Biography
Victor Puertas is an Indigenous forest defender from the Andean region of South America who became one of the longest-detained Stop Cop City pretrial prisoners. He was arrested on March 5, 2023 during the Georgia State Patrol's mass raid on the music festival in the Weelaunee Forest, where approximately 350 protesters had gathered as part of a Defend the Atlanta Forest week of action. He was held at the DeKalb County Jail for three months without bond on a charge of domestic terrorism, then transferred to ICE custody at the Stewart Detention Center and the Folkston ICE Processing Center, where he was held for an additional eight months in immigration detention before finally being released. His total time in custody for the action came to approximately 11 months — the longest pretrial detention of any Stop Cop City defendant. He was indicted in the August 2023 RICO sweep along with the other 60 defendants. The RICO case against him remains pending.
On January 18, 2023, during a multi-agency raid on the Stop Cop City forest encampment in the South River Forest near Atlanta, Georgia State Patrol officers shot and killed 26-year-old forest defender Manuel Esteban Paez Terán (Tortuguita). The killing — the first known police killing of an environmental activist on U.S. soil during a protest — accelerated and radicalized the multi-year movement against the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, a 171-acre, $90+ million police and fire training facility in the South River Forest known to opponents as 'Cop City.'
Georgia and DeKalb County prosecutors responded with the most aggressive use of state-level domestic-terrorism and RICO statutes against a U.S. protest movement in modern history: 42 forest defenders were charged under Georgia's domestic-terrorism statute (originally enacted in 2017 in response to white-supremacist mass shootings) for activities ranging from camping in the forest to attending a March 2023 music festival a mile from the construction site. On August 29, 2023, an Atlanta grand jury returned a single 109-page RICO indictment against 61 of these defendants — the largest RICO indictment of a U.S. social movement in decades. Three Atlanta Solidarity Fund leaders were also indicted on 15 counts each of money laundering and charity fraud (charges later dropped in September 2024). The RICO case has remained largely stalled in pretrial proceedings; this database entry is for one of the small number of defendants who were denied bond or otherwise held in custody for meaningful periods before posting bail.
