Thousands marched today in the streets of historic Puebla in Mexico to say no to the FTAA. After the march, with united trade unionists, campesinos and students in the Mexican city, a commission of social movement, after dialoging with the police and crossing the police barrier that surrounded the convention center, presented to the delegates from the Trade Negotiating Committee a document introducing the declaration of the III Hemispheric Ecounter Against FTAA expressing their firm opposition to the agreement. Representatives of the Henispheric Social Alliance -- Gonzalo Berrón (CUT - Brazil), Rusa Jeremic (Common Frontiers * Canada), Elizabeth Drake (ART * US), and Deborah James (Global Exchange * US) -- were part of the commission, which also included the Mexican Action Network against Free Trade (RMALC), the Emiliano Zapata Campesino Union, the Electricity Workers Union of Mexico, and the Union of Street Vendors of Puebla. Read the declaration Puebla, February 5, 2004 To representatives of the 34 governments negotiating the FTAA: Organizations from various countries in the Americas that are members of the Hemispheric Social Alliance, and Mexican civil society organizations which participated in the FTAA Information and Analysis Forum here in Puebla and in this protest, declare: - The negotiations that you are currently advancing are illegitimate, because, in each of the countries of the Americas, the societies that you say you represent have not been informed, consulted, and much less taken into account in these negotiations that put the future of our countries at risk. - The peoples of the continent have expressed in a thousand different ways their opposition to any further imposition of "free trade," and to the FTAA in particular. This is the true sentiment of the peoples of the Americas, not the position presented as the result of forums that pretend to consult civil society. - We attach and present for your information the Declaration that more than a thousand delegates form every country in the hemisphere adopted in Havana a week ago: (Declaration of the III Hemispheric Ecounter Against FTAA)