Shouting "Yankee, get out!" and singing protest songs, thousands opposed to US President George W. Bush held a massive rally at a basketball arena, two days before the US leader arrives at this seaside resort for the fourth Summit of the Americas.
With images of famed revolutionary Che Guevara hanging from the rafters, organizers gave fiery anti-Bush speeches into a crackly sound system that echoed through the drab concrete stadium several from the luxury hotel where leaders of 34 Western Hemisphere nations will meet tomorrow and Saturday.
Most of the leftist protesters were young people, but also in the crowd was Argentine Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to his country's military regime.
"We've had enough of Mr Bush, who has committed numerous crimes against humanity," Perez told reporters on the sidelines of the rally.
He called the US president a "murderer" for his actions in Iraq and elsewhere.
"This is a chance for the real people to hold their own summit," said Wayra Aru Blanco, a 33-year-old Bolivian Indian, beating a calfskin drum as brightly dressed South American Indian women played reed flutes.
In the run-up to the summit, violent protests broke out in the capital of Buenos Aires over poor commuter train service. Mobs set fire to 18 of the city's dilapidated trains in a working class suburb, stoned and overturned police cruisers and battled with riot police who fired rubber bullets into the crowds.
There was no immediate indication the violence was related to the impending anti-Bush protests at the summit, but authorities blamed the unrest on leftist elements and labor activists. Twenty one people were injured in total, and police took 113 people into custody.
"This was planned," Interior Minister Anibal Fernandez said. "These were armed groups."
Protesters in Mar del Plata, 370km south of Buenos Aires, will spend days protesting Bush's actions in the Middle East and free trade policies they say enslave Latin America workers. They are hoping to draw 50,000 people for their highlight event -- a protest tomorrow.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a leftist whose government has used the country's vast oil wealth to fund social programs for the poor, was invited to attend the march.
Barbara Wood, who came from Vancouver with about a dozen fellow members of a labor union, said the People's Summit was about putting "people at the center, not politics."
"Bush and the other presidents can do whatever they want," she said.
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