Two police officers reduce the lawyer Javier Ordóñez at dawn on September 9 in western Bogotá.
Juan Camilo Lloreda Cubillos, one of the two patrolmen implicated last September in the murder of lawyer Javier Ordóñez in police custody in Bogotá, an episode of brutality that triggered a wave of protests against the public force, has accepted his responsibility in an agreement with the Colombian Prosecutor's Office.
The former police officer will be formally sentenced to 20 years in prison later this month.
“Lloreda Cubillos admitted the crimes of aggravated homicide and aggravated torture, and will collaborate with the full clarification of what happened.
Additionally, he promised to carry out a public act of forgiveness aimed at the victims as a component of reparation and a show of repentance, ”the Prosecutor's Office reported on Tuesday.
His partner, Harvy Damián Rodríguez Díaz, did not reach an agreement, is exposed to a more severe penalty and will face a criminal trial for the same crimes of aggravated murder and torture.
The images of the moment in which the police officers repeatedly unload their
taser
pistols
at Ordóñez in the early morning of September 9 in Bogotá flooded social networks and shocked Colombia.
In the video, it is observed how the patrollers kneel on top of the engineer and lawyer, father of two children, similar to the episode of the death of George Floyd in the United States.
Several witnesses recorded the scene for more than two interminable minutes, in which Ordóñez's pleas for them to stop are heard.
"I'm drowning," he warns, agitated in the midst of the electroshock.
"He is telling them that, please, we are recording them," these witnesses warn the patrolmen, who did not stop until more uniformed men arrived to take him to a nearby CAI where.
There he was beaten and died before reaching a clinic.
His death unleashed public anger, which resulted in two chaotic days of protests, riots and police repression that resulted in the death of 13 civilians in the Colombian capital and the neighboring municipality of Soacha.
The CAI, that kind of small police stations, became the main target of the protesters.
In the framework of the protests, the Government of Iván Duque defended the police as an institution, denounced the alleged infiltration of criminal organizations and argued that responsibility for the crimes perpetrated by soldiers on the nights of September 9 and 10 should be individualized.
The president even visited a CAI at the time and posed with a police jacket in some photographs that earned him an avalanche of criticism for ignoring the victims of the brutality of the public force.
The excessive use of force and police abuses have been firmly established in the public debate in Colombia since the wave of demonstrations against the Duque government at the end of 2019, before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.
During these massive protests, a shot from the Police Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (Esmad) killed Dilan Cruz, a young protester who became a symbol, during a peaceful march in the center of Bogotá.
The image of the security forces has been cracked amid the clamor for reforms in police and military training.
Although social protest has been deactivated in the last year by confinement measures, reports of police abuse have been frequent even in the midst of the pandemic.
