This is over. We have just had a second Seattle.” So announced the Kenyan representative to World Trade Organization talks on September 14. Upon uttering these words, the delegate stormed out of the Convention Center in Cancun, Mexico, where the talks were being held, triggering a walkout by delegates from other poor countries and the collapse of the trade negotiation.

If the failure of the talks in Seattle in 1999 was a huge blow to the WTO, the meltdown in Cancun may count as the knockout punch. After the collapse in Seattle, in the face of militant street protests, the rich nations pledged that the next round of talks would focus on helping the world’s poor

Dubbed the “development round,” the latest series of WTO negotiations was meant to address the concerns of the poor countries of the global South, particularly in the area of trade in agricultural products, upon which the peoples of poor counties are overwhelmingly reliant. Yet, in an astonishing display of arrogance, the rich countries failed to come up with even minimal concessions.

The example of cotton illustrates the point. There are 25,000 large cotton farmers in the US who produce about $3 billion of their product every year. For that effort, the American government gives them $4 biallion in subsidies, which allows them to sell their cotton below cost. Meanwhile, there are 10 million desperately poor cotton farmers in Mali, Benin, Chad and other Central and West African countries, the majority of whom live on less than $2 a day. US cotton subsidies drive down prices and destroy export markets for these African farmers. Yet, not only did the US government refuse to remove the cotton subsidies, more insulting, it produced a memo suggesting that Africans should simply stop growing cotton.

And the story is the same in one agricultural sector after another. Altogether, governments in Europe and the US hand out more than $300 billion per year in agricultural subsidies. Even though doing so impoverishes poor farmers in the global South, the rich countries of the North offered no meaningful reforms in the latest round of negotiations. Indeed, some Western governments have been so blatantly cynical as to increase their agricultural subsidies in the run-up to the Cancun meetings. In the past year alone, for example, the Bush administration passed a farm bill giving American farmers an extra $80 billion in subsidies over the next ten years.

As a result, anger in the Global South had deepened prior to the meetings in Cancun, as Western governments’ claims to support development were revealed to be self-serving lies. And following Cancun, the WTO stands publicly exposed as an institution used by the governments of wealthy nations to rig the rules of the global economic system in their favour.

Via Campensina

It should come as little surprise that the opposition to the WTO meetings in Cancun was spearheaded by Via Campesina, a mass organization representing 100 million peasant farmers worldwide. One of its leaders, Rafael Alegria, played a prominent role in the protests in Cancun, vowing to transform it “from a tourist city into a site of global struggle.” And that’s precisely what he and thousands of other activists did.

From the start of the meetings, mass protests challenged the security wall set up by police to protect government officials. Demonstrators were met repeatedly by water cannons and police dogs. In a dramatic moment, on September 9, Korean farmer Lee Kyng-hae set himself ablaze in protest against WTO policies, dying shortly thereafter. Lee became a symbol of the week of resistance actions, which included a ceremony to commemorate him.

After days of being brutally assaulted by riot police, the scale and effectiveness of the protests was transformed on Saturday, September 13, the day of an International March against Globalization. Thousands upon thousands of farmers, indigenous peoples, youth and trade unionists rallied at the massive security wall. Having seen their events marred by paid disrupters and provocateurs, the protesters organized their own security in which the much-maligned anarchist black blocs played an important role. The militant, disciplined and utterly inspiring mass action which followed was led by the women.

POWER OF THE PEOPLE

One participant described the events: “With the black blocs providing security from the provocateurs, and cordoning off the first ten meters in front of the wire walls, more than a hundred women went forward with bolt cutters and began dismantling the walls, bit by bit. What a diversity of women it was! Indigenous women, punks, students, old women, young women, Mexican women, American and European women, African women. Once the wall was weakened, the Koreans supervised the attachment of 50 meter long, 4 inch circumference ropes to the top of the walls. Then thousands of people of all nations, races and cultures, punks, black blocs, peasants, etc., together pulled the walls down. Quite literally, the power of the people, united, pulled down the walls of the WTO.” Then, as the riot police prepared for a para-military assault, the demonstrators turned the tables. Rather than surging forward, they sat down, holding a ceremony to honour Lee Kyung-hae, and turning the area into a mass peoples’ assembly. Meanwhile, protesters who had infiltrated the hotel zone blocked traffic, confronted WTO delegates, and bewildered an army of private security and military police.

The spirit of the resistance was captured in a communiqué from Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatista Liberation Army which was read out to the popular assembly early in the week. Denouncing “a global machine that feeds on blood and defecates in dollars,” Marcos continued: “In the complex equation that turns death into money, there is a group of humans who command a very low price in the global slaughterhouse. We are the indigenous, the young, the women, the children, the elderly, the homosexuals, the migrants, all those who are different. That is to say, the immense majority of humanity.”

And it was a representative group of that diverse human majority that rallied in Cancun to say No to the WTO. As in Seattle, as the street protests escalated in militancy, trade delegates from the poorer countries were emboldened to resist the bullying by the rich countries. The result was yet another humiliating public defeat for the WTO.

More Seattles

Of course, Cancun is not the end of the struggle, as the global ruling class has more tricks up its sleeve. In light of collapse at the WTO, they are pushing strongly for bilateral and regional trade deals that move in the same neoliberal direction. For example, moves toward a Free Trade Area of the Americas, which was the focus of mass protests in Quebec City in April 2001, continue unabated.