Colombia: a nationwide uprising against police brutality

Colombia is engulfed in a nationwide uprising against police violence and government assassination of social movement leaders. The uprising erupted after September 9 when police detained and murdered lawyer Javier Ordoñez by repeated Taser shocks to his head. Police claimed they had to subdue Ordoñez after they were called to break up a belligerent group that was outdoors, drinking, violating COVID-19 social distancing rules in Bogotá. Other witnesses—many of whom pleaded with the police to stop their torture of Ordoñez—said there was no fight, and that the police just made up the story.

Ordoñez later died in a hospital after police jailed him. As in the U.S., with the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, social media video of Ordoñez’s ordeal, where he is clearly heard to plead with the police to stop, went viral. Demonstrations began at the police precinct where he was held.

The uprising spread around the country over the next few days. On the first night, police killed five protesters, and more than 100 police officers were injured. Dozens of police stations were set on fire.

This eruption of protest comes amid the coronavirus pandemic in which the right-wing government of Iván Duque has prioritized business over public health, and in which the right’s campaign of assassination against social movement leaders continues unabated. For a good background piece on the pre-uprising situation in Colombia, see Daniel Liberos Caicedo’s article here.

Below we translate the statement on the uprising by the Movimiento Ecosocialista in Colombia. The International Socialist Project extends its solidarity to the comrades in the Movimiento and to the struggle in Colombia.

We condemn the police
massacre in Bogotá

Statement by the Movimiento Ecosocialista, September 10, 2020

To the escalating series of police massacres that in only two months reached 47 cases around the country, we must add the one that occurred on the night of September 9, when police killed eight young people, including a minor, when police fired on hundreds of protesters who were protesting in front of the neighborhood police units called Comandos de Acción Inmediata -CAI- for the murder of lawyer Javier Ordoñez. Police from the Villaluz CAI unit arrested the unarmed and defenseless Ordoñez, beating him and Tasering him repeatedly. The number of wounded in the protests that erupted following Ordoñez’s murder have now reached two hundred. Social media networks called the protests after the video of Ordoñez’s torture went viral.

This massacre is part of a chain of murder, repression, and systematic violations of human rights by police forces across the country. Repression of popular mobilizations has killed many in different parts of the country. Citizen complaints of beatings and rapes by the CAIs occur daily. The police force and its repressive behavior are part of an institutional framework structured around state terrorism, codified in the doctrine of the “enemy within” that criminalizes social protest and the daily mobilization of citizens.

The Ecosocialist Movement judges the elite media justification that blames events in the capital on “vandals” to be punished is a smokescreen intended to hide state-sponsored violence. We join with popular and human rights organizations in calling for the police to be converted to a civilian entity, adding that a reform should only be a component of a comprehensive overhaul that aims to dismantle state terror and the judicial impunity that bolsters it. We agree with the call for the immediate resignation of the Minister of Defense and the acting commander of the Bogotá police force.

The mobilizations of September 9 were mostly of youth. They show not only rage against police repression, but also a repudiation of social marginalization to which millions of young people, lacking work, or education, have been subjected. The way in which Duque’s government has managed the COVID-19 pandemic has increased young peoples’ alienation from the system. The handing over of large amounts of money from the public budget to bankers and big business while denying resources to hospitals, health centers and a population increasingly impoverished by economic paralysis completes the picture. The case of AVIANCA (the national airline) is emblematic. The national government has just appropriated $370 million to this bankrupt company, incorporated in Panama to avoid taxes, and managed by US banks. The government shifted money from the budget fund aimed at mitigating the social effects of COVID-19 while the population is increasingly food insecure.

The Ecosocialist Movement shares the outrage and recognizes the social legitimacy of the protests of the September 9 protests in Bogotá as well as those that have confronted so much injustice and barbarism around the country over the last few weeks. We believe that it is urgent to coordinate efforts among all of us who are interested in changing the current state of things to raise demands such as universal basic income, an increase in public spending on health, to raise taxes on the rich, plans for employment and financing of small and medium-sized enterprises, the dismantling of the repression, among others.

The Ecosocialist Movement calls for international solidarity. We urgently demand that Colombia be declared a humanitarian emergency, given the escalation of massacres with absolute impunity that has been taking place in the country, and the indiscriminate repression practiced by law enforcement as state terror. Statements condemning these acts by the United Nations or international agency officials responsible for monitoring human rights violations, are not good enough. We need urgent measures. We call on social and democratic organizations and citizens anywhere in the world to understand the seriousness of the humanitarian tragedy the Colombian population is suffering, to express their solidarity and to demand that the so-called “international community” take action that the seriousness of the situation requires.