“He did what our justice will never do”: People’s Court of Siloam

In siloeda popular district of the city of Cali, 14 magistrates from Argentina, the United States, Portugal, Cuba, Mexico, Spain, Germany, Ecuador and Bolivia were interested in more than 160 victims that police violence left behind during the social outbreak of April and May 2021.

On the 28th, a month after the start of the national strikeUnits of the police, Esmad, Goes, Sijín and the army set up armed and with tanks in the roundabout, diagonally from the south-west fire station, to attack the demonstrators .

This act and other acts of excessive violence, ordered by the central government (at the head of ivan duke), caused the death of 16 young people – including two minors – 48 injured by firearms, 73 people arbitrarily detained and 74 victims of cruel and inhuman treatment.

Given the short and lazy progress of the Colombian judiciary to resolve the complaints of the community of Siloé, a people’s court. His verdict, announced on February 20 of 2023, it designates as responsible those who “should have acted with the necessary prudence and diligence so that these events did not occur”, but, on the contrary, “they are responsible for the action in fact”. The members of the public force who have been identified, by virtue of their condition of command and their quality of guarantors, as the main persons responsible for the events.

For a year they collected testimonies, press clippings, written evidence and videos with which they tried to clarify the allegations in human rights violations.

Abelardo Arandafather of one of the young people who did not return home after going out to demonstrate, underlined that with this exercise “the important thing was to defend life and to remember for these young people, it is something symbolic, of us, of the city. In one year, we gathered all the information on the cases and the magistrates studied them and gave their verdict. The union of all these families and people who were injured, who have lost their sight, who cannot walk or who are in a wheelchair (because of the shooting), we all articulate, we meet, we cry, we laugh, but we seek to find new meanings in life and the memory of these boys”, in an interview for The viewer.

The verdict points to the then president as responsible; to your Minister of Defense and current candidate for mayor of Bogotá, Diego Molano; to the former commander of the army, general Eduardo Zapateiro; the attorney general, Francisco Barbosa; the mayor of Cali, Jorge Iván Ospina, and the governor of Valle del Cauca, Clara Luz Roldán.

The members of the Police and the Army who that day committed Crimes against humanity they would have acted under their orders, with similar actions in other regions of Cali, Buga, Yumbo and Popayán.

However, Italy Perezmother of Michael Andrés Aranda Perez, pointed out that, although those of the “national government were invited to this event, they did not arrive. The sentence that is handed down today is something we already know and that is that the state acted inappropriately. My son was like many young people who wanted change and not vandals, as they ended up cataloging them”, in dialogue with the EFE agency.

Although there is a verdict, it is not binding on the macro case the prosecutor’s office is advancing; Despite this, people’s courts that tried crimes such as those of the Vietnam War or the dictatorships in Latin America contributed to the truthTherefore, according to activist Berenice Celeita for El Espectador, in the best case “what follows is that all the documents in support of the conviction are incorporated into the investigation carried out by the Office of the Prosecutor, the Inter-American Commission of human rights of human rights and other national and international organizations”.

At worst; however, “The court has done what our Colombian justice will never do, but it remains a precedent so that there will never be impunity again,” he told EFE. Omaira Ceronmother of another of the murdered youths.