IMF, World Bank Protests
Exploiters' Party Crashed

by Staff

Washington, DC - In the second major mobilization against corporate globalization in less than a year, thousands of people converged here, April 16 and 17, to shut down meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The message of the protest reached far and wide: We must stop corporate globalization, which exploits people all over the world and destroys the environment in the name of more profits for the rich!

One of the many protests to hit the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meeting in Washington DC. Photo by Indy Media

The DC protests were an important step in building a movement to oppose this kind of global injustice and exploitation. Many trade unions, including the AFL-CIO, endorsed and participated in the actions. Youth mobilized in force for the protests, focusing on issues like worker solidarity, the environment, and against US military interventions. People came from all corners of the globe to participate.

During the weeks leading up to the protest of the World Bank and IMF meetings, organizers were busy training and preparing. They organized into smaller affinity groups and divided up the areas around the building where the meetings took place.

Beginning at 5 a.m., Sunday, April 16, protesters took over their assigned streets, prepared to stop delegates from getting through to the meetings. Many locked-down with bicycle locks, chains and homemade devices to stop the cops from breaking them up. All together, about three thousand people participated in the direct action, with thousands more supporting them. A legal rally later that day drew about 10,000 people.

Police Repression

While activists spent the weeks before the action organizing, the DC police were also busy preparing, studying videos from the actions in Seattle last year, getting special training, and spending $1 million on new tools of repression: rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray, Star Wars-like riot gear and armored vehicles.

	Huge numbers of police and a campaign of repression failed to stop the mass, militant demonstrations. Photo by Indy Media

In the days before the protests, police arrested suspected activists, confiscated supplies, including food for the protesters and giant puppets for street theater. Citing supposed fire code violations they shut down the action center where many protest organizers were based. The day before the action, over 500 people were arrested at a legal rally, clearly intended to reduce the number of people who were willing to blockade the meetings the following day. Police ordered the closure of copy shops to prevent activists from printing literature.

At the demo itself, there were numerous cases of police violence: one man was knocked unconscious, and while on the ground, a cop fractured three ribs, leaving him permanently injured. Other injuries were documented, a few of them serious, with numerous other cases of pepper spraying and clubbing.

People's Victory

So who won, and what was accomplished? Mainstream media tried to downplay the impact and the message of the protests, and claim that the meetings were held without a hitch. But they could not ignore the movement. In reality, delegates from the World Bank and IMF had to get up at 3 a.m. to take special police-escorted buses to get to the meetings before protesters set up the blockades. They were clearly shaken as they tried to defend their actions and pretend that the protests didn't affect them.

More importantly, the protests spread awareness of the global injustices imposed by the World Bank and IMF. Before last years anti-WTO Battle in Seattle protests, and the April 16 Mobilization for Global Justice in DC, very few people in the U.S. could say what the WTO, World Bank and IMF are. Now, whenever those names are mentioned, so is the fact that there is a large, militant and growing movement that opposes them.

We showed that by organizing and taking action, we can challenge the power of the owning class, and create our own democracy in the streets. This was a small, but important victory in the struggle against the system of global exploitation.