Statement regarding the serious situation in Colombia
Today our Abya Yala bleeds again.
We hereby declare the following, in light of the suffering of our Colombian sisters and brothers who today are enduring one of the worst repressions seen in recent decades in our land.
El CLACSO Working Group on Participatory Processes and Methodologies expresses its solidarity and fraternity with the Colombian people in struggle, in the face of the neoliberal measures imposed by the government of Iván Duque, measures that threaten Good Living and its essential basic elements.
Faced with this situation, the Colombian people have taken to the streets, raising their voices and forcefully declaring that the current measures are not the way forward. Thus, young people, women, children, university students, and citizens in general have come together in the streets to fight.
In response to this popular mobilization, the government has unleashed brutal repression by its armed forces, with at least thirty deaths to date, multiple police abuses, arbitrary arrests, sexual violence, censorship, and other atrocities.
In addition to the above, there is censorship on social media and internet outages in areas where the state crackdown has occurred, preventing people from filing reports at the exact moment of the violation. Not to mention the shortages in major cities. These are worrying elements because they signal the materialization of the threat of a State of Emergency, which would grant the president the power to issue legislative decrees, potentially allowing for even greater authoritarianism than has been practiced so far.
Therefore, we condemn these actions in the strongest possible terms. Nothing can supersede the life of any person in our land, and nothing supersedes the right to protest, an essential part of being human. We reject all forms of abuse—physical, psychological, and sexual—against our brothers and sisters, which violate their fundamental rights and do nothing to help find a solution to the current conflict.
As a Working Group, academics, social activists, and above all, Latin American and Ibero-American brothers and sisters, we echo and join the international community's condemnation of all violations of fundamental rights that the Colombian people repeatedly suffer today.
We urgently call upon the peoples and governments of the region, and international solidarity, to demand a democratic solution to the crisis, and that all forms of violence against the people be immediately stopped.
May 7th 2021
CLACSO Working Group
Participatory processes and methodologies
This statement expresses the position of the Working Group Participatory processes and methodologies and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.
