The Strike Committee breaks negotiations with the Government of Colombia

The president's concession to reform the Police with a focus on the defense of human rights was not enough. Nor that the proposal grants citizens tools to supervise the actions of each agent. The National Strike Committee got up from the table and broke off negotiations with the Government.

The presence of the Army on highways and some cities to restore public order, a resource protected by law, is once again the reason given by the organizers of the prolonged strike that is wreaking serious havoc on the Colombian economy.

The aforementioned Committee demands that Iván Duque “repeal decree 575 that authorizes military assistance for the management of social protest,” indicates one of the sections of the statement issued on Sunday night, early in the morning in Spain.. They also affirm that the Executive “delays the negotiation of the emergency list”, which includes proposals such as granting a minimum monthly salary to the millions of poor families, while counting the victims in the framework of the protests.

But also in the number of deaths there is a great distance with those recognized by the Attorney General's Office and the Ombudsman's Office. While both organizations declared that, as of May 30, there were 20 deaths related to the protests, the Committee assures that there are “77 homicides” of protesters.

Some of those who support the strike include cases such as that of a teenager whose body was found charred after a warehouse fire in Cali. Through social networks they spread that the police had shot him dead and then taken him to that place to make the evidence disappear, but Legal Medicine confirmed that he had not been shot and his death was due to smoke inhalation.

The three-day visit of the IACHR (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights) -between June 8 and 10- will not resolve the differences since, in addition to the short duration of the trip, the report they will produce after meeting with social agents, NGOs , mayors, governors and those who deem it necessary, may only contain recommendations.

Before their arrival in the country, parliamentarians from the Democratic Center visited the international organization in Washington to present their vision of what had happened since April 28, just as opposition senators and Vice President Marta Lucía Ramírez did before in her capacity as a new foreign minister.

Faced with the decision of the strike committee, the Duque government responded by insisting that they maintain the will to negotiate without giving up in their efforts to protect the rights of Colombians who do not want to join the strike. It should be remembered that the Army and the police have cleared more than a thousand barricades that interrupted the passage through the roads, but there are still dozens of blockades.

For Wednesday there are new demonstrations called in Bogotá and other cities despite the fact that Colombia is experiencing the worst health crisis since the Covid began with more than 500 daily deaths. The mayoress of Bogotá herself, from the Green Party, blamed the demonstrations for 25,000 infections.