From Colombia to U.S.

, Police Violence Pushes Protests Into Mass

Movements – The New York Times
In Colombia, and many other countries, security forces’ attacks on protesters have led to
nationwide reckonings with injustice.

When the history of this global moment is written, there will need to be an entire chapter
on police forces’ spectacular own goals as force for change.

Around the world, the police have cracked down violently on protests — only to discover
that their attacks, captured on camera and shared across social and conventional media,
have been the catalyst that helped turn issue-based campaigns into mass movements.

Movements like Black Lives Matter in the United States, the 2019 uprising in Chile that led
to a new constitution, and, now, Colombia’s protests grew out of political wounds unique
to each society. But each was transformed into a broad, potentially generation-defining
cause once protesters were confronted with police violence.

Police attacks can cause people to reconsider their assumptions about whether they can
trust their government, or the health of their democracy, said Yanilda González, a Harvard
Kennedy School political scientist who studies policing, state violence and citizenship in
the Americas.
“It allows that first contact of, ‘Oh, what people have been saying is true. The police do
seem to act in these arbitrary and violent ways, unprompted, unprovoked, without
justification,’” she said.

That realization can lead to national reckonings.

“Police violence is a constant as a spark that can trigger protest movements,” said Omar
Wasow, a Princeton University political scientist who studies protests, race and politics.
“And it is a fuel that can sustain them.”

‘Any kind of dissent makes us targets’

The uprising in Colombia began on April 28 as a protest against tax reforms that were
proposed to fill a budget gap that had worsened during the pandemic. They quickly
became a vent for public anger at inequality and poverty, longstanding problems that had
become sharply worse during the pandemic.

Then videos of police attacking protesters went viral, and the protests became a much
broader movement.

Videos circulated of a young man dying after being shot, and then later of his distraught
mother, outside the hospital, screaming to her dead son that she wanted to go with him.
Another clip appeared to show a police officer shooting a youth who had kicked his
motorcycle. Others captured blood-soaked bodies lying on the ground, and panicked
protesters screaming that they were going to be killed.

The reports of police abuses fueled more protests, but police crackdowns continued,
which in turn generated more images and reports of assaults. Each time that cycle
repeated, it gathered more energy, bringing more people to the streets.

Pulling the abuse into view

There are clear parallels in other mass movements, experts say.

When the civil rights movement marched on Selma, Ala., in 1965, its leaders knew that the
police would respond with violence, Dr. Wasow said. But they hoped that bringing that
violence into view of television cameras, and by extension to white Americans outside the
south, would call attention to the reality of life in the segregated south.

“Sheriff Clark had been beating Black heads in the back of the jail for years, and we’re only
saying to him that if he still wants to beat heads, he’ll have to do it on Main Street, at
noon, in front of CBS, NBC, and ABC television cameras,” Rev. Andrew Young, a civil-rights
leader who was arrested at the march, said in a 1965 interview.

When television stations around the country aired footage of police attacking the
nonviolent marchers, including women and children, “Bloody Sunday” became a pivotal
moment in the civil rights movement.

The civil rights movement’s contemporary incarnation, Black Lives Matter, first gained
national attention in 2014 in Ferguson, Mo., when the police used tear gas, armored
vehicles and sonic weapons against people who had gathered to protest a white police
officer’s killing of Michael Brown, a Black teen.

‘This is not the country we want’

In Colombia, the violence against protesters, and the heavy militarization of the streets in
cities like Bogotá, has likewise sent a message that the country’s democratic project is not
just unfinished, but is perhaps in jeopardy.

The 2016 peace agreement was supposed to end the armed conflict between the
government and the FARC. But the actions of the state security forces over the past two
weeks have many questioning whether peacetime democracy ever began at all.

“I think that the story of this country is about the armed conflict,” said Erika Rodríguez
Gómez, 30, a lawyer and feminist activist from Bogotá. “We signed a peace agreement in
2016. And maybe at that moment we felt like, OK, we are going to move on.”
“But actually we have all of the military forces on the streets. And we have these attacks
against us, the civil society,” she said. “So we think now that actually, they were never
gone.”

It is too soon to say whether the protests will lead to lasting change. The attacks on
protesters have made state violence visible to more people, said Dr. González, the
Harvard researcher, but she believes that they are still considering it through the lens of
“their usual scripts about understanding society, and understanding the police, and
understanding everything. So it hasn’t quite come to the point of people converging.”

But Leydy Diossa-Jimenez, a Colombian researcher and Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the
University of California, Los Angeles, said that she sees this moment as a turning point for
change across generations. “Gen Z, they are now rethinking their country, and thinking
about what has been left by prior generations,” she said in an interview. “They are saying
‘No, this is not what we want.’ ”

“And I think for the first time now, the older generations in Colombia are allying with that
idea, that this is not the country we want,” she said.

“I don’t know if the politicians are up to the challenge, and up to the historical moment,”
she added. “I just hope they are.”