Last month’s killing of a nonbinary activist known as “Tortuguita,” who was shot during an occupation protest in Atlanta’s South River Forest, marked the first police killing of a protester in the history of the American environmental movement.
Police entered the forest on January 18 after months of tension with activists camped in the area. Tortuguita was shot and seven others were arrested. It was the second police raid to result in arrests in about a month.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) has told Tortuguita shot and wounded a state trooper before officers returned fire. According to the bureau, no CCTV footage of the shooting is available.
Lawyers for Tortuguita’s family, whose full name is Manuel Esteban Páez Terán, question the police report of the shooting, saying the GBI did not answer the family’s questions about the shooting.
“We have reached out to them through every channel at our disposal. We have received no response, no offer to share information with the family,” Jeff Filipovits, an Atlanta-based civil rights attorney, said in an interview. “They want to know what happened to their child.”
Occupation protests have been a staple of environmental activism for decades, but Atlanta’s was different. Where the police often mediated in previous protests, in Atlanta they acted as opponents whose self-interest – a development project for a police complex – was central to the protest.
“There’s a long history of law enforcement confronting direct-action environmentalists, and those confrontations turned hostile,” said Keith Woodhouse, an assistant professor at Northwestern University who wrote a book on radical environmentalism. “The big difference is that one of these activists was shot and killed, which I think is unprecedented in the United States.”
And in the modern era of protest, environmentalists, who may once have had a narrow focus or branched off from other movements, are now increasingly caught in the middle of a much wider web of social issues.
“The issue of policing in the United States, the militarization of police forces, Black Lives Matter, all of those issues are related to protecting this forest for these activists,” Woodhouse said.