PESO DEL
3.6. ESTUDIO ECONÓMICO – FINANCIERO
As “the fence” became a consistent feature of the streetscape during summit meetings, it became the symbolic and physical focus for much protest activity: art installations on the fence, launching objects over the fence with a giant catapult, tearing down the fence, holding vigils and ceremonies at the fence, and even a suicide on the fence. As I will show below, fences began to function as “the front line”, even though they were often miles from actual summit meetings being targeted.
Before fences became conventional security measures for protests, activist attention was focused on other things. For example, in Washington D.C., during the April 2000 protests against the IMF and World Bank, where fences were fragmented and partial, there wasn’t a strong focus on tearing down or breaking through those barriers. There were large marches and small marches at different times in different locations, there were permitted and unpermitted marches, and there were many other types of actions, including various kinds of street theater and puppetry, Black Blocs, and intersection occupations. At some intersections, there were “soft lock-downs” (e.g., people occupying an intersection by sitting down with their arms linked); at others there were “hard lock-downs” (e.g., people
occupying an intersection by hooking their wrists together with carabineers inside of PVC tubes55). In one intersection, activists threaded yarn between street signs on all four street corners, creating a giant three-dimensional web that was nearly impossible to get through,
55To physically move bodies from this form of lock-down, police need power tools to cut through the
especially for those in police uniforms covered in buckles, clasps, and other things that catch easily on yarn (the officer really did look like a fly caught in a web; the more he twisted to remove himself, the more tangled he became).
In Prague, as mentioned in the previous section, the scenes at the frontlines fit with more traditional protest imagery: the police on the main bridge leading to the Congress Centre functioned as a durable frontline for an entire day, and the Congress Centre building itself became the frontline when activists swarmed up around it. At one point, however, certain protesters were apparently dissatisfied with the low intensity of the frontline on the bridge. Members of the Italian direct action group Ya Basta, famous for their protest
uniforms of helmets and heavy padding—including foam and inner tubes—started
shouting into a megaphone to encourage everyone gathered on the bridge to push forward into the police line. One woman explained, screaming into a bullhorn in a thick Italian accent, that, “our comrades are being beaten by the police!” They needed reinforcement, she yelled, urging the crowd to push from behind to back them up. I was only a few feet from the front line at that point, and could see that there was no significant interaction between the police and protesters. In this situation, it was especially obvious that the form of protest drama certain activists desired depended a great deal on police behavior: without a fence, activists depended on police to play their part in a confrontation for it to be sufficiently dramatic. With a fence, on the other hand, drama could be generated just by interacting with the fence, even without a response from the police.56
Even in Quebec City, where there were plenty of dramatic confrontations with police, the fence was confronted immediately and wholeheartedly as the frontline, independently of interactions with police. Citywide, the fence became a target for “fence decorators.”
56When I describe a scene from Cancún in a moment, it will be clear that a focus on the fence—
96 (Source: BBC 2001c)
One large section of the fence was torn down in a tug-of-war with a long rope and grappling hooks.
Photo by Vinci Daro
This section of the fence was successfully torn down by around a dozen activists pulling on rope tied to grappling hooks that they clamped onto the fence.
Another section became a volleying site for stuffed animals and other objects catapulted over into the protected zone.
Photo by Ken Gould (Source: Gould 2001)
The catapult is the large yellow structure to the left of the center of the photo.
The catapult, in particular, demonstrated the advance thinking of activists who anticipated the fence as a prominent feature of the summit protest drama.
The fence as stage for performing multiple figured worlds
Although fences were meant simply to keep protesters away from summit meetings, they created important sites of visibility and audibility as a side effect. One activist in
Quebec City who participated in the permitted march at the waterfront, far from the fence, and then later participated in street protests at the fence, described her experience like this: "Down on the waterfront we went through everything but it felt like we were putting on a show for an empty city. Up here [near the fence], at least, people are being heard by the people inside the summit." (quoted in DePalma 2001)57 Building on this sense of the fence as a site for being heard and seen, fences in the post-Seattle period quickly began to function as
57In a related vein, the International Director of the Canadian Auto Workers reported that, "…some
[CAW activists] expressed disappointment that the march organisers did not have the route pass closer to the hated barricade… In the next demonstrations our members are demanding a far more militant response than the peaceful march away from the fence." She continued, “We will be looking at the direct action, non-violent methods of the youth movement and offering training to our
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stages and stage props that supported and enabled a wide variety of creative activism. The fence in Cancún, in particular, during the WTO’s Fifth Ministerial meetings, became a symbolic and physical focus for several groups’ actions, including Korean farmer Lee Kyung-hae’s dramatic suicide.
Lee was a fifty-six year-old dairy farmer who had been at the forefront of the Korean farmers’ movement for over a decade58. During the largest march of the week of protests, the Campesino march on September 10th, he climbed up to the top of the security fence at the front of the crowd, made a brief statement, and then stabbed himself in the heart with a knife.
Photo by Daniel Aguilar (Source: Agence France Presse 2003)
Lee Kyung-hae, left, moments before he stabbed himself in the heart during the 2003 WTO summit in Cancún.
As in previous public mock-suicides by Lee, a coffin had been prepared as a central symbol in the performance, and as before he held a sign saying “WTO Kills Farmers.” But this time Lee directed his knife so that the performance was fatal. He was pronounced dead soon
58Lee was well-known and well-loved among South Korean farmers, and was elected three times to
his city council. After losing his own farm land in 1990—as many farmers did— when South Korea opened it’s markets to cheap agricultural imports from the U.S., Europe, Australia, and China, he threw himself into to farmers’ resistance struggles against free trade reforms. He was a central figure in forming the Advanced Agriculture Federation, staged over 30 hunger strikes, many of which required hospitalization, and once attempted to disembowel himself outside the WTO office in Geneva during the Uruguay Round, which opened South Korea to cheap rice imports. His suicide in Cancún was a surprise to his family, but based on a note he left in his hotel room, it appeared the act was planned. (Walker 2003; Watts 2003)
after arriving at the hospital, where he was rushed by supporters and street medics (Walker 2003).
I don’t know how many people at the march realized what was happening at the front of the crowd at that moment; no one I was with or near did, even though we weren’t far from the fence. But it was clear that something had happened when people started shouting in Korean from the front of the march, and the crowd jostled crazily as they
cleared a path to carry Lee away. Had there not been a fence for his performance, Lee surely would have found another location for his act. And even with the fence, he could have chosen a location closer to where the WTO meetings were happening—the fence was nearly six miles away—as many activists, including Korean farmers, had for other actions. But he chose the fence as his stage, and his choice added enormously to its significance in the collective experience of protests in Cancún that week.
Lee’s dramatic suicide was not the only performance that week for which the fence served as a stage. Throughout the week of activities during the WTO meetings, tensions brewed between many anarchists, who didn’t like being told what they could and couldn’t do by other activist contingents, and the “internationals” (mostly from the U.S. but also from various parts of Latin America and Europe), who were trying to act as liaisons between various “outside the fence” contingents, including Mexican students, Indigenous activists, and others. (Contact between the internationals on the town side (outside the fence) and NGO activists in the hotel zone (inside the fence) was limited.) Many anarchists were especially mad when, during last big march (September 13th), a “women’s action” controlled the space along the fence for many hours.
The action was announced by word-of-mouth by pairs of women roving through the crowd less than an hour before it was to begin. Women were to lead the march to the fence, ahead of everyone else, and then make an opening for a group of Campesina women to enter and perform a symbolic/ceremonial direct action at, or possibly against, the fence. It would perhaps be a seated action, and would perhaps take some time; the details weren’t
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clear. We all marched to the fence, women in the lead, and when we arrived, we were asked to line up along the fence arm in arm. We locked arms and lined up with our backs to the fence, facing a line of men who were also locking arms, protecting our space from other men. The purpose and form of the action then began to evolve from one minute to the next.
Explanations for the women-only space along the fence ranged from a desire to keep out provocateurs, who were far more likely to be men59, to a desire to keep things peaceful so that the police would be less likely to attack the Campesina women, during their
ceremony. Another explanation was to provide a buffer between the police and a particular group of indigenous rebels who were usually armed and were often targeted by the
Mexican military. While these arguments seemed to make sense to some people, tensions mounted as time passed over the most appropriate behavior towards the fence. For those who supported the women-only space, it was a way for women and indigenous people to act together in a peaceful show of strength and solidarity—women of the “global north” in solidarity with Indigenous people of the “global south”—but for others, deferral for too long of other plans at/for the fence was a violation of the principle of “diversity of tactics,” which was by then a core organizing principle at summit protests.
After a short while, a group of Campesina women appeared and were sort of moving together through the women’s space. I couldn’t see from where I stood if they performed any kind of ceremony or not, but before long, a message began to circulate that the Koreans were preparing to take down the fence. We were to be ready to defend the space for them so no one interfered, including the police. Then the message coming down the line changed: we were going to dismantle the fence and were to protect each others’ identities so the police on the other side of the fence wouldn’t be able to tell who was doing
59Evidence to support this argument emerged shortly: I saw a man in a dark t-shirt and khaki pants
wander into the women’s space with a camera, and then respond to a command from an un- uniformed officer on the other side of the fence to film women cutting the fence; the officer was gesturing and pointing frantically at the women, and the man with the camera moved right up to the fence to film them. Right away, some men protecting the women’s space grabbed him back away from the fence, yelling at him angrily. He was either a press person working for someone operating on the police side, or was an undercover cop responding to orders from a superior commanding from the other side of the fence.
the cutting. Then bolt cutters were passed down the line, followed by various makeshift shields for concealing the cutting process from the police, and followed soon after by further instructions: we were to cut the fence apart to make it easier to topple because the Koreans were going to come in and tear the whole thing down with ropes they’d woven in
preparation for this purpose.
As the messages shifted, it became clear that there were competing ideas and conflicting desires in play with regard to what should be done at /to the fence (and who should do it, how they should do it, and when). The struggle over approaches to the fence took the better part of a day to work through. Over the course of several hours, there was a reluctant compromise through timing. This compromise produced a series of actions that felt more like a talent show than a protest, with some acts that were interactive, some that were serious, some that were intensely aggressive and some that were playful. Contention over which group would be allowed to perform was partly, I believe, what kept people at the fence, waiting for their turn.
Women began taking turns cutting and pulling big holes in the fence (which was three layers thick so that there were these sort of cages between the layers). Holes started opening up all along the fence big enough for us to go into the space behind the first layer and start cutting through the second and then third layers. Meanwhile, the “women-only” designation was being heavily enforced by men who lined up facing us, arm in arm, and forcibly removing any men who crossed their line. This meant that men who wandered in, or tried to break into, the women’s space were yanked, shoved, tackled, and otherwise attacked by the men protecting the space as we took turns cutting the fence and then passing the bolt cutters down the line. After a little while, another message came down the line that we were to stop cutting so that there would be only one primary opening in the fence where a group of Korean farmers was starting to accumulate. We were to leave the rest of the fence intact enough to protect the crowd from the police during the next phase of the action. But that next phase didn’t take shape very quickly.
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Mounting impatience among some individuals ready to tear down the fence
threatened to break the slow and shifting flow of activity. At one point, a young man broke into the space, furious about being kept from the fence. He approached two women in the line who were in his affinity group, yelling accusations about everyone controlling the space: “I can’t believe that they’re not all infiltrators if they’re trying to tell us not to break through the fence!!” The women seemed convinced by his fury, and shifted their
commitments in an instant: instead of being part of the line of women, in solidarity with the various groups preparing actions at the fence, they turned back to the fence and started tearing their hole open further. One of the women donned a gas mask for the task, despite an absence of any indication that teargas was going to be part of the drama: none of the police had masks and there had been very little teargas used during the protests so far. The young man appeared satisfied, and stood behind the women with his arms folded,
accepting that the women, not himself, should do the cutting, but meanwhile ignoring the people yelling at him to leave the women’s space. At one point he turned to someone yelling at him and explained, defiantly, that he wasn’t going to move because he wanted to make sure nobody tried to stop the women from cutting the fence. He had a established a microcosm of protected space, inside of the larger protected space, defending the women in his affinity group from women in other groups; this microcosm reproduced—at a tiny scale—the larger dynamic of fence-focused activity at that moment, but with the slight variation in who was in control.
Meanwhile, another group of activists at the other end of the fence initiated a giant egg fight, hurling raw eggs over the fence into and onto the police, splattering their shields with runny yellow goop. Some police officers were amused, and began catching the eggs and throwing them back. Then an activist samba band launched into music that
complemented the spontaneous jovial spirit, and for a short while, both police and activists along either side of that section of the fence were dancing to the chant “put your shields down and dance!” Finally, at the other end of the fence, a group of Korean activists carried
out a giant hand-woven rope and attached it to the fence. All of the women in the line linked arms and took three simultaneous steps away from the fence to make way for the final act. In a collective effort involving dozens of activists from different contingents