Its not just segments of (North) America that have bad associations with Florida, elections, and democracy.

For years, Miami has been the haven of choice when the anti-democratic thugs of one or another Latin American country are forced to flee their presidential palaces. The tradition runs from supporters of the Cuban dictator Batista (who, even today, include among their number the kind of terrorist Uncle Sam seems to love most the anti-Fidel kind) straight through to last month, when Bolivian president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, faced with blockades that were shutting down every city in his country, boarded a commercial flight to Miami, never to return. Miami is among many other things the financial capital of Latin America, its wealth swollen with the legal and illegal proceeds of generations of rapaciousness to the south.

For Sanchez de Lozada a man who had previously lived in the United States for so long that he was ridiculed back home for speaking Spanish with a thick American accent--it was in some ways a homecoming. He, like many pro-American heads of state in the Caribbean and in Central and South America, had either gone to school here or (particularly in the case of some of the generals who've led military regimes) received training at Georgia's School of the Americas, where an annual, enormous protest and nonviolent civil disobedience will convene the following weekend (Nov. 21-23).

Of late, Miami has attracted another type of notoriety--as ground zero in the governmental war on protesters. Federal prosecutors there levied felony charges this year against Greenpeace after members of the environmental group were arrested on misdemeanor charges in a nonviolent civil disobedience. The Bush Administration's tactics are analogous to having hauled the black southern churches off to court during the civil right's era. Miami's city council recently shepherded through a parades and demonstrations ordinance that essentially suspends freedom of speech and assembly when the city sees fit.

The latter came as a specific response to Miami's fears of the fracas when tens of thousands of demonstrators descend on the city this week (Nov. 19-21) to protest negotiations for the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, the so-called NAFTA on steroids that Washington hopes will be able to accomplish the same goals once hoped for from the now-stalled World Trade Organization. In a line item that is more relevant than it first appears, Congress approved $8.5 million for Miami's security costs for FTAA. as part of the $87 billion package of military and reconstruction money appropriated for Iraq. The fears in Miami are of another riot, of the police-induced sort that struck Seattle during 1999's WTO talks the last time a major free trade summit was held on US soil. (Seattle's security costs were eventually tallied at over $12 million.) But while the same sort of North American and European global justice activists that came to Seattle, Quebec City, and Genoa will be out in force in Miami, the real story is that the folks that chased Sanchez de Lozada to Miami are coming after him on the next plane.

Bolivia's regime change is part of a grass roots, pro-democracy, anti-globalization movement that in the last four years has swept South America. It helped evict pro-US regimes in Ecuador and in Peru, where the venal dictator Alberto Fujimori was sent packing. In Brazil last year, for the first time in several decades, it elected a left-of-center president, Luis Ignacio da Silva Lula--who made his name as an opponent of IMF-style austerity programs and greedy foreign corporations. (Brazil then led the diplomatic revolt that collapsed the World Trade Organizations talks in Cancun this year.) In Venezuela, it resulted in the crowds that kept President Hugo Chavez in office in 2001, when a US-backed military coup briefly deposed him, and again last year, when a general strike called by the country's biggest business leaders shut down the country for months. In the winter of 2001-2 it produced crowds that in short order chased out of power not one but two regimes that tried to enact harsh new IMF measures. In Bolivia, it resulted first in the so-called water wars in 2000, when Bechtel's franchise on the newly-privatized water supply of the city of Cochabamba were overturned by popular resistance, and then the collapse of the national government last month over the proposed export to the US of newly discovered natural gas reserves.

What is most remarkable about all of these events in not simply that large numbers of people are pouring into the continent's streets to oppose Washington-backed IMF budgets, free trade, and neoliberalism, and in support of a nations right to determine its own economic future. It is that these protests are winning.

They're also dogging America's diplomatic countermeasures. From Santiago to Quebec City and now Miami, FTAA negotiators cannot now go anywhere without facing hostile crowds or, more accurately, hiding behind well-fortified walls so as not to face them. Those walls epitomize the deeply anti-democratic nature of the FTAA and Washington's economic agenda for the hemisphere just as clearly as the School of the Americas represents America's anti-democratic military impulse. To be sure, what Washington wants still carries an enormous amount of weight in the capitals of Latin America. But increasingly, what each country's own citizens want carries even more weight even when its at odds with Washington desires.

For anyone who cheers the spread of genuine democracy, the anti-neoliberalism movement in Asia, Africa, and especially South America is good news. It rejects economic designs of the North specifically because of what it is for--namely, self-determination.

For the time being, as the walls go up in Florida, American officials will be on the wrong side of that battle. But if the recent successes in South America teach us anything, it is that as with the resistance in Iraq peoples desire to determine their own destinies is a powerful force. Even here. Sooner or later, that wall will come down.