(Sept. 10, 2003, Cancún, Mexico): Today in Cancún, Kyung Hae Lee, a 56-year old South Korean farmer, died after stabbing himself in protest of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a global trading institution that has been leaving farmers hopeless and desperate, and silently killing them the world over.

Dispatches from Cancún
Peter Rosset, September 10, 2003

Korean Farmer Takes Own Life Amid Protests in Cancún

(Sept. 10, 2003, Cancún, Mexico): Today in Cancún, Kyung Hae Lee, a 56-year old South Korean farmer, died after stabbing himself in protest of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a global trading institution that has been leaving farmers hopeless and desperate, and silently killing them the world over.

Lee was among the 120 Korean farmers who courageously rammed a dragon structure into the chain-linked fence barricade heavily armed with police and military separating civil society from the official trade meeting. After the barricade fell, Lee climbed to the top holding a sign that read "WTO Kills Farmers" and stabbed himself in the chest. He was rushed to the hospital and died soon after.

Lee's sacrifice underscores the urgent plight he and small farmers around the world face under the current negotiations on agriculture. "He believed that if the negotiations go through, it will be the death of the Korean farmer," said a colleague with the Korea Peoples' Solidarity Movement. Lee joined the thousands of farmers who traveled continents to protest the dead end that the WTO presents, signaling to the rest of the world that he was willing to sacrifice his own life--thousands of miles away from his family and his people--instead of silently suffocating under the harsh rules of the WTO.

His death today falls symbolically on Chusok, one of the largest national Korean holidays where family and friends gather to give thanks to their ancestors for the food they have harvested.

"Derail the Death Train of the WTO"

(Sept. 9, 2003, Cancún, Mexico): The messages from Subcomandante Marcos and Comandantes Esther and David of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) this morning fell like verbal bombshells on the assembled crowd in Cancún, scene of the WTO Ministerial.

"The Global movement against the globalization of death has today, in Cancún, one of its most brilliant expressions," said Marcos in a tape-recorded message read to the assembled thousands at the International Farmers and Indigenous Peoples' Forum being co-sponsored by Via Campesina, the Mexican umbrella peasant group UNORCA and the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) of Mexico. "We salute the very existence of the Via Campesina, your struggle and your resistance," he said in an accompanying letter. The Via Campesina is the global alliance of family farm, peasant, indigenous, farm worker and landless movements, which has affiliates in some 70 countries, both North and South, representing about 100 million people.

In reference to the trade ministers of the world who are meeting to carry out WTO negotiations in the heavily guarded luxury hotel zone of Cancún, he said: "This is not the first time nor the last that those who think they own the planet have to hide behind their high walls and pathetic security forces to make their plans. Just as in any war, the high command of this army of the transnationals, which seeks to conquer the world in the only way that it can be conquered -- by destroying it -- meets under a security system which is matched in size only by their fear."

Because, he added, "this is a war. A war on humanity. The globalization of those who are above is nothing more than a global machine that feeds on blood and defecates dollars." But we do not have to obey this machine, he said, because "we can build a new path, where life means life with dignity, where life means life with liberty.... The entire world is in dispute between two projects of globalization. Globalization from above, which globalizes conformity, cynicism, stupidity, war, destruction, death, and forgetting, and globalization from below, which globalizes rebellion, hope, creativity, intelligence, imagination, life, memory, and the construction of a world with room for many worlds."

In the letter he sent with the tape, he issued a call to "derail the death train of the WTO in Cancún and around the world."

In an accompanying written speech that was read to the crowd, Comandante Esther of the EZLN addressed "sisters, indigenous women, peasant women and city women." She called on women to fight sexism and abuse wherever it is found, even among companions in struggle. "When we demand respect as women we demand it not only from neoliberals but also from those who struggle against neoliberal policies and say they are revolutionaries, but in the home act like Bush." She also called for strength in the struggle against the WTO and neoliberalism, "because what we produce never receives a fair price but what they sell us gets more expensive all the time... while millions of poor men, women and children die of hunger and disease."

In another written speech that was read out loud, Comandante David of the EZLN said that "before the moneyed powerful who meet today to work out how best to eliminate us, to humiliate us, to disappear us, we, the Zapatistas rise up in autonomy and resistance like arms and shields for all humanity and against neoliberalism. Because we, the indigenous people of Mexico, of Latin America, of whatever continent, have always suffered all kinds of injustice... in our own territory we are exploited like slaves."

But, he went on, "the land is ours, it belongs to the peasants and the indigenous peoples, and we should take it back and make it produce for all, not just for a handful of the wealthy who wouldn't even recognize the color of the soil if you placed it before them."

"This is why, from this remote but dignified corner of our country, Mexico, we call on the people of all Mexico, on the peoples of all of Latin America, and on all the peoples of the world, to unite with our resistance, and support the resistance of all poor peoples of the world who are being beaten down and destroyed by the globalization of death. Brothers and sisters of the world, we call upon you to unite and get organized in global resistance."

The hall was packed not just with indigenous, peasant and farmer delegates from Mexico and the world, but also by student activists, environmentalists and others, together with a massive presence of the news media that always flocks to any event involving the Zapatistas, who time and again have demonstrated their ability to electrify and move people to mass action. Shortly after, a first contingent of some one thousand protestors -- mostly students on this first day of action, but accompanied by a small solidarity contingent from the Via Campesina, sallied forth to probe the defenses arrayed at the security perimeter of the luxury hotel zone. The march was filled with music and street theater, and while completely non-violent, led to the complete closure of vehicle access to the zone for several hours, and brought the massive presence of riot police.

The next few days the whole world will be watching Cancún. And the social movements will define what victory looks like.

Dr. Peter Rosset is Co-Director of Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy (www.foodfirst.org), a leading progressive think tank focusing on food as a human right. He is the author of seven books, and has been published in many academic journals as well as in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and other newspapers.