MIAMI - For veteran rights campaigner Richard Spisak, the tens of thousands of marchers expected to hit Miami's streets next week won't just be protesting at a meeting about an Americas-wide free-trade zone.

He believes the protesters will be carrying on a long struggle that began in the days of the divine right of kings and led to the civil rights Americans now take for granted, like racial desegregation, women's suffrage and labor unions.

"What we see in the streets, and I'm not talking about those few that are out there for destruction, but the reason the thoughtful people, the reason the concerned people go the street, is that there's no real voice," said Spisak.

"These decisions, they don't just have an impact on the elect that go to Davos," he added, referring to the Swiss mountain resort where the world's movers and shakers meet annually for a summit.

"They have an impact on the poorest campesino (farmer) in the highlands of Mexico, the family in a trailer park in Arkansas and the poor factory worker who, whether he be in England or Germany or America, that job is gone."

Launched in Miami in 1994, the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas is intended to bring down trade barriers in every country in the region except communist Cuba by 2005.

Opponents, who range from unionists to environmentalists, human rights activists to anarchists, say it does much more.

They say that like other trade deals, it could accelerate deforestation, lead to the privatization of public services like water and prompt factories to move where wages are lower.

Putting profits before life, and the wants of a few over the needs of the many, it may give corporations more clout than elected governments, they add.

"It's not just Chicken Little, the sky is falling, we don't like it because we've nothing better to do," said Eric Rubin of the Florida Fair Trade Coalition. "It's against the people, the environment and democracy."

FROM PUPPET SHOWS TO A NUDE RALLY

Among the 35,000 protesters Miami police expect for the Nov. 17-21 FTAA ministerial meeting will be pensioners, students, union members and veterans like Spisak, 51, of the fight for desegregation and rallies against the Vietnam War.

Most plan nothing more unlawful than sit-ins to block streets, puppet shows and a nude rally at a Miami Beach Gap store to protest sweatshop labor.

As at previous trade meetings -- most notably in Seattle in 1999 -- police expect up to 500 radicals, or "black bloc" storm troopers, to come to Miami looking for a violent confrontation.

The much-feared anarchists point out that like civil disobedience in general, violence itself has a lauded past.

"The Boston Tea Party was property damage," said Sarah Jonesy of the former Anti-Capitalist Convergence, speaking at a rare anarchists' news conference on Tuesday night.

Bombarded almost nightly by television footage of hooded rioters trashing cars and storefronts in Seattle or elsewhere, Miami feels like it is bracing for war.

Activists say city authorities are overreacting.

"If they think that dissent is somehow parallel to invading Mongol hordes, they have lost their minds and they have lost what this country is all about, and that is freedom," said Adam Eidinger of the DC Statehood Green Party.

"The people who are coming are fighting for global justice, they're fighting for human rights. We're fighting for anything but the destruction of the city."

© Copyright 2003 Reuters Ltd

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