Cancun Dispatch: 9/3

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

The evening's assembly is long and hot. A whole group of local youth has come in to join us, and we shift into meetings that are bilingual, conducted in both English and Spanish, instead of in one language with someone quietly translating the other for a small group. It's a much more equal dynamic, but everything takes twice as long. The young woman who has come with the group sits through the whole meeting with the blank expression of someone who has suspended judgment and is not convinced yet of our intentions, but when we finally get a chance to talk about the EcoVillage, her face lights up and she asks me for information about how to join in the project.

After the meeting, Lisa and Juniper and I go out to the airport to pick up two of our friends. There are Presidential Police stationed at the turnoff, and soldiers guarding the airport. Nevertheless, one of our buddies, who shall remain nameless, flew in earlier in the day and made it through security carrying a gas mask and climbing gear. We drive back through the hotel zone, where they are erecting metal barricades along the sides of the roads, building huge metal staircases and bridges so that pedestrians can cross the road without ever getting on it, and building a concrete wall around the convention center. We also hear that they are closing all the schools in Cancun for the duration of the meeting.

Sometimes I wish we were truly as dangerous as they think we are. Sometimes I think we are far more dangerous than they can possibly imagine, but in a completely different way. Mostly I'm thinking about those poor, displaced iguanas, the latest addition to the hundreds of millions of people displaced by the economic and political forces we're fighting against. If we can create any sort of garden on that stripped ground, it will be a symbolic act of real power, an act of magic.

To read Starhawk's reports from other global justice actions, see her book Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising. (New Society Publishers, 2002). Her website, www.starhawk.org has ordering information.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print