Sonya Diehn

The main motivation I had was to demonstrate against the WTO, and the reason I went to Cancun was that I felt as a white person in America, I have a certain amount of privilege and that privilege, the way I see it, adds a responsibility to risk that privilege, to be in solidarity with people who do not have the choice as to whether they want to do hat. People who are faced with life or death situations every day because of neoliberal economic order, to be in solidarity with them.

I experienced problems with machismo that were distressing.

In terms of race, it was extremely international, and I guess I wasn’t really expecting it to have people from every continent, which it basically did. I was expecting more, a lot of Mexican activists, and a lot of, maybe, American activists, and it ended up being people from all over the planet.

I went down there, I waned to be there a couple of days before the action started, but, when I ended up actually going there was just a day before the actions started. I ended up flying into Cancun on a Sunday, and then the actions started on Monday. I flew from Hermosillo, Mexico, so I took a bus to Hermosillo, and I flew from there, through Monterey, and then, on the way back, through Mexico City. When I was in Hermosillo, I had been invited to participate in sort of a working group on environmental issues. I had been developing contacts there, so it was a good way of go9ng into that trip, because it provided pre-contact, and a good sort of beginning to my trip, a good introduction. I also [went down to Collectividades, later in 2003].

I ended up spending a lot of time at the IMC, in the end. Most of he people at the IMC were Mexican activists from other parts of Mexico, like Mexico City, and there were also quite a few [internationals]. I don’t think they were students, but they were probably [late 20s]. Not all. There was definitely some diversity in the age range. The vast majority were males in the IMC. It was mostly make, probably like 70 percent, 60 to 70, which is better than corporate media gender [statistics].

I ended up spending a lot of time with American friends from Arizona, but, then, at the end, I hooked up with and hung out with some of the people from Mexico City, and that was really interesting. I met them through the video project [in Cancun].

I think the machismo would be pervasive in Mexican culture; that is a general thing. I also experienced it at the IMC, not only from the Mexican guys, but from he American guys or the white guys, too.

During the IMC meetings, it was the guys who mostly talked. They would talk for more amounts of time, and more guys would talk for than women, both just the numbers and proportionately. The women would have the note-taker roles, and then men would have facilitator roles. There were some cases where women who were talking [would be] cut off by men. In the video group, the documentary group, it was smaller, so it wasn’t as pronounced, but there were certain situations where there were these two white guys who were making decisions, and they were pretty much making them unilaterally.

I spent most of my time doing the video, [‘Kilometer 0’]. It was very time consuming. It is time consuming to do video. What I ended up producing was the segment on tourism and globalization. It was outside of the protests; it was more average Cancun, day to day. On the Sunday afterwards, I spent half the day in the hotel zone, videotaping, and then the other half of the day in the colonias. We actually rode out to the poor neighborhoods at the edge of town and shot those, and, then, that night, Sunday, I spent the whole night pretty much, I stayed up all night, over the course of 12 hours, produced this two and a half minute piece, subtitled in Spanish and English.

We were only there for a half a day, too, so it is hard to say… [Christian and I] walked around the neighborhoods for a couple of hours. The people were pretty friendly, on our way there, they were giving us directions, and talking about the protest. I felt positive about going there because I think that a lot of people didn’t really know why there were people protesting, so it was a form of outreach. We did have some kind of sketchy experiences walking around, we didn’t feel, I never felt endangered or anything, I felt like it was fairly safe. It was daytime, and it was just a neighborhood, residential neighborhood, but poor. There were a couple of sketchy experiences, where one guy, who was obviously drunk, kept trying to get us to go down the street, go to this place, and we felt kind of sketched out, and then went sort of, ‘Ok, bye bye,’ and went the other way. And then another time there was this great house that was made out of sticks, the houses are made out of sticks in those neighborhoods, or at least some of them, and I thought it was really beautiful, it had a banana tree in front, so I waned to videotape it. This woman was out in front, and she was also very drunk, and there were all these kids around and stuff, and she got kind of aggressive as I was setting up the camera, and she made like she was going to throw a rock at it, but [she was] really drunk, so she probably would have missed. But I was like, ‘Whoa, chill out, it’s ok, I’ll put it away, I’m not recording, there are no issues here.’ It was kind of unpleasant…. I felt positive in some ways\, but, I also felt bad in some ways, because we were just totally voyeurs, we would show up to their neighborhood with the big fancy equipment, and set up and start shooting their lives, their personal lives. I could see how that would be not received well. And I think, on some level, I think people just thought we were weird, pretty much. They thought were weird. And some people were excited that we were there, and some people were probably resentful that we were there.

[Tuesday]

I felt like that was a very powerful day, and in participating in the march, I felt like I was participating in history… I was very impressed with the range of campesinos, people had come from all over. And not only from all over Mexico, but from all over the whole world. There were Koreans, Africans, Americans, French, Canadians, I thought it was a good march, felt good about the march. When we arrived at the barricades, it seemed very disorganized, people were just milling around, big crowd in front, the inevitable confrontation. When the punks were throwing rocks, I had a sort of a bad feeling about it. I am in favor of a diversity of tactics, and I am in favor of militant tactics, but in this situation, it seemed kind of pointless, and I also felt bad, because of the composition of the Mexican police or the Federales, or whoever they were, that they were, I mean, it is like this in the US, but it is more extreme in Mexico, it is like the poorest of the poor, basically. They are all Indians. It is always depressing to see a huge line-up of black cops, like in Miami, for example, where the cops were black. Oh my god, it is so depressing. It was like that feeling that the system has succeeded in pitting the poor against the poor and the oppressed against the oppressed. But, in a ways that is sort of very economically created, there is an economic relationship there. The cops want an income, so that’s their job, they are desperate for a way to make a living. So I felt really ambivalent about that. It was very sort of confusing, what was actually going on, because at one point I heard one of the campesinos, that was on the megaphone, in one of the trucks, I heard him say, ‘If everyone just backs away, they are going to let us walk through,’ and I didn’t know whether to believe that, or whether that was some misunderstanding, or what. I felt like the people who were in the trucks, with the megaphones, for the most part were kind of, personally, I was annoyed by it, because I felt like they were trying to control the situation, and that there wasn’t a clear, organized objective that everyone had agreed to, so some people were trying to bust through, some people were trying to fight with the police, some people were saying, ‘No, no, don’t fight, we need to be peaceful.’ There wasn’t clarity, and there was no group decision making process. I found that sort of upsetting. I did hear another speaker, I think from the Via Campesina that was saying, I really liked what he was saying, he said, ‘We must denounce the violence that is going on here, and what I’m talking about is…’ and I thought, ‘Oh, god, he is going to denounce the protestors,’ and he was like, ’But what I’m talking about is the violence of the WTO!’ And I was like, ‘Excellent! That’s great.’ Because that should be the main point; The biggest perpetrators of violence are the ministers of capital that are making these decisions behind closed doors that affect millions of people, everyone in the world, practically, and are just completely unaccountable, and are all just in it for money. I thought that was good.

[Moving around in Cancun] was pretty horrible, it was just extremely militarized, it sucked. I never got fucked with at all, and I saw people sitting a couple seats away from me that did get fucked with, that didn’t seem were necessarily very obviously demonstrators, but I always kind of went on disguise, or incognito, where I would try to look ‘normal,’ look like a tourist. And then, other times, when I went in, it was with the press passes visible, and that really made a big difference, too. I had two, no I actually had three press passes, so that helped. I think the more credentials that you have, it was proportionally, they assumed that you have something to do there. I think also, it is the attitude and the behavior, if you just act normal and don’t look nervous, it is kind of like a Jedi mind trick, you are not the droid they are looking for. I did that it Miami, too, and I never got fucked with by the cops, even though I spent a lot of time walking around by myself, with thousands of dollars of video equipment that wasn’t mine. I felt lucky, but also that your attitude and your comportment plays a large role in what happens to you.

We had a really interesting experience in the day that we shot the hotel zone and then went to the colonia. This was the time that we saw the action that was taking place, and we weren’t sure what was going on, there were just some people being detained, and that was it. There were a lot of people that were there documenting it, so, we were like, ‘Ok, let’s move on, and see what kind of footage we can get.’ We wandered into this area that was right next to the convention center that was sort of like a dead zone, it was all of these abandoned shops and these fancy cobbled streets that had tufts of grass and weeds growing up all over them, and piles of gravel. It had clearly been abandoned, and we were like, ‘What is this? What is going on?’ It was interesting, because the Hard Rock Café was empty, totally abandoned. There was one restaurant that was open, and so we went there and we started talking to the waiter; we actually ended up interviewing him, because he gave a really good interview [about the working conditions]. It was really insightful, I felt like he really wanted to talk to us and tell us these things, and be recorded. That was great. And so we asked him what was the deal with these shops, why everything was closed. He said that the Hard Rock Café left three years ago, and ever since then, the whole area has died. I thought, ‘Whoa,’ that was very interesting, there is this little rot in the center of this burgeoning capitalist zone, where it seems like there is a lot of money changing hand, a lot of flow of capital, a lot of, well, a couple people getting really rich, right, but there was this one spot where it was dead and abandoned, and it was eerie. It was like a ghost town. It was kind of cool, though. [However,] think of all the resources that were wasted. That is what I thought of. It just struck me that there are all these buildings, there, and they are building these brand new buildings. It is just like in the States, where there are some perfectly good buildings, and the University of Arizona just comes along and tears them down to put in another really ugly but brand new building. It is incredibly wasteful of resources.

I thought that the women cutting the fences element was excellent. Visually, it was brilliant, it was empowering for the women, it was also strategically good, because the cops aren’t going to be as likely to beat up on a woman as on a guy, especially with all of these people watching. I thought that element worked really well, that the black bloc was sort of being crowd control for them was nice, too, I thought that was kind of sweet. It was kind of a role reversal for them. I thought that worked out really well.

In terms of what happened afterwards, I though that was the more problematic part. I thought it was cool, with the ropes, and pulling down the fence, that was also really powerful, very visually powerful, but fully symbolic, and that was the trouble area. I understand that after the fence was pulled down, that there were people who wanted to try to fight with the cops and try to push through. It was probably not the whole crowd, but they probably need the backing of the whole crowd. So, even if not everyone is going to choose to be aggressive, they could be further back and just be another body and be present, to sort of back the people who were. The thing with that, though, is, say you broke through the police line, there were maybe 3,000, 3,500 or 4,000, something like that, protestors, or maybe 5,000 at the height of [the action]. It wasn’t 10,000, which is what I heard, somewhere. That was grossly inflated. There were at least 1,500 cops, I would say, because I was standing on the edge, and I was looking at both sides at one point, or at least 1000. There were a lot of cops. And they had weapons, and shields, and equipment, they had water cannons, and tear gas, all kinds of weapons that they were ready to use, probably if we did manage to break through. So even if we did manage to break through all of their weapons, and overcome their weapons, we would still have eight kilometers, and four more barricades, and thousands more police. So I thought it would be sort of pointless, the same way it was on the Tuesday march, where there were people clashing, and that was the action. I guess there is something to be said for just fighting with the police, just because they are police, but that is not something that I am personally into. Another problem is that tactics like that can endanger people in the crowd who aren’t realizing what they are getting into. So they could show up and be nonviolent protestors, and then get hit in the head by a rock, that the police return into the crowd. That happened on Tuesday, people got injured from the rocks that the cops were throwing back. I think that is really problematic. I think everyone needs to know what the consequences of a tactic are going to entail, and they all need to be on the same page. So that’s the one side. The other side of it is, when the fences were pulled down, the people on the megaphones took it over and had these endless speeches, being translated into three languages, which was part of the reason why it took so long, but I think people were just kind of being long winded. You could visually see directly the loss of momentum that it created, and it just turned into total anticlimax, and I saw a lot of people who were really upset about them saying, ‘Ok, now we are going to give them flowers, and then we are going to leave.’ I thought in the same way that militant tactics can be used irresponsibly, that, in the same way, some of the people who didn’t want to see conflict had taken over at that time and had declared that the action was over. But, ultimately, it was a victory because it was a symbolic victory, the fence was torn down, people felt empowered, and the talks collapsed, so we won, in the end. That action was strategically good. And it was probably strategically good that we didn’t fight with the cops because those would have been the images that you saw in the media. In the media war, we won. It was a symbolic action, so it hadn’t actually affected the talks, it was just a symbolic act. But, I think in this case, it was strategic to keep it at a symbolic act. I feel really ambivalent about that one. The only other thing about that was that most of the people pulling the ropes were guys, and the ropes were really crowded, and if you wanted to pull it, you couldn’t find a spot, you had to push someone out of the way to get a spot. Or it seemed like that. I didn’t try, because I had the video camera. I felt okay about that because it was the women who were out at the front, and cutting, and taking it apart, and the men were pulling, and that was okay. It was a division of labor, but it might have been more inclusive to open up the pulling. I felt like it was very important to have the cutting be the women’s space.

The thing that I walked away from that action feeling troubled about was, again, a lack of group decision making. It would have been ideal at the time where the people were using the megaphones if there had been a coming together, and a group decision, like, ‘What are we going to do.’ Are we going to try to push through, or are we going to not, and then, if we are not, what are we going to do. The effigy burning was good, but, by the time they got around to it, everybody totally had lost their momentum. The lack of group decision making process came up as a problem again and again.

The few meetings that I did pop in, I just felt that they were too disorganized, and I honestly didn’t have the patience to deal with them.

[talks about isla mujeres trip]

Most of the people that I ended up talking to and spending time with were fellow radicals. I was very heartened to find that, well, I guess heartened, but surprised a little bit that a lot of the opinions went across the lines of culture. Some of the opinions I had formed about the actions were also being spoken out of totally different mouths that had formed those conclusions as well. I thought that was pretty interesting, so I guess that radicals are radicals, and it doesn’t matter where you are from.

[talks about hanging out with Mexican activists and talking about machismo issues]

42:00

I thought there was an interesting dynamic created by the NGOs, the nonprofits, that were working on the inside, well, obviously between them and the delegates, and then also between them and the protestors. They weren’t protestors, yet there was a grey area; some of the people inside the convention did do actions. At the beginning, when I went to the International Forum on Globalization talks, one of the first nights, and it was so hard to get in there, we got there really late, and they said they had started really late, and the place was really empty inside, and I was surprised, and they had said that [the authorities] had tried to stop the whole thing from happening, and they were blocking traffic, and blocking people from arriving, and I was really surprised that they would go to that extent for these groups that are totally entrenched in the system, that are pretty moderate and academic. I was surprised by that, but not totally shocked. I had heard some comments from the protestors, like, ‘Why don’t the non-profit people do anything, why don’t they take action? They are just sitting in there, they are not doing anything!’ Sort of degrading their role, or just degrading their lack of action. When I went there, the NGOs were looking toward us, they were really dependant on us for action. They were trying to find out what was happening, or how it was going, and just trying to suss it out. Trying to be involved by extension, or really wanting to support it, and yet seeing that that really wasn’t necessarily their role. Ultimately, I came out of that with a lot more respect for what they were doing, and a sense of, ‘Ok, yeah, you know, there is a division of labor here, it is up to us to do most of the action, and it is up to them to insert the debate, and do the verbal sparring, and the intellectual [labor].’ But then, I thought it was super cool that I found out later that there were people inside doing stuff to disrupt the talks and I thought that was really, really cool. So I gained a lot of respect. But, in a way, ultimately, there was definitely a hierarchy, where the delegates were clearly at the top, and the NGOs were somewhere at the middle, and the protestors were pretty much at the bottom, in terms of mobility, and being allowed to participate. That was obvious, but there were other additional dynamics that made it interesting. This hierarchy, that was the front, the public scale that had to be put out, but there were other dynamics behind the scenes that were really much more fluid. There were times that the protestors were obviously very powerful, and times where the NGOs were really powerful, and, ultimately, the delegates, within themselves, had dynamics that were fluid, when the group of 22 came together, that was the ultimate symbolism for it, where the oppressed people banded together to become more powerful. I think that was a good symbolism for the whole thing, in that the hierarchical front that was put out was definitely just a front.