You see in front of you a narrative “tour” of the symbolism and intention of this image. This poster is the first in a trilogy of educational tools for use in discussing complex issues of globalization in the Western Hemisphere. The second graphic is about Plan Colombia, and work will begin on a third, about Plan Puebla Panama (PPP), in the winter of 2003/04. Once the trilogy is completed, all three graphics will be compiled into a coloring book. We are looking for collaborators in this endeavor, and are eager for feedback on how people are using these materials to further the understanding of globalization and corporate monoculture.

The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)… never heard of it? Well, that’s not surprising, as it has been negotiated in private since the 1994 Summit of the Americas. Like the infamous North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the FTAA is an international trade agreement that aims to eliminate the remaining “barriers” to the free flow of money, goods, and services across borders in the Western Hemisphere, excluding Cuba, in an attempt to create ONE huge, integrated web of “open markets.” This graphic representation of the FTAA illustrates the consequences of this network, and exposes its threat to the well-being of all forms of life throughout the Americas. This image is a map of interconnections, which allows the viewer a moment to find oneself in the bigger picture of the time in which we are all now living...

Planet Earth is depicted in the center of this web. Details on the landmass include the NAFTA and Pan-American Superhighways and the proposed dry canals (freight rail lines connecting deep-water ports on both coasts) that will be part of Plan Puebla Panama (PPP). The DNA-shaped smoke trails represent the overhead spraying of genetically engineered tree plantations and Monsanto’s involvement in manufacturing the chemicals being used in Plan Colombia.

Three spiders...development, militarization, and corporate media have taken control of the web of life. The development spider is extracting natural resources as it decimates the land, consuming forests with chainsaw teeth. One arm is drilling oil in the Arctic and the other is drilling oil offshore to power the concrete spinning machine that weaves roads, power lines, and pipelines.

The militarization spider, with a bandolero of hypodermic needles and an American flag bandana, has machine guns trained on Central and South America. Imperialist intervention in the region has gone by different names over the years: anti-communism, the drug war, and (after September 11) anti-terrorism. Plan Colombia is a US backed military operation under the guise of the drug war, using US tax dollars to arm the notoriously brutal and corrupt Colombian armed forces. This multi-billion dollar operation involves massive aerial spraying of deadly herbicides, including genetically engineered fungal herbicides created by the corporation who brought us Agent Orange...Monsanto.

Just to distract you, and make you think everything is okay, there is the third spider, “Johnny Q Big Guy” a representative of the corporate media, homogenized culture, and tentacles of the internet. He’s clutching onto the earth with Nike teeth and hooks, as television and the NASDAQ blind his eyes. Sprouting from his well-funded back, a media tower with a Disney satellite dish radiates signals, forming yet another invisible web that constantly surrounds us. At exponential rates, this king of spin is churning out a web of generic, corporate controlled culture, with copyright signs and UPC codes for music notes...culture produced for commerce, not community.

The three spiders collaborate and depend on each other, driven by the shortsighted urgency to control resources and expand markets. Meanwhile, they are busy privatizing and polluting things that we absolutely CAN’T live without...like air, land, and most importantly, water.

Caught in the web of globalization, which glistens with droplets of precious water, are the cocooned victims of so-called “free” trade. These animals represent specific struggles against the corporate control of life and almost appear to be modern-day constellations against the night sky.

On the far left, a howler monkey spun in the thread of sewing machines represents the plight of maquiladora and sweatshop workers, who suffer inhumane working conditions, meager pay, and a climate of violence against labor organizers. Since NAFTA, “free trade” between the US and Mexico (combined with militarization of borders) has resulted in massive job loss in the US and the creation of pools of cheap labor in Mexico, as bankrupted and displaced farmers are forced into the rapidly growing zone of export-producing factories. The FTAA threatens to force countries to eliminate laws protecting the rights of workers, calling them “barriers to trade.”

The sheep, tempted by the carrot on a stick, and now bound by the chains of debt, has been forced into the system of privatized education. The FTAA would force governments to sell off all types of public services, including education from elementary to post-secondary levels, to the highest bidder. The result is a system which views students as customers, future employees, and captive markets for advertisements. Such a system has no interest in giving the non-wealthy access to education, teaching creativity or critical analysis, or placing long-term social goals ahead of short-term profits.

Above the sheep is a sick frog being treated with privatized health care and patented medicine. The frog best represents illness, since it is one of the most sensitive indicator species, first to show signs of suffering in the long term evolutionary effects of pollution. It is also a reference to vivisection and the pharmaceutical industry’s relentless quest for knowledge and profit. While drug companies steal and then patent indigenous traditional medicines, corporate health care companies deny life-saving drugs and treatments to those who cannot pay.

The sea turtle is a well-known symbol of ecology and the extinction crisis. In the era of the dinosaurs’ extinction, the earth was losing one unique species every 10,000 years… today we lose over 500 each year. A casualty of industry, the sea turtle is tangled in the binds of a fishing net. She is also caught in the ironic trap of the “six pack ring,” a symbol of how the horror of the extinction crisis and ecological devastation are dumbed-down into fads for “doing your part” to ease the guilt of being a consumer on a dying planet.

The monarch butterfly is a victim of the genetic pollution caused by biotechnology. Cocooned in manipulated DNA strands, she is wearing a gas mask to avoid the genetically engineered corn pollen that is deadly to monarch caterpillars.

The crow is trapped behind the bars of the rapidly growing prison industrial complex. Racial profiling, inadequate legal representation, and racist drug sentencing laws conspire to create a shameful scenario in which the US incarcerates a greater percentage of its black men than the South African regime did under apartheid. Privatization of schools, healthcare, land, and water lead to displacement and impoverishment of people throughout the Americas, and prisons serve as holding cells for populations denied ownership of these resources. Meanwhile, these populations (mostly poor and people of color) serve as free labor to the corporate owners of prisons.

The mouse, bound in its own umbilical cord, being forced to reproduce, is a symbol of the ways that “free trade” disproportionately hurts women, who are the majority of the world’s workforce and of the poor. Her situation also represents the patriarchal aspects of cloning and biotechnology research, which are pushing to eradicate the natural biological functions of women.

The pressures of corporate agribusiness are symbolized by the rabbit, a campesino with patented GMO seeds falling from his hand. He is tangled in the pesticide hose from his backpack sprayer, which he is forced to use in order to maintain his livelihood and compete in the free market. Ironically, the same rich nations that are pushing to eliminate all barriers to trade through the FTAA also heavily subsidize their agricultural sectors. As a result, the US has been able to dump cheap, genetically modified corn on the Mexican market at below the cost of production, forcing thousands of small farmers off their land.

The polar bear, surrounded by pipelines, speaks to the environmental racism in oil and resource extraction on indigenous lands in the arctic and throughout the Americas, where supposedly “nobody lives.” It also represents the trend of countries being forced to privatize communal lands, which are found to have commercial value and sell these lands to corporate interests. Once oil and other resources have been extracted from the land, oil companies move on, leaving a wake of environmental devastation with no intentions of cleaning it up.

The bison, confined by barbed wire of borders, represents the hypocrisy of globalization, which advocates “free” flow of investment capital but strict borders for populations. It’s interesting to notice that while NAFTA was being put into place in 1994, Proposition 187 threatened to take away health care and education from the children of undocumented workers in California. Many have pointed out that in order for free-flow of capital to work for corporate interests, militarization of borders is necessary to maintain cheap labor pools and put up barriers to international worker solidarity. As hundreds of people die each year attempting to cross into the US and post-9/11 “security culture” persecutes immigrants, citizens of rich nations and “key personnel” from multinational corporations are given unlimited freedom to pass through borders.

As the spiders feverishly weave their webs and extract resources for the sake of numbers and shortsighted economies, they are using up and contaminating the Earth’s water supplies. While many of the world’s poor have no access to clean drinking water, the web of globalization is draining oceans and rivers through two giant spigots, and two spider cops in riot gear are hanging a banner quoting the World Bank that reads, “THE NEXT WORLD WAR WILL BE ABOUT WATER.” Why are riot cops doing a banner hang? This is an example of a trend obvious in the most recent years of advertising techniques, where corporations have taken to co-opting the language and symbols of resistance, from spray-painting ad logos on sidewalks to popularizing slogans that invite consumers to “taste the revolution.”

On the arctic poles, icebergs are being dragged away in chains by barge in reference to several corporations’ interest in dismantling the Arctic Treaty to buy up icebergs in order to access precious fresh water for thirsty computer manufacturing. Meanwhile, a pile of computers, discarded because they are a year old and thus “obsolete,” presents startling facts about how the computer industry is using up water and contaminating the land.

As the Earth’s water is being drained into the grid of the metropolis, it is pumped through the machines of resource intensive industries that keep the system running. Throughout the city, and around the clock, the office worker bees are busy earning away, each one of them locked into a cubicle in the hi-rise hives. Addicted to coffee and Coca-Cola, the worker bees are glued to their computers, the engines of globalization. Lightning-speed technology allows billion dollar investments to enter and leave a country in a matter of hours. Two Monsanto bees are depicted on either side of the city in their ivory towers of science brewing up another batch of NutraSweet, instead of honey, to keep the bees buzzing in their production cells.

Presiding over the entire system from the center of the hive are the tribunal bees, the unaccountable decision-makers of secret courts in which, under the FTAA, corporations will be able to sue national governments for any resistance they encounter to free trade. So far, WTO courts have sided with corporate interests in every environmental case which has come before them. NAFTA courts have forced poor countries to pay “damages” to multi-billion dollar corporations to “compensate” them for the potential future profits they might have made, were it not for laws safeguarding labor rights, public services, and the environment.

Looking at the consequences of the metropolis in action, we see sewer sludge being piped out to the dry, eroded countryside through the fortress wall of the city. What was once the fertile soil of the farmland and wilderness has been reduced to cracked, parched soil where the peasants struggle for subsistence.

The metropolis and its inhabitants are encased in a thick concrete and razor wire wall, symbolizing the barriers erected wherever the FTAA, WTO, World Bank or IMF meet. Protesters are detained at the very same borders the FTAA is loosening for corporate interest while dissident voices are kept from being heard in proximity of these secretive meetings held in the name of the people of the Americas. The physical dismantling and breach of these concrete boundaries during protests is a powerful example of collective direct action.

The ants of the resistance are busy mobilizing to fight the situation: speaking truth to the power of the spiders, judges, and worker bees tapping into creative traditions. Above and below ground, on the front lines and behind the scenes, they are organizing.

The above-ground resistance has swelled to an uprising, as the harvester ants approach from the North and South of the Americas in an attempt to regain the resources that have been stolen from them. Ants are marching in from the left (the global south) symbolize the inspiring and powerful struggles of the groups such as Movimiento Sem Terra, the landless peasant movement of Brazil, and the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico.

With babies on their backs, carrying farm tools and musical instruments (including pots and pans), these ants are making themselves heard. They are also documenting their own realities through movements like the Chiapas Media Project and communicating with ants from the Northern resistance.

Meanwhile, a surly little ant spray-paints on the symbolic wall, “Autogestion,” meaning “self management” or “self-birth.”

Rushing in from the right side is the Northern resistance, armed with some of the tactics of the youth involved in the North American anti-globalization movement. They are catapulting a pie as the Biotic Baking Brigade, a tactic to identify specific people whose greed is causing immense suffering and symbolically “assassinate” them, clown-style! The radical cheerleaders are gearing up for a pissed pep-rally with political rhyme...making space for a little “black bloc” tactics in their march (well, most ants are always dressed in black)… Some ants are making music and parading on stilts, others are doing Capoiera and plotting for a Critical Mass bike ride. One ant has just perfected a puppet and is taking it to the streets for some guerilla theater.

Simultaneously, in the underground, the ants carve the words “Global resistance to corporate colonialism” in the anthill tunnels below the city. The illustration shows how the industrial grid of the web... power lines, water mains, and fiber optic internet cables, have replaced the roots of what was once healthy soil, creating yet another invisible web of man-made veins tangled through the earth.

The ants are hacking into this web to power their organizing networks and create their own independent media, broadcasting their struggle for truth on pirated airwaves in defiance of the dominant paradigm. This underground resistance is tirelessly reclaiming the soil, saving seeds, and working to build a more sustainable society. They divert the once enslaved water towards the seeds of hope they’re planting.

Ants have much to teach us. They too, work to undermine the web of the power structure by dismantling the system with its own tools… but, all the while, these agents of compost understand that to build a new world from the ashes of the old, the unsustainable technologies and tools that we are now using must be relinquished in the society we are working to create.

There is a saying throughout parts of Latin America that “the revolution is the work of the ants”... It’s the everyday work we do as minutia, moving obstacles bigger than ourselves, that collectively succeeds in crumbling that big, overwhelming nightmare that sometimes makes us feel powerless as individuals. Ants perform amazingly large tasks by working together, and are a powerful symbol of collective power in the face of corporate control of air, land, water, culture, public services, and life itself.