Statement regarding the recent events in Colombia

Here, rage and orchids grow side by side.
You have no idea what a country is.
Like an old preserved animal
In the most varied alcohols,
You have no idea what it's like to live
Between moons of yesterday, the dead and spoils
Juan Manuel Rocas

From the CLACSO Working Group on Popular Education and Critical Pedagogies We endorse the statement from our colleagues in Colombia regarding the recent events in that country. 

Many of us in the Colombian section of the Working Group are young people, involved in grassroots organizing and working in popular education in our neighborhoods and various institutions. We want to tell you that for over a month now, in Colombia, we have been waking up to bloodshed, saying goodbye to our comrades, and listening to mothers asking why their sons and daughters are dying. We don't have enough fingers or toes to count all the death, all the brutality that overwhelms us, but which, at the same time, compels us to continue fighting from our different spaces.

In Colombia, after the signing of the peace agreement, political violence is resurfacing in gruesome and abrupt forms: targeted assassinations, massacres, disappearances, relentless threats, and constant displacement. This stark violence wounds and tears at our very core. Capitalism, as a system of multiple forms of domination, employs various oppression mechanisms where class, gender, ethnicity, nature, and life itself are subjected to constant alienation, plunder, and dispossession. Young people, as a sociopolitical category and subject, bear a particular burden, where the surplus value granted by the political and institutional order is not exempt from the appetite of capital and the adult-centric, patriarchal, heteronormative, and homogenizing regime that constitutes it.

July, August, and September awaken us to pages stained with blood, reflecting the desolate panorama that has plagued us for so many years. A conception of youth as limited, solely suited for intervention and control, as mere objects of study, passive, has been discursively constructed. But when they rise up to claim what is rightfully theirs, intervening in spaces, symbols, and meanings, they become the internal enemy, "troublemakers," "rebels," and "disobedient," and from this position, their silencing and elimination have been justified, all in the name of defending security and order.

These times greet us by turning off lights, burying seeds that will surely continue to bloom, because in our territories where they left their footprints and projects, hundreds of young people mourn their absence, but we also water their seeds of hope, as Víctor Jara sang to us.Come with me, come, to the heart of the earth we will germinate with it.

We are aware that these events are not new in our country, but motivated by a desire to not silence the violent acts that have marked our history, and with the intention of not normalizing cruelty and brutality, silencing, precarity, disappearances, and murder as forms of control, as well as the stigmatization of young people, portraying them as criminals rather than agents of change, we continue to gather to demand the dignified life we ​​all deserve, to preserve historical memory, and to keep alive the flames and the blossoming fields of our comrades who are no longer with us. 

For a Colombia that continues to suffer despite years of struggle; the youth of this country continue to gather, uniting words and actions against this criminal state that wants to make us disappear, torture us, massacre us, and eliminate us. For the many deaths and the many more lives that we believe must be respected, not only human life but also championed in its fullest expression.

These past few weeks, we have come together every day to continue resisting, to stop the elimination of young people, to stop the extermination of the world's citizens. We have mobilized in the cities demanding respect for life, and it is our voice that has risen and will continue to rise to make ourselves heard and shout in unison, NO MORE WAR AGAINST YOUTH. 

We demand that the State assume responsibility for clarifying each of the murders and massacres perpetrated against young people.

We support the repertoires of political action being carried out by collectives, organizations and the national movement of victims and human rights in defense of life and freedom of expression.

We require that conditions of protection and care be created for our Colombian youth.

We call upon neighborhood, urban and rural communities to remain vigilant, participate and contribute to building a national project where peace, democracy, justice and the affirmation of human rights are the horizon towards which we work in solidarity and responsibility.

11th September 2020
CLACSO Working Group
Popular education and critical pedagogies

This statement expresses the position of the Working Group Popular education and critical pedagogies and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.