Bush arrived for his first international conference as 4,000 protesters swarmed into the historic and heavily guarded city, throwing bottles, cans, rocks and hockey pucks at police officers in riot gear. Thousands of officers threw tear-gas canisters and formed a line to force the protesters back.
Occasionally, demonstrators - many of whom wore gas masks or vinegar-soaked bandannas - tossed the canisters back at police. At one point a line of officers stretched across Rene-Levesque Boulevard and marched against the fleeing protesters, firing tear gas as storekeepers watched.
A proposal to establish the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), encompassing all of North, South and Central America as well as the Caribbean, tops the agenda of the three-day summit.
Creation of the FTAA by 2005 was endorsed at the first hemispheric summit in 1994 in Miami and was reaffirmed in 1998 in Santiago, Chile. Progress has been slow, partly because Bush, like Bill Clinton before him, lacks full negotiating authority from Congress to move ahead.
Since the Santiago summit, public sentiment against globalization has intensified. Protesters have tried to disrupt international economic meetings four times in two years to publicize their opposition. They were most successful in 1999, when tens of thousands of demonstrators - many of them affiliated with labor, environmental and human-rights organizations - halted a World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien deployed more than 6,000 police officers to contain yesterday's protests.
After an initial 20-minute standoff, police surrounded the protesters on three sides; the fourth was blocked in part by the Grand Theatre de Quebec. Officers lobbed tear-gas canisters quickly from all three directions. At the same time, the police moved two armored vehicles down Rene-Levesque Boulevard, Quebec's major thoroughfare, and fired water cannons. Protesters attacked the vehicles with rocks and sticks.
