Organizations denounce police killing of forest defender Tortuguita in Georgia, USA

Atmos reports: “In what is believed to be the first case of a land defender killed in the U.S. for their activism, a Georgia State Patrol trooper killed 26-year-old Manuel Esteban Páez Terán on Jan. 18. But Páez Terán wasn’t known as Manuel to most people; their chosen name was Tortuguita, or Tort, which translates to Little Turtle in Spanish.”

Tortuguita was living in the Weelaunee Forest southeast of Atlanta, Georgia in opposition to the proposed “Cop City” training facility.

Organizer-writer-lawyer Kamau Franklin has explained:

“Cop City is an idea that came after the 2020 uprisings, by the city of Atlanta, the Atlanta Police Department and the Atlanta Foundation — the Atlanta Police Foundation. The idea, basically, is that they want to develop a militarized police base that’s right next to a Black and Brown working-class community. And by building this base, they want to cut down over a hundred acres of forest. They want to develop an area where there is room for explosive testing — explosives testing, over 12 firing ranges, a place where there’s a Black Hawk helicopter landing pad, a training center for them to practice crowd control.”

Among the organizations that have denounced on social media the murder of Tortuguita:

Political leaders in the United States are now supporting the call for an independent investigation of the murder of Tortuguita.

For updates on this situation, please see the Twitter accounts for Defend the Atlanta Forest, Kamau Franklin and Steven Donziger.

And for more background and analysis on this, please see Atlanta Police Kill Forest Defender at Protest Encampment Near Proposed “Cop City” Training Center (Democracy Now, January 20), ‘Assassinated in cold blood’: activist killed protesting Georgia’s ‘Cop City’ (The Guardian, January 21) and The Death of a Forest Defender at “Stop Cop City” (Truthout, January 26).

The Daily Show video can be seen here.