The Friday 20th we did a very big protest against the FTAA here in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The FTAA is the project created by american goverment to create an Free Trade Area including all the American countries, from Alaska to patagonia. Of course this exclude people, only money and prodctus will be "free" to go circulate. They did a meeting with all the presidents of the american countries (except Cuba) the last weekend in Quebec and they faced massive demonstrations against it there. Maybe 70.000 people went to streets to protest against it there. Here we did a protest too. About 2000 people showed up. We did a march in the finacial area here in SP (Paulista Avenue) and we face a very hard repression. The manifestation was supposed to be pacific but the cops came and start to beat up people very hard without warning. And nobody was doing nothing illegal untill then. After this a riot started and it took about 3 hours to end. After this the started to arrest people that were trying to escape in the side streets. They arrest 61 people, 55 of them were minors. The people was tortured in the jail untill the legal comission showed up with lawyers to try to liberate them. A lot of people get serious hurt.

Now we are promoting a huge prosecuting against the Police here, because we have at least 100 people injuried, some very seriously. I was thinking about you helping us a little bit with this. Do you know any groups there that can send letters to the São Paulo State government repudiating this violation to the human rights? If you know, tell them our history and please make them to get in contact with our legal comission:  cna_sp@hotmail.com .A think that a international pressure can help us to prosecute the cops that did that.