The tensions in Miami began well before the first protester arrived. Unlike other American cities that have hosted large protests, Miami had a clear stake in the demonstration's central issue: It is competing with Panama City, Cancun and other cities to become home to the FTAA's secretariat. Thus, when Western Hemisphere trade ministers gathered at Miami's Intercontinental for the November trade talks, police had to show they could handle the kind of anti-globalization activists who have often trashed cities hosting economic summits.

On Sept. 5, Lida Rodriguez-Taseff of the ACLU attended a briefing that the police held for local business leaders at the Intercontinental Hotel. Rodriguez-Taseff was shocked that Asst. Police Chief Frank Fernandez's PowerPoint presentation openly endorsed the controversial trade agreement, telling the audience that it would bring 89,000 new jobs to the area and add $13.5 billion annually to Florida's Gross State Product.

"In situations where the police don't like the protesters' message, they definitely treat protesters as the enemy," says Rodriguez-Taseff.

"Essentially what happened," she adds, "is that the police went from being the neutral protector of liberty and property and safety, which is what their job is supposed to be, to being the enforcer of a political goal of the political and business communities."

The week of the protests, John Timoney, the Miami chief of police, socialized with the trade ministers and publicly taunted demonstrators. On Wednesday, Nov. 19, the day before the main protest march, Miami Herald reporter Oscar Corral followed Timoney onto a boat taking ministers to Miami's Vizcaya park. After the ride, Timoney said, "If they [anarchists] don't do anything by tomorrow night, pardon the expression, but they look like pussies." (Or, "p-----," as the Herald reported it.)

Taking a page from the Iraq war's media strategists, Timoney had reporters covering the demonstrations "embed" with the police. Reporting for the Guardian newspaper, journalist and "No Logo" author Naomi Klein wrote, "As in Iraq, most reporters embraced their role as pseudo soldiers with zeal, suiting up in combat helmets and flak jackets." Several reporters who didn't embed were hauled off to jail in mass roundups during the protests.

Anger and fear about anarchists had been building up in the city all autumn. Al Crespo, a 61-year-old Miami photojournalist who specializes in covering demonstrations -- he recently published a book of photographs called "Protest in the Land of Plenty" -- says he first realized something was awry when his 87-year-old mother called him in hysterics weeks before activists began arriving in Miami.

"I'm Cuban, and my mother listens to a lot of these Cuban radio stations," he says. "She knows what I do, and she called me up one day in a real panic, with the belief that I was going to be killed on the streets of Miami. She was hearing that it was communists coming, and these people were going to blow up the city."

Meanwhile, the police were preparing to face off against a violent enemy. Asst. Chief Fernandez's PowerPoint presentation listed three groups of protesters headed to Miami: "The Green Group (non violent, union based)"; "The Yellow Group (mostly non violent, fringe elements)" and "The Red Group (anti-government, anti-establishment)." The slides also identified the lime-green baseball caps donned by the legal observers who accompany most major protests. According to Rodriguez-Taseff, when the slide appeared, Fernandez said, "These are their lawyers. They're there to antagonize police."

Marc Steier, a New Jersey lawyer who works for the National Lawyers Guild -- a kind of radical ACLU -- arrived in Miami in mid-November to open a temporary office for Miami Activist Defense, a legal collective formed to represent demonstrators. He and a colleague were setting up their computers on Nov. 15 when they got their first phone call: Police, a woman activist reported, were hassling a kid walking down the street.

Just then, Steier says, a volunteer named Henry whom he knew from previous protests arrived, and Steier dispatched him to the scene with a camera, a tape recorder and a lime green hat. When Henry arrived, cops on bicycles were questioning a kid dressed all in black. He turned out to be a local goth who knew nothing of the FTAA.

Then the police crossed the street to where three men, part of a pagan group in town for the demonstrations, were watching. They were friends of the woman who called Steier's office, and one of them was holding her backpack while she used the phone down the street.

"There was nothing about them that would give a casual observer any indication that they were anything but tourists," says Steier, who later interviewed all of them after they were released from jail.

The police asked one man for I.D., which he gave them, and then demanded to search the backpack he was holding. He refused to consent, because it didn't belong to him. At that point, a police vehicle pulled up. According to Steier, the uncooperative pagan was arrested and put in the patrol car, and his backpack was dumped out on the police car's hood.

"The second male sees what's going down, and he starts to be a little more compliant," says Steier. The cops, Steier said, asked for "your name, where you're from, how you got down to Miami, whether you're an anarchist, whether you're here to cause trouble and break things." Finally, the second pagan asked if he was free to go. "'Actually, you're under arrest,' said the police."

The police proceeded to arrest the third man and the woman when she returned from the phone. All were charged with obstructing a sidewalk.

Throughout it all, Henry had been on his cellphone with Steier. Suddenly, he lost contact: Henry had been arrested, too -- charged with obstruction of justice.

Between the 15th and the 20th, the day of the major protest, Miami Activist Defense received dozens of reports of people being arbitrarily detained, searched, photographed and questioned about their backgrounds and their connections to anarchism.

The most authoritative first-person story about such random seizures came from Celeste Fraser Delgado, a reporter for Miami New Times, who was arrested Thursday evening on Miami Avenue as she walked toward the protest's welcome center with a group of protesters she was profiling.

"Throughout the day I'd witnessed police provoke protesters," she wrote. "I'd seen young people cuffed and lined up along the street, but I thought they must have done something bad to be detained. Surely the police would see that we were doing nothing wrong and let us go. Surely they would recognize my role as a working member of the press."

Instead, Delgado's hands were cuffed behind her back. Her pleas to the police to check her credentials were ignored, though they took her black leather backpack with her press pass and notebook inside. She was told they would be returned to her. Instead, they were dumped out and left on the street.

She knows that because John de Leon, an ACLU lawyer, happened to be in the area after her arrest. He was on the phone with Rodriguez-Taseff when he noticed that the street was littered with backpacks, cellphones and wallets. He was collecting the protesters' things when he found Delgado's press credentials.

Delgado was released Friday afternoon, after the charges against her were dropped. Of the more than 90 arrests made at the protests on Thursday, the Miami prosecutors threw out 20 due to lack of evidence. Rodriguez-Taseff says it's "unheard of" for so many cases to be dismissed as groundless.

The total number of arrests in Miami wasn't particularly large -- according to Lt. Schwartz, 231 people were taken in on FTAA-related charges the week of the summit, compared to 631 arrested at the Seattle anti-globalization protests in 1999. Then again, there were nearly five times as many protesters in Seattle as there were in Miami. There was also rampant vandalism during the 1999 demonstrations, and almost none during the FTAA. Indeed, since the protests, Miami officials have crowed about the lack of damage done to their city. That leaves the arrests looking like some sort of extralegal "preventive" or "preemptive" action.

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