No. 1, Monday, September 8, 2003
(other reports will follow from Peter Rosset and Anuradha Mittal in Cancun,
and staff members at actions in the U.S.)
View Photos from this day's events:
I arrived on Saturday at 5:45 PM at the
International Airport in Cancun, only to find Mexican immigration officers
asking each man on my flight if he were Peter Rosset. Well, eventually they
found me and took me to an interrogation room, where they compared my passport
to a document
- perhaps a fax - they had, and talked animatedly among themselves, just out of range of my hearing. My mind of course flashed to the fact that my name was listed on a leaked list of "undesirables" for the WTO meetings in Cancun (see WTO-Listed, http://www.foodfirst.org/media/news/2003/wtolisted.html.
Apparently they knew to stop me, but not why, as I was asked if I
had a diplomatic or ordinary passport! That's tantamount to saying, under these
circumstances, "are you a VIP or a terrorist!" After making a ten
minute phone call and asking me numerous questions, I was just let go. Not so
lucky were farmer leaders from around the world who had their visas denied
outright. Among them were were Bolivian leader Evo Morales, Juan Tiney of
Guatemala, who leads the Latin American section of Via Campesina (http://www.viacampesina.org), Fausto Torres of
the Nicaraguan farm workers organization, ATC, and a host of peasant leaders
from Indonesia and elsewhere.
Sunday, my first full day, was spent
helping Maria Elena Martinez and the other members of the Via Campesina and
UNORCA (<http://www.unorca.org.mx>) team prepare
for the upcoming International Farmers' and Indigenous Peoples' Forum. Her eyes
filled with exhaustion from having only slept twice in the past 5 days, as the
logistical burden of preparing for the arrival of 8,000 people with needs for
renting busses, raising money, getting portable johns, showers, meals, tents,
and chairs, and sound systems and translation for the Forum, multiplied. But
what a great job they did!
Today was the long-awaited inauguration of the Forum, sponsored by Via Campesina and UNORCA, the Mexican peasant federation. Thanks to the solidarity of hundreds of people and organizations from around the world who have responded so far to a grassroots internet fundraising appeal, it has been possible to charter nearly 200 busses so thousands of desperately poor indigenous peasants from Mexico could attend. They come to protest free trade policies - begun through NAFTA and set to be intensified by the WTO - that have brought maize prices down by 50% in less than ten years and torn apart the social fabric of rural communities, as family members are forced to migrate to make ends meet. The Forum began with a beautiful "mistica" ceremony based on Mayan religious rituals, and rousing protest music from Marcial of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) of Brazil.
Alberto Gomez of UNORCA welcomed the assembled crowd, including the thousands
of indigenous Mexicans and the farmer delegations from some 30 countries.
Speakers included Dena Hoff of the National Family Farm Coalition of the USA,
who said "we stand together with our Mexican and Canadian brothers and
sisters in the struggle to roll back NAFTA and to fight for a better and more
just world for all." Rafael Alegria, the international leader of the Via
Campesina, who is from Honduras, likened to struggle to defeat the WTO to a
struggle for life itself. Paul Nicholson, also of Via Campesina and the Basque
Country, announced that European farmer and other activists were at that moment
trying to occupy the headquarters of the WTO in Geneva, which was met with a
huge round of applause. A spokesperson from the Assembly of the Poor in Thailand
decried the negative impact of the WTO on the livelihoods of poor farmers in
Asia, and Mr. Mongalisu of the Landless Peoples' Movement (LPM) of South Africa
called the corporate globalizers the "same imperialists and colonialists as
before, now in their new warships named World Bank, IMF and WTO, who want to
enslave our peoples to the market." Walden Bello of Focus on the Global
South in the Philippines exhorted us to take to the streets peacefully to
derail the WTO negotiations.
Tomorrow is the second and final day of the Forum, filled with workshops on topics ranging from land reform to patents on life, and is also the first day of anticipated non-violent civil disobedience being planned by student groups. And Wednesday is the day of the first big march, billed as the "Mega-March of Farmers and Indigenous Peoples," with the stated goal of getting through security barriers to the Convention Center itself, where the official negotiations will be getting under way. Stay tuned for updates one or more times each day.
Anuradha Mittal of Food First spoke at an
afternoon press conference where a unity statement was presented, signed by
most of the groups here in Cancún. We made a pledge of non-violence in our
protests against the unjust, undemocratic and non-transparent WTO, while still vowing
to derail the negotiations. Read the Statement of Unity here:
<http://www.foodfirst.org/wto/statementofunity.php>
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