"Cancun Report: As Empire Builder,
the U.S. Feels the Heat"

Tom Hayden, AlterNet September 10, 2003

CANCUN, Sept. 8. "The Real Cancun" is a pretty
trashy film, with hard-partying American college kids
being awakened by mariachi musicians against the vista
of a Hilton hotel designed like the nearby Mayan ruins.
In one scene, its hero, Alan, tells his drinking
partner, "People like what they can't have. So, if you
want a girl to really like you, just blow her off."I cannot recall if George Bush ever got loaded in
Cancun, but he seems to be following Alan's advice.
Having blown off the United Nations over Iraq, he now
hopes that the Security Council will be charmed by his
request for money and troops. And the world-class cad
that he is, Bush is also freezing the status of the
poor in the global economy.

Bush has been spending more in Iraq than on the United
Nations' global anti-poverty initiatives. If $60
billion this year is a conservative estimate for Iraq,
that's twice what it would take to retire the debt of
the developing nations, and three times the cost of
eliminating extreme hunger, meeting the AIDS crisis, or
stopping soil erosion.

In comparison, the U.S. contribution to the UN global
anti-poverty program is 0.13 percent of our gross
economic product, about one-tenth the percentage spent
during the Kennedy Administration in 1962. In the
meantime, child labor (10 to 14 year olds) is 14
percent of the Brazilian workforce, 13 percent in the
Dominican Republic and El Salvador, 12 percent in
Nicaragua, and 11 percent in Bolivia.

While waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
Administration has managed to lose most of Europe and
Latin America. Bush (and Monsanto's) battle to impose
genetically-altered crops on Europe has lost American
agri-business $1 billion during the past five years.
And $190 billion in U.S. farm subsidies has inflamed
discontent from Brazil to Mexico.

Meanwhile, the neo-conservative dream of a permanent
American empire is turning out to be short-lived. In
the longer view, of course, America (and the West) are
rooted in a history of colonialism, crusades and the
slave trade spanning five centuries. The settling of
America was an extension of empire, then of manifest
destiny, then of global dominance in the past fifty
years. But the recent advocacy of an American empire
began just more than a decade ago, with the fall of the
Soviet Union. Then came the WTO and talk of a New World
Order. Today that imperial thinking is being seriously
challenged once again.

Just as U.S. military unilateralism has failed at the
UN, U.S. economic unilateralism is being resisted in
the WTO. Like Alan in the movie, Bush is not likely to
get the girl. Instead, the sole superpower is looking
lonely in Cancun, besieged by forces within and
without.

U.S. trade negotiators are working overtime to produce
"momentum" from the Cancun talks, but with little
success.

Cancun itself, a lavish symbol of distorted development
and narco- trafficking, has elected a Green Party mayor
to begin regulating the flow of foreign investment.
Nevertheless, the U.S. wants to "liberalize" the
tourism sector, while the European Union hopes to
eliminate the need to obtain permits for hotels,
restaurants and tourist operations. Cancun's water
supply was privatized by an Enron subsidiary in the
mid-Nineties. The water, according to environmental
specialists, is dirtier than before but costs consumers
four times as much. There is also a push to open rich
genetic diversity and forests surrounding Cancun to
corporate prospectors under privatization provisions of
the Agreement on Trade- Related Intellectual Property
(TRIPS).

In hopes of salvaging a victory in Cancun, the U.S.
recently ended its opposition to a plan for poor
countries to obtain generic medicines to treat HIV and
a handful of other life-threatening diseases. But that
deal, in response to global grassroots pressure, is far
from nailed down, and will be overshadowed by other
conflicts this week.

The flashpoint at this summit is the disintegration of
rural economies after a decade of NAFTA and rising U.S.
subsidies. Earlier this year, a Los Angeles Times
article titled, "Free Trade Proves Devastating for
Mexican Farmers," described angry protestors who rode
on horseback through the elegant doors of the nation's
capital, while farmers carrying firebombs and machetes
abducted government officials to prevent the seizure of
their land for a $2.3 billion international airport
northeast of Mexico City. After unprecedented
absenteeism in Mexico's July 6 elections, Vicente Fox,
the hero of Nineties neo-liberalism, has conceded his
government's failure to heed a "widespread social call
for deeper and more dynamic change."

But the wave of grassroots uprisings is not limited to
Mexico.

Even under a friendlier political climate, Brazil's
landless movement (MSN), which represents 1.5 million
members, has resumed its direct action campaign to
obtain unoccupied land, and birthed a new campaign
known as "the roofless movement" among the urban
homeless.

In post-apartheid South Africa, movements among "the
poors" are struggling to reconnect electricity and
water supplies in slums where at least one million
people were cut off due to lack of funds. Their anger
even extends to the governing African National Congress
which, they assert, has voluntarily imposed its own
neo-liberal program to please investors, including
cutting taxes on the rich, eliminating currency
exchange controls, and tolerating job losses of 100,000
per year.

A huge question hovering over Cancun this week is
whether the Zapatistas will challenge the WTO
Ministerial meeting or deem it irrelevent. The social
movement triggered by the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas
has filtered throughout Mexico in the past decade.
Recently the Zapatistas terminated all contact with
government negotiators and political parties, choosing
to directly implement a broader self-government in some
40 "autonomous municipalities" outside state or
corporate control.

But with or without the Zapatistas, the Mexican
security forces are "creating an overbearing climate of
fear and tension" in this resort town, according to
Global Exchange's Deborah James. One police
commissioner has vowed to "trade an eye for an eye,"
while officials have set aside bullfighting and
football stadiums for mass detentions. A secretive
"watch list" has been prepared by Mexican officials, no
doubt with FBI assistance, and as a result certain
anti- globalization activists have been forced to move
from their hotels.

This week, it's a surreal Cancun on display. A Cancun
where spin doctors prepare feel-good press releases in
barricaded enclaves of affluence. As the American
empire shudders, as the WTO searches for consensus to
disguise the inner divides, as progressive coalitions
and parties flounder under neo- liberalism, the
community-based social movements push forward, making
local history in this interim -- holding to a vision
larger than any can presently fulfill. The future is
uncertain, but they are not going back to either the
Monroe Doctrine or the military dictatorships from
which Latin America has emerged.

They are demonized still as "globalphobics" by WTO
promoters, mere maladjusted parochialists resisting the
modern world. In truth, many of the local residents and
workers protesting the WTO here knew little about the
organization until they heard of its impending arrival.
But they already knew about privatization and the
selling of their resources. Now they are connecting the
dots between their water bills and the globalization
apparatus of power that controls their lives.

One of them, Jose Saldivar, coordinates the "Committee
of Bienvenidos" which welcomes delegates from social
movements around the world. He says his friends are not
globalphobic at all, especially those who sweep the
streets, clean the hotels, and wash the dishes for
thousands of sunburned and drunken tourists each year.
They are "alternmundistas," Saldivar says, people who
believe that an alternative world is possible.

This week thousands of protesters will show the powers-
that-be that people do indeed want what they can't
have, and do not like being blown off.