“When the people take to the streets during a pandemic, it means that the government is more dangerous than the virus,” was written on a sign by a Colombian protester. The slogan says a lot about what has been happening in the last few days in Colombia.
Since April 28, tens of thousands of people have begun to protest in many cities of the country against the tax reform announced by the government of center-right president Iván Duque. On 2 May Duque backtracked by announcing the withdrawal of the project, which according to critics would have affected above all the middle class and the poorest sections of the population already tried by a serious economic crisis. Then the economy minister, Alberto Carrasquilla resigned, but the protests did not stop. Indeed, they have expanded into a radical critique of the government and its handling of the covid-19 pandemic. Colombia is in the midst of its third wave, with intensive care in hospitals across most of the country collapsing.
The toll of the clashes is serious: at least twenty people were killed and more than eight hundred were injured. The executive’s decision to militarize the repression, sending the army to the streets against the protesters, has raised controversy and condemnations from the international community, the United Nations and some NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
In Cali, a city in the west of the country, the third largest in the country, demonstrations were attended and the action of the police was particularly brutal. On April 28, a policeman shot Marcelo Agredo Inchima, a 17-year-old boy who was participating in the protest against the tax reform. On the night of May 2, another agent shot Nicolás Guerrero, a 22-year-old young man in the head who was filming clashes between demonstrators and state forces in the north of the city.
“I heard the shots,” Juan David Gómez, a lawyer present on the spot, told País. “At first I thought the police were using rubber bullets, instead they were firearms. The boy died at our feet, in front of twenty or thirty people trying to help him. We have seen him agonize ”.
The capital Bogotá experienced a night of violence on 4 May with a toll of thirty civilians and 16 wounded officers, and various police stations set on fire. Left-wing mayor Claudia López said that “the level of destruction and violence and attacks on citizens and public goods are very unusual.” Then he added a prayer: “I ask the city and the country to stop and talk”.
Request for dialogue
Videos and images of the disproportionate use of force by the police and the military have been disseminated on social networks, pushing social movements and protest organizers not to stop and to call new demonstrations for the next few days. For its part, Duque’s government, which sees the possibility of being re-elected for a second presidential term in 2022 fade away, has set in motion a strategy of dialogue with the various social movements to persuade them to suspend the national strike, the national strike.
“If the public force, trying to protect cities, does not respect legal limits and uses force in a disproportionate way, it is just adding fuel to the fire and fomenting violence. Obviously we must stop the vandals and the violent, but without trampling the constitution ”, writes El Espectador. The only way out of the crisis, argues the Colombian daily, is to accept a dialogue open to all political and social forces without exception.
According to the Colombian journalist and political scientist Ariel Ávila, director of the Paz y reconciliación foundation, we will only know in a few days who will emerge victorious from this tug-of-war. But in the meantime, there is a certainty: with unemployment at 15 per cent, the increase in poverty, the closure of dozens of small businesses and the old strategy of claiming that the protests are infiltrated by criminals and terrorists, the government has still shown a time to be completely disconnected from reality.
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