Life during Wartime
Lockdown Miami
ANTONIO GOMEZ HARDLY
knew anything about the Free Trade Area of the Americas on Nov. 20, except that it cost him a fried-liver dinner. Gomez was spotted by police amid FTAA protesters on his way to the homeless shelter Miami Rescue Mission, and, without his consent, an officer frisked him for illegal objects.
Gomez was released once a quick search proved his pockets were empty but not before all the fried-liver dinners at the shelter were eaten, leaving him to settle for chicken.
The Miami police said its police-state occupation of the city during the FTAA trade talks was necessary to guard city property from black-clad anarchists bent on violence and destruction, but the cops ended up targeting the most vulnerable people in Miami, many like Gomez who share little with the protest movement. And according to legal observers, evidence from Nov. 20 to 21 showed police carrying out violence against anti-FTAA activists, not the other way around.
John De Leon, a Miami attorney representing the American Civil Liberties Union who witnessed the demonstrations, told me that Miami during the FTAA ministerial had "gotten to the point where it's like a totalitarian state.... People say there was no property damage, and that was a victory, but I saw there was property damage – property of the protesters." In addition, some of the worst police abuses were illegal searches that didn't lead to arrest but left people feeling grateful they weren't thrown in jail, he said.
The Wellness Center, a medical facility set up for activists in Miami, had a revealing map tracking injuries as they occurred on the streets. It also charted the weapons police used, giving medics the ability to anticipate which treatments they would need to perform.
"At one time we had paint balls, pepper balls, tear gas, pepper spray, shock shields, and trauma truncheons all being deployed at the same time," Arnica, a Berkeley medic, told me outside Dade County Jail. "Oh, did I mention rubber bullets?"
By early evening Nov. 21 the Wellness Center was reporting more than 125 injuries, including head wounds and lacerations, contamination from chemical irritants, and various bone fractures. Eowyn Riecke, a media representative for the Wellness Center, told the Independent Media Center the worst injury she saw was from a rubber bullet that hit a protester in the eye at close range.
Police dispersing a jail-support demonstration outside of county jail Nov. 21 corralled about 75 people into the Wellness Center entryway, where injured protesters were gathered to rest. As the cops closed in on the clinic, they swung their batons indiscriminately, and one officer shot pepper spray through the only entrance to the clinic.
Ivy McClelland, a San Francisco activist, was there at the time recovering from heat exhaustion and sunstroke. She told me it looked like police had orchestrated the move to send a message that the clinic was not safe.
Throughout the demonstrations, police made a concerted effort to separate what they called "good protesters" from "bad protesters." This was most evident during the midday AFL-CIO march, when police dramatically stepped up security to prevent "bad protesters" from infiltrating the parade.
Even so, hordes of union members caught sight of the divisive tactics, and some even got mixed up in the fray. AFL-CIO representative Deborah Dion told me police injured and arrested members of the Florida Alliance for Retired Persons. The AFL-CIO, which had denounced direct action before the FTAA ministerial, is now planning a press conference to criticize Miami police actions, Dion said.
"They guaranteed they would use tear gas as a last resort. We obviously know they used it as a first resort," Dion told a group at the Stop FTAA convergence center the morning of Nov. 22.
Only then, long after most of the anti-FTAA contingent had blown town, did the details emerge of what went on inside the jails. The Miami Activist Defense, which operated a legal hotline for protesters, reported various abuses – particularly directed at queers, transgenders, and people of color.
One protester, Cindy, who wouldn't tell me her last name before talking to a lawyer, spoke of a typical experience during her two days behind bars. Cindy said she was handcuffed for five hours inside police vehicles and a "human-sized kennel" at a detention facility near the airport. While there, she said police gave her nothing she would eat (she's vegan) and kept the room temperature unnecessarily cold.
"They told this friend I was with she could only have one shirt, so they took her sweatshirt and left her with a tank top," she told me. Cindy was released at 1 a.m. Saturday on $6,000 bail.
Evan Greer and Alec Armstrong posted bail at the same time on charges they forcefully disputed. Greer told me a judge had already dropped the first charge they faced, felony possession of burglary tools, because they were searched without probable cause. Armstrong, who withheld his name during the arrest, was charged separately with "obstruction of justice under disguise," and both were charged with resisting arrest without violence. But they didn't even go limp, Greer said.
"We weren't going to mess with them. There were 20 cops, three of us, and no witnesses. We just wanted to get out of there," he said. Inside the jail, Greer said, accused felons were subjected to strip searches and put on lockdown during the jail solidarity demonstration on Friday.
U.S. trade ministers claim the FTAA will benefit everybody in the western hemisphere, except Cuba, which has been excluded from the trade talks. Miami city officials say if their city is chosen to permanently host the FTAA if a trade agreement is reached next year, it will especially benefit the city.
But if the government response to FTAA protests is any indication, the opposite is likely to be true. Instead of benefiting all people alike, it appears the FTAA will make life harder for the many who are homeless, jobless, politically progressive, or simply just getting by, while making the world's richest corporations much, much richer.
For more information on those who were arrested in Miami, contact the Miami
Activist Defense legal hotline at (305)-400-6445 or go to www.stopftaa.org/legal.
Iggy Scam contributed to this report.
