Anti-FTAA Protestors Clash with Police

Photograph

By: Spencer Platt

Date: November 20, 2003

Source: Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

About the Photographer: Spencer Platt is a staff photographer for Getty Images. Getty Images is a worldwide provider of visual content materials to advertisers, broadcasters, designers, magazines, new media organizations, newspapers, and producers.

INTRODUCTION

The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is a proposed trade agreement originally intended to encompass all countries in North and South America other than Cuba. However, as of mid-2006, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela had all dropped out of FTAA negotiations.

The FTAA is intended as an extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Its stated goal is to lower trade barriers between participating nations. Critics of NAFTA, who have also opposed the FTAA, have claimed that it encourages the migration of industrial production from the U.S. and Canada to Mexico and bankrupts Mexican farmers by forcing them to compete directly with heavily-subsidized U.S. agriculture. Defenders of NAFTA and the FTAA argue that such trade agreements, by allowing market principles to work on an international level, produce net gains in prosperity for all nations involved.

Opponents of FTAA, which include North American labor unions and middle-class activists as well as farmers and indigenous peasants across much of Latin America, have sought to block it through political lobbying, electoral processes (e.g., in Venezuela and Bolivia), and nonviolent public protest and civil disobedience at the sites of FTAA summit meetings. These summits are gatherings at which representatives of prospective member states negotiate the terms of a possible FTAA agreement.

The 2003 FTAA summit was held in Miami, Florida. (The city of Miami hoped that the FTAA headquarters would be built there and it offered to pay half of the estimated $12–16 million cost of building the facility.) The response of the city police to the protests that occurred during the summit was controversial. Miami spent almost $24 million on security for the FTAA summit ($10.6 million for the Miami-Dade County Police, $13 million for the Miami Police Department), not counting payments on lawsuits brought against city police. Lawsuits were brought for various violations of protestor's civil rights, including mass arrests and improper arrests; criminal violence by police; and illegal mass strip searches of female prisoners. Miami received $8.5 million in federal money from the $87-billion 2003 Iraq spending bill to cover some of the costs of defending the FTAA meeting.

PRIMARY SOURCE

ANTI-FTAA PROTESTORS CLASH WITH POLICE

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

Miami police forces were determined to avoid a repeat of the chaotic situation that surrounded the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999. To this end, the actions of over three dozen law-enforcement agencies were coordinated by the Miami Police Department. Police were equipped with concussion grenades, tear gas, body armor, tazers, and other gear. After being shown video footage of Seattle by the city police, the city commissioners passed a law forbidding protestors to carry sticks, water balloons, and other objects (the law was repealed by the commissioners a few months after the FTAA meeting, in March 2004).

Accusations of criminal behavior by the police were numerous. Alleged police crimes included shooting rubber-coated steel bullets at retreating (therefore non-threatening) protestors; spraying the eyes of non-resisting protestors at point-blank range with pepper spray, which causes extreme pain and sometimes permanent damage; arresting persons for not dispersing without giving them an opportunity to disperse; tazering and beating nonviolent protestors; arresting people for merely looking like protestors; targeting of medics and journalists; and more. The human rights advocacy group Amnesty International stated in a December 16, 2005, letter to Governor Jeb Bush that police actions had violated the United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials: "Concerns include reports of the indiscriminate and inappropriate use of nonlethal weapons on nonviolent protestors resulting in scores of injuries, the obstruction of those providing medical treatment, multiple and random arrests …and the denial of the right to freedom of expression and association." A Florida circuit court judge, Richard Margolius, stated in open court in December 2003 that he saw "no less than 20 felonies committed by police officers" during the protests. When told that no police officers had been charged in the protest crackdown he said, "None? Pretty sad commentary. At least from what I saw."

In April, 2005, several thousand women who were illegally strip-searched after being arrested on misdemeanor charges during the FTAA protests were awarded $6.25 million in a class-action lawsuit brought against Dade County, Florida. Only women were strip-searched, not men, apparently as a humiliation tactic. Under Florida law, it is only legal to strip-search a person charged with a felony.

The actual FTAA-protests operations plan of the Miami Police Department has remained secret, its exclusion from public records laws being affirmed by a Florida appeals court in April 2005. In 2005, other cities expecting to host controversial international economic organizations sent police representatives to Miami to study the operations plan and to model their own police responses to it. By May 2006, five lawsuits based on police actions during the protests had been brought against the Miami police and other law-enforcement agencies by the American Civil Liberties Union. As of this writing, all five cases were still being litigated.

An internal review of the response to the protests by the Miami Police Department admitted minor mistakes, but said that the response was "an overall success." It also stated that "The people and businesses of Miami faced a minimum of inconvenience with resiliency and good humor. Those who came to commit violence faced an intelligent, measured police plan determined to minimize the effect of their criminal tactics."

The FTAA summit at Mar Del Plata, Argentina, in November 2005 failed to produce an agreement. As of mid-2006, prospects for the formation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas appear dim.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Vizentini, Paulo, and Marianne Wiesebron. Free Trade for the Americas?: The United States' Push for the FTAA Agreement. New York: Zed Books, 2004.

Periodicals

Driscoll, Amy. "Judge: I Saw Police Commit Felonies." Miami Herald (December 20, 2003).

Driscoll, Amy. "Ordinary People Join Protests." Miami Herald (November 19, 2003).

Marrero, Diana. "Security at Miami's Free Trade Meeting Cost Taxpayers $23.9 Million." Miami Herald (February 24, 2004).

Rodriguez, Ihosvani. "Appeals Court Protects Secrecy Involving Police Strategy for Miami Trade Talks." South Florida Sun-Sentinel (April 19, 2005).

Salazar, Caroly, and Susannah A. Neshmith. "Summit was 'Success,' Miami Police Conclude." Miami Herald (February 5, 2004).

Schwartz, Noaki, and Trenton Daniel. "Lawsuit on Strip Searches Settled." Miami Herald. April 19, 2005.

Web sites

American Civil Liberties Union. "Police Trampled Civil Rights During 2003 Free Trade Protests in Florida, ACLU Charges." November 17, 2005. <http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/gen/21621prs20051117.html> (accessed May 24, 2006).

National Lawyers' Guild. "The Assault on Free Speech, Public Assembly, and Dissent." <http://www.nlg.org/resources/DissentBookWeb.pdf> (accessed May 24, 2006).