Cancun Dispatch: 9/12

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Juniper and I put our drums in the trunk, hidden under beach towels. We provide ourselves with cover: Doritos, potato chips and Coke. We breeze through the checkpoints, and park outside the Plaza Caracol, the big shopping mall right outside the Conference Center. Lisa pulls up and parks the car right in front of a cop. People are looking up and we see the giant banner, still hanging, with the authorities unsure of how to get it down, or what to do about the climbers attached to it. We look up for a while, admiring it, and start to walk toward the mall. A young man from Indymedia, who is walking around with his press pass hanging, comes dashing up to Brush. "Hey, don't you remember me?" he says loudly. "We met in jail!"

The Security forces are looking at us, and I'm hoping they don't speak English as I hustle him away. We wander around the mall for a bit, drink some coffee, wait out a sudden rainstorm. As we emerge, another dreadlocked, crusty young Indymedia friend comes dashing up to us to point out the state of the banner removal project above. We shake loose from him, now truly sure our cover is blown, then try to talk our way through police lines to go to our meeting point in the building that houses both the Hard Rock Café and the Rainforest Café. I'm trying to explain to the security guard that I need to get a T-shirt for my stepson at the Hard Rock Café, but since I'm pretending not to speak Spanish he doesn't really understand. Finally we give up and decide to just go around the long way, back through the parking lot, across the street, and through a plaza, back across the street, and through a pedestrian shopping alley, and then up a metal stairway that is part of their new security installations, allowing them to barricade the street.

Now we're having a rather hilarious interlude as various groups gather, mill around, and pretend not to know each other. Everyone seems to be in costume as surfers or some sort of tourist, looking cleaner and more spruced up than normal. Even Brush now has a new T-shirt he just bought in the mall. We carefully avoid catching each others' eye as we stroll casually from the café to the balcony, over to the gift shop, down to the ice cream store. Lisa, Brush, Juniper and I spend a long time standing on the curb in front of the cops discussing where to 'eat', until we begin to feel suspicious.

Finally we decide to move the group on, to the area by the sacred Ceiba tree at the Northeast side of the convention center. This means looking for people and trying to decide how to speak to them without seeming to know them. I ask a whole lot of people for the time. Some of them even have watches. For a short while, there are all these little knots of people circulating, asking each other for the time and then asking someone else again and it must be clear, we're sure, that something is going to happen, but it doesn't, yet.

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