Globalization proponents promise increased prosperity, freedom, stability, and development yet neo-liberal policies produce the exact opposite: economic dependency and despair, increased corruption and conflict, social disintegration, and the elimination of communally accessible goods. How is resistance to this being forged by individuals and NGOs at the second Peoples Summit? Along with the large amount of research conducted over the past decade, activists carry testimonials of the violence that NAFTA has done to marginalized communities and remote environments throughout the Americas. This piece looks at narratives from free trade victims from the Peoples Summit in our fight against globalization.

Re-politicizing the Violence of Globalization and Free Trade
Ajay Gandhi
a_ga...@hotmail.com

The chain link fence is up, steel and concrete 13 feet high and 3 kilometres long. A military presence unprecedented in Canadian history, comprising over 6000 policemen, and hundreds of riot police and deputized foreign security personnel is now a reality. Police snipers, surveillance teams, and restrictions on civilian movement will buttress this security buildup. National and international police forces have infiltrated target groups and are monitoring their communications. Ominously, an entire jail has been emptied of its criminals in preparation for an influx of new inmates. What great danger could inspire such planning and cost? For what reason could such an immense coordination of state, corporate and police institutions be justified? The international drug trade, a dangerous rogue state in the Middle East, or perhaps an impending invasion or war?

Actually, something the Canadian government deems to be a greater danger: a well-organized and vocal collection of students, workers, activists, artists and concerned citizens, converging this week on Quebec City for the Summit of the Americas. The heads of all 34 countries in the western hemisphere (except Cuba) are meeting from April 20-22 to discuss the proposed implementation of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA). Canada, which deems itself to be the proud champion of democracy, human rights, and development, seems to be adopting a hypocritical attitude towards activists and protestors.

Placed within the larger social and political context however, such repressive actions on the part of the nation-state are predictable and indicative of contemporary political life in western "democratic" countries. The proposed FTAA follows two decades of economic liberalization and globalization, its models being recent free-trade agreements, especially the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, the United States and Mexico, and treaties in forums such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). NAFTA and the proposed FTAA are two of the pillars upon which a new political and economic architecture is being constructed. The main beneficiaries are multinational corporations able to take advantage of weaker labour markets, diminished tariff barriers, simplified regulatory conditions, and easier access to resources, to quickly manipulate economic conditions for profit. Not surprisingly, free trade's defining elements are: the privatization of public goods in health, education, and social development, which encourages a "free" and "fair" playing field for corporations; the deregulation or dismantling of national and international laws and policies perceived to block the efficient movement of capital and goods; and nations' increasing encouragement of foreign investment.

The FTAA has been vigorously advocated by Canada to poorer countries in the southern hemisphere as a panacea for corruption, stagnation, and underdevelopment. Government, media and business pundits pronounce favourably on increased growth and generously offer to extend the free trade club to countries in the south. Curiously, given that NAFTA and similar treaties are such beneficial agreements, Canada, like all democratic nations negotiating economic liberalization, refuses to let the public view a draft of the FTAA, although corporate partners have had significant input into its current form. And yet large and increasing numbers of people are questioning and resisting economic agreements struck by unseen and unelected bureaucrats, and forged with unaccountable corporations, of which the FTAA is the latest example. Hundreds of such individuals have congregated in Quebec City this week for the second People's Summit (the first was in Santiago, Chile during the first Summit of the Americas), held just before the FTAA meetings commence this weekend. The individuals and NGO's representing labour, women's, environmental, and human rights movements from Canada, the United States, Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico, and elsewhere carry a plethora of research to debunk conventional liberalization and globalization arguments.

Several damning case studies were recounted in the Human Rights, Women's, Environmental, Labour, and Agrarian Forums this week. The most alarming effects of NAFTA are Chapter 11 provisions under which large multinational corporations such as Ethyl and Federal Express have filed lawsuits against the Canadian government. NAFTA's Chapter 11 provision is thought to be one of the cornerstones of the proposed FTAA because of its ability to penalize governments seen to be acting against corporate interests unfairly; despite the rhetoric of justice and fair play, such regulations in economic liberalization agreements are forcing governments to roll back environmental, health and labour regulations, creating a rush to the bottom of minimal standards for economic activity so that countries are at a "competitive advantage". In the Ethyl case, the Canadian government lost at a closed NAFTA arbitration panel and was forced to give Ethyl $13 million, apologize, and roll back its offending regulations, in this case an environmental ban against Ethyl's gasoline additive MMT, a scientifically proven toxin hazardous to human health.

One hardly needs to mention the other key words of disaster spawned by NAFTA: malidiquoras, Mexico's free trade zones in which living standards are nonexistent, and human rights abuses against workers regularly occur, especially against women; real wages, steadily declining for Mexican workers since NAFTA was implemented in 1991; economic and political dependency, on the US market, allowing American cycles of investment and labour needs to govern Mexican and Canadian economies; guaranteed supply- NAFTA contains provisions in which Canada, in exchange for access to the US market, must continually supply resources regardless of social or environmental harm, including oil, gas, timber- and water!

Thus, politicians' apparently sincere promises of increased prosperity, freedom, stability, and development through free trade have produced the exact opposite: economic dependency and despair, increased corruption and conflict, social disintegration, and the elimination of communally accessible goods. The free trade discourse of productivity and transparency exists only for corporations using its restrictive mechanisms against unwilling populations and governments to create the conditions necessary to their wealth creation. In short, economic measures said to encourage democracy and prosperity are actually promoting violence against often marginalized populations and vulnerable environments. Although free trade proponents are backed up by an apparatus of "rational" experts who speak in the language of "objective" economic science, the globalization opponents congregating in Quebec City are piercing free trades' logic with great effect, and revealing its contradictions, imbalances, absurdities, concealments and dangers.

How is such resistance being forged? Along with the large amount of research conducted over the past decade, individuals and NGO's carry testimonials of the violence that NAFTA has done to marginalized communities and remote environments throughout the Americas- to be perpetuated through the expanded FTAA. In particular, the second People's Summit has provided a dynamic forum for diverse constituencies to converge and find common ground for struggles that must work both locally and across borders to fight against economic agreements that operate simultaneously in multiple locations. The greatest weapon against pro-globalization forces, which also builds solidarity among activists, is that of the narrative; only the story, told from first person experience as free trade's victim and target can disturb the dangerous machinery of economic globalization.

To give only a few examples from the People's Summit: Gloria Chicaiza from Action Ecologica in Ecuador is speaking at a workshop on Natural Resource Depletion at the Environmental Forum. She explains the usefulness of the Ecological Debt concept as a way to make corporations accountable, insofar as the social and environmental costs of resource extraction and use, in the prevailing economic model, are left outside the cost of commodities, and not reflected in corporate profit totals- to be absorbed instead by already fragile landscapes and marginal populations. Gloria says that Ecological Debt is the "perspective of our action because it allows a critique of a development model" that treats rural communities as leftover garbage, and polluted landscapes as extraneous-and unseen-economic factors. She notes that the Kosan indigenous peoples of Ecuador have had their land divided and polluted by Texaco in the last several years, which has built extensive oil wells on their traditional land. Although the Kosan were compensated when Texaco operations released oil into important waterways, they refused when Texaco began violating the spirits residing in particular boulders and land areas. Gloria notes that the way "the Kosan drew a line at the killing of their spirits" and refused to participate in Texaco's "development" provides one of the strongest arguments against the ransacking of resources in Ecuador and elsewhere.

Later, Romeo Sanganash, a Cree lawyer and activist from northern Quebec speaks about the long standing conflict between several thousand Crees in Northern Quebec and the southern governments and corporations that have invaded their land and appropriated their resources, most infamously with the construction of the James Bay hydroelectric dam project in the early 1970s. At the time, Crees were told that "they had no rights to the land" and seen by Hydro-Quebec and the government as a "restricting factor" for development; quickly, Cree territory, managed and owned for over 5000 years was subjected to mining, forestry, and dam-related flooding. Romeo notes that his territory cannot be compared to that in the south- "the North has its own features, own people, own history, and is not just a resource to be used by the south". Ultimately, he notes, the Crees are allied with the anti-globalization movement not only because they share the same goals of achieving sustainable development, and protection of human rights. The Cree's most important claim in asserting self-determination is that they are not merely "restricting factors" but self-governing nations that are fighting their very erasure as a people- inevitable if current economic and development policies continue.

Beyond the People's Summit forums, the police are busy finalizing preparations for the incoming heads of state to be present at the Summit of the Americas. By now it is a cliché to note that the Quebec City summit has turned into an autocratic, militaristic operation, perhaps unintentionally revealing the grotesque violence enacted through free trade and globalization, and unleashed here upon citizens exercising their right to democratic dissent, as in previous instances in Seattle and Prague.

Both at globalization meetings where free trade is negotiated, and the numerous sites- farms, streets, forests- where citizens confront globalization everyday, the dominant economic discourse propelling the world economy is often absurd and incomprehensible. Matthew Coon Come, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations in Canada, and leader of Cree opposition to further hydroelectric development in northern Quebec noted during a People's Summit session that the logic of globalization runs counter to our logical human impulses: "My grandmother prophesized that the rivers would be made to flow backward. Now that place where she said this is clear-cut- a desert, a war zone. Every spring when I go back, the water has to be boiled to be drunk or I have to pay to drink water". That a member of a community who has not abrogated his rights to his territory, and that formerly had free access to its resources must now pay for it reveals better than any statistic can the folly of globalization policies driven by rampant consumerism and greed: garbage that must be hidden in lakes and countrysides because of our material appetites, the burning of fossil fuels which produces greenhouse gases which in turn impel us to use more resources to repeat the same destructive pattern; our need to consume goods made under environmental and social duress in distant southern plantations and sweatshops while ignoring local conditions and effects.

In response to these critiques, globalization's proponents produce laughable stereotypes and comments about activists; Jean Chretien, the Canadian prime minister, in a typically articulate moment, accused activists protesting the Summit of the Americas of coming to "have a good time, blah, blah, blah". Others accuse protestors of being rabidly violent, unwitting dupes of romantic philosophies, ignorant of the needs and desires of the "Third World", and even of perpetuating poverty by critiquing globalization. The bizarre incoherence and fear seen in these comments clearly show that despite the massive financial, military, and political resources weighed against anti-globalization activists, those who do construct such economic treaties are on the defense, scared of the consequences of a mass-mobilized movement working for its own interests instead of that of the economic elite. It shows experts, officials, and corporate hacks flailing wildly for a rational response- and lacking one, resorting to lies and violence. When the Summit does begin this weekend, protestors will respond to the irrationality and monstrosity of globalization with puppets, songs, drama and dances that reveal the true faces, intentions, and results of globalization. In this vivid form, those perpetrating violence in the name of human development are revealed in true form.

But even before the unmasking of violence occurs at demonstrations, marches and civil disobedience actions this weekend, the residents of Quartier St. Jean Baptiste in Quebec City have already begun this process. Situated right next to the 3- kilometre long fence protecting visiting trade officials, and at the site of one of the demonstrations planned by Anti-Capitalist Convergence, the residents of St. Jean Baptiste, frustrated at the militarization of their neighborhood, involving continuous patrols by police and restrictions on movement, have already reclaimed their neighborhood from those planning economic devastation in the name of free trade. Along the security fence, residents have decorated the ugly concrete and metal edifice with balloons, slogans, graffiti, political rants and children's paintings. The fence, formerly a mechanism of state violence and control, has thus been reclaimed as an object of the community's creativity and energy. In response to several months of government rumours and fears spread about the impact of anti-globalization protestors, residents are planning to further their dissent with summit organizers, and reveal their solidarity with activists by organizing 5 minutes of noise each night of the summit at 11:00 pm. Using pots and pans, stereos, and their own voices, Quartier St. Jean Baptiste residents will noisily reappropriate their streets from the state's oppressive control.

It is always important to bring the story of globalization, and opposition to it back to the local context, where it is visibly revealed in tangible emotions, plans, art, words, and noise. After all, the greatest victory of globalization's proponents has been to depoliticize labour, the environment, and society as a whole. Instead of seeing cultures and ecologies as repositories of values, morals, creativity, history, and life, corporations and their henchmen in the WTO, IMF and World Bank see only quantitative resources to be exploited, hours to be worked, commodities to be made and sold, and profit margins to be pushed higher. Debate is cleverly neutralized by referring only to potentials, factors, indicators, and goals.

Yet to be able to voice the central effects of globalization is to understand the frustration, pain, exhaustion, disengagement, fear and rage of ordinary people everywhere in response to policies and projects imposed upon them by distant elites. Among these people is the farmer who has lost her farm because of exorbitant seed prices set by agribusiness; the indigenous person whose land was flooded by a dam constructed by multinational engineering companies; the woman working 12 hours daily in inhumane conditions at the sweatshop for Disney, Panasonic or Nike; and the urban slum dweller, forced into homelessness because IMF-imposed austerity measures have eliminated their government's social programs such as affordable housing. Thus, like the Kosan of Ecuador who articulate resistance against oil companies through a refusal to violate their spirits, the Cree who vigorously maintain their refusal to be eliminated as a nation and people by southern governments and corporations; and the residents of St. Jean Baptiste in Quebec city, who refuse the militarization of their neighborhood and reappropriate it by decorating fences and blaring music, the activists converging in Quebec City this week are vigorously resisting free trade and globalization policies not only in defense of their political rights and environmental resources, but also in the name of their basic humanity, dignity, and freedom.