AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, here with Juan González. Welcome, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Good day, Amy, and to our listeners around the country.

And the fallout from the Battle in Seattle continues. Clearly, the resignation of Police Chief Norm Stamper, which I predicted, if you remember, last Friday, saying that it was — I didn’t expect it — even I didn’t expect it to be this quickly — will probably be followed, I’m sure, by the exit from the scene of the mayor himself. I mean, he is scheduled for reelection in 2001. Can you imagine him trying to conduct a fundraiser from Seattle’s corporate community after the fiasco that he presided over last week? But interestingly, I think, actually, the police commissioner was among one of the most progressive around the country. So there were people already gunning for him, and this provided the excuse they needed to get rid of him.

But one of the things that Stamper revealed last week was — or, over the weekend, was how much pressure he got from the Secret Service, which was furious and threatened for a while to cancel the president’s trip to Seattle because of the insecure security situation. So, clearly, while President Clinton, on the one hand, was publicly creating the impression that he was in favor of these demonstrations, in private, the Secret Service and those around him were urging the city of Seattle to crack down. So, when they begin to investigate what the cause of the chaos in Seattle was, they should not stop at the boundaries of King County and the city of Seattle, but direct themselves toward the White House itself.

AMY GOODMAN: And Seattle has a lot to deal with right now with the former president of South Africa and his wife, Graça Machel, who is a human rights activist in her own right, coming to Seattle today. It will be interesting to hear if Nelson Mandela has something to say about the World Trade Organization. He certainly had something to say to President Clinton, when he came to South Africa, about the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, which eventually got passed, saying that this is a law for your corporations, not for the countries of Africa.

But also, the ACLU — and we also did, have talked about this over the last few weeks — is pressing its legal challenge to the city’s declaration, Seattle’s declaration, of a no-protest zone that took place last week. And I know the mayor got angry when the press was calling it a no-protest zone, calling it a security zone, but it was very clear-cut.

And later in the program, we’re going to be talking to a teacher from Seattle. He and his students were involved in the protests in the streets, and at the end of the week, he was carrying some devil costumes of his kids, because they had been damaged, and he had taken them out of a church. And a policeman came up to him and said, “What are you doing with those, and where are you going?” And he said he didn’t want to make it so easy as to say he’s a teacher. And he said, “It’s none of your business,” that people don’t — police don’t have a right to just come up to you and then possibly arrest you if they don’t like what your answer is.

So, there is a lot of fallout and a lot of evaluation of what happened in Seattle. And I think it’s also very important to point out that it was not just the state troopers, it was not just the National Guard, it was not just the Seattle police, and it was not just police from all over Washington state that were in Seattle last week. There were also representatives of each arm of the U.S. military there. Navy SEALs were there. FEMA was there, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Army, the Air Force. Everyone was in town for the World Trade Organization.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: It was quite a display of state power in a naked form, as we’re not — we’re not accustomed to seeing it within the United States. And certainly many, the overwhelming number of protesters were largely white and mostly middle-class, so I’m sure that they especially were not accustomed to seeing this kind of negative display that many of us in the African American and Latino communities have come to accept as a continuing situation in America.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, our listeners to Democracy Now! can be sure we’ll continue our coverage of the issue of corporate globalization. We don’t just do it now. We have continued it far beyond any other media is doing right now in terms of daily coverage, yesterday looking at the issues of police brutality. We will continue to look at corporate power, as we always do. It is not a one-day event for us, or even a three- or a five-day event. But to get a sense, a wrap-up, we spoke to people at the end of last week, women from around the world, about the lessons they had learned. Then we’re going to hear from a teacher from Northern California who was told by a judge that he was stupid if he was a teacher and he was in the streets of Seattle last week, told by a judge when he was being arraigned. And then we’ll go to a Seattle classroom. Well, the kids will come to us and to a Seattle radio station and talk to us about what they learned, and they’ll present a list to us of questions they have for the corporate media about the World Trade Organization. They were studying it for months before they took to the streets last Tuesday.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!, Resistance Radio. I’m Amy Goodman, here with Juan González, as we do some wrap-up of the last weeks on the protests against globalization that took a very physical form last week in Seattle. We are joined by the same guests we had on the program on Friday, women from around the world who are fighting against corporate globalization and working towards grassroots globalization from the bottom up. And today, we want to talk about where you each in your countries go from here. We’re joined by women from Guyana, El Salvador, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Jamaica. Let’s start with Mohau Pheko from the African Trade Network in South Africa.

MOHAU PHEKO: I think that this week, this past week, has been a very rich experience for us, and it gives us the momentum to at least go back and talk more richly with women about the issues, in terms of how we actually pull the very simple issues out of the trade agreements and begin to create campaigns around some of those issues, around seeds, around healthcare, around the issues of agriculture. And I think also what has been interesting for us in the last week is the way that we’ve been able to talk to some of our African governments at the WTO and beginning to actually get some legitimacy and some respect for our views from them, and how at least we can begin to seal some of those issues and begin to talk to each other at the national level about these issues, so that we don’t have to go all the way to Seattle to actually begin the dialogue there, so to strengthen that dialogue, to continue to lobby them in different direction from the WTO.

AMY GOODMAN: All men — all men in your delegation from South Africa?

MOHAU PHEKO: No, actually, we have a lot of women on the delegation of South Africa. So, that has been good. The agricultural minister is a woman. The DG of agriculture is a woman. And there are quite a few trade — senior trade officials who are also women in our delegation.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I have to believe that many of the official delegates in from the various governments in the Third World, seeing what has happened in the United States, are going to be a little bit more receptive to the civil society in their own countries, thinking of what could possibly happen if their own populations begin to get mobilized over this issue of the WTO. Marta Benavides, when you go back to El Salvador, what will you take from here, and what will be your next steps in terms of continuing the battle over the WTO?

MARTA BENAVIDES: The first is to know that if we are united, we have already won. This is a very important point, to start from a position of power, to know that we are not powerless, but we have power, and we can create the conditions — not to be the alternatives, because we keep talking about alternatives, but that we are the answer to everything, that it is us humans that create the wealth and the conditions for how we live.

And when I return home, I’m going to be sharing all this information in many, in a variety of ways, because I work with urban and rural communities, and I work with the national university, as part of a process of initiatives from the citizenry to create conditions, also within national universities, to create opinion. But we share, we have a process in El Salvador that we call sustainability. And that is not talking about sustainable development, but about the processes that allow us to live a quality of life in a healthy environment, without exploiting each other and without getting trade to be an exploitative way. So, what we are talking about now in El Salvador is how do we create the conditions for governance, that there has to be a culture of peace, but we can only get there through an education for peace. So, all these materials are going to be checked and disseminated amongst the population, and we are going to be discussing a lot about that.

But also, I have access to many communities in the United States, many processes in the United States. And part of what we have to do is create the conditions also in the United States that the people here also see themselves as who they are, citizens of the world, and not First Nations and Third World nations and rich nations. And the other thing is that what I observe here, and I don’t know if people in this country are aware of, is that there has been two coups d’états. One is the WTO. That is a coup d’état. And coups d’états exist by force, insecurity and by oppression and by force. And what happened in the streets of Seattle show also what a coup d’état is. And people think that only in Latin American countries, on Africa or Caribbean, there is coups d’états. This is a coup d’état. And that’s what happened in Chile in 1973.

AMY GOODMAN: Marta Benavides of El Salvador is with the International Institute for Cooperation Amongst Peoples, focusing on rebuilding ecological sustainability and the livelihood base in rural areas as part of the country’s peace process.

Jocelyn Dow also with us, president of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, WEDO. And the last time I saw Jocelyn was over a year ago, or actually just under a year ago. It was the beginning of International Women’s Month, Working Women’s Month, the month of March, and we were sitting around Bella Abzug’s kitchen table, Bella Abzug who died just a few weeks after that. And it’s a pleasure to see you back from Guyana and sitting around this table with us, as we assess what happens next after this massive rebellion against the World Trade Organization.

JOCELYN DOW: Well, there are two tasks one has. One has a national task. And in Guyana, one of the problems we have is we have a lot of internal division at the moment over race, over political divisions. And one of the things I think that women have to take, and are trying to take, control of is to say, “Look, stop the internal division. The enemy, the demon, is outside. We have to find a national healing. We have to build a national consensus to really contain this degradation of our countries.”

And, you know, the irony of all of this for us is, of course, nobody leads the governance discussion and tells you more about good governance than the United States of America. But what has been displayed here is such an example of bad governance. The WTO is such an organization that she has no respect for governance issues. They exclude the small. They exclude their own members. They do not consult. They do not allow you to participate. And yet you have this dichotomy in which our governments, our peoples are told, “You have to ensure that good governance is on the table.” So we have to make that a reality for American citizens, as well as for ourselves.

AMY GOODMAN: Jocelyn Dow, who is the president of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, founding member and executive director of Red Thread, a women’s collective in Guyana. We are playing the tape of a conversation we had at the end of last week as these women gathered in the library of the basement of the United Methodist Church in downtown Seattle. It was a place where, every day, activists, hundreds of them, gathered to speak about different themes — labor, corporations, women, healthcare. And we decided, just before we all left Seattle and dispersed — Jocelyn Dow now back in Guyana — to talk about where we go from here. You’re listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! We’ll be back with them in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!, the Exception to the Rulers. I’m Amy Goodman, here with Juan González. Coming up on the show, we go to Seattle to speak with students and a teacher who were in the streets, and the lessons they learned. But now women from around the world who converged on Seattle last week, as we continue with Jocelyn Dow, president of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you something, Jocelyn. In the week that you’ve been in Seattle, you actually have been talking to some of the police, some of the policewomen.

JOCELYN DOW: Yeah, well, you know, we were all in the bathroom together in one of the hotels, and we saw these women. They were looking really wiped out. So, we said, “Well, you know, sisters, I want to tell you, I’ve been to every WTO meeting in the world, and this is disgraceful. And you all have really put on the worst example of police behavior that I have seen anywhere in the world in these few short days. And believe in me, I’ve seen some.” And one woman said, you know, she said, “Look, I haven’t been home for five days. I haven’t seen my children for five days. We were never even briefed on what this WTO was. This meeting took place. There was no briefing to us. We’ve been called in from different departments of the police and put on the streets.”

And, you know, one of the things I think we have to impress on the police and the military is they are workers, too, that ultimately their nexus is not with Bill Gates. You know, it’s not with the corporations. It’s with the people. And you have to build up and really sensitize people that what is going on here is going to go on for them, as well. You know, they’re going to export prisoners to Mexico, and they’re going to lose jobs in Seattle — right? — because, you know, we’re going to move prisons to where it’s cheaper to keep prisoners, because that’s the natural movement of this whole trade mechanism.

But I think women have a real obligation now. We’ve seen a real mobilization of the trade unions and the environmental movement. And I think the important thing for us as women worldwide, and hopefully in the United States in particular, where, you know, you are the godhead of this system, is that what we are going to see is that women will take this to the Beijing review. We are here to decide on Beijing-plus-five. We’re looking at the Fourth World Women’s Conference to review the five years since then. And I think we have a particularly urgent agenda.

AMY GOODMAN: When is that going to take place?

JOCELYN DOW: In June at the United Nations.

AMY GOODMAN: In New York?

JOCELYN DOW: Yes, but there are regional meetings going on all over the world, and I think one is scheduled for Seattle, here, the western region.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Thandiwe Nkomo, one of the — one of the issues, of course, that is still pressing for Zimbabwe is the issue of arms sales and its relationship to some of the discussions here. Are you going to be dealing with this issue of arms sales in the future? And what do you expect to do when you go back to Zimbabwe?

THANDIWE NKOMO: Yes, the issue of arms is very important to us. And like my friends have already mentioned, the lack of democracy that we have seen here in the U.S. pushes us to talk about, you know, the issue of arms. And we met in Zimbabwe on the 23 — 22nd to the 23rd of November [inaudible] small-scale farmers as a network. And we were pushing for new issues. And one of the new issues was around arms trade. And we are calling for all countries caught in stimulating war by selling arms or allowing arms trade from their territory or through their territory should be brought before the dispute settlement board, and, in case of recidivism, be expelled from WTO.

And what I’m going to do, I’m not going only to work in Zimbabwe in terms of sharing this information about what happened here. But I also belong to an international network called GROOTS, Grassroots Women Working Together in Sisterhood. So, that would mean I will share my experiences broader than just Zimbabwe. But we are also going to do a lot of, you know, campaigning and working with our governments around the issues of food security and seeds, patenting seeds and, you know, drugs by pharmaceutical companies, because they come to do research in our own countries, and then we don’t have access to the information that we’ve provided. We are going to work on those issues, and we are going to work with other grassroots movements worldwide, because all these issues are affecting both developed countries and underdeveloped countries.

AMY GOODMAN: And Charlene Barshefsky, the U.S. trade representative who ran the negotiations at the World Trade Organization’s news conference, she was asked about the whole issue of biopiracy, the whole issue of corporations moving into developing countries and taking information, and then talking about intellectual patent rights, that they then have the rights, and going back to your countries and making it illegal for you to sell those drugs in your own country, with developing pharmaceutical industries in your own countries. And she said, “Well, we’re working on a way where if a country has a health emergency or health crisis, that they can get some kind of exemption.” I think that’s what she said. But there’s a lot of language here that doesn’t involve actual written rules. It seems that it’s — well, Juan, you’ve been talking about this.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, we’ve covered it, actually, this week several times in different segments. But I noticed, Jocelyn, you wanted to add something in this vein.

JOCELYN DOW: Yes, I think one of the things we have to realize, that one of the ways in which information is gotten is not only through pharmaceuticals. I mean, we have, for instance, in the Guyana the mapping of everything, all our flora and all our fauna is being done by the Smithsonian. Now, this raises issues for us, because those things are lodged at our local university. I mean, concretely speaking, we neither have the technology nor the capacity, and you have agreements. But what happens, since the United States has not signed off on all parts of the biodiversity treaty? Is the Smithsonian bound by the United States’ laws? Is it bound by the full Biodiversity Convention, for instance? These are issues that have to be raised, because quite often things are discovered, not necessarily, clearly, from corporate raiders. And this bears larger issues about ethics, about trust and about the future, because obviously people who are working now may be well intentioned, but what what will happen later? You know, for countries that were once colonies, there is no confusion about this. You know, the British had everything in Kew Gardens. And many things, you know, the entire world was mapped under the colonial British with Kew Gardens. And therefore, these repositories of information, what is the access? So, you have — it’s a very complex issue about whether it’s just corporations or the link between the corporations and research and universities in the North.

AMY GOODMAN: Jocelyn Dow, president of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization of Guyana. Mariama Williams, also from the Caribbean, is an economist working on gender and trade issues with an organization called Dawn Caribbean. She also works at the Institute for Law and Economics in Jamaica. Where do you go from here when you return?

MARIAMA WILLIAMS: Well, I think the work is at three levels, as Jocelyn pointed out: theh international, the regional and the national. I think in Jamaica, the WTO has been becoming for some time a household word, almost like the IMF, because since last June, the Jamaican farmers have actually been out in the street demonstrating, because one of the effects of liberalization is the reduction of tariffs and nontariff barriers, in particular on meat and dairy products, and that has caused Jamaica to be inundated by cheap, subsidized and also some inferior-quality meats from the U.S. and Canada, which has severely impacted our farmers. And they’ve taken to the street in June, July. And so, there’s been lots of questions posed to the government about WTO. So, increasingly, there’s been big discussions on the radio talk shows, in newspapers about globalization and trade liberalization.

I think what Seattle does is to provide a way for us to go back and say that the government has kind of been on the defensive a little bit in the sense that they’ve been saying, “Well, the WTO” — and the sense that people think that they can’t do anything about the WTO. And I think this massive mobilization of people in the U.S. and worldwide against the WTO provides a stimulation for discussing and for opening up that process among people in the Caribbean and Jamaica. I think we have regional network, CAFRA, the Caribbean Associate of Feminist Research, that’s been putting trade on the agenda. And the idea is to go back now and do the advocacy and the grassroots organizing with community groups, regional linkage among Caribbean womens who have been identifying this problem. But I think this has given us a really good stimulating point to go back to talk about globalization and trade liberalization and to get people energized and to get people moving and start realizing that, yes, this is something that we can do. It’s not inevitable. It is not something that we cannot impact, because there are people globally who are working on this.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, in essence, the protests here have given the weak-willed leaders around the — in the Third World a little bit more backbone now in terms of how they’re going to stand.

MARIAMA WILLIAMS: Yeah, and I think also for governments who have been making arguments, similar arguments, that NGOs have been making inside of WTO, but we’re not listening to. I think the Caribbean delegation has been very strong about asserting about the negative impact, because in the Caribbean, we know globalization. I mean, our region, the geopolitical space, the Caribbean, was created by globalization. It’s not benign. It killed people, wiped out Indigenous people. It brought us from Africa as slaves, indentured servants. So we know this process. It’s not new to us. It’s been an experiment. It’s now being brought to the rest of the world. So, we’re very clear, and I think our governments have recognized it. But in that atmosphere of intransparency and where the centers are isolated, and you’re trying — you’re twisted, arm-twisted into consensus, there has been problem in them being able to organize and generate solidarity amongst themselves and other governments. And I think the protests here and the massive organizing has actually changed something inside that space for the government, I believe.

AMY GOODMAN: I spoke to the Jamaican ambassador to the United States. He went to a congressional briefing to ask about the Caribbean Basin Initiative, basically NAFTA expanded to the Caribbean. Are you concerned about that? He was very much
for it.

MARIAMA WILLIAMS: Well, I think that we recognize that we’re having these multiple level of trade liberalization, because one of the responses from our region also has been to integrate more and to try to take — to consolidate CARICOM, which is our regional process, and to try to link to Central America and Latin America. But I think there’s a sense in which people recognize and said and feel that this is — NAFTA is impacting us, whether we like it or not, that it’s important to be part of that discussion to see to what extent we can actually help to set rules that will be beneficial to us, because NAFTA has actually impacted Jamaica and the Caribbean in terms of the export processing zones, some of which have closed and have moved to Mexico and other parts of the world. For these trade arrangements that exclude you but have impact on your import, people have felt it’s important to try to have some structural linkage to it, for whatever reasons. Yeah?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’d like to ask, because we are talking about the Caribbean — Cuba is a member of the World Trade Organization, was at — gave some briefings. What is happening in terms of Cuba and its role here?

MARIAMA WILLIAMS: Well, I think Cuba has been part of the Caribbean family, I mean, for the long time, and still been — still very instrumental in helping to think through the process and to respond to globalization and trade liberalization, and has been instrumental in helping with the regional process and trying to link to the regional processes in the Caribbean. But I think Jocelyn has some some things she might want to say.

AMY GOODMAN: Jocelyn Dow of Guyana?

JOCELYN DOW: Yeah, one of the things, you know, Guyana has perhaps the closest link with Cuba. If it weren’t for Cuban doctors, a lot of Guyanese wouldn’t survive in many of the difficult years. But more importantly, you know, when you talk about parity and unfair, and the rules being applied across the board, nothing is a greater violation of WTO than the Helms-Burton law. I mean, the U.S. has imposed third-country regulations to do with its all historic, political and economic warfare in Cuba, and now stops drugs getting — pharmaceuticals getting to Cuba from Europe, so that even X-ray film is a problem in Cuba.

Now, I mean, so, this is rules for the mighty and rules for the weak, you know, where the mighty can apply any rule, and the weaker shall, you know, inherit nothing. And this is what it is. And, you know, one of the things I’m proud of of the Caribbean position, and sometimes I’m always disappointed by them, well, but I want to tell you, they were very clear here. They were very clear here about the WTO. It’s a real do-and-die situation. And I want to give you an example of what’s happening. You know, there was a march some months ago in one of our very small islands that produces bananas, by farmers, 600 farmers on the right to grow marijuana. Now, this is entirely new. They said, “Look, if we’re talking about comparative advantage, the comparative advantage we have in trade is drugs and through the growth of marijuana.” Now, this is illegal in that country, yet farmers were able to go on the streets and say, “Look.” Now, what resulted is they came in and they destroyed those fields. So, you move pesticides in. You move a whole culture. A negative culture is now entering our economies because more and more people are turning to the narco-economy to survive.

AMY GOODMAN: Jocelyn Dow, Marta Benavides, Thandiwe Nkomo, Mariama Williams and Mohau Pheko, women from Guyana, Jocelyn Dow; Marta Benavides of the International Institute for Cooperation Amongst Peoples in Salvador; Thandiwe Nkomo of Zimbabwe with the Organization of Rural Associations for Progress; Mariama Williams of the organization Dawn Caribbean in Jamaica; and Mohau Pheko of the American Trade Network in South Africa, speaking to us as we were all leaving Seattle, about where we go from here. And speaking of South Africa, Nelson Mandela and his wife, Graça Machel, are arriving in Seattle this morning for several days of meeting the people of Seattle.