Week of April 20, 2006, Issue #548
FRONT
Ah, the heady days of Quebec City—a gas was had by all
Scott Harris / scott@vueweekly.com
Five years ago this week, the streets of Quebec City were filled with choking clouds of tear gas. Mortars boomed and echoed as helicopters circled above.A three-metre high, four-kilometre-long fence cut through the city’s historic downtown. Inside the wall, the leaders of 34 countries met to discuss the Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA.
It was an ambitious plan to extend the NAFTA model of neoliberalism— the doctrine of free markets, “flexible” labour and reduced social spending—to 800 million people in the western hemisphere.
Six thousand police and 1 200 military personnel were on duty to protect the negotiations from 50 000 protesters.
“It was our most important intervention to date,” says Maude Barlow, chairperson of the Council of Canadians. “There hadn’t really been anything that had shown that level of collective determination. Different parts of the movement came together, and formed a really powerful movement with one voice.”
The security fence, dubbed “the wall of shame,” became a powerful symbol, “… so deeply separating those who have the power from those who don’t,” says Barlow.
As protesters took down portions of the fence along Boulevard Rene Levesque on the afternoon of Apr 20, police in riot gear responded with tear gas. Over the next 36 hours, the gas enveloped most of the old city, landing in people’s homes and activist convergence centres kilometres from the fence.
Over that 36 hours, 5 148 rounds of tear gas and 903 rubber bullets were fired, 463 people arrested, and the whole operation cost taxpayers over $100 million. The RCMP Public Complaints Commission, reporting two years later, found “RCMP members used excessive and unjustified force,” and that the police violated a number of their own policies of engagement.
Identified by police as a “leader” of the demonstrations, Jaggi Singh was one of those arrested. Singh was snatched off the streets by plain-clothed police on the opening day of the Summit and imprisoned for 17 days. All charges against him were eventually dropped.
Singh says Quebec City was an important moment not only because it directly challenged the FTAA, but also because it created links between issues in a way that hadn’t been done before in Canada.
“The links between fighting structural adjustment programs abroad and what happens at home; the links between opposing the dispossession of indigenous people in the Third World and the dispossession of indigenous people here; the link between the war machine and globalization. Now, I think it’s just accepted thinking.”
Singh also says that the experience of Quebec City changed activism in Canada. “There’s now an undercurrent of radicalism in large segments of the movement. What was a bit radical five or six years ago is a bit less so now.
“Those experiences that we went through together are meaningful,” continues Singh. “It’s through those experiences that real solidarity is built ... if we’re still talking about it and networking around it, we’re more powerful for it.”
Despite the mass protests, the Summit ended with a declaration: the 34 leaders pledged to enter into a comprehensive, all-inclusive deal to liberalize markets and create the world’s largest free-trade zone by Dec, 2005.
As the tear gas cleared from the streets and the protesters returned to their communities, the FTAA seemed unstoppable.
Five years later, the future of the FTAA is in serious doubt—the deadlines have passed and the negotiations have been largely abandoned.
Chibu Lagman, a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Alberta, says that a major factor behind the failure of the FTAA has been the rise of populist governments across much of South America.
“You have all these leaders who are running for office on anti-neoliberalism, anti-FTAA platforms,” Lagman says. Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia have all seen left-of centre governments elected since 2001, with Peru, Mexico and Ecuador expected to continue the trend later this year.
“The only countries who have signed on to FTAA are Columbia and the countries in Central America. And even there, you have opposition. You can’t say the FTAA is dead, but it’s in big trouble.”
Lagman says that the opposition has emerged because the so-called “free market” hasn’t benefited most in Latin America, where incomes through the ’80s and ’90s were stagnant and economic disparity grew. Argentina, a country that piously adhered to free market scriptures, saw a complete economic collapse in 2002.
“We’re talking about a generation of Latinos who have seen their standard of living deteriorate rather than improve over the past 25 years,” says Lagman.
The US strategy will shift to negotiating separate, bilateral agreements with individual countries, says Lagman. That’s because there are few countries that share the enthusiasm of Canada and the US for the FTAA, which many see as too wide-ranging and requiring too much control over their economies to be surrendered.
Maude Barlow says it’s unfortunate that Canada has aligned itself more with the US than the rest of the hemisphere. “I wish we could be the top portion of that sandwich, with Bush in the middle,” she says. “Instead, I see a great division growing between North and South America.”
As mass mobilizations against trade deals faded from the front pages of newspapers, the mainstream media has delighted in pronouncing the death of the anti-globalization movement.
Singh says the movement has indeed changed—partly in response to the global changes in the aftermath of 9/11. But Singh says rumours of the movement’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
“I’m looking at the movement internationally, and I feel that it’s deepened in a lot of ways: links between war and globalization, links between the agenda of war and the so-called war on terrorism, and the linkages domestically on the rights of immigrants and refugees.”
He says that mass mobilizations are still happening, but the media is not covering them in the same way they covered the anti-globalization protests.
“If you think about it, there were 50 000 people in Quebec City over three days. In Mar of 2003, there were 250 000 people on the streets of Montreal to oppose the invasion of Iraq. In the US, there were 50 000 people in Seattle [protesting the World Trade Organization] in 1999, but in the last two months there have been some of the largest demonstrations in US history—a million in Los Angeles, 400 000 in Chicago—all part of an immigrants rights movement.”
Singh adds that North American activists need to learn from movements in the global south. While there are natural ebbs and flows, what’s important is to create links between communities over the long-term.
“Struggle has a momentum of it’s own. It’s long term. We can’t think of it in terms of five years, ten years. We have to think of it in terms of decades and decades.” V