Latin American‐Canadian organizations denounce the acts of police aggression and the billion dollar failure of the G20 Summit

The week of June 21st saw tens of thousands of people gather to protest the G20
summit held in Toronto. We protested against the undemocratic policies of social and
economic control that have been imposed by the G20. We gave voice to our causes by
exercising our democratic right to peaceful assembly. However, over this past week,
police rounded up and arrested over 600 people.

These people, including several members of Toronto's Latin American‐Canadian
communities, have been denied access to legal counsel, telephones, food and water,
and held in deplorable conditions in makeshift steel cages. Police engaged in an
excessively violent, heavy‐handed style of policing. Random people and bystanders
were arrested, and many were arbitrarily detained, in one case, several hundred at once
during a rainstorm. Many were beaten in the streets and in their homes, shot at with
rubber bullets and tear gas. Some were sent to hospital with severe injuries. Hundreds
are still in custody.

Many of these violent, unprovoked actions by police took place in Queen's Park‐the socalled
"Free Speech Zone"‐targeting primarily peaceful activists. There were also
alarming reports of pre‐emptive police raids in the houses of community activists
without the proper use of arrest warrants; as well as, the violent arrests and assaults of
numerous journalists.

All this happened for a G20 Summit that can only be categorized as a complete failure
politically and economically for the people of the world. It is yet another of the federal
government's boondoggles ‐ a billion dollars of Canadians' tax dollars, a billion dollars
that could have gone to stop the closure of public schools, to bolster public transit, to
strengthen insurance benefits for the unemployed. In the end, the only outcome of this
expensive meeting was an agreement to continue the support for cutting public
spending. There were no commitments to fighting world poverty, to significantly
improving maternal health or to address the environmental calamities that the present
economic system created.

$1 Billion dollars has been wasted, and the world is no better off. Instead we have
hundreds of people detained and a police force committed to terror and coercion
tactics.

LASN, LATUC, Barrio Nuevo and CASA Salvador Allende denounce these acts of criminal
repression by the police and demand and support the immediate release of all those
who were detained and their rightful access to due process.

We will not tolerate the arrests, beatings and attempt to intimidate Torontonians
exercising their inalienable right to dissent. Our community stands in solidarity with the
people whose lives have been disrupted by the G20 and police violence. We stand in
solidarity with the organizers of rightful protest of the vacuous G20 Summit, including
among others the Community Mobilization Network, and we demand a public inquiry
into the deplorable police brutality that occurred over this past week.

We the undersigned also call for broad labour and community mobilizations to
denounce the outrageous failure of the G20 Summit, to address the current economic
crisis, and to confront police repression.

Signed:
Barrio Nuevo
CASA Salvador Allende
Latin American Solidarity Network (LASN)
Latin American Trade Unionists Coalition (LATUC)