WEB EXTRA DOCUMENTS AT END OF STORY Mario Barcia turned the television set off just after the Marlins won game five of the World Series. He’d been playing flag football with his friends that night, and he had a long day ahead of him. He was tired but happy. Barcia…
Growing up in Hialeah, Adriana Narvaez was surrounded by the political myths of the self-contained town and the curiously unassailable powers of its charismatic mayor, Raul Martinez. At age 29 Narvaez and two other young novices were persuaded by a handful of disgruntled businessmen to run for a city council…
Jamie Loughner was arrested near the Inter-Continental Hotel on the afternoon of November 20 and hers is a twisted tale indeed. Police nabbed her at a spot along the fence erected to keep protesters of the Free Trade Area of the Americas talks away from the hotel, where trade ministers…
Earlier this year we learned how Miami-Dade’s taxpayer-funded Public Health Trust incurred a $2.6 million loss after breaking its own rules. An uninsured patient from Guatemala was admitted for treatment at Jackson Memorial Hospital’s well-regarded burn center. He subsequently died and the bill for his treatment was never paid. Ira…
Joaquin Perez steps gingerly from an SUV onto a red dirt soccer pitch. A dozen shacks surround the field. Behind a makeshift goal a man and a woman putter about their small wooden home. Children kick around empty Pepsi bottles and plastic bags littering the grass of their front yard…
Skirmishes between protesters and cops may have ended with the Free Trade Area of the Americas talks, but Miami will continue to be a battleground, as police and civil libertarians square off over the right to free speech and the accountability of law enforcement. Miami police Chief John Timoney, in…
Miami police Chief John Timoney is old school, but by now he must be aware of several Websites that young techno-geeks who were among FTAA protesters in the city last month have launched into cyberspace. The sites contain videos showing riot police wielding nightsticks and firing rubber bullets and beanbag…
On the morning of November 26, Taimira Perez was on a stakeout in front of the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office on NW Twelfth Avenue. The plucky, Cuban-born street vendor had gotten word that North Bay Village Commissioner Bob Dugger was turning himself in to law enforcement authorities. State prosecutors had…
The Free Trade Area of the Americas talks have been over for two weeks now, and most of the national media covering the events wrapped it up neatly on Thursday, November 20, the day the meetings ended. Their happy news: The talks were a success and the protests were peaceful…
Miami Police Chief John Timoney seems to have concluded that the best way to get the media at his side is by having the media by his side. During his four years as Philadelphia’s police commissioner, Timoney became a national celebrity. During the 2000 Republican National Convention, he granted reporters…
The first-round bell has rung in the contest to define what happened at the FTAA protests two weeks ago. In one corner is officialdom, where Miami Mayor Manny Diaz praises police for showing restraint; the editorial page of the boosterish Miami Herald proclaims “the police, well prepared and out in…
“Why aren’t you here already?” Francesca whines into a cell phone as she stands in the makeshift staging area behind the bandshell on the Lincoln Road Mall. She pauses to listen. “Why the fuck did you take that way?” She rolls her eyes at Jeri, a six-foot-tall (in stilettos) black…
At around 5:00 p.m. last Thursday, November 20, approximately 50 riot police dressed in black were marching north along NE First Avenue. Like an army of androids, clear plastic shields and shiny helmets advanced toward me, a menacing wall spread across the pavement. I was the only civilian in sight…
Last week’s union-sponsored FTAA protest march wound through a locked-down and deserted downtown Miami, the sidewalks inhabited mostly by media and at the Overtown Metrorail station, a pod of poorly costumed undercover cops. What police department they belonged to, we’ll never know. We identified ourselves as reporters and asked where…
Miami Beach is known to gay and lesbian tourists as a friendly destination. Events like White Party Week and the Winter Party attract international gay and lesbian travelers who pump millions into the economy and bolster community fundraising efforts. What’s more, the city’s human-rights ordinance includes a prohibition against discrimination…
From the moment they fired the first concussion grenade, it was clear that police controlled the streets during last week’s FTAA protests. Phalanxes of armored cops bristled with weaponry. Armored vehicles prowled streets and blocked intersections. Downtown was turned into a confusing labyrinth of dead ends and detours. Authorities transformed…
The book sits quietly, battling long odds. Hundreds of other titles line the shelves of Books & Books in Coral Gables. Meditations on politics. Memoirs and biographies. First novels by the graduates of elite writing workshops. Some 60,000 new books are released in America every year. Most disappear quickly, with…
South Beach AIDS Project executive director Kevin Garrity is typical of his generation of gay men in that, at age 43, he’s lost dozens of friends to AIDS. He figures it’s easily a hundred people in the last twenty years. Those losses have made the California transplant a very careful…
Miami is known for its combustible mix of people from all points on the sociopolitical spectrum. At Home Depot the wealthy former somocista bumps into the Sandinista commander who appropriated his Managua mansion. The retired Medellín cocaine kingpin lives in the same Key Biscayne condo as the attorney general who…
Andean Region On the great-grandfather clock of time, 500 years is about a second. And in that second, European mestizos have managed to plunder this region of nearly all its mineral wealth, subjugate the Indian populations, and force on them Western laws and the Catholic Church. But if the recent…
The story of the Free Trade Area of the Americas began — and may well end — in Miami. At the Summit of the Americas held here in December 1994, the heads of every nation in the hemisphere (except Fidel Castro, who was not invited) agreed to tear down trade…
Market Access This issue puts the “free” in free trade by tearing down the barriers between nations and letting goods flow unfettered across borders. The current draft mandates that member countries eliminate tariffs on all imports from other member countries within ten years after the FTAA goes into effect. Taxing…
