Miami Plans for Wave of Protests at Trade Meeting

Cruise ships have been diverted, courthouses cleared and a large-scale police response plotted. This week, Florida’s largest city is bracing not for a hurricane, but an international trade conference.

Street demonstrations by an estimated 30,000 marchers and rampages by anarchists are expected in the city as trade ministers from 34 countries gather to work toward creating what would be the world’s largest open market -- the Free Trade Area of the Americas -- stretching from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in South America.

For months, officials from more than 40 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies have been planning how to handle the storm of protest the conference is expected to unleash, treating it with no less seriousness than an approaching hurricane, said Miami Police Chief John F. Timoney.

“Whether it’s a man-made disaster, a natural disaster, the response is all the same in how you handle these things,” Timoney said in an interview at police headquarters.

Authorities want to avoid a repeat of the 1999 debacle in Seattle, when highly organized groups of vandals used peaceful demonstrators as shields, trashed businesses and helped bring about the collapse of the World Trade Organization conference in that city.

Timoney said his force of more than 1,000 officers has received training on how to ignore verbal insults impugning their sexuality, ethnicity and parentage. Special squads have been formed to swiftly dismantle “sleeping dragons,” the human chains reinforced with PVC pipe, concrete barrels and other materials that antiglobalization protesters have used in the past to paralyze the flow of traffic and people.

And while police will ignore spoken taunts, no violent actions or physical contact with officers will be tolerated, Timoney said. “Put your hands on us, and you’re going to get locked up,” he said.

Beginning Wednesday, the trade ministers of every nation in the Americas except Cuba are scheduled to meet for three days at the InterContinental Hotel in downtown Miami to launch the final phase of negotiations on the treaty creating the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

Earlier in the week, business leaders and representatives of so-called civil society from throughout the Americas are set to meet and submit recommendations on the trade pact to the ministers.

If approved, the FTAA would encompass 800 million people and represent a combined gross domestic product of $14 trillion.

The idea to abolish tariffs and let goods move freely among the nations of North, Central and South America has been in the making since their heads of state and government met in Miami in 1994 and vowed to dismantle trade barriers in an effort to promote democracy and prosperity.

The driving philosophy behind the enormous single market spanning two continents is “the more level the playing field, the more economic activity you can incentivize, the greater the benefits,” said Carl A. Cira, director of the Summit of the Americas Center, an independent research center at Florida International University.

The United States and Brazil, co-chairs of the meeting, have had stormy public disputes about farm subsidies, intellectual property rights and foreign investment. But in talks Nov. 9, they agreed on a framework that may permit progress in Miami.

“As President Bush has stated, the future of our hemisphere depends on the strength of our commitment to free markets, economic opportunity and democracy,” U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick, who will lead the U.S. delegation here, said earlier this month.

Critics, though, have denounced the ambitious proposal as “NAFTA on steroids,” likening it to a broadening of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which some contend is already overly friendly to big corporations and responsible for the export of many American jobs. Labor unions, ecologists, antiwar activists and advocates for the homeless, farmers, indigenous peoples and the poor are among those who have announced their hostility to the project and will be in Miami to voice it.

“We oppose what we’ve seen of it so far,” said Thea Lee, chief international economist of the AFL-CIO in Washington. “The current draft of the FTAA would mean more lost jobs, closed plants, devastated communities and ruined lives, here in the U.S. and throughout the hemisphere.”

The vast majority of the opponents, including 25,000 expected for a march Thursday organized by the AFL-CIO, should be peaceful. But other foes of the proposed pact have made it clear that they intend to prevent or disrupt the meeting. Some self-described anarchists who have already flocked to Florida maintain that destruction of property is a permissible form of protest.

“The Boston Tea Party was pretty American, and that was destruction of property,” said Sarah Jonesy, 26, a member of the Washington-based Anti-Capitalist Convergence.

In streets near the venues, where an estimated 1,000 government representatives and other delegates will be meeting, there will be teach-ins, rallies, stilt-walkers, theater by giant puppets and protests for a gamut of causes -- from Nicaraguan cotton farmers thrown out of work by cheaper U.S. imports to women in the Third World denied an equal share of the benefits of development.

About 100 demonstrators gathered at a workshop Sunday near downtown Miami, Associated Press reported, and about 200 people wearing bright yellow shirts staged a protest parade in Fort Lauderdale.

Some Miami businesses will be closing or allowing employees to work from home. Eight cruise ships will be sailing to other ports, causing an estimated loss of $630,000 in revenue for the Port of Miami. No federal criminal or civil trials or hearings will be held in the federal courthouse in downtown Miami for the week, and Chief U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch has ordered court operations temporarily moved to Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.

Raffaele Scudieri, executive chef at Lombardi’s Ristorante at Bayside Marketplace, a popular tourist and shopping area on Biscayne Bay near the conference site, said he didn’t know whether he would have any customers, or whether to bother opening at all.

“I don’t know why we invite these people to come here,” the Italian-born chef said. “These are antiglobal people. In Genoa, they destroyed everything. They come up here to destroy, to loot, to beat up. In Seattle, they destroyed everything.”

In Genoa, Italy, in July 2001, demonstrators hurled Molotov cocktails, trashed shops and used trash bins as battering rams against police in an attempt to break up a summit meeting attended by Bush and other leaders of the Group of Eight, an association of industrialized nations. Police fatally shot one protester as he tried to hurl a fire extinguisher at officers trapped inside a jeep.

At the last high-profile talks on an all-Americas free trade zone, the April 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, some of the 6,000 demonstrators attacked police with gasoline bombs and rocks as they repeatedly tried to storm a security fence erected to protect Bush and the other attendees.

Two months ago, a meeting of the WTO in Cancun, Mexico, imploded over disagreements on agriculture and investment, as thousands of antiglobalists rallied, peacefully for the most part, in the seaside resort.

In Miami, some preparations taken to reduce the likelihood of violence and disorder have drawn protests of their own.

On Thursday, the Miami City Commission unanimously adopted an ordinance that would bar protesters from carrying glass bottles, water balloons, pieces of wood more than one-fourth-inch thick and any hard metal or plastic objects. Critics objected that the law was targeted at opponents of the FTAA, overly vague and a violation of 1st Amendment rights of free speech.

“This ordinance is so broad that any protester who shows up with a key could be arrested,” said Randall Marshall, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. The ACLU said it is considering a court challenge.

Timoney said he is not worried about an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 demonstrators who may engage in acts of civil disobedience, such as staging sit-down strikes to block traffic or businesses. His concern, he said, is up to 500 “hard-core anarchists” that authorities believe are coming to Miami.

“The anarchists ... make no bones about it, of engaging in property damage,” Timoney said. “A significant group within the anarchists are very violent, and their sole purpose is to engage in assaultive behavior against police officers.”

To prevent anyone bent on violence from infiltrating the AFL-CIO march and using it as cover, the labor federation will deploy 1,000 of its own parade marshals, Timoney said. Plainclothes police will also circulate at rallies and demonstrations so uniformed officers will not have to break ranks to make arrests, he said.

Government officials, who want to have Miami chosen as the permanent headquarters of the proposed trade bloc, have vowed that security will be air-tight. Two concentric rings of security have been created to protect the three hotels and other locations that will host the official functions. Many downtown streets are being closed and traffic is being rerouted. Miami-Dade County police will be put on 12-hour shifts, and law enforcement agencies from Orlando to the Florida Keys will be contributing officers.

The massive commitment by police caused a headache for at least one business, the Florida Grand Opera. On Tuesday and Friday the troupe plans to present Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Traviata” to nearly sold-out houses at the Miami-Dade County Auditorium.

“We always hire a number of off-duty policemen for our performances, but we found out all police will be on duty,” spokesman Justin Moss said. He added that the opera company had to hustle to find part-time security guards available to work those evenings. “We’re on the phone now with our contacts, asking for guards. We might have a hard time,” he said.