naomi klein: activists must follow the money

"Similarly, when Washington started handing out reconstruction contracts in Iraq, veterans of the globalisation debate spotted the underlying agenda in the familiar names of deregulation and privatisation pushers Bechtel and Halliburton. If these guys are leading the charge, it means Iraq is being sold off, not rebuilt. Even those who opposed the war exclusively for how it was waged (without UN approval, with insufficient evidence of WMDs) now cannot help but see why it was waged: to implement the same policies being protested in Cancun - mass privatisation, unrestricted access for multinationals and drastic public sector cutbacks."

"The Bush administration has let it be known that if the Cancun meetings fail, it will simply barrel ahead with more bilateral free trade deals, like the one just signed with Chile. Insignificant in economic terms, the deal's real power is as a wedge: already, Washington is using it to bully Brazil and Argentina into supporting the Free Trade Area of the Americas. It is 30 years since Pinochet, with the help of the CIA, brought the free market to Chile "with blood and fire". But that terror is paying dividends to this day: the left never recovered, and Chile remains the most pliant country in the region."

"In August 1976, Orlando Letelier, a former minister in Allende's overthrown government, asked how the international community could profess horror at Pinochet's human rights abuses while supporting his free-market policies: "Repression for the majorities and 'economic freedom' for small privileged groups are in Chile two sides of the same coin," he wrote. Less than a month later, he was killed by a car bomb in Washington, DC. The greatest enemies of terror never lose sight of the economic interests served by violence, or the violence of capitalism itself. Letelier understood that. So did Rachel Corrie. As our movements converge in Cancun, so must we."