Multiple Banks Funding Cop City and Mountain Valley Pipeline Targeted During Tucson Protest

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 26th, 2024

Multiple Banks Funding Cop City and Mountain Valley Pipeline Targeted During Tucson Protest

Press conference: 101 N Stone Ave, Tucson, AZ 85701, Monday, February 26, 10 a.m.

TUCSON, AZ — On Sunday evening, a group of about 90 protesters marched through downtown Tucson in solidarity with the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, Georgia.

During the march, windows of at least two downtown banks were smashed. The banks, a Wells Fargo and a PNC, are both linked to projects currently destroying forests in favor of more cops, more oil, and a certain march toward climate apocalypse.

A Wells Fargo executive sits on the board of the Atlanta Police Foundation, the organization behind the Cop City project. PNC is a funder of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, an oil infrastructure project currently threatening Appalachian communities.

At least five individuals were detained by Tucson Police Department in connection with the protest. Hours after the arrests, Tucson Stop Cop City activists called for a demonstration outside Tucson Police Department headquarters on Stone Ave. demanding their immediate release.

“The movement objecting to building Cop City has tried every tactic from letter writing, to media campaigns to reaching out to elected officials,” said Natalie Brewster Nguyen, one of the Directors of the Tucson-based Splinter Collective. “And the movement has been violently and seriously repressed. The world needs to pay more attention to what is happening in Atlanta, because our lives depend on it.”

During the march, protesters spraypainted the name “Tortuguita” over one of the bank windows in honor of Manuel “Tortuguita” Esteban Paez Terán, a forest defender murdered by police in January, 2023 during a raid on the Weelanuee forest. The day before the protest in Tucson, Pima County Sheriff’s Department deputies shot and killed a man outside a hotel on the southside of Tucson. From the forests of Atlanta to the deserts of Arizona, police continue to terrorize our communities. 

“Property destruction is not the worst thing,” continued Nguyen. “A few broken windows pales in comparison to the violence that the proposed ‘Cop City’ in Atlanta would continue to institutionalize. Rampant poverty, inequality, police brutality and incarceration are far worse, and building Cop City will only increase these issues in the U.S.”

“People in organized political efforts and actions across the country, for years, for decades, for generations, have been calling for an end to the funding of projects like Cop City, like the Mountain Valley Pipeline, projects that are killing communities and our shared planet,” said Rev. Tracy Howe of the United Church of Christ in Tucson, “Only to have supposedly democratic processes fail them at every turn. Creative methods of raising consciousness and drawing attention to the money, the specific corporations and stake holders of these things are critically needed for any kind of accountability and change.”

Tuscon Community leaders will hold a press conference at 10 a.m. Monday morning in the plaza in front of the Joel D. Valdez Main Library (101 N Stone Ave) in downtown Tucson to address the police repression and the ongoing destruction of the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta.

# # #