Cancun Dispatch: 9/14 - 9/15

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CANCUN CITY, MEXICO -- It is the last day of negotiations at the WTO. Things are not going well, and they have until 11 p.m. to come up with agreements, Some of us want to make one final push into the conference center area, make one last show of opposition.

The group of exhausted people who met the night before could only come up with a time and a meeting place: a beach just south of the security zone, While I'm on my way there with a carload of us, we get a call that the military has blocked off the beach. We try to spread the word that the location has changed to a beach further south.

On the ride we have a discussion about the actions the day before. Tristan was frustrated -- somehow on his section of the fence the women stopped cutting and then just stood and defended the fence from men. That wasn't the plan . . . we were supposed to move back after a short while and let anyone who wanted to have at it, but no one had apparently communicated that to the women. I had been so busy fending off media and aggressive 'helpers' at the center that I never made it out to the edges. There was no clear system of communications or any pre-march planning sessions as the march only got organized late the night before and early that morning, and all and all there was a lot of confusion. And while the power of pulling down the fence with the ropes was transformative for all who took part in it, there were many people on the sides and the back who only vaguely saw what was going on. And then having the whole group sit down and listen to speeches broke the energy that might have carried us all through the fence and given everyone a sense of triumph. The hasty planners had decided not to go through, not to risk a police confrontation in order to gain a few more feet of ground when the conference center was still nine kilometers and two more barricades away, but no one had asked the crowd or even clearly communicated the thinking. All the speeches were on the order of "Down, down, WTO!" and not "Here's the strategy we were thinking of at 8 a.m. this morning." But that is just a reflection of the challenges of working with so many different groups who have such different organizing styles, ideas about time, and senses of what is to be done.

When we get to our fallback beach, the military has blocked it off. But I get a call from Brush that they are up at the first beach, have gone through the military blockade, and that there's lots of press there. We get there quickly, park, and walk past a line of soldiers standing by orange, metal barricades that open and let us walk through.

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