Esmad attacks after 2021: threats drive the family of a victim of ocular violence into exile

Sara Cárdenas was 18 years old. She left home that night to go get ice cream with her mother, Sandra Pérez, in her neighborhood in the town of Suba, in Bogotá. A few hours later, a police attack changed her life forever. It was May 5, 2021 and the National Strike protests were in full swing in Colombia. Tens of thousands of citizens had been demonstrating for weeks against the tax reform of the then right-wing president, Iván Duque. Between the resistance of the protesters and the brutal repression of the Police, areas of numerous cities had become battlefields full of smoke, clashes, vandalism, and tear gas. In Suba there were several points hit by violence. But Sara and her mother had nothing to do with it. They just went for ice cream.

Around 11, as Sandra told the court on May 20, the two women arrived at the Plaza Imperial Shopping Center, a few minutes from her house. It was closed. The surrounding streets, full of protesters. Mother and daughter stopped to observe the scene. “We watched the protests peacefully, we were spectators,” Sandra remembers. Everything became dangerous in a matter of seconds. Sandra says that the participants’ chants were interrupted by devices thrown by the Police. The streets were filled with tear gas. There was smoke and chaos everywhere. Sara and Sandra were scared. They decided to run.

They followed a path to another shopping center, Alpaso Plaza. Somehow they ended up trapped in an alley. They were surrounded by two dental clinics and by clashes between the protesters and the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (ESMAD), the criticized Police force that led the repression of the protests. There was no way out. There was no choice but to wait. “I was paralyzed thinking that the Police were going to persecute the people who were protesting,” says Sandra. But she says it wasn’t like that. “[Tres agentes] “They were standing in front of me,” he continues. The uniformed men, under the command of Mayor Luis Fernando Guavita Moreno, began to insult the two women. “Damn bitch, go to her house and take her dog,” they yelled at her, Sandra told Amnesty International.

At that moment the events began that have Guavita in a criminal trial for three crimes, including attempted murder. One of the police officers pulled out a “long black gun with a wide nozzle,” according to the Prosecutor’s Office accusation against the mayor. He told them to leave. Before they had time to flee, he shot them. Sandra believes the gun was loaded with rubber bullets. Precisely, during the 2019 and 2021 protests, ESMAD police officers used “less lethal ammunition”, but not inane ones. One of them, of a different type, was the one that killed Dilan Cruz in November 2019 and set the country on fire. That night Sandra had 11 impacts on almost her entire body: the eye, the neck, the breast, the rib, the stomach, the vagina, the pelvis. Sara was hurt even worse. She was hit by a bullet in the left eye. She never saw through that eye again.

Due to these events, the Prosecutor’s Office charged Guavita on August 25, 2023. In addition to attempted murder, it accuses him of abuse of authority due to an arbitrary act and personal injury with inability to work. According to the accusing body, the behavior of the police officers led by the mayor caused Sandra to receive a 15-day disability.

A doctor determined that the shot caused Sara a “permanent physical deformity that affects the face and permanent functional disturbance of the organ of vision.” The doctor was right: her aunt Ingrid Pérez tells El PAÍS that a surgeon removed Sara’s left eye in October 2023. She replaced it with a prosthetic. Like her, at least 103 people lost one of their eyes between April and June 2021 during the demonstrations against the Duque Government, according to the NGO Temblores.

The threats

Mother and daughter allege that the police abuse did not end that night, with them covered in blood, lying in the street of Bogotá. It was just the beginning. Seeing that they were seriously injured, several passersby helped them. They put them in a taxi that took them to a nearby medical center. The police did not let them go in peace. Sandra claims that two ESMAD agents, brandishing their weapons, chased them to the clinic, where they finally disappeared. They would appear again and again in the following weeks.

The next day, Sara underwent eye surgery at the Simón Bolívar Hospital. While she recovered, her mother took charge of taking her from medical appointment to medical appointment and filing all possible complaints. “I reported to the Prosecutor’s Office, the Attorney General’s Office, the Comptroller’s Office, the Ombudsman’s Office, the UN, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR),” she said on May 20 before a Military Criminal Justice judge. She also spoke with some of the most important news outlets in Colombia. Given the brutality of the story, the case went viral. According to Sandra, several police officers did not like that.

He says he began receiving threats almost daily. “When I took my daughter to check-ups, to another surgery or to Forensic Medicine, the Police were always present taking photos of us. “He was around our house 24 hours a day,” she recalled in the court proceedings. She also claimed that they constantly called her from private numbers: “If she kept talking they would kill me and leave my mouth full of flies. They said that they already knew that she had a minor daughter and they knew where my house was, that they would rape my minor daughter. That the other daughter would have her other eye removed. That she would keep quiet for me. That she already knows how toads die.”

Scared, she asked the Prosecutor’s Office for protection. A few days later, a police
officer appeared at the door of her house and asked her to sign a document, presumably because he was in charge of providing security. However, Sandra says that she reviewed it and found that the document was not a protection measure against the police, but rather it gave protection for domestic violence. The woman scratched the sheet and expelled the uniformed man from her house. The threats continued.

Almost two months had passed and Sandra was still receiving intimidating messages on social networks: “They insulted us. They called us terrorists, vandals,” she declared before the judge. One night, while she was watching television with her two daughters, she says a laser was pointed at them from the street. They panicked and took cover on the floor. Sandra called the doorman of her building, who told her that there was no one outside her building. A few days later, someone broke the windows in her apartment. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Sandra and her daughters couldn’t take it anymore. They decided to leave Colombia.

The escape

On July 18, 2021, two and a half months after the attack, Sandra, Sara and their younger sister got into a taxi heading to their new life. They allege that a blue car and a motorcycle chased them during the trip to the airport. On the way, they stopped at the house of Ingrid, the girls’ aunt. Sandra left a computer there with all the information on the multiple complaints she had made. Hours later, they were on a plane to Europe, where, after requesting refugee status, they remain today. Ingrid now became the threatened one.

In a telematic interview with this newspaper, she says that she began investigating the case in October of that year. She dedicated herself to collecting videos, testimonies and documents. Two months later, in December, she presented her findings at an event organized by Amnesty International at the Universidad de los Andes, in Bogotá. She claims that when she was leaving, a man stopped her and threatened to kill her: “Silent, she looks prettier. Or does she want to die? Her life was never the same again.

He says he locked himself in his house for months. That she received calls very similar to those made to her sister. That police officers came to her house six times with the pretext of making her sign documents related to the case. That she suffered panic attacks. That she couldn’t stand what he was experiencing. That she was full of fear when, on July 12, 2022, she did the same thing her sister had done a year before: she fled Colombia with her 11-year-old son and asked for help in Europe. Now there were five who had left Colombia due to threats from the Police. They are all still there today. And they want justice to be done.

The cases

At this moment there are two cases open in Justice for what happened to Sara and Sandra. One is in ordinary Justice, already quite advanced. The 52nd Criminal Court of the Bogotá Circuit has accepted the accusation of charges made by the Prosecutor’s Office against Mayor Guavita. The preparatory hearing for the trial was scheduled for April 29, but was postponed to August 22.

The other is in the Military Criminal Justice, and although it is much further behind, the family is concerned about the possibility that it will end up taking precedence between the two. Legal documents reveal that that jurisdiction began the case only on October 6, 2023, when the ordinary Justice had already accused Guavita. According to Ingrid and the lawyer from the legal office of the Universidad de los Andes who represents Sara and Sandra, Diana Mateus, the Military Criminal Justice is moving forward without the victims asking it to do so. Women fear that the goal is to assume jurisdiction and “dismiss the case.” Indeed, according to The viewerOn March 8, Court 186 of Military and Police Criminal Investigation asked the ordinary Justice judge to transfer it to the Military Criminal Court. There is still a preliminary investigation, the first phase of the procedure. Sandra gave her first statements there on May 20.

By video call, Ingrid states that they have been very difficult years, especially for Sara. More than three years after the attack, she continues to go to therapy: “she is trying to understand what it is like to live without an eye and with a prosthesis.” However, she has continued despite everything: she lives alone, has learned a new language and is studying pre-med at university.

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