Colombia police respond to protests with bullets, and the death toll mounts
A teenager shot to death after kicking a police officer. A young man bleeding out on the street as protesters shout for help. Police firing on unarmed demonstrators. Helicopters swarming overhead, tanks rolling through neighbourhoods, explosions in the streets. A mother crying for her son.
“We are destroyed,” said Milena Meneses, 39, whose only son, Santiago, 19, was killed in a protest last week.
Colombians demonstrating against the poverty and inequality that have worsened the lives of millions since the Covid-19 pandemic began have been met with a powerful crackdown by their government, which has responded to the protests with the same militarised police force it uses against rebel fighters and organised crime.
This explosion of frustration in Colombia, experts say, could presage unrest across Latin America, where several countries face the same combustible mix of an unrelenting pandemic, growing hardship and plummeting government revenue.
“We are all connected,” said Len Valencia, a political analyst, noting that past protests in Latin America have jumped from country to country. “This could spread across the region.”
On Thursday, after seven days of marches and clashes that turned parts of Colombian cities into battlefields, demonstrators breached protective barriers around the nation’s Congress, attacking the building before being repelled by police. Several people in President Ivn Duque’s political party calling for a state of siege, which would grant him broad new powers.
The clashes have left at least 24 people dead, most of them demonstrators, and at least 87 missing, and they have exacerbated the anger with officials in Bogot, who many protesters say are increasingly out of touch with people’s everyday lives.
The marches began last week after Duque proposed a tax overhaul meant to close a pandemic-related economic shortfall. By Monday, amid demonstrations across the country, he rescinded the plan. But the unrest has not abated. Instead, fuelled by outrage at the government’s response, the crowds have only grown. Demonstrators now include teachers, doctors, students, members of major unions and Colombians who have never before taken to the streets.
The demonstrations are, in part, a continuation of a movement that swept Latin America in late 2019. Each country’s protest was different. But in all of them, people raged against limited opportunity, widespread corruption and officials who appeared to be working against them.
Then came the pandemic. Latin America was one of the regions hardest hit by the virus in 2020, with cemeteries filling past capacity, the sick dying in hospital hallways, and family members spending the night in lines to buy medical oxygen.
On Wednesday, Duque said he would open a national dialogue to find solutions to fiscal problems and other challenges. But the call for national dialogue was similar to one he made in 2019, and many civil society groups say that discussion produced few results.
“He has no political capital,” said Sandra Borda, a political analyst and columnist for the newspaper El Tiempo. “People cannot sit down to dialogue with a government that by night kills people who protest and by day extends a hand in conversation.”
Colombia will hold presidential elections in 2022. For decades, the country has elected conservative leaders. But Gustavo Petro, a left-wing former mayor of Bogot and former member of a demobilised guerrilla group, now leads in the polls. Duque, limited by law to one term, cannot run for re-election. New York Times