"Free Trade Is War"

Naomi Klein, The Nation, September 12, 2003

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