One of the protests against the government of Iván Duque, in Bogotá (Colombia) .Ivan Valencia / AP
The young people of Colombia are in the front line of the protests against the government of Iván Duque that have unleashed confrontations with the public force in the streets. It is those protesters who have cornered the Executive, to the point of forcing it to withdraw the failed tax reform proposal that triggered the mobilizations. It is also the young people who have put the twenty deaths that are counted until this Wednesday, when a week of marches in the framework of the so-called national strike, amid confusing episodes of police brutality that have been condemned by international organizations. .
"They are killing us" is one of the phrases that are repeated the most on the banners of the mobilizations that have occurred in Colombia during Duque's term, which is going through a pronounced popularity crisis.
Before, that slogan referred mainly to the incessant murder of social leaders in remote parts of the country, but now it also includes young people in the cities and the numerous episodes of excessive use of force in the framework of protests.
"I want to study / to change society" is another of the most repeated songs.
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Protesters have taken to the streets despite the country going through the worst moment of the pandemic, a third wave of infections with hospitals near collapse. "There are people dying of hunger, it is not only because of covid ... the worst pandemic is racism," Isamari Quito, a 20-year-old law student linked to organizations of the "black people", told this newspaper in the middle of the first marches. in Bogota. "Basically this is a hunt," says Luna Giraldo Gallego, a university student in the city of Manizales, who has been marching every day since April 28 and has inhaled tear gas from the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad on more than one occasion. the Esmad.
Polls agree that Duque has decidedly lost favor with young people. 74% of those consulted between 18 and 25 years had an unfavorable image of the president in a recent measurement of the firm Cifras y Conceptos. At 44 years old, Duque is the youngest president in recent Colombian history and although he came to power at the age of 42, he has always exhibited, since the campaign itself, his conservative credentials. That paradox has planned throughout his tenure, and has done so, once again, during this week of trouble. Although the Government opened a process of political dialogue in search of a new consensual reform, the mobilization does not abate, and young people are a central component of the cocktail of discontent that surrounds the Executive of the Democratic Center, the government party founded by Álvaro Uribe.The former president has defended that the police and the military have the right to use weapons in protests.
“With whom we must dialogue is with those who are in the streets, who are young people, who for the most part neither study nor work. Young people who feel with pain that they have no future and that they are not being listened to, ”said the mayor of Bogotá, Claudia López, on Wednesday, referring to the difficult process that the national government has started. The night of clashes in the capital left almost a hundred injured. The figures for the entire country are not entirely clear. The week of protests in different cities has left 24 dead, according to the Ombudsman's Office, which has also published a list with dozens of disappeared, while Human Rights Watch has received complaints about 31 deaths in the protests.
"One feels that this Government, despite the fact that it is at the head of the youngest president in history, insists on ideas that are absolutely expired, expired, which are sent to be collected," says Jennifer Pedraza, 25, a student representative of the University National and member of the Unemployment Committee, which groups together the organizations that call the demonstrations. He anticipates that, despite the tax reform being withdrawn, the mobilization will continue to demand that the Executive guarantee the constitutional right to protest and demilitarize the cities. "Going out to march with this government has been a high-risk activity," he laments. The Colombian population in general, and young people in particular, he assures, are expecting a change. “We have been repressive governments for years, with a too orthodox paradigm of the economy.This has not made life easier for current generations but more and more difficult ”. They are united by disenchantment, rejection of the political class and a deep malaise in front of the Government.
In the wave of protests that had already rocked the country at the end of 2019, young people from public and private universities were prominent protagonists. With their collective action, the students “accomplished a titanic task in a country where cynicism and skepticism are the norm: they managed to inspire us,” writes the political scientist and internationalist Sandra Borda in
Parar para Avanza
, her book on the student movement. But the current wave of mobilizations makes a difference. The pandemic and the confinements have contributed to the increase in inequality and have made it more difficult to access education, health and even maintenance, with social outbursts that are very difficult to control.
They are more spontaneous and emotional manifestations, less controlled by organizations –unions or students– and potentially, as has been seen in recent days in cities like Bogotá or Cali, more violent. Many of these young people are not integrated neither in the educational system nor in the labor one. Their families are marginalized, without support networks. “This is a demonstration for survival. They are young people who are much more on the edge, and due to the nature of the neighborhoods they inhabit, they have a fatal relationship with the public force, ”says Borda. The dialogue convened by the Duque Executive presents problems that are difficult to overcome with regard to these young people, including the repression of the security forces. “You cannot summon the people you murder in the street to sit down and talk.There is a huge credibility problem there ”.
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