“Kilometer 0: The WTO Shipwrecks in Cancun”: Thu, Jan 16, 7-9 pm
 and
“The Miami Model”: Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 7-9 pm

Twenty years ago, the global justice movement period came to something of a close at the convergence against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in Miami. Many remember the coordinated and systematic police violence against the by-then standard “shut-it-down” playbook, which left many US activists bruised and battered into a feeling of defeat.

However, fewer remember the World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial just weeks before in Cancun, Mexico, where a larger and more transnational convergence won a series of symbolic, tactical, and ultimately strategic victories. Cancun involved an encounter between the “summit-hopping” Northern activist scene, and a range of more deeply-rooted, spiritually-articulated, and generationally-committed movement cultures.

Several North American organizers in Cancun brought some of what we’d learned there to the organizing in Miami and while the momentum towards a futile sortie against the police fortress was too strong to fully re-orient, Miami also included a focus on building local organizing and modeling the “other world we know is possible”, lessons drawn directly from our experiences in Cancun.

Join participants in these momentous events to discuss what they might mean for us today. In our first evening we’ll watch “Kilometer 0” and then discuss what we learned in Cancun and how we brought it to Miami. In our second evening, we’ll watch “The Miami Model” and what we can learn from a previous experience of heavy state repression.

In both gatherings we’ll note that despite the feelings of defeat, the neoliberal agenda was largely stopped in its tracks by global grassroots organizing. The WTO expansions failed. There is no FTAA.

Though only a small series of battles in the war against Empire:
We won.