On Saturday, Nov. 22, a few dozen police on bicycles rode by the
warehouse that activists protesting Miami's Free Trade of the Americas
summit were using as a welcome center. The big protest had taken place
on Thursday, Nov. 20, and most demonstrators had already dispersed. Some
were in jail, others were nursing
their injuries. But the cops wanted to deliver a final message to those
still around. "Bye! Don't come back here!" shouted one. A pudgy officer
gave the finger to an activist with a video camera. "Put that on your
Web site," he said. "Fuck you."
It was the end of two days of
what many observers called unprecedented police vindictiveness and
violence toward activists. Certainly, complaints about the police have
become a standard ritual after each major globalization protest. But
what happened in Miami, say protesters, lawyers, journalists and union
leaders, was anything but routine.
Armed with millions of dollars
of new equipment and inflamed by weeks of warnings about anarchists out
to destroy their city, police in Miami donned riot gear, assembled by
the thousand, put the city on lockdown and unleashed an arsenal of crowd
control weaponry on overwhelmingly peaceful gatherings.
Videos
taken at the scene show protesters being beaten with wooden clubs,
shocked with Taser guns, shot in the back with rubber bullets and
beanbags, and pepper-sprayed in the face. Retirees were held handcuffed
and refused water for hours. Medics and legal observers, arrested in
large numbers, say they were targeted. A female journalist, arrested
during a mass roundup, was made to strip in front of a male policeman. A
woman's entire breast turned purple-black after she was shot there,
point-blank, with a rubber bullet.
Afterward, many observers said
the same thing: "This is not America." Civil libertarians, though,
worry that -- in an era when legitimate homeland security fears have
begun to edge over into hysterical paranoia about "anarchists" -- it
might offer a glimpse of where America's response to protest is headed.
"There
is a pattern developing cross-country with regards to the interaction
between police and protesters," says Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, president of
the Miami chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "That
pattern sadly involves the police viewing protesters as terrorists and
treating protest situations as crisis situations akin to war or combat."
Protesters
descended on Miami because they object to plans to create a free trade
zone stretching from Alaska to Argentina, which they say will hurt poor
workers, put downward pressure on wages and weaken environmental
regulations. Police in Miami were determined not to permit a repeat of
the chaos that has marked other trade summits worldwide. They were
bolstered by an $8.5 million appropriation that President Bush tacked
onto the $87 billion Iraq reconstruction bill to pay for FTAA security.
As
a result, they fielded about 2,500 battle-ready police to face off
against around 10,000 demonstrators, most of them union members and
retirees. City officials have since congratulated themselves on the
small amount of property damage in Miami. But protesters say that in
making sure no Starbucks windows were shattered, police trampled their
constitutional rights.
The scale of civil liberties abuses in
Miami is just starting to reverberate outside the city and the activist
community that flocked there. On Tuesday, Dec. 16, the AFL-CIO and the
Florida Alliance for Retired Americans are holding a public hearing in
Miami on "police repression of FTAA protesters." The ACLU has received
134 reports of protester injuries, including 19 confirmed head injuries,
and plans to file at least three and possibly as many as 12 lawsuits
against the city.
The United Steelworkers of America is calling
for a congressional investigation into how police turned Miami into "a
massive police state." Amnesty International and the Sierra Club are
also demanding government probes. The Sierra Club issued an open letter
to President Bush saying, "The fundamental constitutional rights of all
Americans are in jeopardy if the intimidating tactics used by the Miami
police become the model for dealing with future public demonstrations."
And
they could become exactly that. Miami Mayor Manny Diaz called the cops'
performance "a model for homeland security." Officials from across the
country, including members of the Department of Homeland Security and
the FBI, showed up to observe how Miami handled the demonstrators.
According
to Lt. Bill Schwartz, spokesman for the Miami Police Department, law
enforcement officials traveled to Miami from Georgia and New York to
learn tactics to deal with upcoming protests in their cities. In June,
President Bush will host the G-8 summit -- which brings together the
leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia --
on Georgia's Sea Island. Then, on Aug. 30, the Republican convention
begins in New York, bringing tens of thousands of protesters and "the
highest levels of security this city has ever seen," as a New York
police spokesman told the Village Voice.
Upon his return
from Miami on Thursday, Nov. 20, Bill Hitchens, director of Georgia's
Department of Homeland Security, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
"I certainly think this is a precursor for what we could see" at the G-8
summit. Speaking of the Miami police, he said, "We need to do much the
same as they did."
Meanwhile, John Timoney, the Miami police
chief known for calling demonstrators "punks" and "knuckleheads," is
handling security for the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
Timoney is already infamous among activists for his handling of the 2000
Republican convention in Philadelphia, where protesters complained of
indiscriminate arrests and police violence.
How did such a small
demonstration became such a bloody melee? And how did so many
law-abiding people suddenly find themselves in a place that didn't look
anything like the America they thought they knew?
"I no longer
consider Dade county to be part of the United States," says Bentley
Killmon, a 71-year-old retiree who was held handcuffed for 11 hours
after he was swept up by the police as he wandered around downtown
looking for his bus home.
The tensions in Miami began well before
the first protester arrived. Unlike other American cities that have
hosted large protests, Miami had a clear stake in the demonstration's
central issue: It is competing with Panama City, Cancun and other cities
to become home to the FTAA's secretariat. Thus, when Western Hemisphere
trade ministers gathered at Miami's Intercontinental for the November
trade talks, police had to show they could handle the kind of
anti-globalization activists who have often trashed cities hosting
economic summits.
On Sept. 5, Lida Rodriguez-Taseff of the ACLU
attended a briefing that the police held for local business leaders at
the Intercontinental Hotel. Rodriguez-Taseff was shocked that Asst.
Police Chief Frank Fernandez's PowerPoint presentation openly endorsed
the controversial trade agreement, telling the audience that it would
bring 89,000 new jobs to the area and add $13.5 billion annually to
Florida's Gross State Product.
"In situations where the police
don't like the protesters' message, they definitely treat protesters as
the enemy," says Rodriguez-Taseff.
"Essentially what happened,"
she adds, "is that the police went from being the neutral protector of
liberty and property and safety, which is what their job is supposed to
be, to being the enforcer of a political goal of the political and
business communities."
The week of the protests, John Timoney,
the Miami chief of police, socialized with the trade ministers and
publicly taunted demonstrators. On Wednesday, Nov. 19, the day before
the main protest march, Miami Herald reporter Oscar Corral followed
Timoney onto a boat taking ministers to Miami's Vizcaya park. After the
ride, Timoney said, "If they [anarchists] don't do anything by tomorrow
night, pardon the expression, but they look like pussies." (Or,
"p-----," as the Herald reported it.)
Taking a page from the Iraq
war's media strategists, Timoney had reporters covering the
demonstrations "embed" with the police. Reporting for the Guardian
newspaper, journalist and "No Logo" author Naomi Klein wrote, "As in
Iraq, most reporters embraced their role as pseudo soldiers with zeal,
suiting up in combat helmets and flak jackets." Several reporters who
didn't embed were hauled off to jail in mass roundups during the
protests.
Anger and fear about anarchists had been building up in
the city all autumn. Al Crespo, a 61-year-old Miami photojournalist who
specializes in covering demonstrations -- he recently published a book
of photographs called "Protest in the Land of Plenty" -- says he first
realized something was awry when his 87-year-old mother called him in
hysterics weeks before activists began arriving in Miami.
"I'm
Cuban, and my mother listens to a lot of these Cuban radio stations," he
says. "She knows what I do, and she called me up one day in a real
panic, with the belief that I was going to be killed on the streets of
Miami. She was hearing that it was communists coming, and these people
were going to blow up the city."
Meanwhile, the police were
preparing to face off against a violent enemy. Asst. Chief Fernandez's
PowerPoint presentation listed three groups of protesters headed to
Miami: "The Green Group (non violent, union based)"; "The Yellow Group
(mostly non violent, fringe elements)" and "The Red Group
(anti-government, anti-establishment)." The slides also identified the
lime-green baseball caps donned by the legal observers who accompany
most major protests. According to Rodriguez-Taseff, when the slide
appeared, Fernandez said, "These are their lawyers. They're there to
antagonize police."
Marc Steier, a New Jersey lawyer who works
for the National Lawyers Guild -- a kind of radical ACLU -- arrived in
Miami in mid-November to open a temporary office for Miami Activist
Defense, a legal collective formed to represent demonstrators. He and a
colleague were setting up their computers on Nov. 15 when they got their
first phone call: Police, a woman activist reported, were hassling a
kid walking down the street.
Just then, Steier says, a volunteer
named Henry whom he knew from previous protests arrived, and Steier
dispatched him to the scene with a camera, a tape recorder and a lime
green hat. When Henry arrived, cops on bicycles were questioning a kid
dressed all in black. He turned out to be a local goth who knew nothing
of the FTAA.
Then the police crossed the street to where three
men, part of a pagan group in town for the demonstrations, were
watching. They were friends of the woman who called Steier's office, and
one of them was holding her backpack while she used the phone down the
street.
"There was nothing about them that would give a casual
observer any indication that they were anything but tourists," says
Steier, who later interviewed all of them after they were released from
jail.
The police asked one man for I.D., which he gave them, and
then demanded to search the backpack he was holding. He refused to
consent, because it didn't belong to him. At that point, a police
vehicle pulled up. According to Steier, the uncooperative pagan was
arrested and put in the patrol car, and his backpack was dumped out on
the police car's hood.
"The second male sees what's going down,
and he starts to be a little more compliant," says Steier. The cops,
Steier said, asked for "your name, where you're from, how you got down
to Miami, whether you're an anarchist, whether you're here to cause
trouble and break things." Finally, the second pagan asked if he was
free to go. "'Actually, you're under arrest,' said the police."
The police proceeded to arrest the third man and the woman when she returned from the phone. All were charged with obstructing a sidewalk.
Throughout
it all, Henry had been on his cellphone with Steier. Suddenly, he lost
contact: Henry had been arrested, too -- charged with obstruction of
justice.
Between the 15th and the 20th, the day of the major
protest, Miami Activist Defense received dozens of reports of people
being arbitrarily detained, searched, photographed and questioned about
their backgrounds and their connections to anarchism.
The most
authoritative first-person story about such random seizures came from
Celeste Fraser Delgado, a reporter for Miami New Times, who was arrested
Thursday evening on Miami Avenue as she walked toward the protest's
welcome center with a group of protesters she was profiling.
"Throughout
the day I'd witnessed police provoke protesters," she wrote. "I'd seen
young people cuffed and lined up along the street, but I thought they
must have done something bad to be detained. Surely the police would see
that we were doing nothing wrong and let us go. Surely they would
recognize my role as a working member of the press."
Instead,
Delgado's hands were cuffed behind her back. Her pleas to the police to
check her credentials were ignored, though they took her black leather
backpack with her press pass and notebook inside. She was told they
would be returned to her. Instead, they were dumped out and left on the
street.
She knows that, because John de Leon, an ACLU lawyer,
happened to be in the area after her arrest. He was on the phone with
Rodriguez-Taseff when he noticed that the street was littered with
backpacks, cellphones and wallets. He was collecting the protesters'
things when he found Delgado's press credentials.
Delgado was
released Friday afternoon, after the charges against her were dropped.
Of the more than 90 arrests made at the protests on Thursday, the Miami
prosecutors threw out 20 due to lack of evidence. Rodriguez-Taseff says
it's "unheard of" for so many cases to be dismissed as groundless.
The
total number of arrests in Miami wasn't particularly large -- according
to Lt. Schwartz, 231 people were taken in on FTAA-related charges the
week of the summit, compared to 631 arrested at the Seattle
anti-globalization protests in 1999. Then again, there were nearly five
times as many protesters in Seattle as there were in Miami. There was
also rampant vandalism during the 1999 demonstrations, and almost none
during the FTAA. Indeed, since the protests, Miami officials have crowed
about the lack of damage done to their city. That leaves the arrests
looking like some sort of extralegal "preventive" or "preemptive"
action.
It was Thursday afternoon that madness broke loose in
Miami. There had been a scuffle that morning between demonstrators and
police near the fence police had erected around the Intercontinental
Hotel, and the city had been locked down since around 10 a.m. But things
didn't get really bad until about 4 p.m., when a few hundred people
left the officially sanctioned union march to confront the police lined
up along Biscayne Boulevard.
It's not clear what made the police
charge forward, rhythmically beating their big wooden clubs against
their shields. Predictably, many protesters say there was no
provocation, but Lt. Schwartz maintains that the police were pelted with
"rocks, feces in plastic bags and bottles of urine." Three officers
were admitted to a nearby hospital for injuries sustained during the
protests, and the Miami Police Department reports that a total of 18
were injured.
Al Crespo, the photojournalist, admits that some
protesters "acted out," but says that, in covering over 100 protests
over the last six years, he's never seen a police reaction as ferocious
and disproportionate as what he saw in Miami.
"There's a real
parallel between these kind of events and the events in major American
cities after championship football and basketball games," he says. "A
large number of people come out in the streets, and there's always young
people who, for whatever reason, just have a need to get in a cop's
face. Whether you're rooting for the Chicago Bulls or you're in Miami
supposedly protesting against free trade, these kind of events always
attract people who have a real need to act out some internal
psychodrama, and oftentimes that's what sets something off."
Once
the police were set off, though, it's hard to justify what they did
based on protester provocation. Several hundred policemen, armed with
the latest crowd-control weaponry, were arrayed against a sparse lot of
scraggly kids on the broad boulevard. Instead of batons, the police
carried wooden sticks the length of baseball bats, and as they marched
forward, they swung them at whoever couldn't get out of the way in time.
Video taken at the scene shows a boy in shorts being knocked down, and
when his friends try to pick him up, they're beaten back with the wooden
sticks.
At one point, a young man kneels down a few feet in
front of the phalanx, his hands in prayer position. Five or six police
charge him with their shields, then shoot rubber bullets at him as he
runs away.
That, says Crespo, is what was most unusual: the police firing on people as they retreated.
Before
Miami, one of the more violent protests Crespo had seen was at the 2000
Democratic convention in Los Angeles. "What happened in Los Angeles,
which had not happened in any other city up until then, is that the
police came out, took a position and just opened up fire. It looked like
reenactment of a Civil War battle," he says.
"In Miami they did
that, but then they proceeded to march down the street and chase these
people, chase them for blocks," he said. "These were people trying to
get away, and they kept marching and shooting."
Witnesses say that all protesters were targeted, not just those that were causing trouble.
When
the violence started and the air grew thick with tear gas, Stewart
Acuff, the AFL-CIO's organizing director, organized a line of union
peacekeepers to take everyone who wanted to avoid a confrontation with
police up a hill toward the amphitheater where the march had begun.
"We
had hundreds of people we were trying to move up near the amphitheater.
There were seniors, unions members, young people, environmentalists.
Every one of them made a conscious decision not to be in the stuff
happening in the street." But the police followed them. "The cops came
up the hill, tear-gassed us and shot people with rubber bullets. They
pepper-sprayed a senior citizen in his 70s who was sitting in a chair
completely away from any kind of problem, without provocation."
It was, says Acuff, "a police riot."
"They
had trained for six months and they were prepared for a fight and they
wanted a fight," he says. "They were hopped up and wanted to go."
The
ACLU is still working to tabulate all the injuries caused on Thursday
and on Friday morning, when violence again broke out at a jail
solidarity rally for those arrested on Thursday. (At that event, Crespo
photographed a family being forced onto their bellies by a riot cop as
they exited a nearby cancer center.)
Thirteen protesters were
admitted to a local hospital, but many more sought treatment from the
medics working at the protest. In an e-mail, Dr. Ron Rosen, a veteran
street medic, reports, "On Nov. 20, I treated numerous patients
including several with head wounds caused by pepper balls and rubber
bullets, and several with wounds to the areas over the spleen, liver and
kidneys also caused by rubber bullets and baton blows."
_________________________
Seventy-one-year-old
Bentley Killmon was unaware that Miami was becoming a war zone when he
boarded a bus Thursday morning. Killmon's father was a police officer,
and he didn't bear any grudge against cops. "I respected the badge until
that morning," he says.
A former flight navigator and engineer
for Pan Am who retired after 36 years on the job, Killmon opposes the
FTAA because he believes globalization creates a "race to the bottom" as
industries move to find cheap labor, decimating the livelihoods of
workers left behind. "I was protesting what has happened to the middle
class and to the poor," he says.
Killmon, who lives about 100
miles north of Miami, was on one of 24 buses chartered by the Florida
Alliance of Retired Americans. The group's state organizer, 34-year-old
Larry Winawer, was responsible for getting Killmon and another 1,100 or
so retirees to the protest and home again, and he'd arrived in Miami
Wednesday night.
Right away, it felt wrong. "As you're heading
down Biscayne Boulevard" -- the street where the union march took place
on Thursday, and where police faced off with protesters -- "you see
swarms of police in riot gear," Winawer says. "There were armored
personnel vehicles, helicopters hovering at very low altitude with
searchlights sweeping the area. Right away it felt like you were not in
America but in some type of occupied city."
Winawer didn't sleep
much that night, and was up on Thursday at 4 a.m. to make sure that all
ran smoothly with the seniors he was responsible for.
The day's
official activities were centered around the Bayfront amphitheater. From
10 to 11:30 a.m., there was a seniors breakfast and rally scheduled,
with speakers talking about the effects of the FTAA on American retirees
and families. The official union rally and march began at noon, also at
the amphitheater.
Winawer had negotiated with police beforehand
to allow his buses to drop the seniors off near the escalators leading
to the auditorium. Two early buses got through, but by 10 a.m., chaos
had begun to engulf downtown Miami, and the area around the amphitheater
had been shut down. Thus the buses had to drop their passengers off as
much as a mile away. A few buses didn't make it into the city at all --
the police told them to turn around and go home.
A mile "may not
seem like much," says Winawer, "but we had people who were 85, 90 years
old." Then, he says, as they made their way to their rally, lines of
police officers would detain them without telling them why.
Of the 1,100 seniors on his buses, Winawer says about 600 made it to their event.
When
the rally was over, Winawer had to see the seniors back to their
vehicles, which were all parked far away. Killmon was in the last group
of people he escorted, but when they arrived, his bus had already left.
So they headed toward the Holiday Inn, where Winawer was staying.
Winawer
was wearing a bright orange vest and an Alliance for Retired Americans
T-shirt, and had staff credentials around his neck. Yet several times,
he and Killmon were turned back by police lines, and finally told to
walk west along downtown Miami's railroad tracks. There were about 10
other people going the same way.
"All of a sudden, heading east
is a line of police in riot gear," says Winawer. "There were at least 50
-- they had guns drawn and were yelling at people to get down."
He
still sounds incredulous as he recalls it. "He's a 71-year-old man and
I'm wearing my orange vest and credentials. I said, 'He's a retiree and
I'm trying to help him get to his bus.' We each had three or four guns
on us telling us to get down, facedown in the dirt. Ben didn't get down
fast enough and he got a knee in his back."
Hands cuffed behind
them, they were put on a bus and left for three hours, then driven to a
parking garage where FTAA prisoners were being held in wire pens. "I've
worked with livestock before, and these were like stock pens," said
Killmon.
In the pen with him, says Killmon, was a steelworker
named Rick who had a bad shoulder, the result of an injury he'd
sustained falling off a roof. "His hands being handcuffed behind his
back was extremely painful," Killmon says. "He kept asking to be
released so he could bring his hands around in front of him, and they
would not do it. The pain got to the point that he lost control of his
bowels and urinary tract."
"He'd asked at least two dozen different officers for help," says Winawer.
After
another three hours, they were taken to Miami's TGK jail, where they
were processed and put in holding cells. It was after 3 a.m. before
either was allowed to make phone calls. Killmon says he went at least
seven hours without a sip of water.
On Friday, the charges
against Killmon were dropped. Winawer was charged with disobeying a
police officer. They weren't released until early evening.
Both
were in handcuffs for between 11 and 12 hours. Three weeks later,
Winawer's hands were still bruised and partly numb. Killmon says he's
fine as long as he doesn't try to lift his left arm higher than his
shoulder.
"I believe in social justice issues, but I'm not a
screaming radical," says Winawer. Since Miami, he says, "some people
have asked, 'How do you feel about law enforcement?' I feel fine about
law enforcement. What happened to us was not anything resembling law
enforcement. I respect the job that police have to do, but I have no
respect for the job that they did."
Both Winawer and Killmon are planning to join civil suits against the city.
"Ben and I are living proof that civil rights are being erased in this country," Winawer says, still sounding astonished.
___________________________
While Winawer and Killmon were in prison, another confrontation was unfolding outside.
Crespo,
expecting it, was there with his camera. "Just like there's a morning
and an afternoon, there's always a jail solidarity, so we went to the
jail," he says. With him was a local public television crew who were
doing a segment on him and his work.
"The protesters had gathered
at the parking lot of the state attorney's office," he says, two blocks
from the jail. "They're just kids. There was nothing mean-spirited
about them. Their friends are locked up and they wanted to show
solidarity."
There were between 150 and 200 people there, and
Brenna Bell, a 28-year-old attorney from Oregon, acted as a go-between
with the police. At first, she said, the commander seemed reasonable,
but within 20 minutes, he told her that everyone had to disperse.
"At
that time, most everyone started leaving the area," says Bell. "I
stayed behind watching to make sure that everyone left OK. I never heard
the police give the order to disperse that they threatened to give, but
people started walking."
Yet as people left, she says, a huge
line of riot police -- as many as 300 -- followed them. Then, about
three blocks from the protest, seven or eight people sat down and
announced they weren't going anywhere. They were arrested, and 50 or 60
people stopped to watch. Then she and others started walking east,
flanked on two sides by police.
At that point, the police finally
issued an order to disperse, but at the same time, they started closing
in. Video from the scene shows people chanting, "We are dispersing. We
are dispersing." But the police wouldn't let them. "That's when I knew
it was going to be bad," says Bell. The police rushed in, shooting
pepper spray and rubber bullets. "It was utter chaos," she says. She was
sprayed and shot in the back of the leg, and sent off to jail. She
wasn't released until 2 a.m. on Sunday.
Still, it could have been
worse: "I talked to a couple of women who were strip-searched by male
officers," she says. "It's such a powerless situation."
One of
those women was Ana Nogueira, a producer for the radio show "Democracy
Now!" Nogueira was rounded up at the same protest as Bell. Like Celeste
Fraser Delgado, she kept telling the arresting officers that she was a
journalist.
One cop was hesitant, she says, but then another told him, "She's not with us." He meant she wasn't embedded.
At
the jail, "When I got out of the patrol wagon, I repeated that I was a
journalist and that I was wrongly arrested. I asked, 'What do I do?' The
officer told me to shut the fuck up."
Her clothes reeked of pepper spray, so the police made her stand under a huge cold-water outdoor shower.
Then
she was taken into a tent with one female officer and one male officer.
The back of the tent was open, and other male officers could see in.
"They told me to take off all my clothes and put them in a trash can,
and that I was not going to get them back." She asked the male officer
to leave first, but all he would do was turn around. Then, when she was
naked, he turned back to face her.
"Then they put me in prison
garb, and that's when I was taken and processed," she says. "I was one
of the lucky ones. I know other independent videographers who didn't get
their cameras back."
_________________________
While
stories about the FTAA protests proliferate, the Miami police are
showing no signs of remorse. In their view, even peaceful protesters had
it coming for cavorting with anarchists.
"Peaceful protesters in
some cases made friends with the devil, knowing full well they were
anarchists," says Lt. Schwartz. "If someone says, 'I came down to
protest peacefully but yes, I'm aware there are anarchists in my group
and I welcomed them in,' they're certainly putting themselves in an
awkward position. If anarchists are starting to cause problems and throw
things at cops, just because I'm a peaceful protester, but I'm standing
right next to this anarchist, that I couldn't be subject to police
enforcement, I think that's naive.
"You'd have to be deaf, dumb
and blind not to see what was going on in the street, the confrontation
between anarchists and police," he says. "If you chose to stay in the
midst of that and then felt your First Amendment right was hurt, you're
not being honest with yourself."
Schwartz's comments just
compound Winawer's outrage. "All his statements begin with 'if,'" he
says. "And I might agree with him if those things happened. But there
are no ifs here. There's reality. And the reality is that I and Ben
Killmon were nowhere near any other individual, period. We were arrested
for doing nothing except walking where the police told us to walk in an
effort to find his bus.
"I've never been in trouble with the law
before, and I have no ax to grind with the police, but this was just
wrong," Winawer says. "And the bombast, it adds insult to injury. It's
one thing to have done it. It's another thing to put your head in the
sand and deny that it ever happened."
___________________________
About the writer: Michelle Goldberg is a staff writer for Salon
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