Dozens of people took part in the awakening on Monday of the 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 city 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 falter because they are young and children,” the former rector of EFE told EFE today. Los Andes High School, Robinson Lizcano Echeverry.
The victims were Juan Pablo Marín Pérez, Nicolás Suárez Valencia, Sara María Rodríguez García, Valentina Arias and Jacobo Pérez, who were on a farm in the village of Cerro Rico, near the town of Buga, when at three o’clock in the morning on Sunday, four men arrived. armed, they knocked on the door and shot them.
Four of them died on the spot and Jacobo Pérez was transferred to a health center where he died on Sunday afternoon. The attackers also injured the farm’s butler, Ramiro Martínez, aged 60, and another under 17, Santiago Tascón.
So far, the reasons for the massacre are unknown, and the first hypothesis of the Prosecutor’s Office was that it seems that they tried to kidnap the son of the owner of the farm, who is an engineer.
“They realize that they are not capable of kidnapping this person they were thinking of taking and that is where the unfortunate shooting incident took place,” Cali security secretary Carlos Alberto Rojas told Noticias Uno on Sunday.
In Buga, located in the department of Valle del Cauca, indignation and sadness reign, and the mayor’s office decreed three days of official mourning while family and friends celebrated liturgies and victims.
Career ahead
The five young men were childhood friends, went to school together and were on the farm, owned by Jacobo’s father, to say goodbye to Juan Pablo, who was to move to Medellín to study, according to local media.
In the videos posted the same night on social networks, they could be seen laughing, celebrating, while they were floating and playing and throwing chips at the frog.
“Nicolás, Jacobo, Juan Pablo, Sara and Valentina were young people with dreams, with the desire to work … They were young people who studied, made efforts, with families of professionals who every day tried to make a country like this so that their children had the best education, ”Lizcano recalled.
Two of them, Nicolás and Jacobo, were athletes and represented the school and the municipality in roller hockey competitions and leagues; Valentina, the only minor, had just graduated from high school, and Sara was beginning her second semester of veterinary medicine.
Nicolás, 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 had to start his first semester of civil engineering this week as his father. .
The teammates of Jacobo’s hockey team received their coffin today in Buga Cathedral, with sports clothes, strong sticks and heavy eyes on the ground, in homage to their friend.
Against resignation
“I think impunity has reigned in Colombia so much that there is a term used which is resignation, but we cannot continue to think about resignation,” Lizcano asked in the youth’s memoir.
This is the sixth massacre committed so far in Colombia, according to the NGO Institute for Peace Development Studies (Indepaz).
“This is the sixth massacre and the first month (since 2021) is not over yet,” said Indepaz President Camilo González Posso, who considered it “an alarming situation that called on the UN Council to call on the government to take extraordinary action.” .
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet denounced on December 15 that hundreds of people died in Colombia last year in massacres or as victims of selective killings, which was especially the case for social leaders and ex-guerrillas. .