September 12, 2003 The Nation
On Monday, seven antiprivatization activists were arrested in Soweto for blocking the installation of prepaid water meters. The meters are a privatized answer to the fact that millions of poor South Africans cannot pay their water bills. The new gadgets work like pay-as-you-go cell phones, only instead of having a dead phone when you run out of money, you have dead people, sickened by drinking cholera-infested water.
On the same day South Africa's
"water warriors" were locked up, Argentina's negotiations with the
International Monetary Fund bogged down. The sticking point was rate hikes for
privatized utility companies. In a country where 50 percent of the population
is living in poverty, the IMF is demanding that multinational water and
electricity companies be allowed to increase their rates by a staggering 30
percent.
At trade summits, debates about
privatization can seem wonkish and abstract. On the ground, they are as clear
and urgent as the right to survive.
After September 11, right-wing pundits
couldn't bury the globalization movement fast enough. We were gleefully
informed that in times of war, no one would care about frivolous issues like
water privatization. Much of the US antiwar movement fell into a related trap:
Now was not the time to focus on divisive economic debates, it was time to come
together to call for peace.
All this nonsense ends in Cancún this
week, when thousands of activists converge to declare that the brutal economic
model advanced by the World Trade Organization is itself a form of war.
War because privatization and
deregulation kill - by pushing up prices on necessities like water and
medicines and pushing down prices on raw commodities like coffee, making small
farms unsustainable. War because those who resist and "refuse to disappear,"
as the Zapatistas say, are routinely arrested, beaten and even killed. War
because when this kind of low-intensity repression fails to clear the path to
corporate liberation, the real wars begin.
The global antiwar protests that
surprised the world on February 15 grew out of the networks built by years of
globalization activism, from Indymedia to the World Social Forum. And despite attempts
to keep the movements separate, their only future lies in the convergence
represented by Cancún. Past movements have tried to fight wars without
confronting the economic interests behind them, or to win economic justice
without confronting military power. Today's activists, already experts at
following the money, aren't making the same mistake.
Take Rachel Corrie. Although she is
engraved in our minds as the 23-year-old in an orange jacket with the courage
to face down Israeli bulldozers, Corrie had already glimpsed a larger threat looming
behind the military hardware. "I think it is counterproductive to only
draw attention to crisis points - the demolition of houses, shootings, overt
violence," she wrote in one of her last e-mails. "So much of what
happens in Rafah is related to this slow elimination of people's ability to survive....
Water, in particular, seems critical and invisible." The 1999 Battle of
Seattle was Corrie's first big protest. When she arrived in Gaza, she had
already trained herself not only to see the repression on the surface but to
dig deeper, to search for the economic interests served by the Israeli attacks.
This digging - interrupted by her murder - led Corrie to the wells in nearby
settlements, which she suspected of diverting precious water from Gaza to
Israeli agricultural land.
Similarly, when Washington started
handing out reconstruction contracts in Iraq, veterans of the globalization
debate spotted the underlying agenda in the familiar names of deregulation and privatization
pushers Bechtel and Halliburton. If these guys are leading the charge, it means
Iraq is being sold off, not rebuilt. Even
those who opposed the war exclusively for how it was waged (without UN
approval, with insufficient evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat) now
cannot help but see why it was waged: to implement the very same policies being
protested in Cancún - mass privatization, unrestricted access for
multinationals and drastic public-sector cutbacks. As Robert Fisk recently
wrote in The Independent, Paul Bremer's uniform says it all: "a business
suit and combat boots."
Occupied Iraq is being turned into a
twisted laboratory for freebase free-market economics, much as Chile was for
Milton Friedman's "Chicago boys" after the 1973 coup. Friedman called
it "shock treatment," though, as in Iraq, it was actually armed robbery
of the shellshocked.
Speaking of Chile, the Bush
Administration has let it be known that if the Cancún meetings fail, it will
simply barrel ahead with more bilateral free-trade deals, like the one just
signed with Chile. Insignificant in economic terms, the deal's real power is as
a wedge: Already, Washington is using it to bully Brazil and Argentina into
supporting the Free Trade Area of the Americas or risk being left behind.
Thirty years have passed since that other
September 11, when Gen. Augusto Pinochet, with the help of the CIA, brought the
free market to Chile "with blood and fire," as they say in Latin America.
That terror is paying dividends to this day: The left never recovered, and
Chile remains the most pliant country in the region, willing to do Washington's
bidding even as its neighbors reject neoliberalism at the ballot box and on the
streets.
In August 1976, an article appeared in
this magazine written by Orlando Letelier, former foreign affairs minister in
Salvador Allende's overthrown government. Letelier was frustrated with an international
community that professed horror at Pinochet's human rights abuses but supported
his free-market policies, refusing to see "the brutal force required to
achieve these goals. Repression for the majorities and 'economic freedom' for
small privileged groups are in Chile two sides of the same coin." Less
than a month later, Letelier was killed by a car bomb in Washington, DC.
The greatest enemies of terror never lose
sight of the economic interests served by violence, or the violence of
capitalism itself. Letelier understood that. So did Rachel Corrie. As our movements
converge in Cancún, so must we.
Copyright © 2003 The Nation