Protesters march against police brutality; police react violently

Protesters in Los Angeles, CA, attacked by police with horses, batons and rubber bullets.

By Mike Burke and Huck

New York, New York, Oct. 22– About 2,000 demonstrators marched to Times Square protesting police brutality Sunday as part of the National Day of Protest to Stop Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation. Leading the procession were a contingent of family members who lost relatives at the hands of the New York Police, including Saikou Diallo, whose son Amadou was killed Feb. 4, 1999 when four members of the city’s Street Crime Units shot him 41 times.

While Diallo’s case may have received the most media attention, police brutality – and even what many claim to be outright police-sanctioned murder – has reached epidemic proportions in New York and other cities, according to protest organizers.

Sunday’s protest, which began at Union Square, was one of 55 demonstrations scheduled for Sunday across the country.

“(Police brutality occurs in) every major urban area where you got people of color, where you got segregation, where you got class segregation and stratification, and gentrification. At this point it is a national epidemic,” said Steven Francisco of the New York City PoliceWatch, part of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

“It is really rooted in our own history in terms of class, in terms of race, so anywhere those two things come together you are going to see the need for a group that monitors police abuse,” Francisco told the IMC.

Throughout the afternoon, speakers and demonstrators called for the federal government to oversee the city’s troubled police department and to prosecute officers involved in police brutality.

“I believe my son was murdered in cold blood. Justice must prevail,” said Saikou Diallo during an interview yesterday shortly before the march began. “I want the federal government to come and prosecute those police officers who murdered my son under the federal Civil Rights law.”

Founder of the Parents Against Police Brutality, Margaret Rosario, whose son Carmen was shot and killed in 1995 by New York police officers, called for several reforms needed in order to rectify the situation.

“First of all, Mayor Giuliani needs to step down from any type of office – ever since he became mayor he has given the green light to these cops to kill knowing that they are not going to be punished,” said Rosario. “Second, we need to change the 48-hour rule and finally we need an independent CCRB (Civilian Complaint Review Board) because it is impossible for the police to police themselves.”

Fernandez, of the New York PoliceWatch, offered other suggestions for reform.

“I would advocate for increase of community-trained cops, definitely the decrease in the number of cops,” Fernandez said. “Our police force in terms of it’s size is larger than most country’s armies which says something about the police state that exists in the US.”

Hundreds of youths helped organize Sunday’s event and participated in the march.

The Westchester, NY-based Students for Social Justice sent about 35 members to the march.

“The Police are meant to protect people, not to hurt them, and people need to feel safe from the police and not threatened by them,” said the group’s president Jeremy Fischer, who noted the need for the youth to get involved in the anti-police brutality movement.

“If the police keep killing people for no reason then no one will have any justice,” added eight-year-old Kasele Kassally who was handing out flyers promoting a protest to “Stop the Death Machine… (and) the legal lynching of Mumia Abu-Jamal.”

On Mumia, Kassally said “I don’t think he should be in jail right now or on death row because I don’t really think he did anything to the police.”

Kassally was one of dozens of young children whose parents brought them to the demonstration.

“I want my son to have a future,” said Wade Fareed Salaam, noting how young many of the victims of police brutality have been. “I want my son to be exposed to being an activist for a good cause. We need to stop police brutality and racial profiling.”

For LaAnthoney, Salaam’s 10-year-old son, the reason to march Sunday was clear: “so the police stop killing people just like Amadou Diallo.”

A graduate student at Hunter College who identified herself as Sonya said police brutality must be seen as a public health problem.

“I come from a community that experiences this all the time…It totally changes families, it changes neighborhoods -- it puts neighborhoods on the defense. We feel targeted, and that is definitely a public health issue.”

During the march Sonya passed out literature on the Stolen Lives project, which has documented the stories of some 2,000 men and women victimized and killed by the police.

“It is now going to be published in Spanish and we are trying to let people know that. We want to reach the Latino community where a lot of this is happening,” she said.

When the march ended, demonstrators gathered to hear directly from the family victims of police brutality including Diallo, Rosario, and others.

Others compared the New York City treatment of minority groups with those of the South African government during the height of apartheid.

“The police department in this city has a procedure reminiscent of the South African pass laws: you are stopped and asked for ID, why you are where you are; you have no civil rights if this can be done to you without recourse,” said Andrea Fields, whose 17-year-old son, Andre, was shot dead by undercover detectives in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Fields’ offense? “Attacking” police with a toy gun.

Ten anti-police brutality activists arrested in police raid

On Oct. 20, ten members of the October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality were arrested during a police raid at the Bronx apartment where they were meeting to prepare for the rally and march.

Maze Hoffman, of the October 22 Coalition, said that the meeting was interrupted at 10:30 pm on Thursday night when the police, claiming to be serving a warrant, broke down the apartment door, arrested all ten people and handcuffed them face down on the floor. The meeting was being held in the same Soundview apartment building where Malcolm Ferguson was gunned down by police on March 1 of this year.

Six organizers from the October 22 Coalition were released from police custody at about 2 am, Hoffman said. The apartment’s four residents were still being held.

“It’s a divide and conquer tactic,” said Hoffman. “The police are trying to turn people against each other.”

“We need to let people know that we will not accept this kind of police repression,” he said. “We’re not going to allow them to intimidate people from stepping out.”

LAPD uses rubber bullets on protesters

Los Angeles police fired rubber bullets into a crowd of people demonstrating against police brutality near the LAPD’s downtown headquarters. The LA Times reported that police in riot gear fired at the protesters while trying to stop the demonstration from encircling the Los Angeles Police Department’s Parker Center. Until then, the march by about 1,000 people had been mostly peaceful.

The protesters represented a coalition of activists united by anger over police brutality and the death penalty.

“A young teenage girl, hit in the eye at close range staggered down the street with blood dripping from her face. Ten policemen chased down and beat a young man, only feet away from a mother and her three young children who were crying with fear,” said Beth VanBuecken, a journalist. “There appeared to be no serious provocation for this excessive display of police brutality,” she said.

At 3:40 pm, police on foot and on horseback moved forward into an intersection, some knocking protesters out of the way with batons. As protesters were pushed back, some began throwing plastic and glass bottles, and a few set fire to piles of pamphlets and other papers in the street.

Many of the protesters insisted that they hadn’t done anything to provoke police.

“All we were doing was walking and chanting when the cops shot us,” said Gonzalo Islas, 26, of East Los Angeles. He said he was shot by a rubber bullet on his right calf. Among those shot with rubber bullets was a reporter covering the demonstration for the newspaper La Opinion. “I could see them coming and then suddenly, bang, bang, bang, bang, and I was hit,” said the reporter, Edwin Tamara, showing a small bruise on his left shoulder.

During a permitted march, about half a dozen National Lawyers Guild observers stood on a nearby sidewalk when they were confronted by motorcycle officers. Two of the officers rammed their motorcycles into two of the observers:, former Santa Monica City Atty. Bob Myers, 49, and John Martin West, 25. When Myers tried to make a citizen’s arrest of the officers, he was shoved.

“I was standing on a public sidewalk,” said Myers, noting that the police had not declared an unlawful assembly. “He pushed me and would not allow me to talk to a supervisor. The police broke the law.”

Source: New York & Los Angeles IMC: www.indymedia.org, Los Angeles Times

DEA implicated in deal with terrorists

By Gerardo Reyes

Oct. 20— In a desperate effort to trap Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, the governments of the United States and Colombia allied themselves to a fearful criminal organization that was responsible for the deaths of dozens of Escobar’s associates and friends in 1993, according to testimony and documents obtained by El Nuevo Herald.

A former member of the organization — known as Los Pepes, or People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar — said the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) turned a blind eye to the group’s activities. He also asserted that some of the group’s members kept in direct contact with DEA agent Javier Peña, who worked in Medellín.

Peña was the DEA’s liaison with the National Police’s Search Bloc, a unit whose sole mission was to track down Escobar. Today he is deputy director of the DEA’s bureau in Colombia.

Until his death in December 1993 at the age of 44, Escobar led Colombia’s notorious Medellín Cartel.

“The Americans covered their eyes to keep from seeing what Los Pepes did, but they knew exactly what was happening,” said the source, who asked to be identified only as “Rubén.” “In the end, we had a common enemy,’’ he said.

United States law forbids government agencies to work hand-in-hand with illegal groups, much less if they are involved in the commission of violent crimes.

Organized in February 1993, Los Pepes were funded by the Cali Cartel, paramilitary groups, a legion of relatives and friends of Escobar’s victims— even associates of Escobar who turned against their boss to save their own skins.

“The DEA has never compromised itself deliberately and does not condone the actions of paramilitary or terrorist organizations,” said DEA spokesman Michael Chapman in a written statement from Washington.

“However, the gathering of information about the activities of drug-trafficking organizations such as Los Pepes is one of the DEA’s key roles,” he wrote.

According to official documents and contemporary testimony, Los Pepes were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people, among them Escobar’s relatives, lawyers and lieutenants.

‘‘Nobody has finished counting the dead, but I believe that they numbered— on the average — six a day, for almost one year,” Rubén said.

Los Pepes were under the command of brothers Fidel and Carlos Castaño Gil, founders of the paramilitary movement in Colombia. They declared war on Escobar in response to the persecution he unleashed on them and their friends from La Catedral prison.

Escobar, who surrendered to the government in June 1991, had continued to direct the cartel’s activities from La Catedral, a minimum-security institution in the city of Envigado. He escaped in July 1992, after the authorities announced they would transfer him to a more secure prison.

Fidel died in a gunfight in September 1994. Carlos today is the leader of Colombia’s paramilitary groups, which have been vigorously condemned by human rights groups because of the massacres committed during their private war against the leftist guerrillas.

According to one of Escobar’s lawyers, the Castaño brothers and other members of Los Pepes had unrestricted access to the Carlos Holguín School in Medellín, headquarters of the National Police’s Search Bloc.

“It was as if they were members of the Search Bloc,” the lawyer said.“Right there, in the same bunker, slept Peña, the DEA agent.”

As a token of appreciation, the American Embassy gave a visa to “Don Berna,” one of the most active members of Los Pepes, to come to the United States in 1994 and watch the World Cup Soccer games being played in Los Angeles, Ruben said.

Don Berna had worked as a bodyguard for Fernando Galeano, an Escobar associate who was kidnapped, tortured and killed in July 1992 on orders from Escobar.

In it’s written statement to El Nuevo Herald, the DEA made no reference to the visa granted to Don Berna, who is accused of leading a band of mercenaries calling itself Las Terrazas (The Terraces), based in Medellín.

The DEA’s spokesman said that, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, agents of that agency and other US government agencies “worked proudly with the Colombian police to combat the powerful cartels.”

Col. Oscar Naranjo, who directed the Colombian police’s intelligence services during the search for Escobar, said that “a direct channel of communications existed between the police and Los Pepes” and that the American antidrug agencies knew of its existence and took advantage of it.

However, Naranjo denied being in complicity with Los Pepes.

For almost all of 1993, none of the leaders of Los Pepes was arrested, even though the government offered a rich reward for information leading to their capture. At least on one occasion, the then Attorney General, Gustavo de Greiff, voiced puzzlement over the impunity with which the mercenaries operated.

“It seems to me something odd is going on,” De Greiff said in October 1993. His office offered protection to Escobar’s relatives.

Before Los Pepes came onto the scene, the Cali Cartel worked with the intelligence services of the administrations of presidents Virgilio Barco (1986-1990) and César Gaviria (1990-1994) in the search for Escobar.

Their collaboration was so close that the cartel would ask the president’s brother, Jorge Barco, to deliver information to the intelligence services, according to prosecution documents obtained by El Nuevo Herald.

In a sworn statement, the head of the Cali Cartel, Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, identified the president’s brother as an intermediary betwen the cartel and the government. In the statement, Rodríguez told how his organization would warn the authorities about Escobar’s attempts on the lives of politicians, journalists, and police officers.

Escobar was killed by police while trying to escape over the rooftops in the Los Olivos neighborhood of Medellín, on Dec. 2, 1993. He died barefoot, a pistol in his hand.

Source: Miami Herald

Earth First! road block removed after 16 hours

By Japhy Ryder

Suwanee County, Florida, Oct. 23— In the first attempt to block an access road to the Suwannee American Cement kiln being built 3.5 miles from the Ichetucknee River, activists with Ichetucknee Earth First! placed an immobilized camping trailer with 4 people locked down inside on the roadway leading to the construction site.

By 10 pm all four, including one with his arm locked inside a pipe cemented in the road, were cut out by fire rescue workers and arrested by police, ending the 16 hour road block. The road block was put in place early Sunday morning and was recieved well by the local community, which largely is opposed to the cement kiln.

Suwannee County Sherriffs Dept. made several visits to the scene throughout the day, but made their final visit at dusk, along with paramedics and rescue workers. After police asked all non-arrestable people to leave the trailer, they entered and announced that all those not willing to leave would be arrested. None were willing to leave. Police then put plastic handcuffs on the protesters’ arms and legs and used a pneumatic bolt cutter to break the U-locks around their necks.

After three of the protesters were cut out and taken to jail, the rescue workers then spent over an hour cutting out the person with his arm down in the “dragon.” The workers had to cut part of the floor out and then dig and chisel away the limestone and cement to get “Ben’s” arm out of the PVC pipe in the road. The purpose of this road block was to rally the locals who oppose the kiln, and to demand that Gov. Jeb Bush revoke the building permits on the grounds that the pristine Ichetucknee River is an Florida Outstanding Water Way and deserves full protection. Part of the deal between Suwannee American Co. and the state calls for the company to clean up its old contaminated sites, turn over a new “environmental leaf,” and comply with state policy. If this company, which is notorious for noncompliance and environmental degradation, continues its policy of not complying with state law, authorities from the Dept. of Environmental Protection can revoke the permits. The activist community feels that there is evidence that the company has already broken laws and agreements pertaining to the cement plant deal, and that technically the state can revoke the permits, but to date has refused to do so.

Cement kilns are among the dirtiest industrial polluters in the world. Cement kilns inefficiently burn millions of tons of coal and tires to make Portland cement. This process emits dangerous levels of mercury, phosphates, dioxins and fine particulate matter. This kiln will put highly toxic pollutants into the air and water. There are three endangered species- the Florida Manatee, the red-eyed-blind crayfish and the rare silt snail- which inhabit the area near the cement kiln.

Source: Ichetucknee Earth First!: www.ichetucknee.org

Activist held on felonies as “leader” of convention protests

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Oct. 14— A Philadelphia judge has upheld four felony charges against a nationally known activist accused of directing demonstrations and inciting vandalism by protesters during the Republican National Convention.

Kate Sorensen, 38, of the Direct Action Network, was ordered held Friday for trial on charges of riot, causing or risking a catastrophe, criminal mischief and conspiracy to commit all three crimes.

She initially faced 20 charges including 10 felonies, which were later reduced. She also was initially held on $1 million bail; she is out on $100,000 bail.

A trial date has not been set.

Nearly 400 demonstrators were arrested during protests coinciding with the GOP convention this summer.

Assistant District Attorney David E. Desiderio said Sorensen should be held responsible for vandalism caused by members of the group that “she led.” He said Sorensen directed people in the crowds to move to block streets.

“When you run with the crowd you are liable for the acts of the crowd,” Desiderio said.

Defense attorney Lawrence Krasner said Sorensen merely was a participant. He said all the evidence pointed to one thing: “It’s a description of a walk around the city. She’s not telling people to block the road,” Krasner said.

Sorensen is one of three high-profile activists accused of leading disruptive demonstrations. Also charged with more serious offenses as activist leaders were John Sellers, director of the Ruckus Society of Berkeley, Calif., and Paul Davis, leader of Philadelphia ACT-UP. All three groups - Ruckus, DAN, and ACT-UP - were key organizers of recent mass demonstrations, including the 50,000-person protests in Seattle during the World Trade Organization meetings last fall.

Source: Associated Press

ELF destroys logging equipment in Indiana

Marin County, Indiana, Oct. 19— The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) has officially claimed responsibility for inflicting severe damage to logging equipment in Martin County, IN on October 18. This is the fifth major action committed by the ELF in Indiana this year.

The communique sent by the ELF stated, “Early on the morning of October 18, a small group of dedicated folks walked into the Martin State Forest determined to do whatever it took to stop the cutting of the trees on our public lands.”

The ELF is an international underground organization that uses direct action in the form of economic sabotage to stop the destruction of the natural environment and exploitation of life.

“In an effort to be fair and give our opposition time to reconsider their wicked deeds, several warnings had been spray-painted earlier. They disregarded these well intentioned cautions and proceeded with the cut. We were forced to retaliate,” the communique continued.

“Three skidders and one loader were as thoroughly damaged as we could manage without endangering the surrounding forest. Hoses were cut, sand poured into engines and gas tanks, seats and belts were slashed and appropriate messages were spray-painted (Earth Raper, Go Cut in Hell, and We are Everywhere,” the ELF stated.

The communique finished by stating, “Let all those who would profit from the destruction of our last wild places beware. We ARE everywhere and we are watching. This IS a timber war.”

Source: Bioengineering Action Network (BAN): www.ban@tao.ca

Missouri activists protest debates

St. Louis, Missouri, Oct. 17-- Issues such as gay rights, corporate welfare and anarchy got a voice at Washington University Tuesday, but not at the presidential debate.

About 1,500 protesters raised their signs and voices at an organized rally outside the debate hall at nearby Northmoor Park. Among them was Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, who earlier Tuesday sued the commission organizing the debate over its decision to exclude him from the first one in Boston last month.

Later, protesters took to the streets near the university, facing off with police. About five people were arrested as the protesters dispersed. It was unclear what the charges against them were.

Although each demonstrator seemed, in a way, to champion his or her own cause, organizers said they shared a common goal — addressing issues of justice and human rights that they believe are not being addressed by Al Gore and George W. Bush.

A line of Missouri Highway Patrol officers wearing riot gear stood shoulder to shoulder blocking Forsyth Boulevard at Big Bend Boulevard, keeping protesters away from the debate grounds.

After the rally, demonstrators gathered at the police line, waving signs, chanting, beating drums and demanding that Nader be allowed to participate in the debate. The Commission on Presidential Debates excluded Nader from the three debates.

Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch