Article by PBI-Canada

On April 10, El Espectador reported: “Last Friday, April 9, in the midst of the victims’ national day, lawyers representing the fatal and injured victims of the chaos that broke out in Bogota on September 9, 2020, received news that they were waiting for months ago.”

At least thirteen people died and hundreds wounded while protesting in Bogotá and the satellite city of Soacha following the police killing of Javier Ordonez on September 7.

The death of Ordonez evoked memories of the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota given police pinned him to the ground with their knees as he cried “please, no more” and “I’m choking” in a video widely circulated on social media.

The article continues: “The investigating firm notified the lawyers that the processes were reassigned to prosecutors of the Directorate against Human Rights Violations.”

“In the words of lawyer Germán Romero of dhColombia, one of the organizations representing the victims of that night, ‘the request that a single specialized prosecutor, and hopefully of the human rights directorate, be aware of all investigations into arbitrary executions and attempted murders that occurred on September 9 last year has been made since December.’”

“While it took four months for the answer to arrive, Romero said, ‘we see it important, relevant because a single prosecutor who has experience in crimes committed by Public Force agents can know in-depth the evidentiary details.’”

“Specifically, lawyer Romero added, a human rights prosecutor can ‘do a cross-cutting analysis of what happened that day, in context, and not isolated investigations of prosecutors who did not have the possibility of confluenceing on their peer analyses.’”

The full article in El Espectador can be read here.

On April 9, dhColombia tweeted: “Never forget, the Massacre of September 9, 2020 was a massacre committed by the State at the hands of the Colombian Police.” PBI-Colombia accompanied dhColombia that day (April 9) at a protest in front of the Consulate of the European Union in Bogota that called on the international community to speak out against police violence in Colombia.

PBI-Colombia has been accompanying the Associated Network of Human Rights Defenders (dhColombia) since its founding in 2016.