Vanessa Pérez Gordillo * and Raúl García Sánchez **: Erika Prieto: dreams, contagion and repression in Colombia

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olombia has one of the most advanced constitutions in Latin America. Paradoxically, it tops the list of countries that violate human rights. In 2021, according to Indepaz, 162 social leaders and 44 signers of the peace process have been assassinated. When there are no conditions of possibility for the application of the law, words, articles and laws of the legal system land on the reality of dead paper.

The murders of human rights defenders are not the only way to undermine processes of a dignified life in Colombia. The legal field is a quieter tool. The judicial assemblies also interrupt the militant work. The People’s Congress movement suffers it in a rude way; From 2002 until today, the Colombian State has imprisoned more than 150 of our leaderships and maintains more than 400 criminal proceedings in force., denounces in a statement in the framework of another prosecution of the prosecution against one of its leaders: Erika Isabel Prieto Jaime.

We were able to accompany Erika in her social work in Bogotá at the beginning of the pandemic. In the delivery of sanitary material in prisons, defense of informal workers, distribution of food to vulnerable homes or the irregular eviction of hundreds of families in full confinement. Among these tasks, we saw Erika take time to rescue abandoned animals from the street, participate in eternal virtual meetings or accompany the youth of the Blue Shields, the front line during the National Strike. The warmth and human quality that this defender of life gives off is summarized with words like love, tenderness and commitment. But in his case the word contagion applies better. Erika is above all a contagion of joy, dreams and hopes.

On December 10, Human Rights Day, he voluntarily appeared before the Attorney General’s Office to defend his innocence. In statements to the media, this law graduate affirmed Obviously, there is a lot of fear, because I know what the State manuals are, I know the injustice that exists within the criminal law, I know how all this exercise of the powerful in Colombia works, but even so I think what needs to be done It is to show our face, to say that what we have done to transform the lives of the impoverished, we have done in total legitimacy, and that in no way do we have to bow our heads for that.

His prosecution continues these days with a legalization of capture hearing, where it will be decided whether to continue the process in freedom or preventive detention. The usual strategy of the prosecution is to try to imprison the defenders until the trial arrives and there the judge usually acquits them, but if they have been in jail for several years, their lives and their organizational process have been cut short., affirms Luis Mangrané, Spanish lawyer of the European Network of Brotherhood and Solidarity with Colombia.

No one shall be subjected to enforced disappearance, torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishmentsays Article 12 of the Colombian Constitution. The 1991 Magna Carta coincides with the process of modernization of the State in line with the Washington Consensus. The neoliberalization process in Colombia, unlike Chile or Argentina, does not come from the hand of military dictatorships, but rather from a Rule of Law. It puts itself at the service of the free market and the ideology of entrepreneurship by applying the classic package: privatization, deindustrialization, labor flexibility, increased extractivism, strengthening of the financial sector or expansion of the agricultural frontier at the service of the cocaine economy. Colombia cannot be understood without drug trafficking and its links with the State and the financial sector, which are manifested in structures such as paramilitarism, criminal groups created by the State that attack the social movement, protecting the interests of big capital. Politics, counterinsurgency warfare and drug trafficking inject juicy fruits to the financial world. Reality sifted by a Constitution that, combining liberal and social democratic elements, favors consensus and the reproduction of order.

The coexistence of this legal facade with the architecture of violence is a symptom of the resistance capacity of the Colombian people. But also of an announced crisis. The one that is evident today in the structures of the State, subordinated to the interests of the US imperial geopolitics, with at least seven military bases in Colombia.

State and market can try to end popular resistance. Kill her, imprison her, try to nullify her. But the Colombian people will continue to give birth to contagion of dreams like Erika, capable of transmitting the certainty that it is possible to change the current state of affairs, and that we are going to achieve it. In statements to Telesur before being arrested, she expressed: I want to say to the boys who have been prosecuted that the hardest thing about this is feeling defeated, and thinking that because one cries and is sad, that is wrong; that is normal, the abnormal thing is that we were like them, that we did not feel. We feel with all our heart, but that does not mean that we will not win.

* Philosopher

** Journalist