Colombian President Ivan Duque announced he was deploying military troops to the city of Cali as international alarm grows over the policing of deadly anti-government protests across the country in recent weeks.
Friday marked a whole month of nationwide protests, which began over a proposed tax increase but have since morphed into a broader anti-establishment mobilization.
Three people died during protests in Cali on Friday, authorities said, bringing the officially reported toll over weeks of unrest to 49, two of them police officers.
After chairing a security meeting in the city, Duque announced: “the maximum deployment of military assistance to the national police” would begin immediately.
The latest deaths occurred in clashes between “those blocking and those trying to get through” a barricade, Cali Mayor Jorge Ivan Ospina said in a video posted to social media.
A Cali prosecutor’s office representative said an off-duty investigator had shot at the crowd, killing a civilian, before being lynched by protesters. Video footage showed a man lying in a pool of blood and another nearby wielding a gun, then attacked by a group of people.
During clashes in Madrid, anti-government protesters take cover from a police water cannon on the outskirts of Bogota, Colombia.
AP
Ospina said he regretted what he described as an “insane situation of death and pain.”
“We cannot allow these circumstances to keep happening in Cali. We must not fall into the temptation of violence and death,” he added. Human Rights Watch, which puts the death toll higher than the official one, at 63, said the situation in the city of 2.2 million was “very serious.”
Jose Miguel Vivanco, the rights group’s America’s executive director, urged Duque to take “urgent measures to de-escalate, including a specific order prohibiting agents of the state from using firearms.”
“Colombia can’t mourn any more deaths,” his tweet concluded. About 2,000 people have been reported injured, and more than 100 people reported missing due to the unrest.
Right to protest peacefully.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Colombia’s Vice President Marta Lucia Ramirez in Washington on Friday. The US diplomat “expressed his concern and condolences for the loss of life during recent protests in Colombia and reiterated the unquestionable right of citizens to protest peacefully,” according to spokesman Ned Price. Blinken also “welcomed the national dialogue President Duque has convened as an opportunity for the Colombian people to work together to construct a peaceful, prosperous future.”
But two weeks of negotiations to end the unrest have yet to bear fruit.
To move forward, protest leaders insist the government must acknowledge abuses by the police and armed forces. But Bogota, while conceding individual bad apples, claims leftist guerrillas and dissident FARC fighters have infiltrated the demonstrations to foment violence and vandalism.
