denounce cremation of protesters in 2021 marches

Crematorium ovens in Bogotá would have been used to make people who participated in the disappearance disappear. the national strike of 2021 in Colombiaaccording to complaints from one of the alleged parties involved, which, however, have been rejected by the authorities.

Sergio Venegas, administrator of the Sur and Serafín cemeteries, located in the south of Bogotá, where the bodies of the protesters were cremated, assured in statements to the magazine Change who bribed officials to obtain the administration contract for the necropolis. According to what he said, a police general would be behind having given the order to cremate the protesters.

The voice of america he tried to contact Venegas without success.

Bogotá councilor Iván Cancino, who once denounced irregularities related to the 2021 marches, believes that the facts must be clarified.

“It is a very serious complaint and it must be investigated and the control entities and the prosecutor’s office must be allowed to operate in the investigation and as soon as possible and expeditiously clarify what happened in judicial and investigative terms,” ​​Cancino told the VOA. “We are not asking to go out and deny this information, what we have to do is clarify this investigation, and the latest thing the mayoress came out yesterday to say that in the framework of the national strike there was not a single disappeared when there were disappearances”.

Faced with these complaints, the mayoress of Bogotá, Claudia López, pointed out that they are fallacies said by the businessman, which at the time were investigated by the corresponding authorities.

“It is false that in Bogotá there have been disappearances during the national strike, it is false, we verified these reports of alleged disappearances with the Prosecutor’s Office, with the ombudsman and the ombudsman, all the alleged reports that came to make cases of alleged 79 disappearances, all 79 were found alive and well by the judicial authorities,” said López, in a press conference delivered on Tuesday.

Daniel Salguero, a young man who participated in the protests and a member of the “front line,” a group of people who confront the public forces in demonstrations to “protect” the protesters, told the VOA that there were disappearances in the framework of the 2021 protests.

“The Temblores organization has carried out a census of 50 people who have not been found in the framework of the social protest. We do not understand how there are so many graves in the framework of the social protest, from March to October 2021 in the cemetery, which are marked as NN”, commented Daniel Salguero.

During its visit to Colombia, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) stated in his final report that the complaints about the disappearances during the 2021 national strike had to be urgently investigated.

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