Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 4, 1994 TAG: 9406060155
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Immediately, security guards came and told him he could not pass out newspapers inside the festival. They asked him to leave.
Valdivieso, co-director of Roanoke's Plowshare Peace Center, refused. What followed was a sometimes heated, 45-minute debate between Valdivieso and security guards, city police and festival officials. The police told him he was under arrest, Valdivieso says, but finally let him go after he agreed not to pass out newspapers inside the festival.
Festival officials say they do not allow anyone to distribute literature within the festival because it creates trash and walkway congestion.
Valdivieso says that's unfair: ``Because a newspaper can be trash, they decided to trash my rights.''
Wendi Shultz, the annual event's executive director, says the festival didn't violate Valdivieso's rights- it applied the no-literature rule to him just as it does to everyone else.
Shultz says the festival is a private group that leases space from the city, and it has the right to set its own rules.
``We don't want people coming to Festival and being bombarded with all kinds of information and material that they don't even want [that might] interfere with them enjoying the music and activities,'' Shultz says.
Valdivieso says he didn't force the papers on anyone. And he says the Free Press doesn't contain superfluous information- it contains stories about war, pollution, sexism, racism and other issues. Plowshare Peace Center and the Free Press are sister organizations.
As the debate continued Sunday afternoon, Valdivieso says, ``The cops were saying, `Let's take this bum out of here.' One of the cops said this was a 'family-value-oriented event' and I was hardheaded and an idiot because I was destroying the festival.''
He says they also asked whether Valdivieso, who immigrated here from Chile, was a U.S. citizen.
Valdivieso says he told them he didn't have to identify himself unless he was arrested. When they asked him for his driver's license, he says, he refused on the grounds that he wasn't operating a car at the time. But they were in front of the downtown public library, and ``I told them I could give them my library card. They didn't want that.''
Eventually, a police sergeant came and ``he was very polite,'' Valdivieso says. For a while, he says, the discussion focused on whether he'd be taken to jail or simply escorted off festival grounds. Finally, he says, he asked the sergeant what would happen if he tucked his newspapers under his arm and simply walked around and enjoyed the festival.
He says the sergeant told him: ``Nothing.'' So he walked away from the group.
Now Valdivieso wants to challenge the festival's no-literature rule. He has complained to the city attorney's office.
City Attorney Wilburn Dibling said Friday that Valdivieso was free to distribute newspapers along adjacent city streets, but the festival areas in Elmwood Park and elsewhere are "within the exclusive control" of festival officials.
Shultz says court rulings support the right of private organizations such as Festival in the Park to stop literature from being distributed.
She says Valdivieso is free to come to the festival and ``if he wants to stop people and have them listen to what he has to say, that's fine.''
Or, she says, Plowshare is welcome to rent a booth next year in the ``product and service exhibit area.'' The exhibit area, where companies such as Pepsi offer samples and information, was open for the first weekend of this year's festival.
Shultz says Plowshare could pass out literature from the booth with one condition: It would have to be put in special plastic bags the festival provides to the vendors.
by CNB