Tear gas and torches or puppets and peaceniks?
Next week's Free Trade Area of the Americas summit will stir up a mix in downtown Miami that promises to be part protest, part prayer vigil, part carnival -- and potential riot. Police are prepared if black-clad anarchists try to torch the city. Activists fear cops will unleash pepper spray and rubber bullets.
One thing's for sure: demonstrators, numbering perhaps in the tens of thousands, will converge on downtown Miami to convey their anti-globalization, anti-corporate message. And they represent the full spectrum of the protest movement in the United States today.
They are your parents, your nieces, your migrant housekeeper, the farm worker who picks your tomatoes or the steelworker who assembles your car. They are, overwhelmingly, nonviolent.
"The people who are opposed to the FTAA are very diverse," said David Meieran, a protest spokesman from Pittsburgh. "Those will include everything from retirees to immigrants to skilled workers to postal workers."
Or World War II Army vets such as Jim Worl.
"Here I am an old geezer," the 80-year-old Fort Lauderdale anti-war activist said. "By all means I'll be there. It's important to me. I feel the FTAA is a corporate grab."
The FTAA summit will bring together trade ministers from 34 nations in the Caribbean and North, South and Central America -- excluding Cuba -- to discuss reducing trade barriers in the Americas. Opponents say the trade pact will lead to a loss of U.S. jobs, exploitation of foreign workers, environmental harm and unchecked corporate imperialism.
A hornet's nest of hodge-podge protesters, their numbers estimated at anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000, will gather in downtown Miami during the Nov. 17-21 summit. Groups from the benevolent Sierra Club to the mysterious Black Bloc anarchists have been organizing for months.
Demonstrations will range from the whimsical to the somber. Ministers will lead prayers. More frivolous protesters will hoist oversize banners, or toddle on stilts. A Free Carnival Area of the Americas, made up of stick-mounted puppets and placards crafted over weeks by the Lake Worth Global Justice Group, will lampoon the summit taking place at the Hotel Inter-Continental overlooking Biscayne Bay.
"We don't have any money," said Melodie Malfa, a member of the Lake Worth group. "This is our PR campaign."
Medics and legal experts also will be on hand to assist stricken or incarcerated activists.
A band of bicycle sideshow performers is wheeling from North Carolina to South Florida, offering teach-ins and street theater along the way. Expect "radical cheerleaders," pompon-waving women to call attention to their cause with such cheers as "Riot, don't diet" and "Free Trade No More."
Other entertainment will be provided by renegade country singer Steve Earle and British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, an activist. Celebrity protesters will include John Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO, and U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, an Ohio Democrat opposed to the FTAA.
Among the intelligentsia will be Naomi Klein, Canadian author of No Logo, an anti-corporate globalization treatise; and the single-named Starhawk, a self-help author and member of the Pagan Cluster and Rant Collective from Mendocino, Calif., whose field of expertise is the "spiritual basis of anarchist ideas."
It's anarchists police are preparing for, especially the Black Bloc, whose member dress in combat pants, black hoods and masks. They've been known to rip up curbs with crowbars to throw concrete chunks at police. Another disruption could come from a padded bloc, an informal group that assaults police lines behind handmade shields made from inner tubes, carved up garbage cans or reinforced cardboard.
Similar groups caused more than $2 million in destruction -- and garnered much media attention -- when they protested the World Trade Organization at its 1999 meeting in Seattle.
"They were very sophisticated, quite frankly," said Clark Kimerer, deputy chief of operations for Seattle's Police Department. "They were there to foment chaos. There was a level of organization I hadn't seen before."
Yet sending a message, not throwing stones, is the main objective of most demonstrators. Union workers, practiced in the method of peaceful protest, will make up the bulk of the crowd, say protesters and police.
"People have an absolute right to protest anything," said Miami Police Chief John Timoney. "We're preparing for what we're expecting: the vast majority who will be fine. The AFL-CIO will be fine."
Maya Bell of the Orlando Sentinel contributed to this report.
Robert Nolin can be reached at rnolin@sun-sentinel.com or 954-572-2024.
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