The Colombian Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into the events that forced this Saturday the security team of Francia Márquez, candidate for the Vice Presidency and second of the left-wing candidate Gustavo Petro, to take her down from the stage during a campaign closing ceremony in Bogotá.
On Saturday, during an act in a central square in Bogotá for the Day of Afro-Colombianity, Márquez, a lawyer and a well-known Afro-Colombian environmental activist, had to be escorted off the stage after a green laser coming from a building hit her. pointed at his face while he was giving his speech.
Márquez held a big event in the capital, at the ‘Fiesta del Vivir Sabroso’, where she made reference to “nobodies” like her: “political history always told us that politics was not for us, the nobodies and nobodies of Colombia, that politics was not for blacks, for indigenous people, for peasants,” he said.
“Today we have the historical responsibility to assume this moment, and to get involved in politics to bequeath to our sons and daughters, our grandchildren, a different Colombia, a different nation that recognizes our diversity,” he assured minutes before his escorts , with bulletproof shields, had to stand in front of her and take her down from the stage, while she continued addressing her audience, shouting “They will not pass!”.
Márquez, who was the Goldman Prize (the Nobel Prize for the Environment) in 2018, has already denounced several threats to “exterminate” her during the campaign, with pamphlets from the paramilitary organization Águilas Negras, and she herself was the victim of an attack in 2019 when she was in a preparatory meeting for talks between indigenous people and the government and was attacked with weapons and grenades.
The Prosecutor’s Office has also reported that it has opened an investigation and “advances urgent actions regarding the alleged threats made against several journalists in the country, in the sense of silencing their microphones after the May 29 elections.”
The first electoral round in Colombia to elect Iván Duque’s successor will take place next Sunday, with Petro as the main favorite, but the election will surely have to be played in a second round, on June 19, against the right-wing candidate Federico ‘Fico’ Gutiérrez or the populist Rodolfo Hernández.
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