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July 2007

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Miami Impeachment Protest

By Jeff Nall
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July 2007
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On Saturday April 28, 2007, 1,500 Miami Dade College students participated in a graduation ceremony featuring guest speaker President Bush. Despite the Miami Herald’s predictions that Bush would receive “more cheers than heckles,” a group of people equal in size to the number of graduates greeted the president with a criminal’s welcome. On the same day that activists in cities across the country took to the streets calling for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, more than 1,000 people confronted Bush with a wall of opposition along the entryway of the Kendall, Florida campus. 

In an April 27 article, “Cheers likely for Bush at MDC speech,” the Miami Herald quoted accounting and economics teacher Maria Mari saying, “This is a commuter school. Students don’t stick around” to plan protests. Yet, the number of young protestors was equal if not greater than the number of aged activists. Luis Cuevas, Florida state coordinator of the Progressive Democrats of America, was impressed by the turnout. “I think it’s a wonderful experience to see so many people, particularly very young people, present at this place,” he said. 

First-time protestor 25-year-old Miami resident Cassandra Wendels said the event was both positive and empowering. “This is actually my first event,” she said. “It’s nice to feel so much energy from other people so that it makes the whole point stronger. It’s nice to know you’re not sitting home and watching the shit on TV that you’re actually there, you’re in it. I’m going to get off my couch a lot more and make a whole lot of other people get off of their couches a lot more and be here.” 

Responding to the Herald’s contention that Bush was almost guaranteed a friendly welcome, Miami Beach resident Dave Patlack said he felt like protesters stood up to the paper’s challenge. “This is hugely successful,” he said. “The Miami Herald on Friday threw down the gauntlet to South Florida activists and said, show it. And we did, today. This is the largest outpouring against Bush we’ve had in Miami Dade county. This is a blue county and we don’t want Bush here. He’s a bad example for commencement. This should be a day of celebration for the students, their families, the staff, the teachers. But today we feel the pain that Bush brought to this country through his lies, through his integrity loss, through the terrors that he has brought throughout the world.” 

Despite the solid showing from a city often labeled politically apathetic, many news reports failed to portray the event accurately. In its online story, “Protestors Greet President Bush With Jeers,” CBS 4, Miami-Ft. Lauderdale inaccurately reported that only “dozens of protestors voiced their disapproval of the President’s actions in Iraq,” during Bush’s commencement speech (April 28, 2007). The short article went on, “Not everyone at the protest had something bad to say about Mr. Bush. Even though they were in the minority, there were some people who had nothing but good things to say about the president’s performance.” 

Actually, at the height of the event, around 5:00 PM, less than a half-dozen Bush supporters waded through a sea of more than 1,000 anti-Bush protestors. While the South Florida Sun-Sentinel had no trouble reporting that the president spoke to “1,600 of the College’s 8,000 graduates,” the paper demeaned the protest twice, stating, “hundreds of protestors” had gathered outside of the college. One of the event’s many organizers, Simon Rose, press secretary for Democracy for America, Miami, believes inaccurate crowd estimates are unforgivable. “Before you cite a number, if you say hundreds then you better make darn sure you’ve counted the number of people rather than arbitrarily throwing out a number. I know several people who counted well over a thousand.” 

Even more important than the media’s low-balling of protest attendance, Rose believes the ratio of supporters to detractors was the real story that went unreported. “What was really significant is that there were over 1,000 protestors against his policies as opposed to maybe half-a-dozen supporters,” said Rose. “To me, it is almost shameful that the media isn’t reporting that, the tremendous ratio of protestors versus supporters. Frankly, I expected a lot more supporters of the president to show up. I felt very good about how few did show-up, it’s so telling.” 

Among those at the event were Miami Dade College graduates, punk rock musicians performing anti-war anthems, activists with bullhorns bellowing for impeachment, college and high school students, members of the Unitarian Universialists, a couple holding helium field balloons with “Impeach” slogans, and middle aged men and women across the ethnic spectrum. 

Brad Shaw, an African-American from Miami, said he came to the protest to “stop Bush and his crimes against us all.... He needs to respect us all,” said Shaw, adding, “Bring our troops home, they need to come home and see their kids, they need to be back home with us.” 

Graduate art student Jacqueline Gopie who attends Miami’s Florida International University, set-up her paper-mache anti-Bush work on the side of the road. Describing the piece, Gopie said, “I have a cartoon that Jim Moran did where one hand he’s bleeding Iraq, he’s like ‘Oh, I can’t.’ This is the first time he’s ever enacted the veto and this is what he uses it for. So I just put all of these articles of people, the names of the dead, people who have been killed, various stories about the Iraq war and just put them all over his body to show how hypocritical it is. 

“It’s in reaction to the statement Bush made when he signed a veto of a bill that was going to increase funding for stem-cell research,” she said. “He said he didn’t want to allow stem-cell research because it would mean the murdering of innocent lives.” 

A Gainesville resident, Cuevas, bolstered the event’s impeachment theme by dressing as an imprisoned Dick Cheney. “This is part of the backbone campaign—Chaingang.org —we carry across the country to places where there are activities,” he said. “And what we want to do is attract attention to the problems and to the individuals that have caused it. And at the same time to bring attention to the activities of the activists who are against the war.” 

Rose believes the event was an indication that Miami is a city waking from its slumber. “This was by far the largest demonstration in the county since the FTAA protest,” he said. “Miami is always being accused of being apathetic and so many people turned out for this thing. That’s a story in itself, that Miami is getting the message.” 

Z 


Jeff Nall is an activist and freelance writer and photographer. 

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