Colombian government opts for force instead of dialogue as protests continue
By Joshua Collins.
Joshua Collis is a freelance journalist based in Colombia who has reported for Al Jazeera, Vice and The New Humanitarian.
Bogotá, Colombia. Deisy Paricio lights candles at a commemoration ceremony in the Soledad neighborhood for those who have died during the ten bloody days of protest in Colombia. "We are here to denounce the actions of a criminal regime," she says, with a cold cadence in her voice that borders on fury. "We are demanding justice. We are demanding dignity for the victims of this government."
Around them, a few hundred demonstrators hold torches and candles in their hands. They chant over and over again in rhythmic unison: "The people, united, will never be divided!
After a few minutes of silence, a speaker reads the names of the 34 people who have lost their lives since the nationwide protests began on April 28. After each of them, protesters clang the pans they have brought for this purpose, a common protest tactic in Latin America that dates back decades called the "cacerolazo".
The mood at the commemoration ceremony is very different from eight days earlier, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets singing and dancing in a massive, festive protest march in the city center, where they were quickly gassed by police forces, and street altercations between angry youths and Colombian police spilled into the side streets of Bogotá's labyrinthine downtown.
Day by day, the mood has grown grimmer as state violence continued to escalate against the mostly peaceful protests. Police have confirmed 34 deaths, although they say seven of them are not related to the protests. NGOs in the region say the real numbers are higher than official statistics reflect. Temblores, a human rights group in Bogotá that has been tracking the violence, reports 37 deaths and more than 300 injured, with a total of 1,728 recorded cases of police violence.
"We have watched the increase in violence with extreme concern," said Alejandro Lanz, co-executive director of Temblores. "Most of the victims we have recorded have been young people protesting peacefully. There is no guarantee of life for anyone."
Social media is flooded nightly with a torrent of graphic and disturbing videos of violence, mostly at the hands of police, as youths fight pitched battles in the streets amid tear gas and stun grenades.
Both Temblores and another NGO, Indepaz, a peace monitoring group in Colombia, have reported receiving indications of indiscriminate police shootings of civilians amid the chaos.
"I have to go," Lanz told Ethnic Media Services at 9 p.m. Friday, interrupting an interview. "As we do every night, we're about to start getting reports of violence happening across the country. Our investigators and lawyers will be focusing their full attention on it over the next few hours."
Activists called a nationwide strike in Colombia nearly a month ago over rising violence, the continued killings of social leaders, increasing poverty, as well as inequality and what critics see as failed promises by President Ivan Duque's administration regarding the country's 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebel group FARC.
The agreement ended a 50-year civil war in Colombia, but it was also highly controversial. Duque won election in 2018 promising to dismantle aspects of the agreement, and he has delivered on those promises. Investments promised to rural communities never arrived, tactics in the drug war escalated, and those who lost their land in the half-century conflict - who hoped peace would mean they could return to their homes - are still waiting.
These issues have been simmering for years, culminating in 2019 with massive protests that were put on hold by the arrival of COVID-19 in Colombia. The protests stalled under extreme blockade measures and a crippled economy that raised the poverty rate to 42.7 percent.
A deeply unpopular tax bill that would have increased the cost of food and basic consumer goods gave the protest movement a big boost in popular support, and was largely reported as the flagship issue driving the movement, but the heavy-handed policing and hardline rhetoric of Duque's party soon displaced taxes as the main target of those on the streets. The controversial bill has since been withdrawn, but the protests have morphed into deeper discontent with the government itself.
The government's response has been mainly hard-line rhetoric against the protesters. Presidential adviser on human rights, Nancy Patricia Gutiérrez, stated in an interview with Semana magazine that "human rights only exist for citizens who fulfill their duties as part of society".
Several politicians from Duque's Democratic Center party have called the protesters "terrorists", "narcos" and have even claimed that the protesters are organized by guerrilla groups. These accusations have been made without evidence.
"The momentum, for now, is clearly with the protesters," said Sergio Guzman, director of Colombia Risk Analysis, a research and consulting group in Bogota. "The government is also aware that it is behind in the narrative and is getting more and more desperate. The administration has offered nothing but fear rhetoric since these protests began. But outside their base, they are not finding a receptive audience."
Meanwhile, the government has militarized multiple cities and has even publicly discussed declaring a state of national emergency, a measure that could mean suspending the right to protest.
The United Nations, Human Rights Watch and the U.S. Embassy in Colombia have called for the escalation to be minimized and for the rights of protesters to be respected.
Back in Soledad, at the ceremony for those who paid the highest price during the protests, Ana, who declined to give her last name, sat with her boyfriend, and the couple held hands as the names of the latest victims were read.
"We just want President Duque to listen to what we have to say," he said. "It seems like all the politicians, all the pundits and all the media want to tell us what we think."
"This violence is so absurd. It could all have been avoided so easily if only they would listen to us."
