Eight Oberlin students joined roughly 10,000 other demonstrators in Miami on Nov. 20 to protest talks between 34 nations that seek to create a free trade zone spanning the entire Western hemisphere.

As trade ministers met inside the Inter-Continental hotel that Thursday, about 500 protesters made their way to downtown Miami, where 2,500 police were positioned with batons, sprays and riot gear.

The protesters, playing drums and waving banners, were corralled into an intersection where they continued to dance and flaunt their costumes. One Oberlin student came dressed as Columbus’s ship, the Santa Maria, and chanted anti-free trade slogans.

“We only got a few blocks before the police started pushing us with their batons,” sophomore Arthur Richards said. “They were so well-prepared, it was ridiculous. They were over-zealous.”

Oberlin student Maude Richards said that she was on the front lines when the police began pushing the crowd towards the waterfront.

“They pulled out batons and pushed them into you,” she recalled. “If you didn’t move, they would jab you in the stomach and the groin. I got hit in the teeth.”

Within 45 minutes, the protesters were repositioned to a spot along the eight-foot riot wall and kept at bay by police blockades on two sides and the Atlantic Ocean on a third.

Nearly 300 yards from the hotel, one protester tried to scale the wall but was shot down with rubber bullets.

Several small skirmishes broke out by noon as protesters refused police orders to retreat. Rounds of tear gas and large quantities of pepper spray were shot into the crowd. Concussion grenades were also fired, with the police warnings of “Back! Back!” filling the air.

Some protesters attempted to link arms to keep their ground, but were eventually forced to retreat. “At a certain point, people get tired of being hit with batons,” Arhtur Richards said.

Protesters shouted at the officers as riot squads extended their batons into the throng of demonstrators.

There was a striking difference in the way the police treated protesters who refrained from verbal insults, Maude Richards said.

“A lot of the protesters would yell personal attacks at the police,” she said. “I would say, ‘I’m really scared, please don’t hurt me.’ I noticed that they didn’t seem to be jabbing me as hard. It shows that they are human, too.”

Many protesters dispersed at noon to allow larger contingents participating in the sanctioned protest march organized by the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations and United for Peace and Justice and other organizations.

The organized protest was sanctioned by the police and included well over 10,000 marchers on a 2.2-mile route. Union officials were stationed along the route to maintain order, and a few arrests were made during the event in the sections downtown.

The march ended around 3:30 pm. at the waterfront. Small bands of protesters, many of whom had joined the union for the march, began a second push towards the hotel, but were cut off by a police line one block away from the fence.

Tension levels rose during the next 15 minutes as protesters resumed their earlier dancing and chanting.

“We hoped that they would let us through,” Arthur Richards said. “There were several union flags flying out front.”

The demonstrators waited, hoping that the blockade would retreat, but instead, chaos ensued.

At around 4 p.m., the police began firing tear gas into the crowd without provocation, according to Oberlin students.

Arthur Richards alleged that many people tried to join arms, but “the police were so violent so quickly that a lot of people started running away.”

According to the police, several protesters were being too aggressive in their push towards the fence, using slingshots and other makeshift weapons to disrupt the peace.

Before long, the police turned pepper spray and batons on the protesters in full force. Rubber bullets were also fired into the crowd. Several protesters tripped and fell during their retreat.

“I starting backing up and tripped over the curb,” Arthur Richards said. “One policeman pulled off my bandana and sprayed me in the face with pepper spray. I felt lucky I wasn’t arrested.”

Other demonstrators had been handcuffed after breaking away from the throng, he said. Volunteer street medics reached Arthur Richards and decontaminated him.

“I couldn’t breathe,” he recalled.

Another Oberlin student was shot in the leg with a rubber bullet. During the confrontation, several street fires were lighted by protesters. Police arrested 200 protesters and ten others were treated by hazardous materials teams, a CNN report said.

The nine protesters from Oberlin were able to regroup at the far end of Biscayne Boulevard and quickly retreated into one of the adjoining working-class neighborhoods.

“The people were really cool, supportive,” Arthur Richards said of the neighbors. He said that many homeowners were sitting outside and welcomed the protesters in to make phone calls or use the toilet.

“The response was really varied,” he said. “One group of teenagers asked if we were from the FTAA protests. They wanted to roll a joint for us.”

From Oberlin

The nine activists, including one non-student who organized the trip, began planning more than a month in advance.

Their bus left from Cleveland on Tuesday, Nov. 18, carrying College students and “some ladies in their 60s,” according to Arthur Richards. The 30-hour trip was broken in Columbus and Cincinnati, where they picked up a large group of Ohio activists, including students from the University of Ohio in Athens.

The group arrived in Miami on Wednesday, Nov. 19, and headed directly from the “Convergence Center.” The makeshift center housed a diverse array of workshops on direct action, civil disobedience, defenses against pepper spray and other police weapons, in addition to making banners and costumes.

At night, several Oberlin students went to a free concert in a downtown park, where they were searched at gunpoint by about ten police officers, according to Arthur Richards. Although the tension was already building, no arrests were made.

The next day, the Oberlin group arrived at the train station in downtown Miami to find a squadron of police officers already in riot gear. Several Oberlin students went inside a building to use the bathroom and were ordered out by the police even before the protests began.

Several checkpoints were enforced around the downtown area. In a news report, CNN likened the scene to a police state.

The aftermath

After Thursday’s semi-violent clashes between protesters and police, Friday turned out to be relatively calm.

Inside the hotel, the free trade talks concluded with mixed results, and most of the union marchers had already left. The nine Oberlin protesters joined a smaller score of others on a march to the jail where 200 people had been locked up on Thursday.

Once again, the police showed up ready for a riot. In response, the crowd chanted “We’re not armed, why are you?” and softened police tactics, Arthur Richards said.

The police formed a faint perimeter around the protesters as they reached the prison, where chants of “Free all prisoners!” filtered into the jail cells. Sean, a protester staying with the Oberlin contingent, was locked up for the night, but released in time to board the bus back to Ohio.

“He heard us, saw us through his jail cell,” Arthur Richards said. “He told us later that it gave him strength.”

The protest at the jail continued after the bus left for Ohio. According to other protesters, the police finally gave the crowd three minutes to dispel, and then arrested many of those who refused to leave the area.

In the aftermath of the protests, the AFL-CIO has asked for a probe into the police violence over the course of the negotiations. They also claim that a significant contingent of laborers was not allowed to march.

The American Civil Liberties Union has condemned the mastermind behind police tactics, Chief John Timoney, claiming that his pre-emptive strategy “suspended the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.”

The unions estimated that 25,000 people protested, while police put the number closer to 10,000.

On the whole, the experience was a disappointment for the Oberlin participants.

“It was a hard realization to come to that we were totally decimated by the police,” Arthur Richards said.

“But I don’t think we were totally defeated,” he added, and questioned if a protest that showcased so much police brutality and only small instances of property destruction on the part of protesters could be considered a defeat.