Colombia: Why do the protests against the Iván Duque regime persist?

The recent protests in Colombia against the Iván Duque regime have not stopped, accounting for several deaths and hundreds of injuries. The majority ask for his departure from the government and this time, it is not only Bogotá where the strong demonstrations are located.

In an RT report, journalist Nazareth Balbás explains what is behind these protests and why the Colombian people are so agitated and ‘fired up’.

Cali was already ‘burning’ from before. The third most important city in Colombia, after Medellín and Bogotá, is the focus of media attention in recent days for the shocking images of violence, police repression and excesses, but the ‘minefield’ has been formed over the years. The Iván Duque government’s tax reform, launched (and withdrawn) during the pandemic, only blew it up.

The capital of Valle del Cauca, located between the Andean and Pacific regions, is considered «the city of the displaced». This label shows the most painful balance of armed violence, which persists despite having signed peace with the oldest guerrilla in the region, and which translates into a latent conflict of economic inequality and social stigmatization, aggravated by the ‘legacy’ of drug trafficking.

In this context, the protests of the last week have developed. So far, authorities have confirmed at least 24 dead and 42 people missing. In contrast, social organizations report a balance of 31 deaths, 1,220 injured and 87 citizens as ‘not located’.

The images of violence, which have been widely disseminated on social networks, show the use of firearms by the authorities, but also by civilians, as well as the blocking of access roads to the city, the shortage in shops, the destruction of public property, vandalism and an indignation that begins to exceed the conjuncture to put the finger in a much deeper wound. So why Cali?

«Death hawks» in Colombia

The new wave of protests began throughout Colombia on April 28. But last Friday, a tweet by former President Álvaro Uribe calling for support for the use of firearms against protesters raised outrage to the point that Twitter had to remove it.

For Uribe, the political leader of President Iván Duque, the police and soldiers had to use their weapons to «defend the population» from the «criminal action of vandalism», in a speech that also turned to criminalize the protests. A day later, the Defense Minister himself, Diego Molano, assured that behind the demonstrations were drug trafficking factors, as well as the dissidents of the FARC and the ELN, a version that was supported this Wednesday by the Prosecutor’s Office.

Although the nation’s attorney general, Francisco Barbosa Delgado, promised to investigate «all the aggressions» perpetrated by the public forces against the protesters, he insisted that the magnifying glass would also be placed on the actions against the police and the military, highlighting that the right to legitimate protest has «a limit» and will not be «permeated by organized crime».

On the side of the protesters, however, the situation is different. With calls to «stop this massacre» and «they are killing us», the people who have taken to the streets to express their rejection of Duque’s government and suffered the repression, do not cease to show on social networks the disproportionate action of agents who shoot with firearms against crowds, arbitrarily detain the population, chase those who gather to protest and attack the most disadvantaged populations of Cali, such as Siloé and La Luna.

In contrast to the calls for dialogue made by the national government, in social networks there are many complaints from Cali for police abuses, sabotage of the internet to prevent broadcasts that allow them to circumvent the silence of the traditional media in Colombia, and defenselessness in the face of deaths, disappearances, arrests and hundreds of wounded, which have not even been officially consolidated. The numbers of victims vary depending on who gives the figures.

On Monday, after knowing the death of Nicolás Guerrero, the mayor of Cali, Jorge Iván Ospina, did not hide his consternation at the situation. «I radically and absolutely condemn that firearms have been used, I completely condemn that some ‘death hawks’ want to use Cali as a theater of operations, as a scene of armed confrontation. We have to de-escalate this circumstance, we have to summon life», he said. And he added: «There are criminal hands in these activities».

Inequality, displacement and drug trafficking

The opposite image of the police repression in the popular areas of Cali is in Ciudad Jardín, one of the most affluent neighborhoods of the capital of Valle del Cauca, where its inhabitants have threatened to use their weapons to repel any attack by the «vandals».

On Tuesday, videos of armored luxury vans filled social networks to show how residents of that sector blocked access to the urbanization, located in the south of Cali. That postcard, although particular, is a sample of the levels of social inequality that are in the substratum of that city.

According to the most recent report from the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), some 6.3 million people joined the ranks of poverty in Colombia during 2020. In the count of cities, Cali is in second place, after Bogotá, with a greater number of poor people.

These data, which reflect the impact of the pandemic in the country, have special significance in Cali, where a large part of the population of the popular strata that make their living from informal work, has been more affected by quarantines, demands attention from the State and rejected a tax bill, such as Duque’s, which sought to impose higher taxes on consumption.

In addition, the identification of the capital of Valle Cauca as a city that receives displaced people from conflict zones adds a greater burden to the situation, since these people are not only economic victims of the pandemic, but also of the violence in their territories, drug trafficking and precariousness.

In fact, the geographic location of Cali between areas such as Chocó, Cauca and Valle del Cauca, where drug trafficking, paramilitarism and armed groups have control in the absence of the State – since long before the protests – make them especially vulnerable to scourges such as arms trafficking, an issue that several analysts have pointed to as the reason why the situation has escalated with greater violence and, so far, seems difficult to control.

For the moment, the protesters remain determined to make their claims visible and denounce the excesses of the police, while the Government has called for a «dialogue» to try to calm the criticism that is beginning to be heard, albeit shyly, by the international community. However, one thing is clear: Cali has been burning for a long time, but now it can be seen.