Brad Will

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Bradley Roland Will (1970-2006) was a U.S. anarchist, documentary filmmaker and a journalist with Indymedia New York City. He was shot and killed on October 27, 2006 during the teachers' strike in the Mexican city of Oaxaca.^[1][2]

Contents 1 Early life 2 Activism in the U.S. 3 Activism elsewhere 4 The shooting 5 Reaction and news coverage 5.1 Federal Police mobilized 5.2 Demonstrations at Mexican consulates 5.3 Committee to Protect Journalists 5.4 Commemoration and memorial 6 See also 7 External links 7.1 Video 8 References

[edit] Early life

Will was born in Evanston, Illinois, and raised in the affluent community of Kenilworth, Illinois. He attended New Trier High School, graduating in 1988. Will earned a B.A. in English from Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Beginning in the summer of 1991, he was a regular attendee at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the summer writing program of Naropa University. There he was influenced by activist poets Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka and Diane di Prima, among others, and was a teaching assistant to Peter Lamborn Wilson (a.k.a. Hakim Bey). In 1995, after spending time at Dreamtime Village in southwest Wisconsin, he moved to New York City, stayed in various squats on the Lower East Side and finally residing in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.

[edit] Activism in the U.S.

At Naropa, Will participated in a satirical performance art piece designed to mock the Colorado religious right and protest a proposed amendment to the Colorado constitution (Amendment 2, which sought to limit gay rights in the state). Will, who was hetrosexual, wedded a gay man in a ceremony conducted by Peter Lamborn Wilson, a Universal Life Church-ordained minister. The mock ceremony included a procession of their wedding party in drag, parading in front of a Promise Keepers event in Boulder.

While in New York City, Will became involved in the squatters movement of the Lower East Side and in what has become known as freeganism, an effort to live outside the mainstream economic grid by means that includes collecting and eating food discarded by stores and food manufacturers. Other than the occasional help of plane tickets from family and friends and other travel arrangements as trade, Will was practically able to live with no reliance on money. He also fought the removal of community gardens, including the Chico Mendez Mural Garden on the Lower East Side, named after Brazilian activist Chico Mendes. Will was an active participant in protests across the country, usually for various social justice and human rights causes, and was involved with environmental movements such as Earth First! and the Fall Creek Tree Village in the Willamette National Forest outside Eugene, Oregon.

Will gained some notoriety for his efforts to prevent New York City from demolishing a squat on Fifth Street in the Lower East Side. When construction crews arrived at the building to begin taking it down, he stood atop the roof waving his arms. His efforts stalled the demolition, but the city eventually leveled the building, which housed a café, a meeting place and a performance space. Will later talked about the building in a program produced by Paper Tiger Television called "ABC Survives, Fifth Street Buried Alive".

"We were making a home out of a crumbling building. The interior of the building needed help, and we brought that building back to life. It was standing strong. And the only reason it was standing was because people were living in it. If we had let it go the way the city wanted it to go — they tore out the stairwell, they punched holes in the roof. The water — the rain was rotting that building from the inside out. We replaced the joists. We rebuilt the floors. We sheet rocked the walls and made the building alive. What did they do? They killed it. That building is over a hundred years old. It was standing strong."^{[citation needed]}

Will was a proponent of anti-corporate media and he hosted his own program on Steal This Radio, a Lower East Side-based pirate radio station. Commenting on this form of broadcasting, Will said:

"I think for the FCC, micro media that is non-commercial, anti-profit, community-based, is poison to their program of supporting corporate control of the media. And what they are interested in is supporting the National Association of Broadcasting and their complete leveling of culture in the United States, their complete clear-cutting of American tastes and values and trying to propagate through Congress, through elected officials, through lobbyists, through huge amounts of money being thrown into the media spectrum, their ability to control what people think. And that’s really what’s at stake, is the free flow of ideas in people's minds that is so much controlled by the media as we know it and especially the mass media that has the public ear and that really dominates people's lives."^{[citation needed]}

After helping organizing Buy Nothing Day and a Reclaim the Streets protest in Times Square, Will traveled to Seattle for the historic 1999 WTO protests.

[edit] Activism elsewhere

In 2000, Will traveled to Prague, Czech Republic to protest the International Monetary Fund Summit in 2000 and participate in activities related to the Anti-globalization movement during that year. His activism brought him to Ecuador, Argentina and Chiapas, as well as to Brazil in support of that country's landless peasant movement.

In between his trips abroad, Will returned to New York and remained involved in the local activist community. In August 2001, for example, he participated in a Dumpster Diving Forum held at the Wetlands Preserve at 161 Hudson Street, and joined participants for a roving exploration of useable food in Tribeca garbage accompanied by a TV crew from PBS's Life 360. Will entertained participants by singing songs about dumpster diving as the group walked along Canal Street.

In recent years, Will had turned to making documentary films for the Indymedia network and other alternative media outlets. In between making films, Will worked occasionally as a stagehand and lighting technician. He remained an activist and a committed eco-anarchist, participating in events like the April 8, 2006 General Assembly of the New York Metro Alliance of Anarchists.

During the summer of 2006, Will continued videotaping demonstrations, including a June 15 protest at the Mexican Consulate in response to a violent police incursion into the teacher's plantón (encampment). On June 29, he videotaped and helped organize a protest against Victoria's Secret at the Manhattan Mall. The protest, organized by the Wetlands Activism Collective, was part of a national campaign in protest of the company's use of Canadian boreal forest and Southern US forest pulp in the printing of an estimated 395 million catalogs every year.

Shortly thereafter, he traveled to an Earth First! Rendezvous and a CrimethInc gathering. He also helped to raise money for his friend Daniel McGowan, who was accused of participating in a series of environmentally motivated acts of property destruction and faced life in prison. At the time of his death, he was working on a documentary about folk punk music and experimenting with a vegan raw food diet.

[edit] The shooting

Will had arrived in Oaxaca in early October 2006 in order to document and film the teachers' strike, knowing that because he was traveling under a tourist visa, he was violating Mexican law.^[3][4][5][6] On October 27, he was videotaping near a barricade erected by pro-strike protesters when gunmen approached and opened fire. Will was shot twice and died while he was being carried away from the area. Along with Will, two protesters – Esteban Zurita López and teacher Emilio Alonso Fabián – were also killed. Several others were injured. Mexican daily newspaper El Universal published photos of the suspected gunmen, who are believed to be local officials. ^[7][8]

A Oaxaca news organization has claimed that Pedro Carmona, a local politician and member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, shot Brad Will.^{[9] [10]} During a news conference on October 29, Oaxaca mayor Manuel Martínez said that four men, all local public officials, were being detained in connection with the shooting.^[11]

[edit] Reaction and news coverage

In the initial reports reagarding the shooting, Will's name was incorrectly reported as "Bradley Roland Wheyler" and "William Bradley Roland. ^[12][13]

News of the shooting traveled quickly and in response, several independent media groups, activists and other organizations issued statements condemning the incident. Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos issued this statement:

“

[Will] is like the people who came here with us on the bus, who are carrying the voices of the people from below so that they would be known... And this person was a compañero of The Other Campaign... We are issuing a call to all of The Other Campaign at the national level and to compañeros and compañeras in other countries to unite and to demand justice for this dead compañero. We are making this call especially to all of the alternative media, and free media here in Mexico and in all the world.[14]

”

An open letter written "to honor the memory" of Will and support "the Oaxacan people's efforts to establish a popular government that recognizes local traditions and values," was signed by numerous academics and activists, including Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Arundhati Roy, Starhawk and Howard Zinn.^[15]

[edit] Federal Police mobilized

The day after the shooting, Mexican President Vicente Fox changed his previously non-intervention policy and ordered Federal Police to Oaxaca to reestablish government control of the city. The army was also mobilized to provide intelligence support to the police, but not to engage directly with protesters. APPO representatives declared their intention to resist the government's armed intervention in the crisis and by the beginning of November, violent clashes continued between protesters and police.^[16] The government claimed that the Federal Police that entered Oaxaca was unarmed.

On October 28, Will's colleagues and strike supporters held an emergency rally the Mexican consulate in New York. Speakers, including longtime New York activist Beka Economopoulos, condemned the Mexican government's response.

[BEKA ECONOMOPOULOS] Our friend Brad Will was murdered by government-backed paramilitary forces in Oaxaca, Mexico. Now Brad’s death is being used as a pretext by the government and the media to send in more of those same troops... [W]e demand... all guilty parties at all levels be identified and held accountable for the assassination of Brad Will and other civilian victims in Oaxaca.^{[citation needed]}

[BRANDON JOURDON, NYC Indymedia] Brad Will went to Oaxaca, because he was a firm believer in direct democracy. He went there to document what was happening amongst people there, who are trying to create a system of direct democracy. He died doing what he loved.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Demonstrations at Mexican consulates

On October 30, more than 200 protesters convened outside the Mexican consulate in New York City to deplore the killing of Will and others and to demand an end to the violence. The protest was organized by the activist group Friends of Brad Will.^{[17] [18]} Additional demonstrations occurred outside Mexican consulates worldwide and protesters briefly occupied the consulate in Raleigh, North Carolina.^[19] Simultaneous protests were also held around the world.

[edit] Committee to Protect Journalists

The Committee to Protect Journalists sent an open letter on October 30 to the Mexican attorney general calling on the federal government to launch an official investigation into Will's death. The statement also mentioned that David Vega Vera, special independent prosecutor, had begun gathering information and facts related to the case.^[20]

[edit] Commemoration and memorial

On November 11 and 12, Friends of Brad Will organized a gathering in New York City to commemorate Will's life. The event included a memorial service at St Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, as well as speeches and concerts.

[edit] See also

• 2006 Oaxaca protests
• Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO)
• Friends of Brad Will

[edit] External links

• Obituary, from The Chicago Tribune.
• Friends of Brad Will, activist group created in his name.
• Brad Will 1970-2006, a friend's tribute.
• Memoriam and tribute from American poet Lisa Jarnot, October 28, 2006.

• Memorial and Convergence more information from Lisa Jarnot on the Brad Will memorial at the Poetry Project, including a schedule of events.

• Fragments of a Shattered Hope, essay by Brad Will on the squatter movement in Sohno, Brazil (reprint of an article that appeared in Boog City, Issue 24, April 2005).
• Brad Will interview, El Libertario, February 2006 (Spanish)
• BradWill.org: website set up by Will family
• Brad Will Foundation

[edit] Video

• Brad Will's last video footage, 2006 Oaxaca teachers' strike, includes interviews with protesters and the shooting (16:32, mp4 format). Creative Commons by-nc-sa license. Torrents available from indytorrents.org.
• Brad Will In His Own Words, archival Footage of Will discussing the importance of community media and the struggle against NYC demolition of a lower east side squat (via Democracy Now!)
• Brad Will 1970-2006, friends remember Indymedia journalist and activist killed in Oaxaca (via Democracy Now!)
• Friends of Brad Will Shut Down the Mexican Consulate, Includes footage of Brad singing, and of arrests at Friends of Brad Will demonstration. (via Not An Alternative)

[edit] References