Between April and June 2021, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Colombia in rejection of the tax reform proposed by the government of Iván Duque, which was finally rejected before the popular outcry. The days were mostly peaceful, although the roadblocks and the destruction gave way to a fierce repression that, according to the Ombudsman’s Office, left a balance of 60 civilians and two uniformed dead, while human rights organizations raise the figure to more than 70 victims.
Despite the fact that the tax hike was the trigger, thousands of citizens continued to march through different departments of Colombia with the aim of overthrowing the health care reform, demanding a police reform, and repudiating the murders of social leaders and ex-combatants. The streets fell silent but now Colombian youth denounce a “witch hunt” that continues after the arrest of more than two thousand protesters, according to organizations such as Indepaz.
The figures of the National Strike
The NGO Indepaz recently presented a balance on what happened during the National Strike. The organization recorded 2005 arbitrary detentions and 79 murders, of which 44 were attributed to members of the security forces. For its part, the office of The UN registered between April 28 and June 16 complaints of 56 deaths, including two police officers, during protests in the city of Cali and 49 victims of sexual violence. Official figures are much lower, showing 24 murders during the two months of protests.
The Ministry of Defense spoke of “259 arrests of criminals and criminals of the first line”, a faction of protesters tasked with repelling police attacks. The Duque government did everything possible to reduce the hundreds of thousands of protesters to the so-called front line, whose alleged leaders, four men and three women, were arrested after being charged with “conspiracy to commit a crime, possession and trafficking of dangerous substances. , and violence against a public servant “.
“The Office of the Prosecutor presents us as an organized radical group that is dangerous for society and that has an irrational hatred towards the police”the law student told AFP agency Juliana Higuera. As a single mother to five-year-old Salomé, she was granted house arrest, but five of her friends are still behind bars.
“The case resembles the Argentine film ‘The Night of the Pencils'”, denounces the center-left councilor Diego Cancino, who evidently learned through audiovisual media about that dark chapter of the dictatorship that began in 1976 in Argentina. “The persecution of the protest passes and, later, when things are calmer, when spirits are calmer, boom! The barrage of judicial persecution comes”, explains the Cancino parallelism.
The rise of “digital witnesses”
Beyond the detainees of the front line, an element that distinguished the massive protests this year in Colombia has been the possibility of registering different human rights violations live and direct. This was the case, for example, on Thursday, May 6, when the cell phones of different protesters showed how a police truck in the city of Cali was transporting plainclothes agents who attacked them with firearms.
The case of Nicolas Guerrero, a young 22-year-old artist who lived in Cali. According to witnesses who accompanied him on May 2, Guerrero was shot by police agents while he was in a “candle” near the municipality of Calima in honor of those killed in the National Strike. Thousands of people saw how Guerrero was killed in the middle of the Instagram broadcast of a local DJ.
Another iconic face of that televised violence has been that of Lucas Villa, student at the Technological University of Pereira. Throughout the Cinco de Mayo he was participating in the peaceful marches in the city of Pereira, and Through videos shared by Twitter and Facebook, several users highlighted their joy. At night, Lucas and some of his companions were approached by surprise by a gray vehicle from which they emerged at least seven shots. town He received two bullet wounds: one in the head and one in his right leg. After being diagnosed with brain death, he died in the intensive care unit of Hospital San Jorge de Pereira.
Reforming Esmad, the pending task
Camilo González Posso, president of Indepaz, said in a statement that must be discussed urgently “if the training of the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (Esmad) and other police forces designed to suppress demonstrations has been permissive with procedures that carry the risk of harm to protestersPosso added in that sense that “Hundreds injured and many dozens killed by police brutality cannot be considered isolated events of individual responsibility nor outside the responsibility of the commanders who are in charge of the operations “.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) recently noted the connection between the abuse of force against social protest and the policies and orientations that locate protesters as “terrorists who must be dealt with with tactics of war”, and even as accomplices of armed groups such as the ELN and the dissidents of the FARC. For Posso, the Duque government “does not fit the recommendations of the IACHR on the demilitarization of the police,” which is why he called for “banishing any policy and discourse that leads to treating the protest as an attack on institutions, on national security. or as a risk of infiltration by criminals “.
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