The faces of the social outbreak in Colombia

1Andrés Sánchez, 28 years old. Go and work. Walk and rummage. He protests as he collects cans, cardboard that he carries in a sack. On one of those cartoons he painted his reason for demonstrating: "for a more equitable country, without discrimination" he wrote with a marker on a piece that he collected in the morning. "I'm here to support the people and I take advantage of the march to search," he says as he walks down the seventh avenue in Bogotá. Sánchez finished high school and was studying the installation of networks in the Sena, a state technical institute, but he "got messed up," he confesses. Now he collects recyclable material that he sells for 3,000 pesos per kilo (less than a dollar) with which he helps his mother at home. “Someday I want to study zoology. My thing is animals ”, says the young man who lives in Las Cruces, a poor neighborhood in the center of Bogotá.where for a month he has finished his march and his work day. IVÁN VALENCIA

2 “I am marching to accompany the students, for a future with better health and education for my children,” says Jessica Preciado, 27, a cleaning worker at a school. She carries eight-month-old Samuel in her arms and places a scarf on the face of Nicolás, her nine-year-old boy. At his side, his mother, Ana Preciado, and in the baby carriage a dozen eggs that they have just been given. At some points of the marches they give food to the protesters. It is the first time she has gone out in a month of demonstrations but she says she wanted to do it sooner. "I'm also marching for better opportunities for me." It's difficult: “Either they don't give you a job because you don't have an education, because you don't have experience or because you're very young. So what does one have to do? Take to the streets to sell to do whatever it takes ”. Fear of violence in the marches? "Not.Social networks are highly censored, the news does not tell things as they are, ”says Preciado. IVÁN VALENCIA

3 “They say that these marches belong to the young but the (old) cuchos are also ours, they belong to everyone,” says Yolanda Rico, a biology teacher at a public school. Covered with a Colombian flag, colored hat and mask, this 52-year-old woman has been marching for a month. It started on April 28 and says it hasn't stopped. “The boys are being massacred, disappearing. That's why I'm here ”, he affirms and lists the list of reasons that he has written on a milk carton, as a lesson on a class board. “We are not asking for welfare or alms, it is not about giving people 160,000 pesos (40 dollars that the Government of Iván Duque gives to the poorest), but about rescuing decent work and that we once again have decent social benefits, that the boys do not finish the study and stay in the air,no options ”. IVÁN VALENCIA

4 “We march because we seek equal rights for all. We have reached a point of no return, we are convinced that we can change the country ”. The one speaking is Ginis, a puppet that has become common at marches in Colombia since 2019. Her voice is provided by Gina León, artist and photographer who went out to march representing the AGarrapata collective. He does it together with Richard Caro, puppeteer and voice of Don Alirio, a peasant from Boyacá who protests for those who cannot leave or are unable to stop working. "From art we want to communicate the boredom of the people by all the public policies and the mismanagement of this Government," says the actor who walks, like many in Colombia, by bicycle. IVÁN VALENCIA

5For Omar Rodríguez, the national strike embodies a paradox: it gives him work. The job that has eluded him as a theater actor during the coronavirus pandemic is presented to him at marches. Represents a worker for a troupe of the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores. “I act as a city worker and through him I denounce that workers have very strict hours and bad wages; but at the same time I am as an actor denouncing that the artists have not had support from the Government ”, he says. At 30 years old, Rodríguez has spent half his life in the world of dance and performing arts on the streets. “Many local dance or theater groups have declined or have failed due to lack of management by cultural entities. We are here to claim decent work, "he says. IVÁN VALENCIA

6 “We believe that health is not a business,” says Marleny Muñoz, a nurse at a hospital in northwestern Bogotá, firmly as she marches alongside the union of health workers to which she belongs. That is his main motivation for taking to the streets in the middle of the third wave of the pandemic in Colombia, a country that has reported more than 400 daily deaths from covid-19 in recent weeks. The moment will never be ideal to demonstrate, Marleny reasons, but "if we all do not put a grain of sand we are not in anything". At 40 she has two daughters and is now a grandmother, since the oldest, a 21-year-old college student, is also a mother. "It is a good example for them, the oldest has not been able to leave because she studies and works, but I represent her," he says.Muñoz has been on the streets steadily this month because he does not trust this government, nor does he believe that it has really given up on the tax and health reforms that the protests have led him to withdraw. He only goes out during the day and with social organizations, he explains. He censors the episodes of vandalism that usually occur at night, although he attributes them to the aggressiveness of the security forces. "If the Esmad or the police do not attack, the young people work well," he says. IVÁN VALENCIAyoung people work well, ”he says. IVÁN VALENCIAyoung people work well, ”he says. IVÁN VALENCIA

7 “I am in this demonstration because it is born to me, I like it, I am happy. And also so that young people have a better future ”, proclaims Luz Nelly Vargas next to the Plaza de Bolívar, the heart of Bogotá. At 75 years of age, he jumps and sings at the top of his lungs the popular “stop to move forward”, the song that comes out of the speakers of the groups of comparsas organized by the labor unions. Wear a mask. He has not yet been vaccinated, but he is not afraid of contagion: "I have been marching for a month, I am not lazy, and thank God, nothing." She worked for many years in a liquor factory, but now she does housework. He marches almost daily with his 52-year-old son René, "encouraging young people." They come from Soacha, a municipality near the capital that has been the scene of protests, riots and the burning of an articulated bus this week."Like it or not, the strike is not going to stop," he says. IVÁN VALENCIA

8Behind a scarlet Mexican wrestling mask, Juan Manuel Cristancho, a 41-year-old theater teacher, eloquently explains that he uses it as a way to build a symbol. “It means the fight. Education is a fight against the different types of poverty: spiritual, economic, social. I am the son of Education, not of inheritance, and that has allowed me to travel to different parts of the world, I think that accessing that is a fundamental right ”. He works in a school in the south of Bogotá, but does not belong to the teachers' unions. "I am not marching just for one cause, I am linked to the multiple causes that are becoming visible at this time," he points out. “It is not a workers' struggle only. It is a struggle of LGBT communities, peasants, truck drivers, young people, feminists.As it is not a march of a single guild, this requires a Tower of Babel in which all those languages ​​that are speaking are heard. The solution is to listen ”. IVÁN VALENCIA