Saturday, April 18, 2009

Chapter 4: Formation, Challenges, Campaigns & Strategies of the Hemispheric Social Alliance


Heather Day's Masters Thesis: University of WA Geography, June 2007
‘A Deep Expression of Hope’:
The Role of the Hemispheric Social Alliance in Constructing
Alternatives to the US Model of Regional Integration
Note: ASC refers to the Spanish acronym for Hemispheric Social Alliance (Alianza Social Continental)

Chapter 4 The Construction of Counterhegemonic Integration
Chapter Outline:
Section 1: Forging the Hemispheric Social Alliance (ASC)
-Envisioning a hemispheric social alliance: Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1997
-The role of the AFL-CIO/ORIT in the ASC’s founding
-The role of the Development GAP and the Hemispheric Network for Just and Sustainable Trade and Development
-The First People’s Summit of the Americas: Santiago, Chile 1998

Section 2: Forging the Spaces of Counterhegemony
Four Challenges
-Communications and Accessibility
-South/North Balance of Power and the Meaning of Solidarity
-Representativeness of NGOs vs. Social Movements
-Representing Women’s Voices and Gender Issues: The Women’s Committee of the ASC

Campaigns & Strategies
-Organizational Structure, Objectives and Strategies
-Campaigns: “Liberate the Text!” & Continental Peoples’ Consultation
-Building Alliances
-Countering FTAA Ministerials: Inside/Outside Strategies
-Peoples' Summits

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Section 1: Forging the Hemispheric Social Alliance
Envisioning a hemispheric social alliance: Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1997

The Hemispheric Social Alliance was founded to resist the US model of regional integration, and so it is not surprising that its history mirrors the calendar of negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas, starting three years after it was first proposed by George Bush Sr. in Miami in 1994. In its own account of their founding, the ASC states, (ASC 2002a):

"The great contradiction of the FTAA plan is that it tries to impose a blanket agreement without considering the structural imbalances between each economy in the hemisphere, so for the first time in history we are facing a threat that will affect all social sectors and every country within the region. This unprecedented challenge led to the birth of the Hemispheric Social Alliance, a grouping that promotes the broadest level of unity with which to obstruct the FTAA, under the slogan "Another America is possible".

Thus, while the FTAA represented an unprecedented threat, it also created the impetus for social movements to organize on an unprecedented scale. Spurred by the experience of national and cross-border multi-sectoral coalitions who organized opposition to NAFTA and trade agreements with Chile, the hundreds of activists who gathered in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 1997 at the “Our Americas” Forum envisioned an alliance powerful enough to “confront the current economic model and corporate rule” (Common Frontiers 2005). The 1997 forum ran parallel to the third FTAA Ministerial and the Americas Business Forum. It was coordinated and partly funded by the Brazilian labor federation, CUT (D/GAP 1997).

There were two primary actors at the Belo Horizonte forum: labor, represented by the AFL-CIO and its Latin American affiliate, ORIT, and the ASC’s pre-cursor, the Hemispheric Network for Just and Sustainable Trade and Development, led by the US-based NGO, Development Group for Alternative Policies, or D/GAP. In the next section I take a closer look at these groupings in order to consider the implications of the fact that two US-based institutions (ie the AFL-CIO and D/GAP) were integrally involved in the formation of an alliance whose primary goal is to oppose US hegemony. In particular, for many in Latin America, the presence of the AFL-CIO was an instant red flag.

The role of the AFL-CIO/ORIT in the ASC’s founding
The role of trade union organizations in the founding of the ASC is significant, and somewhat troubling, given the dominant role of the US labor federation, the AFL-CIO. Playing a key role in the historical meddling of the US in Latin America, discussed in the previous chapter, the AFL is notorious for having cooperated with the US government (and the CIA) to undermine anti-capitalist movements in the Americas throughout the twentieth century. Beginning with their attempt to undermine revolutionary forces during the Mexican revolution, to the AFL’s participation in the overthrow of Guatemala’s President in 1954, to their role in destabilizing Allende in Chile, to the recent support of forces attempting to undermine Chávez in Venezuela, the AFL’s international role is aptly referred to as “labor imperialism” (Scipes 2005). In Latin America these operations were partly carried out through the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), until 1995, when a new slate of leaders were elected, who dismantled AIFLD and its other regional affiliates, replacing them in 1997 with the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, (known as the Solidarity Center). Many hoped that this change would mean the end of the era of labor imperialism, prompting a labor council in California to push for the AFL to “come clean” about its role in the 1973 Chile coup. While this effort was resisted by AFL leadership, evidence of the AFL’s role in Venezuela and, to a lesser extent, Haiti, caused a rank and file movement in California to push for passage of the “Build Unity and Trust Among Workers Worldwide” resolution at their state-wide convention in 2004, calling for the AFL to make their past and present actions abroad transparent (Scipes 2005, Hirsch 2005). While the resolution passed in California (representing a rebuke by one-sixth of the AFL’s total membership), and a similar measure passed in Washington state, the AFL-CIO has yet to respond (ibid). Kim Scipes, a labor activist and sociology professor, documented this unsuccessful campaign “to get the AFL-CIO to own up to its past” to its members, who, he asserts, “to this day have no idea of what the AFL-CIO has done and continues to do overseas, nor that its actions have been funded overwhelmingly by the U.S. government” (Scipes 2005).

The AFL’s involvement in the ASC is via their membership in the Alliance for Responsible Trade, the US affiliate to the ASC, and through their role in ORIT , the regional labor federation the AFL-CIO founded in 1951. ORIT is a member of the ICFTU , (International Confederation of Free Trade Unions), founded in 1949 as an anti-communist alternative to other global federations of national union organizations. As an instrument developed during the Cold War, ORIT has been under the control of the AFL throughout much of its history; in 1963 the AFL provided 90% of ORIT’s budget (Jakobsen 2001: 365); its president today is Linda Chávez-Thompson, executive vice-president of the AFL-CIO.

Contradictions in ORIT’s leadership structure and positions on trade and globalization came to the fore at the same time, in the late nineties, according to Kjeld Jakobsen, head of International Relations for the Brazilian federation, CUT, and an officer in both ORIT and the IFCTU (Jakobsen 2001: 375-377, who published his views in Antipode’s 2001 “New Issues for Labour Internationalism”). Struggles to decentralize decision-making in ORIT and to ensure greater representation of Global South members in the leadership coincided with initiatives undertaken to determine ORIT’s position vis-à-vis the FTAA and related measures. Jakobsen recognizes that workers in the North and South have formed quite different positions faced with neoliberal reforms; “The major challenge for the international trade union movement is to integrate the struggles and concerns of workers both North and South. If it is to succeed, international trade unionism needs to find common ground between these workers” (2001: 370). ORIT, influenced by the AFL-CIO and IFCTU position, sought the inclusion of a “social clause” in the WTO and the FTAA. Yet Jakobsen argues, “For the workers of the South it is fundamentally important that the international trade union agenda also include unambiguous opposition to the neoliberal experiment” (2001: 370, emphasis added). The ORIT also lobbied the hemisphere’s governments to allow a Trade Union Forum a seat at the table, to have access to the negotiations equal to that of the Business Forum; this proposal was never approved. Meanwhile, as Jakobsen documents, other efforts to influence the negotiations proved “completely ineffective, given the scope of the processes and interests involved and the inequality of the opposing forces” (2001: 376).

In April of 1997, ORIT’s Congress approved a new leadership structure (Jakobsen 2001: 377). One month later, this new leadership came to the CUT-sponsored forum in Belo Horizonte understanding the need for “a new approach” (Jakobsen 2001: 376). This was partially achieved by meeting with the Hemispheric Network for Just and Sustainable Trade and Development, and planting the seed that was to become the ASC; together the groups led a march of 10,000 to protest the FTAA Ministerial, and issued a joint declaration, “Building a Hemispheric Social Alliance to Confront Free Trade”.

Yet, while Jakobsen insists “Belo Horizonte pointed the way toward a new direction for trade union intervention in trade agreements within the continent, based on reinforcing unity and integration with popular movements” (2001: 376) the “Declaration of the Workers of the Americas” produced by the labor groups at the forum falls short of a new, less conciliatory position on trade. The declaration concludes, “[we] declare our firm determination to fight for democratization of the FTAA process. We workers produce all goods and services. Without our participation, the negotiation and implementation of continental integration and of our countries’ involvement in international commerce are problematic” (Inter-America Regional 1997: emphasis added). Rather than reject the US model all together, the trade union groups issued a rather weak warning to their governments. However, they did commit to organizing a summit to counter the meeting of the heads of state the next year, in Santiago, Chile. This alternative summit was made possible by significant funding from the AFL-CIO, via ORIT (Bendaña 1998), and was the site of the official launching of the ASC where the first draft of Alternatives of the Americas was unveiled, both positive advancements in the resistance to the FTAA.

Thus the AFL-CIO cannot be dismissed outright due to its very problematic history of intervention in Latin America. But its ambiguous strategy of pursuing a seat inside the negotiations at the same time that it pressured from the outside represented, at least initially, a weakened or watered down stance in relation to the overall position of the ASC, of firm opposition to the FTAA process. The relationship of labor to the rest of the ASC network continued to test the limits of its counterhegemonic position, addressing my question of the “degree” to which it is possible to resist hegemony. I will continue to explore the role of labor vis-à-vis the FTAA and the ASC after introducing its counterpart in the formation of the ASC.

The role of the Development GAP and the Hemispheric Network for Just and Sustainable Trade and Development
The other significant player in the 1997 forum was the Hemispheric Network for Just and Sustainable Trade and Development. This network of networks was the ASC’s predecessor, including the national, multi-sector networks who developed effective cross-border organizing strategies through their work to oppose NAFTA, its predecessor between Canada and the US (CUFTA), and bi-lateral agreements between Chile and the US and México. The range of civil society groups represented in the national networks was wide; in the US it included environmental, labor, religious, family-farm, women's, and consumers’ sectors, in addition to development, research and public-policy organizations. Some of these sectors had little experience working together, and often saw their interests pitted against one another (for example, labor and environmental groups), however they found common cause in their rejection of the radical model of free-trade pursued by the US government . These networks shared national and sectoral updates and analysis via the “Our Americas” newsletter, published in Spanish and English and distributed via the web and email. The Hemispheric Network mobilized many of the 700 activists who participated in the 1997 Belo Horizonte summit, with whom members of ORIT formed such fruitful relationships.

The Development Group for Alternative Policies (D/GAP) played a key, but often invisible, role in forming and leading this, and other, networks. Founded in 1976, D/GAP is an activist policy organization based in the US “with one foot among forces for democratic change and equitable and sustainable development in the South” (D/GAP 2007). With strong ties to organizations throughout the Global South, who work as partners in their policy work, D/GAP “is organized to provide access for those in the South to Northern policymakers and opinion shapers and to expose Northern officials, media, and, to the extent possible, the general public, to local realities abroad” (ibid).

D/GAP was one of the first organizations in the US to address the new model of integration sought by the US in the “Enterprise for the Americas Initiative”. In January 1991 D/GAP called the first tri-national meeting to organize opposition to NAFTA (D/GAP 2007). The model of collaboration pursued by this network was later adopted by the ASC. The US coalition that formed to counter NAFTA came to be known as the Alliance for Responsible Trade (ART) . D/GAP, under the leadership of Karen Hansen-Kuhn, helped to organize ART in 1991, and served as its secretariat until 2006 when the Quixote Center took over (ibid). When the Clinton Administration started to push for the FTAA, Hansen-Kuhn worked to expand relationships with civil society networks throughout the Americas, and played a key role in creating the Hemispheric Social Alliance. She also headed up the ASC’s Monitoring and Alternatives Committee, coordinating the drafting of Alternatives for the Americas (ibid).

In addition to its central role in the founding of the ASC, The Development GAP launched the 50 Years Is Enough Network, and SAPRIN, the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network, two other well-known, and critical initiatives that have had a considerable impact in the global justice movement, and beyond. While North-South collaboration is often riddled with problems related to power imbalances, these efforts have earned praise as “exemplary models of South-North networking” (Cheru et. al. 2004), demonstrating that there is a clear role to be played by Northern allies to struggles in the South. One can find “A Message from the Board of Directors’ Southern Members” on the D/GAPS’s web-site; it reads, in part:

For there to be economic justice, there must be concerted action in the South and North. For all the progress that we have made in the South in establishing the capacity to mobilize and advocate on our own behalf, we need, now more than ever, partners in the North capable of understanding and supporting us in this endeavor by working respectfully in tandem with us and intelligently and aggressively vis-a-vis Northern institutions to address the constraints to our self-determination that lie in the corridors of global power. (Cheru et. al. 2004)

The use of this statement on its web-site appears to be geared towards establishing D/GAP’s credibility in the eyes of the public, and perhaps potential donors, but D/GAP has a proven track record advocating for changes to IFI policy in partnership with Global South movements and organizations. As a result, D/GAP was well situated to both help organize and coordinate a hemispheric-wide network. The D/GAP’s experience also helped to guarantee a network based on respectful North/South collaboration, no small accomplishment. D/GAP was also well positioned to secure funding for this project, despite its clear rejection of mainstream economic policies. The D/GAP has a history of working within powerful institutions to work towards radical change; the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review project is one example, carried out with the support and funding of the World Bank (until it released its critical results), in addition to “European governments, the European Union, the United Nations Development Program, and private foundations” (Engler 2003). Funding of the ASC’s operations is not entirely clear, however D/GAP helped secure funding over two years for ART/ASC from the Moriah Fund; other grants to the ASC came from Oxfam International, the Ford, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, Rockefeller and Solidago Foundations, who funded translations and publications (ASC 2002b, ASC 2004). ORIT and the AFL-CIO have also provided funding for at least part of the costs of the People’s Summits.

In addition to the positives, some of the ASC’s limitations might be related to the foundational role of D/GAP as well. Their focus on policy and influence in powerful US based institutions may have been a factor in the ASC’s limited grassroots strategy in the US context. Compared to other US groups, (e.g. Stop CAFTA Coalition and Citizen’s Trade Campaign), the Alliance for Responsible Trade (the US affiliate of the ASC that was led by D/GAP until recently), has not been very visible to those of us involved in membership-based organizations. One New York based activist told me that his organization has not “prioritized participating in ART because they don't really mobilize” and involvement is limited to those who can attend meetings in DC (pers comm). To this observer, it appears that ART’s US-based political work has been focused on getting paid advertisements published to put pressure on elected representatives, and to send people to international conferences. While these are considered useful tactics, they do not contribute very much to building a mass-based movement. It is unclear why ART did not promote grassroots strategies – perhaps they did not see mobilization as their role, given other organization’s potential for leadership, or maybe their staff just did not have that specific training, political orientation, or resources.

Distance from the grassroots/membership bases of organizations is one of the potential weaknesses, and contradictions, of networks of networks like the ASC. It is somewhat of a paradox that a body like the ASC is simultaneously operating at intricate yet vast, mesh-like scales, spread out over so much space it is almost impossible to map, and at the level of a relatively small group of people, who rely on close, trusting, personal relationships to set strategy and direction for the whole. This paradox has repercussions for the organization’s legitimacy; for whom can it claim to speak? The ASC’s process for developing alternatives reflects these dilemmas; I will return to these questions in the section on Alternatives.

What is clear is that D/GAP’s politics, know-how and working relationships were a guiding force in the ASC. Their clear rejection of the policy “impositions from the North” combined with their commitment to “the right to self-determination and [to] the belief that local knowledge is indispensable to the shaping of sound development policies, programs and projects relevant to local needs and conditions” set the stage for the Alliance’s rejection of the US model of regional integration and the pursuit of alternatives (D/GAP 2007).

The Hemispheric Social Alliance really got underway when ORIT and the Hemispheric Network for Just and Sustainable Trade and Development (led by D/GAP) began organizing the first People’s Summit of the Americas. This was the first effort by the Alliance to counter the FTAA by creating a space of opposition during a meeting of the region’s Heads of State.

The First People’s Summit of the Americas: Santiago, Chile 1998
In 1998 the Hemispheric Network and ORIT worked together to organize the first “People’s Summit of the Americas” parallel to the 2nd Summit of the Americas meeting. The alternative summit attracted two thousand delegates (twice as many as anticipated) from all 35 countries of the hemisphere. Delegates represented North and Latin American NGO’s, unions, religious and community organizations, environmental, women’s, farmer, indigenous and other social movements and trade networks who “gathered to express [their] collective rejection of the dominant "neo-liberal" agenda that promotes trade and investment liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and market- driven economics as the formula for development” (ASC 2001a: 1).

In addition to formally launching the Hemispheric Social Alliance, a major accomplishment of the 1998 People’s Summit was the collective drafting of Alternatives of the Americas: Building a Peoples' Hemispheric Agreement, as described in the previous chapter. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the symbolism of meeting in Santiago, where neoliberalism was first implemented under the Pinochet dictatorship, was acknowledged in the opening pages of the first draft of Alternatives. The drafters contrasted President Clinton and “the…most powerful government of the Americas”, who praised Chile as "the model for the hemisphere”, with the President of ORIT who rebuked Clinton’s declaration at the Summit, asserting “"When young children must come and beg for food, we must be clear that Chile is no model" (ASC 2001a: 4). Another analysis noted that Chile was symbolic in 1998 because it was “officially slated to become the next member of NAFTA or a full member of Mercosur”, two models of trade agreements that represented contrasting poles at the time (Bendaña 1998). A political space had also been opened when Clinton failed to win fast-track negotiating authority from the US Congress in 1998; this allowed Chile to assert the benefits of stronger controls on foreign investment, a position rejected by the USTR (ibid).

Given the scope of the FTAA, to an outside observer the formation of a transnational, multi-sector coalition may seem like an obvious development. However, the Cold War, as well as many other political factors, created serious divisions between social movements in the region, and even within the same sectors. As suggested already, of particular significance in the Hemispheric Social Alliance is the effort by the labor movement to build bridges with other sectors, and the constructive role played by the AFL-CIO, (who had elected new leadership just three years previous), and ORIT. Given the history of US labor imperialism, forming alliances with US-backed labor groups was approached cautiously. Reporting on the Santiago Summit, Alejandro Bendaña (1998, para 9) wrote, “Latin American ideological veterans of ideological wars stared with disbelief at the new face and rhetoric of the U.S. and Canadian labor movements. For many non-union sectors outside of México , working with U.S. supported unions seemed surrealistic”.

The obstacles to alliance-building were multiple. Anner and Evans call the historical gulf between the North and South combined with the typical differences between unions and NGOs “the double-divide”, stating that this was “particularly debilitating in the Americas” (Anner and Evans 2002: 4). However, their analysis of the ASC leads them to conclude that “bridging the double-divide should be thought of not as a utopian dream but as a “work in progress” (Anner and Evans 2002: 2).

Real differences caused real tensions during the 1998 summit. The result of decades of business unionism, in some places, combined with the intense pressures caused by the globalization of capital resulted in a weakened and fractionalized union movements throughout the Americas, including many national union federations who were complicit with neoliberal restructuring (González González 2004). As became evident in 1997, labor overall was inclined to take less critical stances towards the FTAA, as much of the movement was lobbying for inclusion in the FTAA process through a “Social Clause” and through the Labor Forum, both positions advocated by the AFL-CIO, ORIT (at least initially), and the ICFTU. Having played a major role in the election of President Clinton, the AFL-CIO was not pleased at being shut out of the negotiations. However, as Jakobsen (from Brazil’s CUT) highlights, many in the Global South feared that incorporating labor rights into trade agreements could have “possible protectionist uses that could aggravate their already difficult economic situation” (2001: 370). Despite the rhetoric of solidarity, many perceived the AFL-CIO’s interests as self-serving, as US workers’ relatively higher standard of living had been undermined by NAFTA specifically, and globalization generally (González González 2004). The ‘inclusion’ provisions did not challenge the fundamental economic model endorsed by trade agreements, that prevented the kind of development some unions in the South were calling for, “a program of national development which seeks to protect local industries, and even keep them in public, rather than private, hands…policies which encourage the formation of an internal, national market, based on the rising income of workers and farmers” (Bacon 2000). Clearly, the more radical unions in the South were not represented by ORIT’s position, thus this was not only about a North-South divide.

These differences, at the root of challenges to forging a “new labor internationalism” (Waterman 2001), did not prevent the labor movement from building bridges with the other sectors present in Santiago, nor did they prove too big of an obstacle to those who sought a more radical rejection of neoliberalism. Creating the Hemispheric Social Alliance thus signified a historic break-through, and was achieved only by committing to “the broadest level of unity with which to obstruct the FTAA” (ASC 2002a). According to Anner and Evans, this alliance “represents the first time that ORIT has agreed to establish a structure to coordinate strategies and actions with NGOs” (2002: 17). Over time, this collaboration significantly impacted ORIT’s position on the FTAA, as reflected in changes to the ‘Labor’ chapter of Alternatives. The second draft, published in 2001, reflects the strategy of inclusion, with a nuanced position on how a “Social Clause” should be enforced. However, by the time the fourth version was published in December, 2002, “lengthy discussions among unions and NGOs” had taken place (Anner and Evans 2002: 17), resulting in a Labor chapter that reads (in part):

“[Unions and civil-society networks] have come to agree that it is not enough to add a labor or social clause to a bad agreement…years of experience…have taught that the problem was not just the limited nature of the workers’ rights clauses in such accords, but rather in the very orientation of the free-trade agreements…Over and above the inclusion of a workers’ rights clause and appropriate adjustment mechanisms, we believe that any economic integration process among our countries must include mechanisms for improving basic labor standards and social programs so that the agreement contributes to improvements in working and living conditions for working people and a more equalized distribution of income within countries.” (ASC 2002b: 40, 43)

These changes were clearly approved by ORIT, as the CUT’s International Relations director, Kjeld Jakobsen (quoted above), who also served as a VP of ORIT, was acting as Executive Secretary of the ASC in 2002, at the time of publishing (Anner and Evans 2002: 17). Peter Bakvis of the ICFTU co-authored the 2002 Labor chapter, indicating the ICFTU’s endorsement as well (ASC 2002b).

The AFL-CIO even received the sincere praise of Leonel González González, International Secretary of the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC) - the Cuban equivalent of the AFL-CIO - who credits the US and Canadian labor federations with ensuring a much more rapid response to the FTAA than to previous impositions of neoliberalism, by making their partners in Latin America aware of what they learned through their fight against NAFTA (González González 2004). He also credits the AFL-CIO with slowing the progress of the FTAA by mobilizing their membership in a successful campaign against fast-track (ibid).

Anner and Evans attribute the emergence of the ASC to “labor’s realization that it did not have the power to defeat the FTAA alone. Broad social alliances became a political necessity” (Anner and Evans 2002: 17). Two of the key actors in the ASC’s founding concur. Hector de la Cueva, representing the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade (RMALC), stated, "The building of the Hemispheric Social Alliance is an extremely ambitious and complex process because of its range and diversity. At the same time, it represents the only road to creating a true counterweight to modify, influence or at least curb the anti-democratic agenda and social exclusion of our governments" (Common Frontiers 2005, emphasis added). Karen Hansen-Kuhn (ART-US) expressed a similar sense of urgency, insisting, "Our only hope for changing the rules of the game on globalization is to build a peoples’ movement for just and sustainable trade and development. The Hemispheric Social Alliance is a big step in that direction. The Alliance will help us to make connections among peoples, issues and campaigns, not just to inform ourselves but to act in a united way" (ibid, emphasis added).

Relating this history of labor’s changing position demonstrates how the ASC did not seamlessly proceed from vision to reality; it was an involved process requiring concerted effort, showing the commitment of the participating organizations to a process reflecting their principles.

This is a still unfolding story. The relationship of labor (and the environmental movement) to trade agreements continues to be locus of trade debates in the US. At the time of writing, the soul of the Democratic Party has said to be on the line. One faction of the Party is calling for a new US trade policy, and for many of them, their critical position on trade was a decisive reason for their recent election. This faction accuses Party leadership of selling out to the Bush administration, and excluding them from recent negotiations with the Republicans. At issue is whether recently negotiated trade agreements with Peru, Colombia, Panama and South Korea will integrate enforceable provisions protecting workers, the environment and access to affordable medicines. A trade agreement with Colombia is especially troubling; the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center reports that 4000 trade union organizers have been assassinated in Colombia with almost complete impunity since the mid eighties (The New York Times 2006). The Campaign for Labor Rights asks, “What are we saying if we allow the approval of an agreement that lacks any meaningful labor provisions with a government that has failed to respond to the violence directed at union organizers?” (CLR 2007). Labor issues continue to represent a potential fault line, demonstrating the risks involved in attempting to forge multisectoral, transnational counterhegemonic alliances.

Forging the Spaces of Counterhegemony (1): Four Challenges
In order to develop discourse capable of confronting the multiple hegemonic discourses constituting the FTAA – globalization, neoliberalism, development, and capitalism – I argue the ASC had to forge ‘spaces of counterhegemony’. I mean this both literally and figuratively. Meaningful public debate on trade agreements has been lacking across the hemisphere. Secrecy and lack of transparency of the FTAA process produce obstacles to democratic participation. Efforts by those who had access to information, and tried to engage with the official FTAA process, were deemed futile (as described below). In this void, spaces needed to be created in order to voice concerns, educate the public and organize opposition. Creating ‘spaces of counterhegemony’ means people have to be engaged, have to believe they have a role to play, and have to see that change is possible. It means giving people tools to see through the social reality constructed by hegemonic practices, that make certain political choices seem normal and common-sense. It means creating places where people can speak up and be heard. The ASC has created those spaces in multiple ways: in the streets, through technical support to negotiators, in workshops on the issues and to develop Alternatives, and by enabling activists through their research and publications, to name a few.

In the context of the FTAA, creating counterhegemonic spaces means enabling democratic participation in the decisions that will affect us. As I will discuss in the next section of the chapter, the ASC’s campaigns and strategies have created the spaces necessary to “seize the discourse” away from the hegemonic institutions. But first I will explore four challenges related to power and representation that the Hemispheric Social Alliance has had to struggle with in the process of creating these spaces. These issues have to do with creating an organization capable of producing counterhegemonic discourse, whose means are consistent with its principles and its vision. Describing the process of ‘direct democracy’ utilized by World Social Forum organizers, Walden Bello addressed this concern, explaining, “The central principle of the organizing approach of the new movement is that getting to the desired objective is not worth it if the methods violate democratic process, if democratic goals are reached via authoritarian means” (2007). These challenges, of communication in a transnational network, of balanced power in an alliance bridging the North and South, of the differences between NGOs and social movements, and of women’s full participation in the Alliance, all constitute the groundwork of a process of creating counterhegemonic spaces.

Communications and Accessibility
Power dynamics are inherent in transnational networks such as the Alliance that rely heavily on the internet for intra-network communication, and travel to often-times distant conferences. Communication between Alliance members is facilitated by the web-site (www.asc-has.org), which includes sections in the four predominant regional languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese and French), and a list-serve. Spanish is used as the network’s common working language, with most reports and declarations published in both Spanish and English, and some in Portuguese. In addition to the annual meetings in Havana, face-to-face meetings take place at events already attended by Alliance members, such as Social Forums and FTAA Ministerials. Rotating the location of meetings from country to country makes them more or less accessible to Alliance members, depending on where they are traveling. However, travel costs are still prohibitive for many, making accessibility an issue, and limiting the number of people able to participate. It is unknown whether fundraising is commonly undertaken in order to facilitate attendance, as was the case for the grants made to Ecuadorians to attend the Quito FTAA protests.

The ability to access information and to participate in decision-making is enhanced for those who have use of computers, and access to the internet, although the Alliance seems to rely primarily on the internet for planning, information exchange, and publicity of forums and declarations, while major decisions on strategy and campaigns are made at face-to-face meetings. In their in-depth 2001 report, Social Movements on the Net, Osvaldo León et al. take up the challenges, but also advantages offered to those organizations who have access to the internet, but acknowledge that “the digital gap” reflects considerable imbalances, between and within the North and South, but also between social sectors. According to León et al, the United Nations Development Program’s 2001 “Human Development Report” found that in 1998, 0.8 % of Latin America’s population was connected to the internet; by 2000 the percentage had risen to only 3.2 % of the region's population, whereas 54.3 % of people in the US were connected by then. The UNDP report also showed that the majority of people connecting were under 25, male, and college-educated, although the gender gap has been closing.

By my own informal investigation of Alliance member organizations’ presence on the web, it appears that access has greatly improved in the past five years, as I have easily found up-to-date web-pages for every organization I have searched. The Ecuadoran organization that published the above-mentioned report, the Agencia Latinoamericana de Información/Latin American Information Agency (ALAI), has been dedicated to this goal and thus instrumental in enabling this presence, seeing the internet as an important tool for Latin American social movements:

“[I]t is becoming clearer that, beyond the advantages that Internet offers for access to information and quick communication, its development as a system of autonomous, decentralized networks, with their multi-directional, interactive communication capacity, more than just an instrument, it is becoming a place for social struggles to be waged. Therefore, use and skill in handling it are not all that count, but also strategy-making to enhance the results of using this “space”. (León et al 2001, emphasis added)

A web-presence for organizations, as well as other joint initiatives such as calendars of events, have increased movements’ visibility, in addition to concretizing the benefits of belonging to a network. As Leon et al (2001) write, “Networking reinforces organizations’ belonging to a larger, supranational entity, to a resistance movement, which makes policy and builds international-scale agendas. Organizations no longer feel weak and isolated, but discover the value of collective action and international solidarity”.

Communication by email requires a greater degree of access than a web-presence, and offers another set of challenges and opportunities. Beyond the financial implications, with the potential of “horizontal sharing of information among organizers and movement members” (Pollack 2000), email may enhance access to decision-making, and therefore power. However, in some cases, leaders have been criticized for controlling the flow of information via email, thereby reproducing existing relations of power (Routledge 2003b, Pollack 2000). Information overload is another challenge, particularly for membership in list-serves, leading some activists to complain of the burden this new technology can impose on organizers (León et al 2001). This is one of the challenges ALAI addresses in the technical support they offer to Latin American organizations.

Without having done any formal investigation of this issue, it is difficult to make any firm claims. However I will conjecture that reliance on the internet is less of an issue in the Alliance than the expense of travel, given that decisions seem to be made at meetings. The expense of travel is not prohibitive only for the relatively less well-of organizations of the South. The Alliance for Responsible Trade (US) recently made a fundraising plea on their web-site to send their director to an ASC meeting in Brazil. Nevertheless, Internet access does seem to be essential for keeping up to date on the issues, and internal communications. While staff of most network organizations probably have regular access to computers, few members of organizations do in most countries in the Americas. This makes the creation of spaces for participation all the more important for the Alliance’s work.

South/North Balance of Power and the Meaning of Solidarity
“Those of us who live and work for social change in the Third World, or the South, have been profoundly sobered by the nature and intensification of the role that the United States has been playing in the world during this era of rapid globalization. Though always affected by American policy, we have seen, especially over the past year, that the United States is willing to accept few limits on the use of its power to achieve its economic objectives. The increased alienation and instability that spawned the events of 9/11 and that have intensified as a result of subsequent U.S. actions have made frighteningly clear the continued failure of American political institutions to grasp the pervasive anger and resentment that the U.S. policy agenda has engendered around the world. Never has it been more important for us to work, in the context of South-North collaboration, with our U.S. brethren to confront these realities in the struggle for economic justice...”
(Cheru et. al 2004, emphasis added)

The above statement, written by members of the board of the Development GAP, eloquently expresses the importance of ‘South-North collaboration’ particularly involving those sectors working for social change in the US. The Hemispheric Social Alliance began to pick up momentum precisely in the post 9/11 era, when the need to develop relations of solidarity intensified. However, despite good intentions, balance of power can never be taken for granted.

Power in a network is partly a function of access to information, as discussed in the previous section, and partly tied to representation in decision-making bodies. The ASC formed to build “Another America”. Behind this simple slogan is a trenchant critique of the abuse of power by institutions founded in and operating with the capital mainly of the Global North. Of course, in Latin America and the Caribbean, the fiercest condemnation is reserved for the US - the US government, its dominant role in the international financial institutions, its corporations, etc. One of the reasons this slogan is meaningful to Latin Americans is because it attempts to reclaim the name “America” for all of the peoples of the region (when, generally the only people referred to as “Americans” are those from the US). The power wielded by the US partly operates through hegemonic discourses that tell people in the Global South to copy the US – to be “developed” means to be more like the US; globalization is good because liberalized economies lead to liberalized democracies, like in the US. Of course, these discourses ignore the particular histories that led to accumulation of wealth in the US, and the failures of the US model of democracy, etc. Despite these elisions, they still exert considerable power.

A hemispheric network whose aim is to resist these discourses and construct counterhegemonic possibility will benefit from the leadership of those who have the most direct experience of US domination. Furthermore, in principle, the means of resistance ought to reflect the vision, or desired outcomes. In this context, that translates into guaranteeing representation of Global South members of the ASC in decision-making bodies. A diversity of experiences also helps to ensure sectoral representation.

The initial Coordinating Committee of the Alliance, determined in 1999, included 5 national and 3 regional networks: Common Frontiers Canada, Québec Network on Continental Integration, Alliance for Responsible Trade (US), Mexican Action Network on Free Trade (RMALC), Brazilian Network for People’s Integration (REBRIP), Latin American Congress of Rural Organizations (CLOC), Regional Workers Organization (ORIT) and Civil Society Initiative on Central American Integration.

Five of the eight networks represented on the original Coordinating Committee were based in Latin America. In 2002, the ASC changed the composition of the Coordinating Committee to include two representatives of movements, committees, or coalitions for each country, and two from each hemispheric or regional network. Thus the new structure guarantees much greater representation from Latin America, and the Caribbean. A rotating Secretariat acts as the coordinating body; this was first housed by Mexican Action Network on Free Trade (RMALC) in México, then by the Brazilian Network for People’s Integration (REBRIP).

The location of the Secretariat in the South is significant, and was a conscious decision; Anner and Evans claim that ensuring leadership from “the countries of the South…has been even more important…than the focus on labor-NGO alliances” in the ASC (2002:18). While US (and Canadian) based members of the Alliance have proven their dedication to working in solidarity with their partners in the South, power imbalances still reproduce themselves. For example, US and Canadian groups’ access to resources is much greater, which can have an impact on organizational decisions. Korzeniewicz and Smith’s research on the ASC found that “some southern groups claim that their northern counterparts have used advantages in experience and access to governments to advance national and sectoral interests under the guise of a common, alliance-wide position” (quoted in Newell 2006: 43). My research has found that US and Canadian NGOs had a disproportionate influence on early drafts of the Alternatives document, which was rectified in later versions (pers comm).

Another possible issue is that the horizon of what seems possible and “alternative” in the US context may seem quite limited in the context of many Latin American countries, many of whom were recently, or are currently, engaged in revolutionary politics. The initial strategy of ORIT (backed by the AFL-CIO) is a case in point. The initial draft of the Gender chapter, written primarily by a member of a US NGO, was also criticized for containing an overly narrow vision.

Attention to North/South issues is of particular importance in the ASC given the pivotal role of US institutions (ie D/GAP and the AFL-CIO/ORIT) in its founding. Recently, scholars have begun to critically consider the politics of Northern groups whose work is framed as “solidarity” (e.g. the AFL-CIO “Solidarity Center’”). “Solidarity movements are distinguished from other social movements in that solidarity activists are said to seek social change or the transformation of power relations for the benefit of others, while participants in labor, feminist, queer, and environmental movements are said to mobilize on their own behalf” (Passy 2001, cited in Sundberg 2007:147, original emphasis). Conceptualizing solidarity in this way can be problematic; if people in the North are seen as acting primarily on behalf of South, it positions the South as victims and North as saviors. “This paternalistic model of solidarity acts to reinscribe asymmetries at the heart of US imperial power” (Sundberg 2007: 160), the same asymmetries at work in hegemonic discourses.

Sara Koopman researched the identities of white female solidarity activists who ‘crossed the line’ in acts of civil disobedience to protest the School of the Americas in Georgia. She argues that these activists, who are known in the movement as “prisoners of conscience”, often reproduce the gendered role of ‘innocent good helpers’, (re-)enacting a form of imperialism that we, as United-Statesians “carry within” (forthcoming: 23). As one of her interviewees eloquently put it, “I enact my solidarity upon them. I turn them into the object of my solidarity, into the object that creates my subject” (forthcoming: 15, original emphasis). Koopman writes, “When we play this role we unintentionally reinforce the mechanisms that sustain the systems of domination that we are struggling against. We set up an ‘other’ and raise our Self above them. These politics of identity affect our ability to change geopolitics from below” (forthcoming: 23).

Speaking from my own experience, many in the US get involved in ‘solidarity’ and fair trade work because they are aware of the destructive role of the US and feel a responsibility to respond. Yet, while they may respect the social movements of the Global South as protagonists of their own struggle, they often fail to make connections between their own lives and those with whom they work ‘in solidarity’. Understanding the devastating consequences of neoliberalism’s implementation in the North enables an approach grounded in the mutuality of struggle.

In interviews with Juanita Sundberg, members of a Vancouver, Canada solidarity group called H.I.J.@.S., who are primarily Latin American exiles, expressed their hope for a mutual solidarity model, enabling a “two way exchange and learning from each other to improve both of our struggles” (Sundberg 2007: 161). As Sundberg explains,

“[T]he idea is that if people in the North try to work from their own experience then they will be in a better position to try to listen to and collaborate with others involved in equivalent struggles in different locations. Developing practices of solidarity built upon embodied experiences and mutuality is ever more urgent in light of neo-liberal restructuring in the Americas…In this context, transnational solidarity can no longer be about those in the North supporting struggles in the South…Mutuality in solidarity encourages individuals and collectives to speak for themselves, while walking with others to contest neoliberal models…” (Sundberg 2007: 162)

It is indeed a strength of the ASC that its Northern-based networks evolved out of struggle against CUFTA and NAFTA (both before and continuing after their implementation). Speaking from their own experiences, the negative effects of NAFTA, and neoliberalism more broadly, on US and Canadian farmers, workers and others are included in ASC analyses, including Alternatives for the Americas. For example, the introduction declares that “respect for the rights of workers, women, indigenous peoples, black peoples and Latinos living in the United States and Canada must be central to any process of integration” (2002a: 3).

The US members have also put their relative privilege and access to resources to work for the Alliance, for example by applying for grants for the network. In the planning for the FTAA Ministerial meeting in Quito, Ecuador in 2002, “Northern groups recognized…that a strong mobilization in Quito would undermine oft-heard claims that people in developing countries are clamoring for free trade while only misguided students, angry anarchists and selfish trade unionists stand in the way” (Ruben 2004). European and US activists, as well as the AFL-CIO, raised funds to help Ecuadorians travel to Quito to attend the FTAA protest, and set up interviews with Western media to illustrate the breadth of opposition to the FTAA in the South (Newell 2006: 17).

Representativeness of NGOs vs. Social Movements
Another issue related to North/South representation and decision-making is that of NGOs vs. social movements and membership organizations. As a network of networks, the ASC encompasses a dizzying number of organizations, corresponding to a full spectrum of organizational types, including social movements, NGOs, research and investigation centers, trade unions, and union federations. With the aim of seeking the broadest possible alliance, criteria for inclusion in the ASC are straightforward: “All social justice organizations who can identify with and adopt the principles and objectives of the HSA, whether directly or through national and sub-regional coalitions, are invited to participate” (Common Frontiers 2005).

In the neoliberal era, NGOs have proliferated in Latin America, as in much of the rest of the world. One of their primary functions is to replace the services of the state that have been restricted through structural adjustment conditionalities. While some NGOs accept the instrumentalist attitude of state and multilateral donors, and comply with the role of filling gaps left by withdrawal of the state, Bebbington and Thiele (1993) argue that this leads to a loss of credibility. Progressive NGOs are oriented towards challenging the neoliberal state’s role, yet often find themselves compromised, especially by state or international financial institution funding which reduces their accountability to the people they are supposedly meant to represent (ibid., Roy 2004, Petras 1997). While some credit NGOs with attempting to adapt to difficult new realities (Nagar and Raju 2003), others tend to generalize and condemn all NGO’s; Petras (1997) dismissively calls them “neoliberalism from below”.

The biggest risk is of de-politicization. Petras (1997) warns of co-optation, when he writes, “There is a direct relation between the growth of social movements challenging the neoliberal model and the effort to subvert them by creating alternative forms of social action through the NGOs”. Arundhati Roy (2004) similarly warns of resistance being “depoliticized” through NGOs, whose “real contribution”, she asserts, “is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right…Eventually - on a smaller scale but more insidiously - the capital available to NGOs plays the same role in alternative politics as the speculative capital that flows in and out of the economies of poor countries. It begins to dictate the agenda. It turns confrontation into negotiation”. In a similar vein, Pollack (2000) cautions that NGOs and trade unions are “deeply embedded in the existing system” making it difficult for them to promote alternatives that might undermine their existence.

While these risks are real, and involve other forces I don’t have space to explore here, transnational movements against capitalism and corporate driven globalization have included many progressive NGOs, working side by side with social movements. Escobar (2005) notes that existing models for describing and understanding social movements do not apply to the current era; he proposes the theories of political scientist Sonia Alvarez as a way forward. Alvarez (2000a) “underscores the growing centrality of NGOs for social movements such as Latin American women movements - the fact that NGOs have been critical to building and sustaining political-communicative networks among feminists and in articulating feminists demands in civil society and other political arenas” (Escobar 2005). Alvarez promotes a view of social movements as “expansive, heterogeneous and polycentric discursive fields of action which extend well beyond a distinct set of civil society organizations” (2000a: 7), a field that “is constructed, continuously reinvented, and shaped by distinctive political cultures and distributions of power” (Escobar 2005).

Using Alvarez’s ‘field of action’ concept, the ASC can be described as a social movement, which includes networks of NGOs, in addition to trade union organizations, academic institutions, independent research institutions and other social movements. For example, REBRIP (the Brazilian Network for the Integration of the Peoples) includes the Landless Workers Movement (or ‘MST’, often referred to as the strongest social movement in the world), the CUT, the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis (IBASE), Jubilee-South, multiple women and gender related NGOs, and Oxfam Brazil (amongst many other groups).

The clear lines drawn between NGOs and social movements are blurring. Nevertheless, the question of whether NGOs (or other types of organization for that matter), truly represent anyone, in other words, whether they have a base, remains a contentious issue. Newell states, “trade unions in particular question who NGOs represent, occasionally referring to them in dismissive terms as ‘non-governmental individuals’. NGOs, in turn, have been critical of the overly hierarchical and bureaucratic nature of some trade unions” (Newell 2006: 17).

These tensions exist in a broad alliance like the ASC, where the degree of representation and democratic functioning varies a lot across institutional and organizational types, making it difficult to generalize. However, regardless of the politics of representation of the hundreds (or probably even thousands) of organizations in the ASC, the primary purpose of the ASC has been to support and cross-link popular education efforts that engage as many people as possible in the debate on the future of the Americas. While in general social movements are more geared towards effective grassroots engagement, a much more in depth study would have to be done to gauge the relative success of various institutional types in guaranteeing this goal.

Representing Women’s Voices and Gender Issues: The Women’s Committee of the ASC
The final issue I address here related to representation and power issues is that of women’s participation in the Hemispheric Social Alliance. Women have been involved in the Alliance since its inception. Recognizing women’s historical exclusion from debates about trade policy, spaces have been organized to enable women’s participation within the broader movement. At the first People’s Summit in1998, women organized a forum, in which “Women from various countries gathered to challenge the patriarchy that is linked to the differential negative impacts of trade and investment that women are experiencing” (ASC Women’s Committee 2004). However, these “differential negative impacts” were not reflected in the first or second draft of Alternatives for the Americas. To ensure the incorporation of a gender analysis in the Alliance’s work, a Women’s Committee was launched in 2001, until now the only “sectoral” group in the Alliance. The Women’s Committee is dedicated to empowering all women to fight neo-liberal processes, empowering the women of the Hemispheric Social Alliance, creating alternatives from a gender perspective, developing strategies for advocacy and mobilization, and broadening recognition of the contribution of feminist thought to the critical analysis and commitment to challenge gender inequalities (ASC Women’s Committee 2005d).

The Committee established a bilingual list-serve to facilitate communication. In 2004 they published their first newsletter, Bilingual Bulletin by Women for Women in the Americas, available on the Alliance web-site. The Bulletin broadens awareness of the Committee and its history, and aims to “highlight meetings, research and work that women are doing nationally and regionally” on the interrelated issues of free trade agreements and “access to essential services, debt, militarization and violence which are inextricably linked to the free trade model in the Americas region” (ibid). Bringing together feminist and non-feminist identified coalitions and networks from throughout the Americas, the Women’s Committee represents one of many transnational feminist networks launched in the past decades.

Playing important roles in social movements resisting neoliberal globalization around the world, womens’ work for change in national and regional contexts gained an international identity when women’s groups organized civil society forums to coincide with the conferences of the world’s leaders organized by the United Nations in conjunction with the UN Decade of Women. Starting in 1975 in México City, and repeated in Copenhagen in 1980, Nairobi in 1985, and (outside of) Beijing in 1995, women from throughout the world have met to elaborate issues to be prioritized by their respective governments and to learn from each other and network. In addition to attending international conferences, activists participated in lengthy preparatory processes in each region, often re-shaping women’s organizing within nations and regions (Alvarez 2000b). Disagreements over strategy occurred at these meetings, “pitting women from the North and from the South, and revolved around prioritizing equality and sexuality issues versus economic and political issues” (Moghadam 2005: 6). According to Moghadam, a consensus began to emerge in the meetings leading up to the 1985 conference, allowing the formation of numerous transnational feminist networks, bringing together women from the North and South to pursue common agendas; a new era of international activism was spawned, including the proliferation of transnational feminist networks (Moghadam 2005: 5).

Some of these networks were dealing with the consequences of post-fordist transitions to neoliberalism, including the increased numbers of women living in poverty, often referred to as the ‘feminization of poverty’. Labor has also been “feminized” in the sense of increased numbers of women workers in the low-paying, instable forms of work created in this era of globalization, as transnational corporations search the world over for the cheapest available labor, pitting countries against one another in the race to attract this form of investment. The ‘feminization of labor’ also refers to the extension of the poor work conditions that are common to women to the rest of the workforce, including low incomes, lack of benefits, poor job status, and exploitative working conditions. Temporary, part-time, casual and home-based work are more and more common throughout the world, and the informal economy as well as remittances from family members living abroad sustain many families in the Global South. Cut-backs in social services, carried out both in the North and in the South, meant that women’s work at home substantially increased at the same time many women were entering the workforce for the first time. (see Elson 1994, Ehrenreich and Fox Piven 1984, Pearson 1998).

Feminist scholars have documented other ways that the changes in the international division of labor that began in the seventies have had multiple impacts on women and gender relations. For example , the research of Maria Mies and Cynthia Enloe linked women’s first world consumerism with the predominantly female work-force in low-paying jobs in the third world, revealing how labor is racialized and gendered in both contexts. Carla Freeman, Diane Wolf and Aihwa Ong, among others, complicated the neat categories of First/Third and consumer/worker by considering the consumption patterns of women working in factories for the global market. Studies showed that, while exploited, women working in these factories also developed new self-identities with the disposable income they earned, thus becoming consumers in the global market-place themselves, albeit in different ways. Many studies focused on the lives of women in export-processing zones, key sites of capitalist accumulation, yet only 2% of women globally work in these factories, leaving many aspects of women’s lives under-theorized. (Ramamurthy 2003)

While these studies have contributed to a rich literature on the links between gender and globalization, the links between gender and trade agreements specifically have not been sufficiently documented. The Women’s Committee has brought attention to this gap, and worked to develop an analysis using several strategies. At the second People’s Summit in Québec in 2001, the Committee invited women from throughout the Americas to give their personal testimony addressing the impacts that trade and investment policies were having on their lives. Examples of the testimonies are posted on the Women’s Committee’s web-site:

A woman from the Windward Islands talked about the loss of livelihoods for women banana producers as a result of WTO rulings. A woman from México talked about the violence stemming from the maquiladora factories in México where women are regularly beaten, raped and sometimes murdered. An indigenous woman from the Andean region shared her experience with land displacement, discrimination and cultural identity becoming a commodity to be bought and sold. A woman from the inner city in the U.S. talked about her social and economic marginalization as a woman of color within the worlds’ richest country in the world. (ASC Women’s Committee 2005d)

Women who participated in the Québec summit also helped to draft the Gender chapter for Alternatives for the Americas, which underwent multiple revisions in the following years. I learned in an interview with Alexandra Spieldoch, a key member of the Women’s Committee based at the Center of Concern in DC, that the first draft came to be re-worked by a US-based NGO, Women’s Edge, who acquired funding for the project, and through a combination of a short publishing deadline and the Committee’s lack of ability to coordinate, a version was published without very much discussion of its contents (pers comm). The first draft’s proposals fell short of the expectations of Committee members, requiring a substantial overhaul. My analysis of critiques of this draft suggest that the Women’s Edge was limited in its vision of “alternatives” to what seemed possible within a liberal paradigm, while Southern groups involved in the Committee called for a much more expansive vision encompassing social and distributive justice.

New versions were published in 2002, and again in December 2005, after substantial revisions were made, including the input of participants in workshops at the 2004Americas Social Forum in Quito, Ecuador, and at the third People’s Summit, in Mar del Plata, Argentina in 2005 (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2). A gender analysis was also incorporated into other chapters.
Other activities the Women’s Committee has pursued aimed at building an analysis include the sponsorship of a methodological workshop in El Salvador, intended to identify research gaps regarding gender and public spending, and a workshop they organized at the Americas Social Forum called “Women and the defense of the right to water”. They presented two case-studies they had researched and published of struggles against privatization in Bolivia and Brazil, in which women were key actors.

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The Committee is represented at all ASC meetings and events, including the annual Havana meetings, and the multiple counter-summits. At the FTAA Ministerial in Miami in 2003, the Committee issued a declaration announcing why “Women say NO to the FTAA!”. This document contrasts the agenda developed at the 1995 Fourth World Conference of Women in Beijing with the FTAA, declaring:

“The achievement of this agenda has been impeded and reversed by the political proposals and impositions of trade agreements, the neoliberal economic model, and patriarchal dominance. This model imposes and reproduces unequal relations between and within nations, and between women and men. The experiences, research, and analysis of the real impacts of trade agreements such as NAFTA in our countries has demonstrated that these agreements, rather than resolving the acute problems that plague our countries, make them worse.” (ASC Women’s Committee 2003)

The declaration closes with a feminist adaptation of the ASC and World Social Forum slogan, “Another Equal and United Americas is Possible!”.

The existence of the Women’s Committee in the ASC is a clear instance of the counterhegemonic possibility of the Alliance. While being cognizant of the pitfalls created by collapsing the experience of all women in the Americas into a neat, unified category, we can say that women as a group have been disproportionately impacted by decades of neoliberal policy, throughout the Americas. Feminists have made extensive contributions to critiques of the dominant discourses of development, globalization and neoliberalism, and women’s organizing, especially in Latin America has been one of the most significant transnational social movements to emerge over the past two decades. Thus the Women’s Committee is an essential space within the Alliance for bringing the multiple voices of women in the region forward.

Section 2: Forging the Spaces of Counterhegemony - Campaigns & Strategies
In this section I review the more literal spaces, and places, the ASC has created or imbued in order to construct counterhegemonic discourse. These spaces actually constitute part of the alternative discourse to the FTAA; these campaigns and strategies can each be considered as a ‘text’ that, together with published texts, tell a convincing story of possibility. This story has proven capable of disabling the inevitability narratives of globalization and neoliberalism, both of which are carried out in the name of “development”. The disruption of the FTAA can be attributed, in part, to the effectiveness of the actions taken by the ASC to construct an alternative discourse,

Organizational Structure, Objectives and Strategies
With delegates present from most of the countries in the hemisphere, the Hemispheric Social Alliance was formally constituted in Costa Rica in 1999 where the organizing structure, mission, broad objectives and initial strategies were determined. It is not clear who was invited to this initial meeting, or how the invitation was made, but it is assumed that it was based on who participated in the 1997 and 1998 forums in Brazil and Chile.

The ASC is a network of networks (which has yet to be mapped), made up of about 16 regional sectoral networks and 16 national multisectoral networks (ASC 2007); collectively the Alliance claims to represent over 50 million people. The delegates in Costa Rica determined a structure led by a Hemispheric Council, which meets annually in Havana “to set policy and develop strategies”, and an elected Coordinating Committee, whose role is to oversee the ASC’s activities between the yearly Hemispheric Council meetings (ART 2004, Anner and Evans 2002: 18).

After the 1999 founding meeting, Graciela Rodriguez, representing the Brazilian Network for People’s Integration, stated,

"I had the feeling when I left Costa Rica of being back in the era of Simon Bolivar, caught up in the old dream of integrating the people of the Americas…but now constituted differently. This time it is led by social organizations through movements of farmers, campesinos, workers, community activists, women, academics and environmentalists. Together they make up civil society throughout the hemisphere, in an alliance.” (Common Frontiers 2005, emphasis added)

The movements for an alternative to the US model of integration of the Americas have been led, as Rodriguez foresaw, by the people of the Americas, not by states. However, just as I could not have imagined the changes that would take place when I first got involved in the fight against NAFTA and the FTAA, Rodriguez probably never imagined the way in which some social movement proposals would be adopted by states, just a few years later.

The fight against the FTAA and for alternatives is summarized by the ASC in the slogan, “Yes to Life, No to the FTAA”. The strategies and campaigns behind this slogan were determined in accordance with broad objectives, articulated differently over time. The following objectives and strategies are quoted from the overview of the ASC on Common Frontiers’ current web-site :

“The broad objectives of the ASC are to:
- Strengthen civil society within and between countries in the Americas;
- Be recognized as a dynamic movement which can mobilize its members and where the different views and positions of civil society can be represented;
- Implement agreed upon common strategies while, at the same time, respecting diversity;
- Support and strengthen the efforts of the different sectors at the local, national and regional levels;
- Promote the enforcement of the basic standards approved by the International Labor Organizations (ILO);
- Promote and campaign for the enforcement of all rights already recognized in the many international instruments, covenants and declarations already signed.

For the initial building of the Hemispheric Social Alliance, we identify two parallel strategies:
1) To impact the official integration process by lobbying, making policy proposals, influencing public opinion, developing media strategies;
2) To build broad-based support for the Alliance with the trade union movement, environmentalists, landless people and homeless people, women’s organizations and all other social movements, especially those most marginalized by the present economic model.”

This two-track strategy still holds today. However, for the purpose of my analysis, I will describe how the ASC forged counterhegemonic spaces in four primary ways: through two campaigns – Liberate the Text and the Continental Peoples’ Consultation, Alliance Building, Countering FTAA Ministerials and Organizing People’s Summits. I have grouped these strategies so as to explain them as coherent discursive entities, but this requires the reader to go back and forth in time over a few years.

Campaigns “Liberate the Text!”
The first campaign initiated by the ASC was to pressure for the release of the official draft of the FTAA negotiating text “with the hope of initiating a real public debate on its contents” (ASC 2001d). Although the hemisphere’s governments had been in negotiations since 1995, five years later the specifics of the text were still kept secret, prohibiting any meaningful dialogue about its provisions. Having had the experience of NAFTA, the Alliance knew that the FTAA was similar, and therefore had attempted to utilize the available channels for input into the process in order to express their concerns. The rhetoric of the FTAA was promising after all, as the official Ministerial Declarations committed the governments to the reinforcement of democracy and human rights, and to the support of education and reduction of poverty (ASC 2001c).

Many groups tried to participate in the FTAA process. Sampson (2004) interviewed several US-based activists who expressed frustration at seeing no changes in the USTR’s approach after submitting papers and attending briefings and hearings held by the USTR. As mentioned in Chapter 2, a committee was set up within the FTAA process for the express purpose of “receiving inputs from civil society” (Barlow 2001), called the Committee of Government Representatives on the Participation of Civil Society (CGR). In an interview with Sampson, Alexandra Spieldoch of Center for Concern called the CGR “totally useless” and Timi Gerson of Public Citizen described the CGR as “little more than a “postal inbox” concluding that either their comments never reached negotiators or that the negotiators paid them little heed since no negotiator had ever commented on receiving one of their documents” (Sampson 2004: 46).

Sampson concluded that “Unlike other political arenas where an opponent can find a voice and meaningful dialogue ensue, under the current structure there appears to be no room for an opposition” (Sampson 2004: 53). Similarly, Newell notes, “There has been less access for NGOs to trade policy compared with many other international and regional bodies in issue areas, where entitlements to make statements, access to delegations, and availability of information are routine expectations” (Newell 2006: 9). Instead, NGOs and other bodies are typically excluded, given the “commercially sensitive issues”, “highly technical nature of the negotiations”, and the “ideological homogeneity of knowledge” in the trade area (ibid). Exclusion is reinforced by the imbalance in resources, particularly in the more developed countries, where governments devote “millions of dollars to infrastructure…top-level translators and interpreters…and hundreds of people freed from other duties for the process” (Cavanagh et al 2001:158 quoted by Newell 2006: 10).

Given this scenario, the ASC knew that the only way a draft of the FTAA text would be released was through pressure. Starting in 2000, over 300 organizations lobbied their governments throughout the Americas for over a year to “liberate the text” (ART 2004); the release was announced at the April 2001 Summit of the Americas. Timi Gerson of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch claimed the campaign was not successful “until the US Congress got involved and pressed for release” (Sampson 2004: 38). The contradiction between rhetoric and reality was exploited by the Alliance, which was particularly effective in the US context, where “free”-trade’s backers (including those in the US Congress) needed the veneer of legitimacy. Continued pressure was necessary to ensure the release of future draft texts at Ministerials following Québec’s. During the FTAA Ministerial in Quito, Ecuador in 2002, Public Citizen got members to fax over 1000 letters to the USTR and Congress-members to demand the release of the text at the end of the meeting; this mini-campaign was also successful (Gerson 2002).

Continental Peoples’ Consultation
To counter the lack of opportunities for real citizen participation in the FTAA process, in 2002 the Hemispheric Social Alliance endorsed another popular-education campaign, the Continental Peoples’ Consultation. Inspired by Brazil’s experience, where in September 2001 over ten million people participated in a nation-wide popular referendum on the FTAA, the purpose of the campaign was “to educate millions of people in the hemisphere on the issues involved in the FTAA over a relatively short period and to consult a broad range of people on their opinions on the proposed accord” (Hansen-Kuhn 2002). Over 100 organizations were involved in the ''people's plebiscite'' in Brazil, including CUT and other Alliance members, who trained over 20,000 people in preparation for a week of voting at tables set up in public places all over the country (ibid). A survey asked three questions; ''Should the Brazilian government sign the FTAA treaty?'' (over 98% said no), '''Should the Brazilian government continue participating in the FTAA negotiations?'” (95% said no), and, linking free-trade to militarization, ''Should the Brazilian government hand over part of our territory, the Alcántara base, to U.S. military control?'' (98% said no) (Osava 2002). A similar campaign was carried out in Argentina in November 2003, when 1.2 million people voted over a one-week period in a Popular Consultation on the FTAA, debt and militarization. (La Capital 2003) (see Figure 4.3).
Referendums were organized differently in other countries over the next year, for example, through consultations in social assemblies in Peru, consultation within organizations in Chile, and through an opinion survey in the US and Canada. US groups also held town-hall meetings, speaking tours, and some cities passed local resolutions as part of the
People’s Consultation Campaign (Hansen-Kuhn 2002). The Campaign aimed to unify these efforts through common objectives and a common question, ‘Do you agree that your government should sign the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement?’ (Hemispheric Campaign 2001). Subsequent efforts failed to carry the weight of Brazil’s referendum, but according to campaign organizers, millions more people were educated about the FTAA and engaged in the campaign through the consultation, the results of which were timed to be presented to the eighth meeting of trade ministers in Miami in November 2003 (ART 2004).

That the Consultations had to be organized to educate the public and demonstrate their will epitomizes both what is wrong with free trade policy, and the critical role played by the ASC and global justice movement more broadly in creating spaces of counterhegemony. Discourses promoting so-called free-trade agreements have gained hegemonic status for multiple reasons. One is, you hear something repeated enough times, ie “free-trade is good”, and you start to believe it. It is well documented that the powerful interests representing corporate America who benefit from the public taking this viewpoint for granted have disproportionate access and control over media, a growing concern given the intensified concentration of ownership in recent years (Cooper 2007; see also Herman and Chomsky 2002). In the US context, one has to be curious and resourceful to seek out the independent news and analysis sources, who counter the myths about globalization/free trade being good for everyone, a leveler, inevitable and irreversible, and the path to democracy (Steger 2002, Sparke 2008a).

Thus, in the general US public, very little is known about the actual content of trade and investment agreements. Anecdotally, in my own experience of wearing an anti-FTAA pin, even after ten years of talks had taken place, most people told me they had never heard of it. Even more worrisome have been the accounts of elected representatives who are said to have voted in favor of trade deals, including NAFTA and CAFTA, without even reading them (Ricker and Stansbury 2006). This is despite the fact that in the US during the NAFTA debate, “"reading the bill" became a fetish among a subset of the public” when Ross Perot insisted he had read every page, causing “congressional offices [to be] deluged with requests for copies of the enabling legislation” (Schmitt 2004).

Lori Wallach, the lawyer at the helm of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch (GTW), tells the story of acquiring a draft of NAFTA, and carrying it around with her where ever she went, slamming it down on desks and podiums across the country to make its existence known, and to exhort people to read it. Of course, to the layperson, there is a barrier created by the legalese of these agreements, which are very long (NAFTA had 1700 pages) and complicated documents. Wallach and GTW, as well as a few other activist groups, have done a great public service by working to “translate” trade agreements into comprehensible terms and concepts.

Another reason free trade agreements have largely gone under the radar is because they are usually negotiated in secret, with very little information released to the public. This is what forced the ASC to organize the Liberate the Text campaign.

Furthermore, once the negotiations are over, the process of ratifying free trade agreements tends to exclude public participation and debate as well. In the US, Clinton and Bush both tried to get trade deals to be voted on using “fast-track” procedures, which limit the total number of hours for debate on the Congressional floor, and exclude the possibility of amendments. Critics contend that fast-track limits the democratic process by not allowing a full public discussion or changes to trade agreements once they are introduced.

Votes on trade deals have been very controversial in many countries. As already mentioned, Clinton notoriously made multiple, last minute deals to get NAFTA passed (Tucker, Wu and Prorok 2005). In a repeat, (only George W. Bush was in office), to pass CAFTA “Representative Jim Kolbe, R-Arizona, promised to "twist arms until they break into a thousand pieces" if necessary to get the vote” (Ricker and Stansbury 2006). True to their word, the Bush administration kept the vote open until shattered humerus bones littered the floor of the House of Representatives…CAFTA passed 217-215, the closest trade-related vote in the history of the US Congress.

After experiencing over a decade of the Canadian-US FTA, 74 percent of Canadians stated they “favored a popular vote” on any future agreements in a poll commissioned by the Canadian Labor Congress (Dwyer 2001). According to Dwyer (2001, para 3), “Twenty-one percent of all Canadians over the age of 18- 4.4 million people-said they would join the protests in Québec if time and money allowed”, (referring to the 2001 FTAA protests).

In El Salvador, a similar story of manipulating procedures and late night votes emerged:
“Given that CAFTA was an international treaty, opponents demanded a two-thirds vote as required by the Salvadoran constitution. The ruling ARENA party responded by blocking all debate on the constitutionality of CAFTA. Then, with the Assembly building surrounded by riot police protecting it from protesters - a group of whom had previously occupied the building to protest CAFTA - ARENA introduced CAFTA at 3:00 AM on December 17, 2004. Finally, it was rammed through over the vociferous opposition of the FMLN party on the last legislative day before the Christmas break. Legislators admitted to having not read the CAFTA implementation text, which was withheld until a few days before the vote.” (Ricker and Stansbury 2006: 22)

In Guatemala, thousands of protestors surrounded the national legislative building, “demanding that the question of CAFTA ratification be put to a national referendum” (ibid). Guatemalan Bishop Monsignor Álvaro Ramazzini explained, “the reason that people today are now protesting” is because "CAFTA was negotiated behind peoples' backs" (ibid) (see Figure 4.4). After a tense two day stand-off, the military dispelled the protest, marking the first time the military had been mobilized since the 1996 peace accords had been signed, which stipulated that the army could not act against domestic protests (ibid). Tragically, the next day two people were killed when police shot them during a CAFTA protest (ibid).

The only country to hold an actual referendum will be Costa Rica, where fierce opposition (including multiple general strikes) and legal challenges pushed back the ratification of CAFTA and forced the approval by the country’s Supreme Elections Tribunal of “the first public referendum since it gained independence from Spain in 1821” (Inside US Trade 2007). The vote will take place in September, 2007.

Thus, the Hemispheric Campaign’s popular consultation initiative served many purposes. Without the means to participate meaningfully in the trade and investment decisions affecting them, the ASC, and social movements comprising it, were forced to carve out spaces to demonstrate their desire for change. The People’s Consultations were vital not only for their symbolic weight, but because they expressed the will of the global justice movement, and of peoples throughout the hemisphere, to be taken into account.

While it is possible to draw parallels between the ‘democracy deficit’ in the United States and the rest of the continent, as I have just done, I recognize that generalizing risks misrepresenting the differences between the social realities produced by hegemonic discourses throughout the region. As demonstrated by comparing US social movement organizing with the relatively more politically engaged populations in many regions of the Americas, many more fissures in hegemonic discourse are visible outside of the ‘Empire’. Identifiable continuums between colonial legacies and structural adjustment, for example, make for a much more politicized general public in Latin America and the Caribbean, than in the US (not to speak for Canada, which has its own characteristics). The “pink tide” is just one indicator of this. However, as for the extent to which hegemonic discourses are circulating and being resisted in various places, there are so many complicating factors, another study (or studies) would be required to adequately comprehend, for example, the considerable differences between Chile in the post-Pinochet/”neoliberal miracle” era, and Argentina, or Oaxaca, México, both sites of great social upheaval these past months and years.

However, even without these detailed studies (which surely are being done), I think it is clear that the potential for, and reality of, counterhegemonic discourse and material practices is much greater across Latin America today than not only the US, but perhaps anywhere else in the world. It seems that one of the key explanations for this particularly engaged region is its geographic proximity to the ‘Empire’, and its specific history, and present reality, of US imperialism. Perhaps US double-speak is more easily decipherable when repeated iterations are imposed upon you.

Therefore, one response to the question of what spaces counter hegemonic discourse emerges from is that it depends on positionality to a great degree. One must have the necessary knowledge to be able to decipher the coercive nature of hegemonic discourses, and the spaces in which to express the will for change. Information takes many forms; experience is one of the most important. The Hemispheric Social Alliance has created spaces in which people with different forms of information and experience could participate. This is the essence of “popular education”.

The Alliance also demonstrates the power of amplifying various scales of struggle by working across borders, as well as across sectors. In the next section I focus on the alliance building strategy of the ASC.

Building Alliances
The attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 had an immediate impact on the emerging Global Justice Movement, breaking its momentum. That month, annual demonstrations against the World Bank and IMF at their DC meetings were cancelled , ending, for awhile, the series of protests that had captured the world’s attention since the surprising shut-down of the WTO in Seattle in December 1999. More importantly, the strategies and rhetoric of the US government shifted, and in the “us or them” equation, protestors of US policy were marginalized by key Bush administration officials who accused them of partaking in the latter camp, thus equating critique with terrorism. The stakes of protest were thus raised, not only in the US, but also throughout the world.

Two months later, the Hemispheric Council of the ASC met for the first time in Havana, Cuba. The final declaration acknowledged the historical significance of these events by condemning “the tragedy caused by the terrorist attacks”, and by connecting those attacks to state terrorism, thereby implicating the US, and condemning its role in Afghanistan.

The ASC took a significant step forward towards fulfilling its second overall strategy, of strengthening support of the ASC, when it launched the Hemispheric Campaign against the FTAA at this meeting. The public launch of the Hemispheric Campaign took place at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, a few months later. The Campaign was proposed as a way to encourage organizations to participate in the coordinated activities of the ASC, without necessarily becoming members of the network. All subsequent Hemispheric Council meetings have taken place at ‘Hemispheric Encounters of Struggle Against the FTAA’ (or Encuentros), in Havana.

The 2002 meeting in Havana, in which over 800 activists participated, solidified the Hemispheric Campaign, resulting in a clear, and ambitious plan of action (Campaign for Labor Rights 2003), framed by the following objectives:

1. Obstruct the FTAA,
2. Defend our national sovereignty,
3. Change the economic model of external dependency,
4. Construct an alternative for social integration and sovereignty among the peoples of the Americas.

Furthermore, as general guidelines, it was agreed that to this end it is necessary to:
1. Give priority to the campaign – not consider it as just one more activity,
2. Develop all activities as permanent processes,
3. Stimulate mass participation,
4. Provide information intensively to the grassroots and the general population,
5. Link this struggle with other elements of the neo-colonial strategy (Debt, Plan Colombia, Plan Puebla-Panama and other related schemes).

Locating the Hemispheric Campaign meetings in the one country not included in the FTAA obviously sends a clear message. For a network dedicated to opposing the US model of integration, Cuba is the ultimate counterhegemonic place. The declarations of the Hemispheric Campaign always allude to Cuba as an example of resistance and alternatives to the dominant, neoliberal model. In opposition to the Washington Consensus, the 2001 final declaration proposed the ‘Havana Consensus’,

“based on the perspective of integration and solidarity among equals, through the conquest of social justice and well being for all our peoples. Unlike the Washington Consensus, which is founded on the fundamental role of the market, our goal is to build an alternative and solidarity-based agenda rooted in the globalisation of economic, social and cultural rights.” (Hemispheric Campaign 2001)

Fidel Castro has been present at these meetings, as well as two other leaders who symbolize resistance to US hegemony in the hemisphere, Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez. Soon after he narrowly lost the 2002 Presidential elections in Bolivia, Morales took part in the Encuentro, a visit which foreshadowed the trade policy he would later propose once elected in 2006. In 2005 Hugo Chávez was personally invited by Castro to attend the closing act of the Encuentro which included the celebration of the signing of the Boliviarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) accord between Venezuela and Cuba (Real World Radia 2005a). I will discuss the relationship of the ASC to Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela more in chapters four and five.

Countering FTAA Ministerials
Another element of the Alliance strategy was to have a regular presence at FTAA Ministerials. In October, 2002 the ASC organized the ‘Hemispheric Days of Action and Resistance’ to counter the Quito, Ecuador Ministerial; “The purpose of these days will be to carry out actions to stop the negotiating process of the FTAA and obstruct the governments signing this treaty. The objective…is to hold the largest mobilization possible at this stage, in each country and in Quito, Ecuador” (Hemispheric Campaign 2001). The seventh FTAA ministerial was met by large mobilizations, many led by Ecuador’s powerful indigenous movements (see Figures 4.5 and 4.6).

A noticeable shift had occurred within the hallowed halls of the fancy hotels in Quito, where opposition to the FTAA was expressed by newly elected leaders, including Lula from Brazil, Ecuador’s new President, Lucio Gutierez, and Chávez from Venezuela, who expressed concern about the secrecy of the negotiations in a letter to the Ministers, and called for a five year extension of the negotiating deadline (to 2010), a proposal that was rejected (Gerson 2002).

The final declaration made by the ASC in Quito is a useful and educational document, responding substantively to each point of the official Ministerial declaration, revealing its flaws. The first contradiction highlighted by the ASC is that of the Ministers’ commitment to “raise living standards”; the ASC responds: “We…are incensed that the Declaration speaks of [these] objectives…when the proposals in the FTAA would serve to convert public goods and services linked to such social rights as water, health and education into private goods, making access to them conditional on the ability to pay” (ASC 2002b). The ASC also confronts the declared interest in promoting democracy and development, taking into consideration unequal levels of development in the region and the needs of smaller economies, stating “The balanced participation of smaller economies in such an accord would only be possible if it were preceded by an economic development plan and the transfer of capital to those countries. This would be natural in an economic integration strategy, but for now is clearly outside the plans of a free-trade agreement like the FTAA” (ibid). The declaration closes with the lament, “We do not need more exercises in propaganda on the supposed benefits of free trade”, calling instead for “a real and substantive debate on economic integration in the Americas” (ibid).

Inside/Outside Strategies
In 2003, after the 3rd World Social Forum, the Alliance’s primary activities were preparing for the WTO and FTAA Ministerials. Increasing coordination with the fight against the WTO, and the global WTO campaign, “Our World is Not for Sale”, was one of the priorities the Alliance set for itself in 2001.

At each Ministerial, the Alliance’s strategy of pressuring governments is partly achieved by keeping close tabs on the negotiations. A ‘Monitoring Team’ is responsible for analyzing the updated drafts of the FTAA, a task made more difficult by the public versions released by the governments, which do not indicate the countries’ positions on disagreements in the texts (Gerson 2002). Complementing the Alliance’s outside strategies, the Team also conducts an ‘inside’ strategy by both pressuring and consulting with governments during the FTAA Ministerials. This strategy has become increasingly important over time, as more and more leaders sympathetic with at least some of the demands of social movements have taken office. In 2004, Sarah Anderson, at the Institute for Policy Studies, commented,
“During the past several negotiating sessions, there have been teams of HSA activists present to collaborate with negotiators from Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, to help point out areas of concern and share information. In Miami, we also organized a civil society dialogue with negotiators from those three countries, and the Argentine representative clearly stated that the protests and public pressure were helping them.“ (Sampson 2004: 52)

This statement affirms that inside and outside strategies reinforce one another. This strategy has also been employed at WTO Ministerials. While it did not lead the mobilization, the ASC participated in the preparations for the Cancún, México WTO Ministerial in 2003, given that it took place in the hemisphere. As with the previous WTO meeting in Doha, Qatar, the geographic remoteness of this isthmus seemed to have been strategically chosen to limit protest (for example, there is only one road in and out of Cancún).

Conflict was brewing in the weeks preceding the Cancún meeting, as the WTO failed to come to agreement on the issues up for debate. The stakes were high, since the 1999 meeting had ended in failure, followed by the commitment to ‘development’ made at the 2001 meeting, partly to appease third world countries’ concerns about the WTO’s undemocratic process. However, even though the WTO’s legitimacy was on the line, in the weeks before Cancún, the under-resourced developing countries’ Ministers reported feeling manipulated and excluded from key decisions (Kwa 2003b). Aileen Kwa, policy analyst for Focus on the Global South, has written extensively on the power dynamics in the day-to-day operations of the WTO, exposing the reasons why developing country opposition to the US, EU and Japan is virtually impossible to express in practice, despite the supposed consensus process.

“On the face of things, the WTO is rules-based and democratic. But in reality, it is putting in place rules that are skewed against developing countries interests, and that are rammed through using high-handed tactics and outright exclusion, coupled with backroom bullying, blackmail (such as threats of stopping aid and loans) and bribery (offers of technical assistance).” (Kwa 2003b)

A lot is at stake for the Global South countries as well; a country whose Minister blocks consensus will be blamed for bringing down the supposedly multilateral, rules-based trading system (in addition to facing the above-mentioned threats) (Kwa 2003a).

These politics, seemingly internal to the WTO, spilled out into the global arena when a block of Global South countries led by Brazil, calling themselves the G20, banded together “to avoid a predetermined result at Cancún and to open up a space for negotiations in agriculture” (G20 2006). With the legitimacy earned by representing 60% of the world population, 70% of world’s rural population and 26% of world’s agricultural exports (ibid), the G20 changed the rules of the game in Cancún, showing for the first time the potential for a world trading system not dictated by the Global North. While this development – and the collapse of the fifth WTO Ministerial - was cause for celebration, the G20 failed to meet the expectations it raised when it pursued policies contrary to governments and movements intent on defending an agriculture policy that does not rely on exports (Bello 2003b, Bello and Kwa 2004).

Two months after what was considered a victory for social movements at Cancún, the FTAA returned to its birthplace, Miami Florida, where two of the sons of its Founding Father created a less than welcoming atmosphere for the Ministerial and its critics. After activists were painted as “terrorists” by the Miami Police Chief, an $8.5 million dollar budget for “security” was approved through the $87 billion approved for the Iraq war in the previous month; with over forty law-enforcement agencies deployed, George and Jeb literally brought home the "war on terror" (Klein 2003, Solnit 2003).

Those brave enough to turn-out were terrorized by the disproportionately represented tanks and robo-cops with rubber bullets (see Figure 4.7).
Taking to the streets became more and more dangerous at the same time that the contradictions amongst nations inside the Ministerials resulted in failures, in both Cancún and Miami. The Miami talks ended a day early when Brazil resisted US demands to liberalize sensitive areas, including investment, intellectual property, government procurement, services and competition policy (Bello 2003a). Thus the US version of the FTAA was scrapped in favor of “FTAA-lite”; this compromise allowed countries to withdraw from certain parts of the agreement (ibid, Solnit 2003). The next FTAA Ministerial, scheduled for 2004 in Brazil, was cancelled. While this represented a kind of victory for the opposition, the failure of the FTAA negotiations resulted in a shift in US strategy, forcing the resistance movement to change course as well. After 2004 the Alliance was forced to fight multiple battles at once.

A few months after the Miami Ministerial, I attended the PanAmazonic Social Forum in Venezuela where ASC representatives analyzed what had occurred in Miami. Far from seeing in the results a victory for the ASC and broader movement, their analysis was pessimistic, expressing wonder at the way the US is always able to adapt to momentary failures in their strategy, such as they did after Miami by pursuing bilaterals and subregional deals. They expressed concern particularly for the smaller, less powerful countries, who could be isolated if they did not go along with the US’s plans. They argued that within the FTAA talks, the more powerful countries such as Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil were the only hope of the smaller countries, who don’t have any possibility of pressuring for better negotiating positions. One participant tied the US strategy to the shifts to the left in the region, warning, “It is my very personal opinion that this is their way of trying to destroy them, the cultural processes, the new paths of governments in these countries, no? To start isolating everyone who doesn’t join the dance of the little FTAAs” (pers comm). Some of the smaller countries, particularly in Central America, were indeed “bullied” into signing agreements later (Ricker and Stansbury 2006: 21).

People’s Summits
The final strategy I examine in this section was the first implemented by the ASC. In 1998, the network was launched at the People’s Summit, running parallel to The Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile. Since then, two other People’s Summits have been orchestrated by the ASC– in Québec in 2001, and in Mar del Plata in 2005. Building on this strategy, the ASC co-coordinated the Social Summit for the Integration of the Peoples, held during the meeting of South American Heads of State in December 2006.

In many ways, the People’s Summits embody the possibilities and limits of the counterhegemonic spaces the ASC creates; in this sense, they crystallize the politics of the Hemispheric Social Alliance. The possibilities arise out of the creation of a time, place, and space for the opposition to neoliberalism in the hemisphere to be expressed, heard, elaborated upon, and felt – both by participants and non-participants. The limitations arise out of the border spaces between participant and non-participant, between the insides and outsides of the Summits, between who is included and who is excluded. The definition of these boundaries is fluid, and derives from different positions on movement strategy, that are ultimately at the core of what this movement is about. At issue are protest tactics, debates over what the relationship should be between social movements and states, and the need to ensure ongoing grassroots organizing to sustain the energy created by Summits. These issues have salience across the movement, and have been struggled over before and after every big protest event. Reading about the People’s Summits brings me right back to the moment of impassioned engagement with these issues before and after the 1999 Seattle protests.

The Summits are weeklong events, leading up to the Summits of the Americas, whose methodology has evolved in tandem with the World Social Forum in the sense that there is an increasing effort to find ways to go beyond education and critique to taking action towards constructing alternatives. However the broad contours are the same: Plenaries alternate with workshops and sectoral forums (in 2005 these included Labor, Women Trade Unionists, all women, Indigenous, Health and the Environment and Education), cultural events, at least one major demonstration, and a closing press conference reporting on the results of the Summit.

Between one and five thousand people have participated at each Summit (numbers have grown each year). Many travel thousands of miles, with almost every country of the Americas represented at every Summit. While the event takes place over a week, the impact is felt long after – for each person who participates, but also in terms of the political effects – deepened analysis, organizational networking, radicalization (for some) of being attacked by police, realizing you have something in common with people or sectors you thought were different from you.

Based on my own experience of Seattle’s WTO protests and the Social Forums I’ve attended, I think the People’s Summits probably have a lot in common with this description of the “three critical functions” of the World Social Forums, as described by Walden Bello (2007, emphasis added):

First, it represents a space — both physical and temporal — for this diverse movement to meet, network, and, quite simply, to feel and affirm itself. Second, it is a retreat during which the movement gathers its energies and charts the directions of its continuing drive to confront and roll back the processes, institutions, and structures of global capitalism…Third, the WSF provides a site and space for the movement to elaborate, discuss, and debate the vision, values, and institutions of an alternative world order built on a real community of interests. The WSF is, indeed, a macrocosm of so many smaller but equally significant enterprises carried out throughout the world by millions who have told the reformists, the cynics, and the “realists” to move aside because, indeed, another world is possible…and necessary.”

To me, the feelings Bello evokes have real significance. Countering hegemonic discourse happens by creating a way to not only imagine, but to feel something else, something vital. In my experience, nothing compares to the feeling of traveling from a distant place (metaphorically in my case in Seattle) where global justice organizing is one of many struggles facing busy people, to a site where everything you breathe for several days is a celebration of that (very diverse) struggle. That the struggle is global becomes real when you march with Korean workers, indigenous people from throughout the Americas, Thai farmers, Turkish global justice activists, Indian fisherfolk, Brazilian feminists, Zimbabwean debt activists . Joining tens of thousands in the streets of Seattle, and in the soccer stadium in Porto Alegre, Brazil are moments I will never forget, moments that were affirming, that filled me with the hope and energy to continue. Seattle was especially transformative, because I was so much more involved in the preparations, it was a particularly historic moment that took place in my hometown, and it lasted so many days. By the end I was exhausted, but I felt like more of a human being - caring and open and sensitive and alive and connected to others - than I ever have, before or since.

A Québec Summit testimonial describes the energy of one event:
“One highlight of the People's Summit and protest had to be the Saturday morning speeches in the big tent - full to capacity with over 1200 people and upwards of 3000 more standing outside hanging on every word of the leaders from all regions and representations of this great hemispheric movement and beyond, while continually breaking into the movement's chants, spontaneous clapping, and the raising of arms and fists in solidarity with the profoundly felt words of the speakers.” (Anon 2001)

The creative expression and diversity of these global justice protests has been very inspiring. The most famous stunt performed was the catapult that launched teddy bears over the three meter high fence erected around the Summit in Québec. Of that Summit, one journalist wrote,

“Imagination was not in short supply. A contingent dressed in black-and-white cow uniforms marched as 'Mad Cows Against Globalization'. A huge Ronald Macdonald swayed over the crowd with large bags of money in either hand. One group dressed as business executives holding hands over their ears to block out dissent and chanting satirical slogans like 'defend the three-martini lunch'. There were Haitian contingents, Asian-Canadian groups, local Mobilization for Global Justice coalitions (MOBforGlob) from New Jersey to Ottawa, people from all over Latin America, the World March of Women and LOLA (Little Old Lady Activists).” (Swift 2001)

The WSFs in Brazil created alternative spaces in multiple other ways, many of which I imagine were experienced by those who attended People’s Summits: through local and alternative food courts, big public art installations, dance performances and free open air concerts, by making it inclusive, inexpensive (once you get there), with a sliding scale depending on what part of the world you are from, with simultaneous interpretation available in multiple languages, even in huge stadiums. These experiences combine to make it feel like another world is indeed possible.

In some ways, the performance of the counter Summit emulates the official Summit. Both offer “simultaneous translation in three languages, well-stocked media rooms, press briefings, detailed accreditation forms and helpful trilingual officials” (Walkom 2001). But, especially since the 1999 Seattle protests, the insides and outsides of the official Summit have been made very clear. In Québec, delegates met behind a huge constructed wall forming a perimeter around the Summit of the Americas, providing an apt symbol of the democracy deficit decried by protestors . The ‘wall of shame’ kept the Heads of State safely ‘protected’ from the thousands of non-violent protestors who came to demand their inclusion, getting a “democracy clause” in return and promises of peace and prosperity.

One critical difference between the WSF and People’s Summits and other Ministerials is the element of confrontation between protestors and “security” forces. This is where movement strategies and tactics often become a point of contentious debate between different elements of the global justice movement. The organizers of the last two People’s Summits, brought together by the Hemispheric Social Alliance, have included around 100 organizations, but is focused on the alliance between labor and multisectoral coalitions (as in the ASC). These groups have preferred to negotiate protest routes with the police prior to the Summits, partly in exchange for public funding (Dwyer 2001, Walkom 2001). Many other organizations also prepared for months for the protests in Québec and Argentina, outside of the People’s Summit process. While the People’s Summit advocated non-violence, some of the other, often anarchist-identified, groups argued for a “diversity of tactics” and would not rule out property damage (Dwyer 2001), mirroring organizational dynamics in many other protests (including Seattle). Two of these groups in Canada, La Convergence des Luttes Anti-Capitalistes (CLAC, or Anti-Capitalist Convergence) and the Québec City-based Le Comite d'Accueil du Sommet des Ameriques (CASA, Summit of the Americas Welcoming Committee), organized their own counter-summit, called the "Carnival Against Capitalism," which included “a march of several thousand on the eve of the summit and a march to the perimeter fence on the first day of the summit” (ibid).

CLAC and CASA’s (amongst other groups) decision to directly confront the perimeter wall (see Figures 4.8, 4.9, 4.10), caused the People’s Summit organizers a mini-crisis, which was widely reported in the media. One Toronto Star headline read, “Québec City Demonstrators' Dilemma - To March To or Fro? Route of final rally sparks debate fraught with symbolism” (Walkom 2001). There was disagreement within the ASC about whether to risk the full assault of the police, and the potential discrediting of their demands, by marching to the wall (where combat had been taking place for a few days) or risk the loss of credibility amongst their own members by deciding to not show their solidarity with the mostly young protestors who had been taking the heat for attempting to tear-down the much hated wall.

In the end, the People’s Summit march directly paralleled what happened in Seattle: at a certain point, most marchers kept following the approved route, away from the wall (in Seattle, away from the downtown core where the streets were blocked by protestors), while some dared to split off and ender the fray at the wall. A very similar dynamic occurred four years later at the Mar del Plata People’s Summit (pers comm).

Despite the difference over the use of direct action as a tactic, it was positive that in Québec, all aspects of the movement stood together, making joint statements in press conferences, and the People’s Summit leaders refused to criticize the actions taken by CLAC and CASA. When asked by a journalist what she was “going to do to control the angry youth”, Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians (one of the lead People’s Summit organizers), responded,
“These are young people born into a toxic economy, a society that deliberately sorts winners from losers and measures its success by the bottom line of its corporations, not by the well-being of its young. These youth are the result of years of poisonous economic and trade policies that have created an entrenched underclass with no access to the halls of power except by putting their bodies on the line...The question isn't what I am going to do with angry young people…The first vandalism was in that scar of a wall they put up in our beautiful city.... [T]he real violence lies behind that wall, with the thirty-four political leaders and their spin doctors and their corporate friends who bought their way in , sleeping in five-star hotels and eating in five-star restaurants and thinking they can run the world by themselves.” (Dwyer 2001)

Bridges were built in the streets of Québec, just as they were in Seattle, when people involved in more traditional sectors, including trade unionists, saw the bravery and the creative action of those who were on the front lines with the police, and who were the majority of those arrested, and decided to join them, or at least expressed their increased esteem of those who had been marginalized by some in the movement, and criminalized by the state. After Seattle, one union President from Massachusetts wrote of his experience, “There were plenty of people in the labor movement pushing for the labor movement to join in the Direct Action-we lost….In Seattle, we were bailed out by the kids” (Crosby 1999). After Québec, A Canadian unionist stated, "A lot of our members who came to Québec are now telling me they want to take part in the fight-back that takes place in the streets. A lot want training in direct action" (Dwyer 2001).

Nevertheless, the Hemispheric Social Alliance, but more specifically the most visible organizers, including labor unions and the Council of Canadians, lost credibility in the eyes of some in the movement, having created the impression of an “inside” and “outside” to the supposedly fully inclusive People’s Summit process. Yet many making these critiques were not likely to have supported the ASC’s political discourse in any case, given the centrality given to the role of the state – a viewpoint obviously not shared by anarchists.

While it is certainly true, as Anner and Evans argue, that “this event-focused strategy has its limitations” (2002: 19), the ASC’s ability to organize a consistent presence at the Summit of the Americas ensures that the hemisphere’s governments have not been able to ignore the broad resistance to neoliberalism. The Summits have been very successful at raising the profile of the FTAA, and influencing public opinion (pers comm). The action outside the official Summits has also helped to embolden those Heads of State inside, such as Chávez, who in 2001 was just beginning to make Venezuela’s dissent from the FTAA process known (ASC et al 2006). In 2002, Anner and Evans wrote that “the ASC would greatly benefit if more members would actively work to influence their governments in between the big summit events” (2002: 19). The vast changes in the the Latin America political panorama over the past several years indicates that many ASC members were indeed actively pressuring their governments, resulting in major shifts away from the US-imposed trade and investment strategy.

Which brings me back to the fundamental role the People’s Summits have played in strengthening the ASC’s articulation of alternatives. In 1998 and 2001, involving Summit participants in the drafting of Alternatives was one of the ASC’s major objectives (I will explore this process further in the next section). Workshops on Alternatives for the Americas in 2001 were well-covered by the mainstream Canadian press; one article reported,

“Organizers hope the People's Summit will dampen some of the criticism of the antiglobalization movement — the main complaint being that they are quick to protest but slow to offer feasible alternatives…The 3,000 registered delegates aim to emerge from the scheduled workshops and seminars with an alternative vision of the future of the Americas” (MacKinnon 2001).

This reportage adds a key text to the counterhegemonic discourse constructed by the ASC, strategically contributing to the Alliance’s refutation of neoliberal discourse. This counterhegemonic discourse has effects. In monitoring public opinion in Canada, fair trade groups have observed that support for free trade agreements goes up or down relative to how much they mobilize. The impact of the People’s Summit was clear according to one activist: “Around the Québec Summit, when we again got coverage, boom, the support fell, and we once again were winning the public opinion war, so it just proves the media fight is so important” (pers comm).

In 2005, when the Summit was again convened in South America (in Mar del Plata, Argentina), the focus had shifted somewhat, given social movement gains of intervening years. In their final declaration, the Alliance “celebrated” the fact that the signing of the completed FTAA had been scheduled to take place at this Summit, but instead the hemisphere’s leaders failed to agree to continue talks (ASC 2005). The Alliance claimed credit, and looked to the future, proclaiming, “After Québec, we constructed a huge campaign and held continent wide popular consultations against the FTAA. We managed to stop it…we commit to doubling our resistance, strengthen our unity in diversity and to convene a new and even larger continental mobilization, to bury the FTAA forever” (ibid) (the last phrase borrowed from Hugo Chávez). The declaration acknowledges the major challenge of confronting the new strategy of the US, which sought to weaken opposition by dividing negotiations into separate regions. Indeed, in a setback for the movement, CAFTA had been approved by the US Congress the previous summer, however the extremely close vote demonstrated the movement’s success at having “substantially changed the trade debate” (ART 2007b).

Fittingly for Argentina, who was still in the throes of its 2001 economic collapse (largely blamed on the IMF), the overarching ‘banner’ of the Mar del Plata People’s Summit was “Bush out of our Territory!” In case someone was unaware of who Argentines ultimately held responsible for their hardships, The Washington Post reported that in a poll of 21 countries’ residents on their views of the US, Argentines had the highest rate of disaffection, at 65% (Reel 2005). The accompanying themes of the Summit were, “No to the FTAA, free trade, debt, militarization and poverty” and "Yes to People’s Integration: Another America is Possible” . Anti-Bush and anti-FTAA (ALCA) posters were plastered throughout the city (see Figures 4.11 – 4.14).

The 3rd People’s Summit was again the site of a huge security fence, and a conflict between the ASC’s policy of non-violence and non-confrontation, and other movements accusing them of being reformist. National sovereignty and self-determination emerged as the rallying cries for many of the social movements represented in the ASC. In her address at the closing rally of the Summit, Blanca Chancosa, a Chechua indigenous representative from Ecuador, challenged US “rhetoric of increasing democracy in the region”, stating "We want a true democracy in our countries. We don’t want a patronizing democracy like Mr. Bush wants to impose. The countries of South America should be sovereign with dignity. Not an imposition, not a single owner who decides the lives of the people and that is supposed to be democracy. To this we say no" (Gordon 2005). Chancosa also read the final declaration of the People’s Summit (see Figure 4.15). Hugo Chávez addressed the rally next (for two hours), declaring that he would deliver the final declaration to the official Summit (Arnold 2005).

The participation of Chávez marked the first time that crossover occurred between the official and counter-summits. Evo Morales also attended, six weeks before he won the Presidency in Bolivia. With the ascendancy of radical leaders and social movements demanding transformational change, the threat of an enlarged US military presence in the region was a major focus of many. Argentinean Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel contrasted militarization with social and economic needs in his address, stating "Our people don’t need more armies, much less North American armies. What we need are resources for healthcare, for education, for life - not for killing" (Gordon 2005).

Chávez and Morales’s presence in the 2005 People’s Summit set the stage for the next phase of the Hemispheric Social Alliance, in which the proposals outlined in Alternatives for the Americas were adopted and incorporated into the trade strategies of some states. This was a remarkable accomplishment. In the ASC’s words,

“In 2001, when the HSA decided that it needed to mount a campaign against the FTAA, the only president opposing the FTAA was Cuba’s Fidel Castro – today he is joined by the Presidents of Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. This dramatic political shift has been brought about by the vigorous work of the social movements in the hemisphere over the past twenty years. Five years ago, the HSA immersed itself in building resistance to the Free Trade Agreements. While resistance must be sustained, new political alignments in the south provide a space in which we can also act creatively to construct new models of commerce and economic integration.” (ART 2007a)

The process of cross-germination was cultivated at the February 2006 Americas Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, where discussions took place on the two most widely disseminated proposals for alternatives to the US model of regional integration at that point, the ASC’s Alternatives, and the Venezuelan ALBA (Alternativa Bolivariana para las Americas y el Caribe). The next Summit co-organized by the ASC, in December of 2006, was the Social Summit for the Integration of the Peoples, hosted by the newly elected President, Evo Morales, who facilitated “substantive dialogue between the heads of state and other officials and participants in the alternative civil society forum” contributing to the further consolidation of these visions (ART 2007b).

In this chapter I have described the multiple strategies employed by the ASC to construct counterhegemonic discourse. In Chapter 5 I will discuss the most visible impact of these strategies, as visions of alternative integration articulated by the ASC are begun to be implemented in the Americas and the Caribbean.

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