Looking for a way out in Colombia

A protester holds a banner during one of the protests against the government of Iván Duque, in Bogotá.LUISA GONZALEZ / Reuters

On the nights of September 9 and 10, 2020, at least 10 people died in the protests that followed the murder of Javier Ordóñez at the hands of the Police in Bogotá. At the same time, no less than 22 buildings of Commands for Immediate Action (CAIs, small neighborhood buildings usually located in parks) of the same Police were burned. Most of the deaths reportedly occurred at the hands of police firearms. On May 4, history almost repeated itself. 16 CAIs vandalized, a disproportionate response, dozens of wounded (several of them policemen, in particular some low-level patrolmen who were inside a CAI while they were setting it on fire from outside); and almost miraculously no one died in a spiral of violence that began to recur.To understand its dynamics and find a way out, it is essential to get out of the logic of deaf dialogue between political elites of different signatures.

Because on this occasion the spiral occurred within the framework of a national strike that has had a large part of urban Colombia mobilized since last April 28. The mobilizations are sustained throughout the country, with a particularly intense social and security crisis in Cali that has alerted the rest of the cities. For this reason, what happened in Bogotá this time deserved much more attention: with what happened between September 9 and 10, it is not even easy to reconstruct a looped story. Now, voices immediately came out condemning the situation, in a range that ranged from "I condemn, but we cannot equate citizen violence with that exercised by the State," to "I condemn and accuse the organizers of the strike of what may happen to it. to the public force ”, passing through the equidistant ones“ I condemn: that is not how they protest, all life is sacred ”.What was striking is that all of them assumed a more or less close link between the situation in Bogotá and the vanguard of the general strike: students, semi-organized unions from different sectors, and elected politicians from the left wing of the spectrum (some of them he even called "peaceful mobilization" as the "only way"). But the strength of that connection is worth questioning.

Segments of the protest

In the week and a half that the strike has been active, a pattern has been repeated: during the day, protests that begin and end more or less peacefully. As night falls, the violence is uncovered. The first thing that stands out is that the profile of the protests is different at all times. And we can understand unemployment as the confluence of three rivers of mobilization in a single stream that does not join, but maintains separate paths. At the forefront are the students, with a poorly defined but ambitious focus on social order reforms and guarantees for protests in relation to the police. Nearby are more or less organized unions and unions, with much more specific objectives ("no to health care reform", "lower our tolls", "no to Uber-like platforms",etc.) but a closer presence and capacity for mobilization within society. And beyond that is the torrent of young people that is activated in neighborhoods and peripheral cities, socially, urbanistically and economically segregated.

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  The keys to a conflict that spreads across the country

The students feel their own grievance with respect to the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (Esmad) of the Police, fueled by clashes and abuse of force by the unit in handling the protests for some time. It is a generation that has been politically socialized in the current and recent revolts, which had the national strike of November 2019 a turning point that would even lead the Supreme Court of Justice to defend the right to protest over police violence. one year later. Within all these protests, a fundamental element of mobilization has been the opposition to Esmad, to the point that its dismantling is for some an inalienable point of the demands.

But an important part of the nocturnal conflicts with more tragic results have been transferred precisely to these segregated areas. And this is where the greatest police lethality is concentrated. It happened in September in Bogotá, and it has happened again now. Of the 24 deaths confirmed by the Ombudsman's Office as of Wednesday, May 5, 17 occurred in Valle del Cauca, all the others being spread throughout the entire national geography. It is in Cali, the capital of the Valley, where we have seen more use of firearms at the hands of the Police. There are also, incidentally, evidence in the form of video of their use at least sporadic and localized by those who confront them. However, media and discursive attention, both in networks and in alternative or traditional platforms, tends to focus on the student segment and, in addition,extrapolates the dynamics that affect this segment as if it were the general strike, when it is not.

The relationship between the three lanes of the protest exists, although it is probably fickle and poorly articulated.

The overlap also: after all, not a few students or members of unions and other groups come from these same neighborhoods.

But understanding the strike in a segmented way and the police reaction to it, even as an approximate model, helps to envision that this claim that the opposition elites to the government can stop it with a single gesture of dialogue is rather illusory.

De-escalation to protect lives becomes, unfortunately, also much more complex.

Not one, but many conversations

In this framework, what would a national dialogue achieve? If your content is specific and meets the demands of the more organized segments, it could deactivate some of the roadblocks that currently remain on various highways throughout Colombia. If its content is broad and ambitious, and if it also includes a purposeful acknowledgment of Esmad's excesses, it could also help to reconcile on that front.

On the other hand, it will not be very effective if it is not articulated with the subnational dimension: there has been a considerable difference between cities and regions in the degree of escalation of violence, or in the capacity of the authorities to achieve that blockades are opened or closed. to the movement of basic supplies or medical missions, undoubtedly the product of the different strategies followed by local and regional governments, as well as their ability to articulate and find interlocutors.

This local dimension, key to de-escalation with these two segments of the protest, becomes even more essential with the third. Here the vision of Jorge Mantilla, an expert conflict researcher, is particularly illuminating. In a conversation, Mantilla underlined the endless infinity of roles usually attributed to the police in Colombia: they are attributed tasks of managing coexistence at ground level. The policeman, the expert illustrates, is the first contact official for any ordinary citizen in the country.

But at the same time the policeman is logically responsible for security in his area. That creates a double incentive for the abuse of a foot of force that, Mantilla remarks, does not have good working conditions or salary. The community turns to them at all times to resolve any issue, and so does the authority to handle security crises.

In this context, the probability for problems to arise between the community, particularly its younger segments, and the police (also particularly young in its base ranks) multiplies. A tragic example was observed on the fourth day in the town of Bosa, south of Bogotá: there a spontaneous protest was mounted around a CAI because news of the rape of a minor at the hands of the policemen who occupied it circulated. The news was false, apparently invented by a citizen as revenge for a fine, but the official clarification was not believed or assumed by the citizens of the neighborhood. The night would end there in severe disturbances.

The Esmad did arrive in Bosa, but on other occasions it has been the rank and file patrolmen who have directly confronted the population. This does not justify (nothing can do it) but it does help to understand why they resort to these firearms, the last but almost the only one available, which of course multiplies the probability of homicide in abuse of force. Here, the trail of the chain of command and decision-making is obscured, activating inadequate resources for handling critical situations that often lead to immediate or delayed escalations of localized violence. Then, the aforementioned chain of command seems incapable of solving them from above, from the organizational, civil, and political authority and minimizing the damage both for the population and for its own agents,of those who have leaked videos these days expressing to their superiors the lack of means to go out and handle the situation in the streets.

This same pattern is reproduced between the public force (especially the Esmad) and the students, by the way: in all cases, the systematic recourse to conflict resolution exclusively through force leads to an “accumulation of grievances” , as International Crisis Group analyst Elizabeth Dickinson notes, it "leaves little room for hope for a short-term resolution."

For all these reasons, a comprehensive reform of the police and its political and organizational actions is urgently needed, for the benefit of both the community and the people who make up the institution at its grassroots levels. It is also essential to follow up on the 46 investigations opened for police abuse during these days: the incentives and sanctions towards the agents should be realigned so that they are as far as possible from the recourse to confrontation.

But before even getting into it, it seems even more urgent to articulate immediate solutions to active entrenchments.

These solutions, which include opening spaces for dialogue to manage accumulated problems, are not scalable, but rather have to be produced almost neighborhood by neighborhood.

The social and institutional infrastructure for this is scarce, according to Mantilla, even in cities like Bogotá where figures such as the coexistence manager already exist.

The lack of articulation of civil society in many neighborhoods (not in others, where there are visible community leaders), further damaged by a pandemic situation, makes consultation difficult: with whom to sit down and talk, even at the local level?

But if you look for those references, they always exist, even if they are implicit, incipient.

Bottom up

All of the above leads us to a dialogue that would be very different from that proposed by both the Government and certain leaders of the opposition, or of the Colombian intelligentsia. Instead of starting by sitting down the national heroes (or unemployment), one should start by sitting in the streets. On May 5, the first “truce” between protesters and police took place in Cali, in a sector that had been particularly conflictive since last week: El Paso del Comercio. It was not resolved in dispatches: it was articulated by the young people in the streets with the rank-and-file patrolmen. In the same way, the partial unblocking of a city that has been without supplies for a week has been achieved thanks to joint efforts at the middle and grassroots level of civil society,with the participation of the authorities in multilateral dialogues that have started at a medium level, not a high level.

What arises here is a conversation that begins below, listening, and that from there must leave items of change at all levels. The neighborhood, the city, the department and, finally, the State, whose work right now in the dialogue should focus on listening and showing empathy rather than on the institutional-elitist aspect of the “Bogota bubble” that it has acquired. It is about giving a local solution to a national problem, at least in its origin or in one of its central vectors. Many de-escalation of violence that have different origins, motivations and actions, to converge in one. And this should go before even defining the specific content of the reforms, before talking about who should resign or remain, if a way forward is really sought that does not leave behind those who are always left behind,and on those who disappear from the spotlight once the elites have their problems temporarily processed.

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