4th Summit of The Americas - Protests Against FTAA and Bush

Protests Against FTAA and Bush

Leading up to the summit, Bolivian presidential candidate Evo Morales, Argentine soccer legend Diego Maradona, and Cuban singer and composer Silvio Rodríguez travelled together to take part in the "Peoples' Summit" or the "American Anti-Summit", summoning Latin American activists who oppose the neoliberal "Washington Consensus", the FTAA, and U.S. President George W. Bush.

Morales, Maradona and Rodríguez were part of a group of participants who travelled aboard a train named the Expreso del Alba from Buenos Aires to Mar del Plata. Alba is an acronym for Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas ("Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas") but is also the Spanish word for dawn. The Express was joined by road by hundreds of buses carrying members of political and social organisations, protests organizers claimed days before the summit.

The group arriving in Mar del Plata aboard the ALBA Express went to the World Cup Stadium where Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez spoke to the crowd, then joined the "peoples' march" summoned to repudiate the presence of George W. Bush in Latin America.

The march did not come close to the exclusion zone and ended peacefully. However, radical protesters (piqueteros, left-wing political parties, anarchist organisations, etc.), who opposed what they considered reformism, organized a second march in which the protests turned violent. Protesters lit fires, hurled Molotov cocktails, and set fire to a bank. Police used tear gas in an attempt to quell the violence. Unconfirmed reports indicate that there were at least twenty injured resulting from the violence. During the incident, MSNBC reported that 60 arrests had been made by 7:50 p.m. local time.

The downtown streets of Mar del Plata seemed empty and ghostlike by the time rioting had started. On MSNBC during the incident, NBC News Chief White House Correspondent David Gregory and Washington Post reporter Michael Fletcher attributed this to the widespread anticipation among locals that the summit would bring violence. Fletcher said during the broadcast that "people (local residents and business owners) anticipated that this summit was coming, and (the locals) got out of town" and that "most businesses and shops are closed". Washington Post journalist Michael Fletcher also suggested that the violence was an outletting of anger caused by "growing wealth discrepancies" and the "rich getting richer", problems which he says many South Americans believe have "been made worse by free trade... and government inefficiency".