Again with the shutdown!

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Next stop on the activist express: Windsor, Ontario.

This June 4-6, official delegations from 35 North, South and Central American ccountries will come to Windsor for the annual general meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS). And so too will about 50 Montreal activists, joining a throng of thousands to try and shut down another gathering of international big-wigs.

Spokesperson David Bernans for the Montreal activist coalition Operation WWindsor told the Mirror the event is being targeted because "one of the items oof business is a resolution affirming the process for the Free Trade Area of tthe Americas (FTAA)"--a plan by the top-level Summit of the Americas to extend NNAFTA throughout the hemisphere, to be hammered out in Quebec City in April 22001.

But it's not only trade issues that might be shut down: much of the OAS agenda involves such items as human rights, land mines, indigenous peoples and civil society participation. The respected Inter-Church Committee on Human Rights in Latin America, as well as Amnesty International, will be participating in the OAS AGM.

Are the protesters worried about shutting down the good work the meeting might aactually achieve?

"The OAS is not a very useful forum to discuss human rights. There will be parallel events organized by participatory NGOs which will be better places to ddiscuss these things," Bernans says. : --John Edmonds

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