It was Thursday afternoon that madness broke loose in Miami. There had been a scuffle that morning between demonstrators and police near the fence police had erected around the Intercontinental Hotel, and the city had been locked down since around 10 a.m. But things didn't get really bad until about 4 p.m., when a few hundred people left the officially sanctioned union march to confront the police lined up along Biscayne Boulevard.

It's not clear what made the police charge forward, rhythmically beating their big wooden clubs against their shields. Predictably, many protesters say there was no provocation, but Lt. Schwartz maintains that the police were pelted with "rocks, feces in plastic bags and bottles of urine." Three officers were admitted to a nearby hospital for injuries sustained during the protests, and the Miami Police Department reports that a total of 18 were injured.

Al Crespo, the photojournalist, admits that some protesters "acted out," but says that, in covering over 100 protests over the last six years, he's never seen a police reaction as ferocious and disproportionate as what he saw in Miami.

"There's a real parallel between these kind of events and the events in major American cities after championship football and basketball games," he says. "A large number of people come out in the streets, and there's always young people who, for whatever reason, just have a need to get in a cop's face. Whether you're rooting for the Chicago Bulls or you're in Miami supposedly protesting against free trade, these kind of events always attract people who have a real need to act out some internal psychodrama, and oftentimes that's what sets something off."

Once the police were set off, though, it's hard to justify what they did based on protester provocation. Several hundred policemen, armed with the latest crowd-control weaponry, were arrayed against a sparse lot of scraggly kids on the broad boulevard. Instead of batons, the police carried wooden sticks the length of baseball bats, and as they marched forward, they swung them at whoever couldn't get out of the way in time. Video taken at the scene shows a boy in shorts being knocked down, and when his friends try to pick him up, they're beaten back with the wooden sticks.

At one point, a young man kneels down a few feet in front of the phalanx, his hands in prayer position. Five or six police charge him with their shields, then shoot rubber bullets at him as he runs away.

That, says Crespo, is what was most unusual: the police firing on people as they retreated.

Before Miami, one of the more violent protests Crespo had seen was at the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles. "What happened in Los Angeles, which had not happened in any other city up until then, is that the police came out, took a position and just opened up fire. It looked like reenactment of a Civil War battle," he says.

"In Miami they did that, but then they proceeded to march down the street and chase these people, chase them for blocks," he said. "These were people trying to get away, and they kept marching and shooting."

Witnesses say that all protesters were targeted, not just those that were causing trouble.

When the violence started and the air grew thick with tear gas, Stewart Acuff, the AFL-CIO's organizing director, organized a line of union peacekeepers to take everyone who wanted to avoid a confrontation with police up a hill toward the amphitheater where the march had begun.

"We had hundreds of people we were trying to move up near the amphitheater. There were seniors, unions members, young people, environmentalists. Every one of them made a conscious decision not to be in the stuff happening in the street." But the police followed them. "The cops came up the hill, tear-gassed us and shot people with rubber bullets. They pepper-sprayed a senior citizen in his 70s who was sitting in a chair completely away from any kind of problem, without provocation."

It was, says Acuff, "a police riot."

"They had trained for six months and they were prepared for a fight and they wanted a fight," he says. "They were hopped up and wanted to go."

The ACLU is still working to tabulate all the injuries caused on Thursday and on Friday morning, when violence again broke out at a jail solidarity rally for those arrested on Thursday. (At that event, Crespo photographed a family being forced onto their bellies by a riot cop as they exited a nearby cancer center.)

Thirteen protesters were admitted to a local hospital, but many more sought treatment from the medics working at the protest. In an e-mail, Dr. Ron Rosen, a veteran street medic, reports, "On Nov. 20, I treated numerous patients including several with head wounds caused by pepper balls and rubber bullets, and several with wounds to the areas over the spleen, liver and kidneys also caused by rubber bullets and baton blows."

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Seventy-one-year-old Bentley Killmon was unaware that Miami was becoming a war zone when he boarded a bus Thursday morning. Killmon's father was a police officer, and he didn't bear any grudge against cops. "I respected the badge until that morning," he says.

A former flight navigator and engineer for Pan Am who retired after 36 years on the job, Killmon opposes the FTAA because he believes globalization creates a "race to the bottom" as industries move to find cheap labor, decimating the livelihoods of workers left behind. "I was protesting what has happened to the middle class and to the poor," he says.

Killmon, who lives about 100 miles north of Miami, was on one of 24 buses chartered by the Florida Alliance of Retired Americans. The group's state organizer, 34-year-old Larry Winawer, was responsible for getting Killmon and another 1,100 or so retirees to the protest and home again, and he'd arrived in Miami Wednesday night.

Right away, it felt wrong. "As you're heading down Biscayne Boulevard" -- the street where the union march took place on Thursday, and where police faced off with protesters -- "you see swarms of police in riot gear," Winawer says. "There were armored personnel vehicles, helicopters hovering at very low altitude with searchlights sweeping the area. Right away it felt like you were not in America but in some type of occupied city."

Winawer didn't sleep much that night, and was up on Thursday at 4 a.m. to make sure that all ran smoothly with the seniors he was responsible for.

The day's official activities were centered around the Bayfront amphitheater. From 10 to 11:30 a.m., there was a seniors breakfast and rally scheduled, with speakers talking about the effects of the FTAA on American retirees and families. The official union rally and march began at noon, also at the amphitheater.

Winawer had negotiated with police beforehand to allow his buses to drop the seniors off near the escalators leading to the auditorium. Two early buses got through, but by 10 a.m., chaos had begun to engulf downtown Miami, and the area around the amphitheater had been shut down. Thus the buses had to drop their passengers off as much as a mile away. A few buses didn't make it into the city at all -- the police told them to turn around and go home.

A mile "may not seem like much," says Winawer, "but we had people who were 85, 90 years old." Then, he says, as they made their way to their rally, lines of police officers would detain them without telling them why.

Of the 1,100 seniors on his buses, Winawer says about 600 made it to their event.

When the rally was over, Winawer had to see the seniors back to their vehicles, which were all parked far away. Killmon was in the last group of people he escorted, but when they arrived, his bus had already left. So they headed toward the Holiday Inn, where Winawer was staying.

Winawer was wearing a bright orange vest and an Alliance for Retired Americans T-shirt, and had staff credentials around his neck. Yet several times, he and Killmon were turned back by police lines, and finally told to walk west along downtown Miami's railroad tracks. There were about 10 other people going the same way.

"All of a sudden, heading east is a line of police in riot gear," says Winawer. "There were at least 50 -- they had guns drawn and were yelling at people to get down."

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