Tortuguita, the Earth Protector killed by the Capital
Manuel Teran, also known as Tortuguita, Little Turtle, were 26 years old.
Born on April 26, 1996, and with a family of Venezuelan descent, Manuel identified themselves as nonbinary and preferred to use the pronoun they/them. Manuel was described by all as having a sunny, generous, and peaceful persona.
They had begun using the nickname Tortuguita to seek the anonymity that is often required in activism such as theirs, dangerous because it is radical, risky because it is peaceful.
They firmly believed in nonviolent civil disobedience, and often those they spoke to, whether journalists or other activists, were reminded of the not only moral but also strategic virtues of peaceful resistance to any kind of abuse, social or environmental.
And the very place where Tortuguita lost their life is, in the faux-democratic Global North, the one that, in our opinion, best represents the coexistence of both struggles: that for social rights and that for environmental rights.
The place where Tortuguita died is now a forest.
But Western policies of profit and oppression want to destroy it to build Atlanta's Cop City.
It is a project with a nominal value (the real one, as you will find out in a few lines below, is much higher) of $90 million: a police training center, with a heliport, a mock city to recreate urban guerrilla settings, and an area for explosives drills, all to be built in place of the DeKalb County forested area that only in 2017 the City Council pledged to leave intact forever.
An overview of the project from the City of Atlanta
Instead, on September 8, 2021, the project was approved with 10 votes to 4 against some of the details of the operation, but not its nature. In the hours following the outcome of the vote, the protests, which had already preceded it, grew louder: many took to the streets to represent their dissent, and the police ended up defending themselves by arresting 11 people.
It was a premeditated and organized reaction, much like the U.S. policies that have been fostering gentrification for decades, i.e., that process of transforming an entire working-class neighborhood into a high-end residential area, with sky-high housing prices and consequent replacement of the existing population with another. A process, moreover, unknowingly supported by the original residents themselves through their taxes that finance speculative housing strategies coordinated between private interests and public institutions.
In essence, having identified a working-class neighborhood causes the quality of life within it to progressively worsen by eliminating essential public services such as schools, hospitals, recreational spaces, public transportation, urban sanitation, street maintenance, and thereby driving down the market cost of land and housing.
Subsequently, a greater police presence fuels widespread social tension and heavy-handed prosecution of petty crimes against part of the resident population, deprived of many employment opportunities due to the area's economic depression.
The persecution of many of the area's residents encourages legal proceedings against them and the subsequent eviction from housing units already in the hands of housing speculators or about to be acquired.
The emptying out of an area of the neighborhood (or an entire adjoining neighborhood) thus allows the demolition of the old buildings, the construction of a new housing complex, and its repopulation with high-income owners who occupy prominent positions in large legal, banking, and financial companies. Those people now living this quality of life, feel the need to protect their assets, and demand and obtain increased police presence, cameras, complaints, and arrests.
The function of the police, also decisive in this passage, is to prosecute crimes that affect the quality of life; a quality decided by a capital-based system.
And one better understands many of the dynamic parallels to this scam if one looks at who benefits from a project like Cop City. Here is a list of them:
First are the politicians, of all stripes, who secure slices of the electorate by constantly sending out messages of fear about disparate crimes and communities of color.
Then leaders and officers of the urban police and prison corps who see their influence growing.
Of course, the big corporations that profit from the construction world, primarily those in cement and fossil fuels.
And still, companies in the arms, security, and surveillance systems sectors.
Consequently, the banks, through financing to the aforementioned companies, interest on the mortgages of the elite, and interest on the increasing debt of the impoverished population.
Finally, the media, who generate the most views with clickbait about crime and the constant juxtaposition of the two different needs, the popular and the financial.
This system, composed of a few exploiters, needs a huge number of exploited, whose limit of exploitation is constantly being moved further away and controlled by instruments of mass punishment, de facto social batons in the hands of men in uniform.
As scholars David Correia and Tyler Wall have explained, police forces defend the accumulation of capital (and thus encourage it): the success of Capitalism depends on the discipline and rigor of those who serve it and the persecution and criminalization of those who threaten it.
The fact that Capitalism is not a grand conspiracy but rather a mutual aid among the major players in the world of speculative finance is evident precisely from the support for the Cop City project by companies such as Delta Airlines, Coca Cola, and Mercedes Benz.
After all, as early as 1961, in his farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower alerted the nation to the fact that
"the wide-scale and intricate connection between the military and war industries could determine the course of economic development and policy decisions in the country, to the detriment of all other industries and ideas."
These constant violations of human beings, and the resulting rape of their Mother Earth, were opposed in Atlanta by many activists who, after petitions and marches, saw the occupation of the forest as the most effective nonviolent way to resist.
Photo from the Twitter account of Defend the Atlanta Forest.
So many of them have been arrested, several times, and some have even received an inconceivable charge: domestic terrorism. Brutal assaults by security forces, weapons in hand, had become more and more frequent. Then, on the morning of January 18, a gunfight with a tragic outcome occurred in the forest, according to police: a Georgia state police officer was shot in the abdomen, not critical, and declared to be in a stable condition as early as the next day.
Firing that shot, again according to police theories, were Manuel Teran, who allegedly opened fire without warning on the officers who were proceeding into the woods. And, because of this, the officers returned fire, killing Manuel.
Many activists confirm that one of many violent clearance operations was underway that morning, and some claim to have heard at 9:04 a.m. shots, a dozen in rapid succession, and then a louder bang. Throughout the rest of the morning, the round-up and evacuation operation had gone on with a full-scale hunt for activists through the use of dogs, tear gas, and demolition machinery, just as had happened other times.
Only this time someone had lost their life.
Someone who preached and practiced nonviolence fell victim to violence.
And of lies.
So many are now calling on journalists and humanitarian organizations to conduct independent investigations to restore the Truth because no one believes the claim that Tortuguita held a gun and shot another living being.
No one wants this immense collective injustice to be compounded by Manuel's personal one.
Killed by the fury of capital.
Forever alive in that forest and in the struggles to come.
The author of the article, Manlio Pertout, is a cofounder of The Human Exploring Society.
This article has been released under the Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 International Creative Commons license. Feel free to share it under the license terms.
Cover illustration by Martha Stephens, cofounder of The Human Exploring Society, based on an illustration freely published on Defend the Atlanta Forest.