EMERGENCY ACTION- STOP REPRESSION IN QUITO! NOT FTAA! VIVA QUITO!

NO FTAA! VIVA QUITO! STOP THE REPRESSION!
EMERGENCY DEMONSTRATION
SOLIDARITY WITH ECUADORAN MASS ACTION AT THE FTAA SUMMIT

FRI NOV 1, 5PM
Chevron-Texaco
575 Market (between 1st and 2nd)
San Francisco

Today (Wed Oct 30), 500 students from the Central University of Ecuador marched on the corporate businessmen of the Americas Business Forum, who will bring their FTAA wish list to tomorrow's closed-door FTAA Summit with government trade ministers. The student demonstration was attacked with tear gas, bullets were fired, students arrested and two students beaten by police and hospitalized. Tomorrow all of the caravans from the country will arrive and the mass actions will begin. The popular movement in Ecuador is confronting global capital's most important meeting of the year in Quito, Ecuador-- the Free Trade Area of the America's Summit. Also today, 44 women from Movimiento Mujeres Luchando por la Vida occupied McDonalds in Quito. Solidarity actions are taking place across the America's and in Europe.

Chevron-Texaco is one of the corporations meeting in the America's Business Forum and has a 30 year history of extracting oil and destroying local communities and ecosystems in Ecuador. Their Quito facilities are a target of the demonstrations by Ecuadorans from the Amazon region who demand ChevronTexaco "clean up and pay up: their damages.

Ecuador`s social movements say the FTAA represents a death sentence for small farmers, indigenous cultures, local food systems, and endangered forests, that it will create a whole new set of rights for transnational corporations at the expense of local communities, that it will deal a devastating blow to the productive capacity of small countries like Ecuador. They also protest against the militarization of the region under Plan Colombia, the military arm of the economic domination strategy encoded in the FTAA. The FTAA puts more power and wealth in the hands of a few corporations and the governments they control, increasing poverty, disempowerment, poison air and water, militarization, unaffordable medicine and misery in the Bay Area and across the Americas.

Initiated by Action for Local Global Justice and Amazon Watch