AFL-CIO Sues Miami over FTAA

Let me take you back to Miami, a little more than four years ago.

Protesters from around the country were gathering to protest against the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

They were met by a police riot.

The Miami police used tasers, shock batons, rubber bullets, beanbags filled with chemicals, large sticks, and concussion grenades against peaceful, lawful protesters.

Now the nation’s leading labor organization, the AFL-CIO, is suing the city of Miami for its police state tactics.

The AFL claims that the police violated the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights of the union activists who had come to express their disapproval of corporate globalization. It is seeking “declaratory and injunctive relief, damages, costs and attorney’s fees” because the city and the police department violated their “rights of free speech, assembly, petition and association,” along with their “right to be free from unlawful seizure” and their “right not to be deprived of liberty and property without due process and compensation.”

The lawsuit, which the Florida Alliance of Retired Americans also joined, says that on November 20, 2003, “law enforcement officers…without warning or provocation, blocked protestors . . . from marching on the portion of the permitted route.” A little while later, “law enforcement officers advanced without warning, firing at this group from close range with ‘less lethal’ ordnance, including projectiles, ‘beanbags,’ ‘pepper-spray balls,’ and attacking some of them with batons. The persons they assaulted had not engaged in unlawful conduct.”

Along with AFL-CIO itself, individual members of the federation are suing.

Three of them--Deborah Dion, Michael Cavanaugh, Stewart Acuff—allege that they were “detained at gunpoint and confined inside the Bayfront Park Amphitheater, without provocation or cause,” on November 20, 2003. Police also allegedly blocked senior citizens and labor activists, including speakers, from gaining access to the Amphitheater.

Thea Lee, the political director of the AFL-CIO for the past 10 years, is also suing.

I talked with her this week.

“I have never seen a police response this brutal,” she told me.

She, like many others, was trapped by police who advanced on all sides, even though everyone was assembling peaceably.

She says a colleague next to her got hit by a rubber bullet, and all around her people were getting hit in the head.

When she complained to the police, they surrounded her and hurled the most vile, crude, and sexist comments at her, so much so that she says she feared for her safety.

“Blow me,” “Fuck you, bitch,” and “That’s why I’m not married, so I don’t have to fuck a bitch like you” were some of the remarks that Thea Lee recalls hearing.

“It was a little bit scary,” Lee says. “Here we were, two women surrounded by cops in full riot gear who were being very obscene.”

Lt. Bill Schwartz, spokesman for the Miami Police Department, told me he has “no statement at this time” in response to the lawsuit.

Cristina Fernandez, in the city of Miami’s office of communications, said, “It’s an ongoing lawsuit, and we usually don’t comment on those.”

I asked Thea Lee why she’s suing. “It’s important to fight back,” she said. “We want to send a message to the Miami police department and to the rest of the country that this kind of behavior is completely unacceptable. Otherwise, more and more peaceful actions by demonstrators will become fair game for abuse by police forces.”