Dozens of people went to the funeral homes of five young students, three men and two women, aged between 17 and 18, who were killed over the weekend while on a farm in the town of Buga. , in southwestern Colombia.
“Sometimes in Colombia these acts of violence become culture and what we want with this is that in historical memory this does not fade because they are young people and children,” he told Efe today who was its rector at the Liceu de Los Andes, Robinson Lizcano Echeverry.
The victims were Joan Pau Marín Pérez, Nicolás Suárez Valencia, Sara María Rodríguez García, Valentina Arias and Jacobo Pérez, who were on a farm on the path (village) of Cerro Rico, near the town of Buga, when at three o’clock this Sunday morning four armed men arrived, knocked on the door and shot them dead.
Four of them died on the spot and Jacobo Pérez was taken to a care center where he died on Sunday afternoon. The attackers also injured the estate’s butler, Ramiro Martínez, 60, and another under-17, Santiago Tascón.
The reasons for the massacre are unknown at the moment and the first hypothesis of the Public Prosecutor’s Office was that he apparently tried to kidnap the son of the owner of the estate, who is an engineer.
“They realize that they are not going to kidnap this person who they thought was hard and that is where the unfortunate shooting took place,” Cali Security Secretary Carlos Alberto Rojas told Notícies Un on Sunday.
In Buga, located in the department of the Cauca Valley, there is indignation and sadness and the Mayor decreed three days of official mourning while family and friends said masses and tributes to the victims.
Race ahead
The five young people were childhood friends, went to school together and were on the farm, owned by Jacobo’s father, to fire Joan Pau, who was moving to Medellín to study, according to local media.
In the videos they posted that same night on social media they could be seen laughing, celebrating, while inflating floats and playing tossing chips at the frog.
“Nicolau, Jaume, Joan Pau, Sara and Valentina were young people with dreams, with a willingness to work … They were young people who studied, worked hard, with families of professionals who tried every day to make their country so that their children had the best education Lizcano recalled.
Two of them, Nicholas and Jacobo, were sportsmen and represented the school and the municipality in competitions and leagues of hockey on skates; Valentina, the only minor, had just graduated from high school and Sara was starting her second semester of veterinary medicine.
Nicolau, who had just turned 18, recently returned from a study stay in Australia to start mechanical engineering at university, and Jacobo from an exchange in Canada, and was due to start the first semester of this week. ‘civil engineering, like his father.
Companions of Jacobo’s hockey team received his coffin today at Buga Cathedral, wearing sportswear, sticks in the air and heavy gaze on the ground, in honor of his friend.
Against resignation
“I believe that in Colombia so much impunity has reigned that there is a term that is used which is resignation, but we cannot continue to think from resignation,” Lizcano asked, in memory of the youth.
This is the sixth massacre committed so far this year in Colombia, according to the NGO Institute for Peace Development Studies (INDEPAZ).
“This is the sixth massacre and the first month (of 2021) has not yet ended,” said the president of INDEPAZ, Camilo González Posso, who considered it “an alarming situation that has called that from the Council of the “The UN is being asked by the Government to take extraordinary measures.”
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet denounced on December 15 that hundreds of people died last year in Colombia in massacres or as victims of targeted killings, which has been the particular case of social leaders and ex-guerrillas.