The demonstrations that go through Colombia leave a chilling figure: at least 129 people missing in a month of national strike. Organizations in defense of human rights denounce that the majority of people who went out to demonstrate and have not returned home to date lost track of them several weeks ago. “We want you alive,” they shout in the streets.
A slogan runs through the demonstrations that took place a month ago in Colombia: “If they arrest you, shout your name and your ID number.” There is a palpable fear in the Colombian streets: to disappear. From April 28, the day that this unprecedented wave of demonstrations against the government of Iván Duque began, until May 23, at least 129 people disappeared in the framework of the protests of the national strike and have not yet been located.
These are figures from the Office of the Attorney General of the Nation, a body that in a brief statement and in an official video assured that it had also located 290 people who had been initially reported as missing. That implies that, During more than three weeks of protests, the Prosecutor’s Office collected a total of 419 complaints of this type. France 24 contacted the judicial body, but did not receive a response.
#ATTENTION | Prosecutor Francisco Barbosa, confirmed in a report from the judicial PMU, that of the 43 people who died since the beginning of the protests, 17 deaths are directly related to the demonstrations, 7 more are under verification and 19 are not linked to mobilizations. pic.twitter.com/I4Wv1fuL0z
– Colombia Prosecutor’s Office (@FiscaliaCol) May 25, 2021
The figure varies according to some human rights organizations. For example, the Human Rights Observatory of the Coordination Colombia Europe United States (CCEEU), registers 168 disappeared. The Defend Freedom campaign, which groups together several entities, reports up to 346 “presumably missing” people.
“The prevailing feeling is that of uncertainty associated with the emotions of anguish, fear, but also the hope that they will return,” explains Angélica, a young volunteer who accompanies the mothers of some of the people who follow. missing. He also speaks of “anger” and “frustration”: “It is always a roller coaster of all these emotions with the feeling of seeing the disappeared in the photos of the marches, in the streets, everywhere”.
And it is that, during the last month, reports of disappearances accumulate day after day, up to hundreds: “Our channels are overflowing,” acknowledges Alberto Yepes, from the CCEEU Observatory. A phrase repeated by all human rights organizations consulted in this way.
What reports of disappearance reach human rights organizations?
The organizations for verification and defense of human rights in the demonstrations are overwhelmed for several reasons, but there is one clear: fear. “The reports of disappearance are growing and being very disparate due to the great fear that exists that the police will violate you,” says Alejandro Lanz, co-director of the NGO Temblores.
According to Lanz, many complaints occur when the police arrest someone and transfer them to a detention center because there “is when more acts of physical and sexual violence occur”. In addition, it confirms that “the Police are preventing the person from having the right to due process” and from contacting their relatives or relatives. This factor contributes to the arrests being reported as missing, as they do not have access to information on their whereabouts.
Yepes corroborates the same practice, which he calls “systematic”, of “detaining people and refusing to provide information to both the authorities and their families.”
Natalia, a member of the human rights group Esquema Feminista, also denounces a “tendency towards profiling” of people who have been demonstrating for several days in the same points of Colombian cities and who are also “active people” who have visibility within the mobilizations. These people are the ones who “disappear in the demonstrations when they are taken” to the detention centers, he says.
How do those who were reported as missing appear in Colombia?
In some cases, people reported as missing have simply been held incommunicado and are quick to contact their loved ones. In other cases, organizations manage to place them in detention centers or hospitals through their verification work. But sometimes the outcome is more worrying.
Natalia, who works in Bogotá, denounces it: “Some of the people who disappear while traveling appear hours or days later, beaten.” The same explains Darnelly Rodríguez, regional coordinator of the Francisco Isaías Cifuentes Human Rights Network, who reports that, of the 54 people they located in Cali and in the surrounding municipalities, 24 had been violated, presumably by agents of the public force.
Worse still is the case of Brahian Gabriel Rojas, a 26-year-old who had been missing since the first day of the protests, on April 28. They saw him for the last time in Arenera de la Virginia, in the department of Risaralda, in the middle of an intervention by the Colombian police riot squad, ESMAD. He appeared lifeless in the Cauca River.
A month without finding the missing persons of the protests in Colombia
“People have been missing since April 28,” Darnellys recalls. A month without knowing the whereabouts of people who went out to march, who were returning from a protest, who were arrested. In fact, according to the organizations contacted for this report, most of the people who remain undetected disappeared during the first days of the protests.
These 129 people, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, have not been found in health centers or ordinary places of police detention. The Prosecutor’s Office describes these people as “not located”, although Yepes affirms that should be considered victims of enforced disappearance. “Enforced disappearance has two elements, one is detention, legal or illegal; and another is the refusal to give information or hide the whereabouts ”. According to him, these two elements are already combining today.
Alejandro Lanz, from Temblores, considers that “it is not possible to affirm that there is forced disappearance by the Police” with the information they have available. However, it stresses that violating the right to communicate with the detainees of the mobilizations “is an indication” and “may represent a risk of enforced disappearance.”
In the midst of the search for those who still do not appear, human rights organizations denounce that access to information from institutions is increasingly difficult. “Neither the police nor the control agencies are facilitating the verification work,” says Natalia, who adds that they have registered “direct attacks” and “barriers” by the public force in the demonstrations to prevent access by rights defenders. humans.
The same complaints made by social and human rights organizations were supported by Luz Marina Monzón, director of the Unit for the Search for Missing Persons (UBPD), in an interview with France 24. “The Prosecutor’s Office, which is the one that has to developing the task of searching for these disappeared persons has not put all the legal mechanisms that exist ”at the service of that task, he assures.
In addition, it ensures that entities such as the Ombudsman’s Office or the Personería, which are the control entities that should “review the records of people’s detention (…) are not working properly.” This medium tried to contact the Ombudsman’s Office, but did not receive a response from the institution.
Disappearances, a ghost of the Colombian armed conflict
Monzón, who heads the unit in charge of searching for people who disappeared during the Colombian armed conflict, has a clear analysis of the situation: “During the conflict, people were disappeared under patterns similar to those we are seeing today”, patterns that range from denying information on the whereabouts of detainees to the use of irregular detention centers.
In Colombia, the armed conflict left more than 120,000 people missing, according to the UBPD, many of whom remain unaccounted for. That figure is much higher than the enforced disappearances that occurred during the dictatorships of the Southern Cone.
“Although disappearance is a common phenomenon in the country, what has happened in the last month is very worrying,” laments Natalia.
Lanz agrees: “It is one of the most serious human rights crises in the history of the country.” “We continue without touching the ceiling of police violence in social protests,” he adds.
According to the NGO Temblores, in a month of protests, 3,155 cases of police violence have been registered, among which there are 46 victims of eye injuries, 22 victims of sexual violence by agents of the public force and 43 fatalities, in addition to 18 cases of deaths that are still in the process of verification. The Prosecutor’s Office, for its part, also reports 43 deaths, although it specifies that only “17 of them have a direct link in the framework of the protests.”
Among the dozens of slogans that are heard throughout the country, one recycled by decades of conflict is insistently shouted: “They were taken alive, we want them alive.”
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source https://pledgetimes.com/where-are-they-in-colombia-dozens-of-disappearances-are-denounced-in-the-national-strike/
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