Cancun Dispatch: 9/13

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The Koreans have spent the evening twisting rope, taking thin stranded cord and twining it together and twisting and braiding fat lines of it, thick as a thigh, long enough so several hundred people can pull each one. Some of them climb up on the fence and begin tying the rope on. The rest of us line up and grab hold. The sun is blazing so hot that I think I'm going to pass out. We are all sweating and thirsty and whatever water appears is drunk down immediately and sweated out almost instantly. I am standing next to Lisa and Juniper. Lisa and I are smiling: We have been working together on this mobilization for months, we have both given more than the full measure of our considerable energies and skills, we have worked ourselves to exhaustion and beyond, and this is the moment we've been working for.

Finally the order comes, "Pull!" We grab hold, and pull all together. I feel a tremendous surge of strength, not just my strength, but all of strength together, Mexicans and Koreans and internationals, tiny indigenous women in their bright dresses, big, burly men, students and workers and local people from the town, our friends from the NGOs who've come out to march with us, everyone linked in the same effort like this great rope twined of many strands. And the fence moves.

We pull, and wait while the ropes are repositioned and tied, and pull again. One section of the fence is finally pulled away, and rolled off to the side. The black bloc take it up the street and use it to barricade a side road where the cops could come in and trap us. it's a perfect example of permaculture principles in action: using local resources, recycling, and illustrating that the problem is the solution. While we wait, we drum and dance. The Korean drummers are on the side with a blond guy with a jimbe, and I join them for a while. A group of South African women are smiling in the center and dancing, and they motion to me to drum for them. Behind us, Chac the giant puppet looms, creating a mythic backdrop for this collective act. We form up and pull again, a mighty, powerful heave strong enough to pull an empire down. And it feels so, so good! I am thinking about all the fences and the barriers, the fence around Quebec City and the steel fence and giant container barriers of Genoa.

After an hour or so, the final section of fence across the road is pulled away. Now the way is open for us to move through -- but the plan is not actually to do that, but to hold a ceremony and walk away, as nine kilometers, two more barricades, and about 10,000 riot cops still lie between us and the WTO. The Koreans and the campesinos move forward, negotiate a truce with the police, and call on us all to sit down.

They begin a ceremony of burning the WTO in effigy, which seems to involve a lot of speeches, all of which have to be translated into Spanish and English, and eventually the crowd gets restless. Some of them want to go through the space we've opened, and weren't part of the decision to tear down the fence and then leave. Some of us are calling out to let a woman speak, as man after man takes the bullhorn. And in the midst of the speeches, Lisa gets a call from our friend Antonia who is just outside the WTO conference center with a group of Koreans who have torn down a piece of the barricade and are now in confrontation with the police. The police are advancing and the Koreans are hurling their bodies onto the police shields. The Koreans are laughing but Antonia is terrified. We start calling all the press and NGOs we know who might be able to go to their aid.

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