One Small Step Toward Justice

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MINNEAPOLIS -- When I left the Cancun convention center for the last time, just after noon on Sunday and only hours shy of the Ministerial's official closing deadline, a group of NGO's were in the hall outside the media center chanting: "No means no! Reject the text!" These activists -- including members of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Food First, Council of Canadians, Global Exchange, and Focus on the Global South -- were making one final full-court press to back up the 70-plus Third World countries that had rejected the bullying of the U.S. and E.U. earlier that morning after an all-night negotiating session.

By the time I boarded the plane home at 2:40 PM, those same NGO's were dancing in the halls of the convention center, cheering the collapse of the trade talks. And across town outside the security zone several thousand global justice protesters were dancing in the streets.

The Kenyan delegation, disgusted by the strong-arm negotiating tactics of the U.S. and E.U. -- which were attempting to broadly expand the WTO's authority over issues like foreign investment and government procurement -- had abruptly pulled out of the talks, bringing the consensus-based process to a screeching halt. Other poor countries immediately followed suit, torpedoeing any hope of reviving the talks in the final hours.

I didn't find out about it until I got home that night. My wife picked me up at the airport and said the talks had collapsed. She'd already read about it on the web site of Stockholm's main newspaper Dagens Nyheter (Daily News). I was incredulous but relieved, and curious to see how the press would spin it in the coming days.

It was clear even before the Ministerial began that the spin war after it was over would be fierce, and the coverage since Sunday has not disappointed. Take, for example, Elizabeth Becker's front page article in Monday's New York Times. On the front page, Becker quotes US Trade Rep Robert Zoellick, EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, and WTO Director General Supachai Panitchpakdi, all heaping blame on the poor countries with variations of Lamy's line, "We could have all gained here and now we have all lost."

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