President Gustavo Petro announced in the framework of the Dialogue with the presidents of Community Action Boards, which took place in Pasto, that “hundreds of young people who were detained in the protests in which excesses were registered in different departments of Colombia, will be released before of the Good Night”.
“They have the right to spend Christmas with their families,” the president said at the public event.
The president compared what happened with the youth of the First Line with what happened during the dictatorship in Chile, when dozens of young people were killed in the stadiums after the death of Allende “in a stadium like this, cold and dark, they killed Víctor Jara and dozens of young people.”
In this sense, he assured that the protest is a democratic right and that the governments that order the killing and torture of young people are not democratic “and this is the government of change,” he said.
For this reason, he assured that the young people detained will be managers of peace, “This government does not side with social youth leaders who only expressed themselves by keeping them imprisoned when they have the right to spend Christmas with their families,” concluded the president.
The strike lasted for nearly two months. and acts of violence were the daily bread of a Colombia that was plunged into fear and violent repression.
According to a report by Indepaz, a total of 1,832 illegal arrests were reported in the context of the protests, the vast majority of them involving young people, including many of them minors.
A total of 75 murders were also reported, of the 44 were allegedly the responsibility of the Public Force, the report portrays.
Following the protests and investigations carried out by the Ministry of Defence, many of the detainees, members of the so-called First Line, were charged with crimes such as conspiracy to commit a crime, assault on a public servant and possession and manufacture of dangerous substances.
Alirio Uribe, representative to the chamber, assured precisely that “In Colombia there are a number of young people who are imprisoned for exercising their rights to social protest, We have created a proposal to create the Accidental Human Rights Commission to guarantee the rights of young people who are unjustly deprived of their liberty”, accurate.
Through a short statement, the then Minister of Defense, Diego Molano, immediately responded to the request made by the joint commission of the government of Gustavo Petro, to free the members of the front line who were captured by the authorities during the national strike demonstrations.
“There were more than 303 captures. There was a prior intelligence and prosecution process, with all the procedures of the Prosecutor’s Office and, of course, of a judge who issued the arrest warrants; the other arrests were in flagrante”, the official sentenced.
However, since President Gustavo Petro took office, they have been working on the possibility that the young people arrested will return to freedom and finally, this Saturday, December 3, the president assured that this will happen before Christmas, although He did not reveal details of whether all the detainees will be released and how the release will be carried out.