Spanish-Language Journalist to Spend Father’s Day Behind Bars After Protest Arrest
By Nick Valencia
A Spanish-language journalist arrested while covering Saturday’s anti-Trump protest in Georgia will remain in custody through Father’s Day, as questions mount over the police response and the treatment of demonstrators on the ground.
Mario Guevara, an independent journalist with a large social media following, was livestreaming Saturday’s “No Kings” protest in DeKalb County when police arrested him. He now faces two misdemeanor charges: obstruction of a law enforcement officer and being a pedestrian on the roadway.
Video of the arrest showed riot police swarming Guevara, seizing his phone mid-broadcast, and placing him in handcuffs. The stream continued even after the phone was taken from his hands.
According to court records, Guevara was booked into the DeKalb County Jail at 4:49 p.m. on Saturday.
The DeKalb County Police Department later released a statement saying officers had given protesters “multiple warnings” to stay out of the roadway and arrested those who failed to comply. The department claimed that “no weapons were drawn during the arrest,” though body-camera footage and eyewitness video show an officer raising and racking a long gun in front of Guevara.
Those on the ground say the official version of events doesn’t match what really happened.
“I was towards the front of the line when we started marching,” said one journalist who witnessed the escalation. “Initially DeKalb police gave us the green light to march on Chamblee Tucker Road. We marched up to where you can turn onto I-285, but we never had any intention of walking on the highway.”
The eyewitness said the group stopped at a traffic light and remained peaceful for nearly 15 minutes, chanting. Organizers moved through the crowd encouraging calm. Then came the shift.
“One of the organizers on the mic told us, ‘Hey guys, we will continue to march but let’s just move over to the sidewalk.’ We all moved to the sidewalk by the gas station—and then DeKalb police started to push and pull us,” she said.
She described a chaotic scene in which officers, despite the group’s compliance, used force to shove demonstrators into a confined space behind a gas station. “Not once but three times they cornered us at the back of the gas station, where we were stuck against a fence. Many of us were coughing, struggling to breathe, our bodies and faces burning from the gas. There were kids in the crowd I was in, and yet they kept going.”
She said volunteer medics eventually helped some climb over the fence to escape. “No one was in the street—we were on the sidewalk,” she said. “The police started throwing gas again into the parking lot where the Planet Fitness is located. It kept going until my group, which included my sorority sisters, decided it was getting out of hand.”
The law firm representing Guevara, Díaz & Gaeta, said in a statement it is “taking all measures to defend Mr. Guevara and protect freedom of speech as provided by the First Amendment,” adding, “It has come to our understanding that the reporter Mario Guevara was arrested recently … for merely videotaping the protests.”
Guevara remains in jail awaiting his next court appearance. His attorney declined to comment further.