Police director is dismissed after misogynistic and homophobic comments

One controversy after another. The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, announced on Twitter on Wednesday, April 12, the dismissal of the director of the Police, General Henry Sanabria, a controversial official whose opinions were criticized as misogynistic and homophobic.

The announcement was made by the president, who on several occasions had come out in defense of Sanabria when he came under public scrutiny for his comments. The leftist thanked him for his “hard work.”

Sanabria was appointed by Petro last August with the aim of reforming the public forces and giving them a more humane approach and preventive security. A welcome change, at the time, by civil society organizations that criticized police action in the 2021 protests, which left at least the 80 dead, according to the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (Indepaz).

But, from the beginning, his religious fanaticism marked his management and he quickly became involved in controversies for his ultra-Catholic messages posted on social networks and his comments in the media.

A fanaticism that, according to the denunciations of members of the public force, transferred to the daily tasks in the Police. Salamanca is a member of the Congregation of the Marianos, an association of the Catholic Church that professes the cult of the Virgin Mary.

Among his first controversies was the order to the agents to start and end the days with Catholic prayers —despite the freedom of worship that has existed in Colombia since 1991, when the current Constitution was signed.

“To be frank, the problem has nothing to do with the fact that they are devotees of the Virgin Mary in a country where there is freedom of religion. Their devotion to the Virgin is logical, justified and accepted, but it should be a cult belonging to its intimate, private orbit,” said journalist María Jimena Duzán in a podcast dedicated to the management of Sanabria.

According to the journalist, within the police institution there was an instruction from Sanabria to include said Catholic prayer also in public acts. “A police force that has to dedicate a good part of the day to prayers and their paraphernalia, can hardly fully carry out their work,” she added.

The controversies of General Sanabria

In September 2022, the dismissed police director declared war on the Halloween parties, popular in Colombia, considering them a “satanic strategy to induce children into the occult.”

In a message on his social networks and citing the book of Corinthians, Sanabria asked Colombian families not to celebrate Halloween. “You cannot drink of the Lord’s cup, and the DEMONS’ cup, you cannot partake of the Lord’s table, and the Demons’ table,” he read in the post.

The director of the Colombian Police generated another controversy when he assured the ‘Weekly magazine’ that within the institution exorcisms are performed to combat crime. “Here in the Police we have done it, of course, with the accompaniment of the military bishopric. Thank God we have a military bishopric, like other police forces, that helps us in this work of fighting evil,” he said.

“That exists and, thanks to the courage of many priests, we have managed to counteract this evil in the Police. For example, the operation against Mono Jojoy. That was exorcism,” he added.

In the same interview, the official rejected the use of condoms, considering it “abortive.”

Another of the controversies that surrounded the police chief was a publication on International Women’s Day. “The charm of a woman makes her husband happy, and if she is sensible, she makes him prosper. A discreet woman is a gift from the Lord; an educated person is priceless. A modest woman is the greatest charm; nothing is worth as much as a person reserved,” he posted on Twitter.

“I wish we could” expel unfaithful agents from the institution, was another of the general’s statements, who assured that “a person who is unfaithful is not a guarantee pledge.” He also referred to the right of women to abort, about which he assured it is “a mortal sin because it threatens life (…) Very strong hatred is generated when abortion is done.”

Sanabria was also criticized when he assured that there are some 12,000 uniformed officers in the institution who have HIV, a statement that linked the LGTBIQ+ community. “Unfortunately, since there are so many of us, there is a large LGBTIQ community in the institution. Suddenly there is no education that allows them to be careful in what they do,” Sanabria said.

In substitution of Sanabria, General William Salamanca will assume, a reserve major general “with more than 37 years of experience in the institution,” Petro said on Twitter.

Salamanca had been on the list of candidates to lead the Colombian Police from the beginning due to its closeness to Petro, it was even part of its transition team with the previous government.

“What happened is that we lost eight months because the person who designed the security strategy was General Salamanca, today appointed director of the Police. And that person, one would believe, did have the experience and knew the discourse of human security. And it turns out that later the president chose an experiment that eight months later did not work out,” political analyst Pedro Viveros told a local channel.

Salamanca is a business administrator and police administrator, with specializations in International Relations and Integral Security. He has a master’s degree in Government and Public Policy from the Externado de Colombia University and Columbia University, in the United States. In addition, he has a master’s degree in Public Security and is a student at the Hemispheric Defense Center in Washington DC, where he has studied the fight against terrorism, crisis management and leadership.

General Yackeline Navarro, second in command of the Police and close to Sanabria, with whom she also shared her religious beliefs, was removed from office.

with EFE