WORLD WORLDWIDE MEXICO US News Journal Update - (en) Mexico, CATL - La GrietA #7: COP CITY WILL NOT BE BUILT! (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 In April 2021, the decentralized STOP COPCITY movement emerged in

response to the construction of the largest police training center in
the United States and in defense of the forests of the city of Atlanta,
in the state of Georgia. The front is made up primarily of fellow
anarchists who organized in 2020 during the riots against police
brutality over the murder of George Floyd. The comrades report that in
this context, it was possible to speak for the first time of the
abolition of the police as a viable proposal to break the cycle of
violence that poverty and militarization impose on the territories,
however, all attempts to reduce resources repressive forces through
institutional means were unsuccessful.
Copcity's objective is the privatization and militarization of the
repressive forces. It is calculated that the estimated investment for
the construction of this center amounts to 90,000,000 USD, and that it
will be in charge of various private corporations, including Hollywood.
The project consists of the construction of a simulated city where
training will be carried out for special operations such as riots and
forest fires. Due to the seriousness of the environmental and political
impacts of this center, environmentalists, activists, human rights
defenders and members of the artistic and cultural sector have joined
the mobilizations.
Since the beginning of the movement, various actions have been carried
out. Among them, more than 30 demonstrations, direct actions that have
involved both confrontation with the authorities and sabotage of
construction machinery, the temporary squatting of various areas of the
forest where cultural festivals have been held, and the creation of
community gardens. Investigations have also been carried out to locate
the homes of copcity promoters and shareholders and hold demonstrations
outside their homes and operational offices. (It is worth mentioning
that these types of actions have caused the desertion of some of them).
The Atlanta forest has become a flash point of resistance. After two
years of latent conflict, the situation has been escalating. Starting
last year, the police began filing "domestic terrorism" charges against
almost all of the arrested activists. The lawyers attached to the
movement have also carried out a series of legal actions to stop the
progress of this death project, including an electoral referendum. Many
of them have been victims of harassment by the authorities, searches of
their homes, arrests and fraud charges.
One of the strategies of the movement to spread its demands and stop the
advance of the repression has been to approach the mass media or the
bourgeois media as they call them. This has been a determining factor
because, through the interviews that their demands have obtained in the
media, they have been heard throughout the country and internationally,
this has also opened the possibility that the voice of the native
Americans and the radical anarchists have an echo outside our communities.
On January 18, 2023, agents of the Georgia State Police assassinated
Manuel Paez Terán, known as "Tortuguita", a fellow eco-anarchist of
Venezuelan origin who was part of the community in resistance settled in
the forest camps in Atlanta. This is the first case of an environmental
defender being murdered in recent US history.
It is probable that the implementation of this operations center will be
a watershed for its replication in Latin American countries and in other
parts of the world and that many of the police elements trained there
provide their services in situations such as "interventions" carried out
by the government of United States or that provide advice to police
corporations in other territories. An example of this is the School of
the Americas, founded in 1944, which served as a specialized training
center in Latin American military counterinsurgency doctrines.
The importance of this movement lies not only in the defense of the
Atlanta forest and all the life that inhabits it. To stop the
construction of a police city is to stop the advance of police brutality
against Black, Latino and minority communities that for decades have
been the victims of discrimination and violence. This also represents
the continuous struggle for the defense of life and the right of the
peoples of the world to a life without police or military on the streets
or in the neighborhoods or in the communities or anywhere on the face of
the earth.

) https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=696666769167632&set=a.461491022685209
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