• Colombia The UN and the EU condemn the police repression in Cali

  • Latin America Colombia protests against tax reform

They tried to burn them alive.

They set fire to a neighborhood police station in Bogotá, which has armored windows, and when the ten officers managed to get out and run, some injured, the mob pursued them to attack them.

They had no way of repelling the attack other than trusting to be left alone within a few yards.

Not far from the Colombian capital, some 38 kilometers away, in Tocancipá, an ambulance was trying to transfer a pregnant woman about to give birth.

They had to stop at various barricades, open the vehicle and show that the urgency was true, so that they were allowed to continue.

The obstacles took so long to overcome that the fetus, which was in trouble, arrived dead at the hospital.

In addition to that death and 19 others, so far 522 police officers and a thousand civilians have been injured, 254 businesses looted, 87 bank branches and two government headquarters attacked, loads of stolen trucks, as well as dozens of buses, tolls and CAI (small police stations) destroyed, among many other damage.

Bogotá, Cali, Bucaramanga, Medellín, Neiva, Armenia, were some of the affected localities

.

For the Ministry of Defense, the FARC dissidents, as well as urban cells of the ELN, are behind the most brutal attacks and those that presented the same pattern.

Precisely, opposition congressmen presented on Tuesday a proposal for a motion of censure against Minister Diego Molano for "human rights violations."

The widespread violence has not only caused multimillion-dollar losses in the public and private sectors, it has also plunged citizens into fear and anxiety.

All this paints a bleak picture in the main cities and leaves the Government on the ropes.

Iván Duque, who already has a new finance minister willing to seek consensus for a new tax reform less ambitious than the last one,

tries to stop the general paralysis with a call for dialogue and a specific agenda

.

He hoped to begin this same May 5 to end on May 20, with ten different interlocutors, including mayors of capital cities, transporters, students and political parties.

But it

has

already

received the first doors slammed

.

His outstretched hand did not stop the demonstrations called for Wednesday by the Unemployment Committee, which took place in parallel with the blockades and acts of vandalism that have not ceased since April 28.

And he also failed to seat political rivals.

Sergio Fajardo, on behalf of the Coalition of Hope, made up of center-left and center-left leaders who aspire to win the next presidential elections, left him standing.

They did not attend the meeting at Casa Nariño, which they had accepted at first, as "a way of highlighting our total disagreement with the way you governed, they are responding to the just demands of a citizenry that is fighting to improve their terrible conditions of existence." .

Specifically, they were referring to the clashes between the security forces and the vandals in Cali on Tuesday night.

"The strike has thrown him to the canvas, but they have not knocked out Duque yet. He does not rule over reality but over what he imagines," the acute political analyst Gustavo Álvarez Gardeázabal tells EL MUNDO. "He has been a president with very few readings and has not been able to understand that Gustavo Petro is a Leninist in almost all his acts. And Leninism works when you have a weak leader in front, like Tsar Nicholas II."

On the contrary, the former senator and one of Petro's bishops, Armado Benedetti, in dialogue with this newspaper does not consider that his boss is gaining points. "A new citizenship is walking, which is everywhere, in Spain, in France, in other countries, and it is fighting against an authoritarian power.

The people who are marching are angry, afraid of the future, and there is nothing to believe in

." Nor does he believe that it is possible to put them all in the same bag because "each one protests about one thing and there is no one to talk to."

Yesid Lancheros, political editor of

Semana

magazine

, considers that it is "a strike with three components. One, of people concerned about social problems. The second, a hidden face that is the emergence of a new phenomenon of violence. They are dissidents. of the FARC, the ELN and criminal gangs trying to generate as much chaos as possible. And a third, a strike for political purposes, which promotes a situation of anxiety. But they may backfire because the famous silent majority may think before that panorama that prefers to feel authority ".

For his part, Francisco Miranda, director of the economic daily

Portafolio

, thinks that

we are not facing "popular demonstrations that overthrow governments

, but disorders that generate chaos. And that does not allow governing and exacerbates the feeling of need for change with a view to 2022. Duque it must rebuild a minimal majority that allows it to advance. "

For the one who was Secretary General of the Presidency of Juan Manuel Santos, Alfonso Prada, "

there can be no winner with deaths and injuries

. Only the middle class that achieved the withdrawal of the tax reform through peaceful protest. Duque has lost governance due to his permanent errors on various fronts. He can recover it with dialogue, with humility and tolerance, with the parties that have criticized him, with the Unemployment Committee, among others. "

Finally, for the analyst Rodrigo Pombo, "the only ones who can gain governance are political leaders who have supported this type of widespread demonstrations.

Whoever dominates the street ends up dominating the public agenda

regardless of whether or not they have the votes."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • FARC

  • Spain

  • France

  • Juan Manuel Santos

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