To walk around downtown Miami these FTAA days is a chilling, dispiriting experience. The city is in the grips of a paramilitary occupation, sanctioned under the guise of public safety. It looks mostly like intimidation to me.
I've been in a lot of tense cities and high-security zones -- Sydney and Atlanta during the Olympics, London and Madrid during waves of terrorist bombings, and New York after 9-11. But I've never been in an urban setting quite as creepy and uncomfortable as this.
There are more police equipped with more menacing toys than you can shake a stick (or toss a Molotov cocktail) at. Most look like they've stepped straight out of the nightmarish, futuristic sets of the movies Robocop or Brazil.
There are fences and barricades, restricted areas and closed streets.
That this stifling atmosphere is needed for talks involving the free movement of goods and services would be funny if it wasn't so frightening.
"It's crazy," Norlan Tolson said Tuesday as he watched the phalanx of police in full riot gear surrounding the fenced-off entrance to Bayside Market Place, where he manages the Wilson's Leather store. "It really feels like a war."
For a stretch on Tuesday, nobody could get in or out. I suppose there are worse places to be trapped. I grabbed a latte from Starbucks and waited.
Call it the FTAA paradox: where the talk is about removing borders and knocking down barriers, but where the streets outside the "official hotels" are filled with barriers and those who haven't fled town for the week can be excused if they feel like caged animals.
All this is being done because of the threat of the potentially destructive actions of the radical fringes of those opposed to a potential hemispheric trade pact.
But on Tuesday, it was the police, not protesters, who broke the windows of a parked car. They were concerned about a "suspicious" container. Turned out to be paint. Which, of course, can be considered a weapon under a law passed last week by the Miami City Commission. So can water balloons, spitballs or anything else that can be thrown.
"Better to be safe than sorry" has been the mantra of police and local leaders. But after spending the last two days walking the streets, I have to say I feel more threatened by the potential police response to demonstrations than what some tabouli-eating, Phish fans might do.
Police sealed off Bayside because a few hundred demonstrators were a few blocks away. You would have thought they were defending the Alamo. The shopping complex management watched the scene from under a tarp on the parking garage roof, like Napoleonic generals. A group of bored and disgruntled managers and workers gathered at the flagpoles below, griping about empty stores and tables and the fines threatened by the landlord if they closed.
"So much for free trade," said Tolson, whose store rang up a meager $150 in sales on Tuesday.
Along the southern perimeter of Bayside, a cigar-chomping commander of a Broward Sheriff's Office unit ordered his troops to "Gear Up!" before taking a spin in an armored vehicle to scout the area. Radios crackled with word of protesters carrying water bottles filled with "unidentified liquids."
In front of us, a riot squad from the Hialeah police lined the fence along Biscayne Boulevard, shotguns in hand. At our feet was a pile of empty "Super-Sock" beanbag artillery boxes, the ammunition they had just loaded.
I picked up a box but didn't read it until later, after one officer pointed a gun toward me while another allowed me through an exit gate.
"Super-Sock ammunition was developed for use by law enforcement personnel in situations where armed force is acceptable but lethality is unwarranted," the box read. "Shot placement rather than deployment range is the critical factor in the determining the extent of injury caused. Shots to the head, neck, thorax, heart or spine can result in fatal or serious injury."
If you're heading to Miami today, keep your fingers crossed. And watch your back and thorax.
Michael Mayo's column can be reached at mmayo@sun-sentinel or 954-356-4508.
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