally caught up to him.

"I remember this one time he was blowing fire in the middle
of a Critical Mass ride in Times Square. The cops went to
grab him and he threw his bike over his shoulder and ran up
over the roof of a cab and got away. It was amazing."

The repercussions go beyond Will's own tragic murder. While
it would be wrong to blame Will for the violent crackdown on
APPO by federal forces, journalists on the ground say it
sets an ugly precedent. In the words of Giordano: "Anytime
the local forces of repression can't contain a rebellion in
Mexico and want the feds to storm in, the recipe now exists:
Kill a foreign journalist."

Neary says Will knew what he was getting into. And he did it
anyway.

"The last time I saw him was back in August," she says. "I
told him, 'I love the work you do. But you don't always have
to be on the front lines. You're not invincible.' I said to
him, 'Watch out, listen to the silent places inside you. You
matter too.' "

"He told me, 'I've got to be part of the revolution,'" Neary
recalls. "'There's stuff going on down there that I have to
see. This is what drives me. This is where I've got to be.'
He always put himself on the front line. Once he was there,
turning back was not an option."

It would be easy to see Will's life as a classic case of
upper-middle-class rebellion. But Neary says his passion ran
deeper.

"He wanted to get to the things that were slipping through
the cracks," Neary says, "the people whose faces will never
make the news because of what and who they are."

That was Will's objective: giving people who had no names in
the media a presence. He was traumatized by world events and
the fact that people were dying around him. "He felt these
people didn't have a choice to be in their situations,"
Neary says, "but he had choices and he was using that
privilege to help give people a voice."

Will's journalism was always aimed at the activist crowd. He
didn't bother much with translating his radical perspective
to a broader audience -- let alone properly punctuating his
sentences.

In the wake of Will's death, at last, his reporting did go
mainstream. His murder spotlighted the social upheaval in
Mexico, which is ready to explode. It's not just APPO's
popular takeover in Oaxaca, but also the larger battle over
the contested national election and the widening
polarization of rich and poor in Mexico as multinational
corporations gobble up land and resources.

Americans don't pay much attention to festering discontent
south of the border, just to the consequences: the flood of
immigrants crossing over, along with an increasingly violent
drug trade. The American government's response: put up a
multibillion-dollar wall.

For now, Will's murder may have put a chink in that wall.
His death, however briefly, made the crisis in Oaxaca
impossible to ignore here. On Sunday, November 5, tens of
thousands of APPO supporters from across Mexico descended on
the capital to stand in solidarity with the besieged
demonstrators. Though violence is ongoing -- one protester
was shot when gunmen opened fire on the march -- APPO has
managed to hold off federal forces seeking to wrest away
control of the university campus and is still controlling
parts of the city. The battle is not yet over.

Additional reporting: Bill Weinberg

Editor's note: This piece was updated online on November 14.

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