The Price of Freedom

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Miami Police November 2003

Recently another blogger reported on a legal case involving Commissioner Jennings decided by the City of Miami wherein Miami admitted that their police were wrong in taking certain actions against citizens. They paid out $51,000 to those in this one group that demonstrated in Miami almost seven years ago. This is to clear up any confusion about this case in 2003 and a totally different case involving Commissioner Jennings at the Israeli Embassy in March of last year when she was protesting the actions of the Israeli Defense Forces, who shot her friend, American Tristan Anderson, in the head. She was cleared of those charges as well.

In 2003, approximately 34 people in this particular group protested against FTAA. It was estimated to be tens of thousands protesting that day. FTAA was a proposed agreement to eliminate or reduce the trade barriers among all countries in the Americas but Cuba. Trade ministers met in Miami in November of that year to discuss the proposal and extend NAFTA. NAFTA was to eliminate barriers of trade as well as investment between the US, Canada and Mexico. Several South American countries opposed it including Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, etc. The U.S. had pushed for a single comprehensive agreement that would increase intellectual property protection and to reduce trade barriers for goods.

According to Wikipedia, "The implementation of NAFTA on January 1, 1994, brought the immediate elimination of tariffs on more than one half of US imports from Mexico and more than one third of US exports to Mexico. Within 10 years of the implementation of the agreement, all US-Mexico tariffs would be eliminated except for some US agricultural exports to Mexico that were to be phased out in 15 years. Most US-Canada trade was already duty free. NAFTA also seeks to eliminate non-tariff trade barriers." This agreement was one in which I believed President Clinton was flat wrong.

The reason for the protest was that this group believed that “one of the major causes of immigration of labor from Mexico and Central America was NAFTA and CAFTA. If the FTAA had passed we would have been pitted against 33 other nations in a race to the bottom as all the multinational corporations would go to where the labor was cheapest and the labor laws and environmental protections were the weakest,” said one of the legal observers at the demonstration. Cara Jennings was one of six legal observers that day. Their focus was to bring attention to the causes of why people have to migrate to look for work.

The protesters met with unbelievable resistance in Miami. As one person who attended the protest described the ordeal, “We were all shot at and tear gassed at a peaceful protest attended by people from all walks of life. I got two rubber bullets in the back. Not life threatening but it scarred the life out of me. I witnessed Panagiotti running away, then stopping and going back to help a stranger who had fallen and then hit by a "beanbag" bullet at a distance of only about 50 yards. He was a hero.”

A few years ago, these protesters filed a class action suit for what they suffered during that legal and non-threatening protest in 2003. The Miami City Commission ruled that the Miami police had used unnecessary and excessive force and directed its Finance Department to pay damages. These protesters gave $300 each for a bail fund for other activists for future events.

The protest for human rights abuses in the Americas in November 2003 took all these years to bring justice to those in this Group who peacefully protested and were subject to police abuse. Sometimes protecting our freedom is a big price to pay but now with this declaration by the City of Miami that they were wrong, the First Amendment is still alive in Miami.