Dispatches

The right to breathe

No well-dressed demonstrator was without a gas mask at last Tuesday's WTO protest marches, but within a few hours the masks were illegal. Gas masks specifically became contraband at 10am on Wednesday morning, December 1, when Mayor Paul Schell added language to his declaration of emergency that banned the purchase, sale, or possession of them within city limits. According to press accounts, some Capitol Hill demonstrators were arrested Wednesday night simply for possessing gas masks; many other protesters had masks confiscated by police at various events. Under Schell's emergency order, mask-wearers could face misdemeanor charges, bearing penalties of up to 180 days in jail and a $500 fine.

There's no accounting yet as to how many protesters may be charged with possessing masks, says Seattle Police spokesperson Clem Benton. "Because of the mass arrests that occurred, we don't have those figures now as to who was arrested for what," he says. Attorney Dave Osgood, who has battled the city in the past over enforcement actions against music clubs, says he's investigating the situation for a company that sells gas masks. He is now weighing court action to have Schell's law declared unconstitutional. "I believe," says Osgood, "that as a citizen of Seattle, I have the constitutional right of being able to breathe."

JAMES BUSH

Fractured farms

Pissed off farmers from France, Spain, India, Mexico, and the Midwest gathered at Victor Steinbrueck Park last Thursday to rally the masses against big agribusiness. Several thousand farmers, sea-turtle impersonators, and consumer-rights enthusiasts attended. The speakers were Public Citizen's Ralph Nader, Texas talk-show host Jim Hightower, and farmers Helen Walls and Ralph Allison. They demanded justice for the little guy who tills the soil, and the crowd was roaring.

After the rally, a march led by Allison with police escort headed down to the Cargill grain elevator at the north end of Myrtle Edwards Park. It's anyone's guess what organizers thought they'd find there. No doubt aware that the marchers were coming, Cargill employees had apparently stayed home that day. No one but riot police was waiting behind the barbwire-topped fences that surround Cargill's facilities. Demonstrators asked to be let in the gates. Of course that didn't happen, but one policeman admitted that he and his colleagues did sympathize with the protesters.

That didn't help much. Protesters looked around wondering how to take this show to the next level. Allison preached to the crowd about Cargill's many wrongdoings, including a recently passed farm bill that the corporation's lobbyists supposedly helped write which has lowered grain prices to half of farmers' production costs so that Cargill can ship grain more cheaply. This information only made the crowd more antsy to put an immediate dent in Cargill's bottom line. There was talk about scaling the fence and destroying property, but the barbwire was a deterrent to that. Moreover, many of these activists were farmers past a certain age, and they knew that vandalism was probably not the most effective way to get what they wanted.

It was too bad. At the rally, the speakers had warned that Cargill, Monsanto, and other agribusiness groups would soon drive small food producers out of business, and the crowd was ready for blood. But the reality is that it's going to take a lot more than hollering to keep these companies from writing laws and taking out patents to expand their power. The successful protests from earlier in the week gave many WTO opponents the feeling they were winning, or could win the globalization battle eventually. But the grain elevator's stony silence sent these farmers one loud, clear message: Their struggle is still in front of them.

CATHERINE TARPLEY

Chaos in the suites

The chaos wasn't only on the streets. Inside the Convention Center's warren of meeting rooms, disorder reigned, participants say. "In all my 22 years [of attending trade conferences], this is the most disorganized, with the most confusion prevailing inside," said Chakravarthi Raghavan, editor of a daily newsletter called The South-North Development Monitor, speaking at a panel on Third World trade concerns. "This is irrespective of the protests outside. It's too difficult to get the things you expect in a conference. This is a sentiment widely shared."

A French delegate agreed, noting that it was extremely difficult to get ahold of paperwork, receive drafts of documents, and such. A delegate from Germany was more charitable, noting that "confusion is inherent in any international negotiation." Indeed it was clear this negotiation was a mad scramble, with no agenda beforehand and with countries that were already heavily at odds placed under even greater stress because of the intensity of the protests outside.

But the confusion seemed to afflict the least powerful countries the most. Representatives of Caribbean, Latin American, and African nations complained bitterly during the final hours of the conference that they had been completely shut out. "A lot of our ministers do not even know what's going on, they don't even know where meetings are taking place," groused Hassan Adebayo Sunmonu, a trade-union activist based in Ghana, speaking on behalf of a Third World coalition. The UK Trade Network, a coalition of British aid groups such as Oxfam, summed up by saying, "[Developing countries were] left baffled in the corridors while the big countries [took] the important decisions behind closed doors."