Ecologistas en Acción has opened an internal investigation after learning that a court in Arganda del Rey is investigating a complaint of sexual assault against one of its founders and active member of the organization, Santiago Martín Barajas.
elDiario.es has compiled the testimony of three women, one of them the complainant, who recount different episodes with the activist and has agreed to the complaint, a medical report and some of the summonses that the court has already sent to several people to the next few weeks. Ecologists have asked Martín Barajas to leave the organization while the investigation lasts. Although he currently has no position, he is one of its most powerful and influential members.
The coordinator of the Organization of Ecologists in Action, Carmen Duce, assures that they were not aware of any case and that on Thursday morning they decided to open an investigation, as established in their protocol against sexual and workplace harassment, to find out what had happened. happened. Soon, he assures, they will send a communication to the staff and also to the volunteer staff to communicate the existence of these mechanisms and the launch of the investigation to try to reach possible victims.
Later, the organization issued a statement in which it stated that although “late in the afternoon elDiario.es informed us of the next publication of the article, until this morning we have not learned the details of it. Nor had we had prior knowledge of the complaint or its status.”
They also add that, in their internal investigation, they will have “external and expert help, in order to avoid possible biases derived from our personal relationships, in an extremely delicate and painful issue, and given the seriousness of the events that are reported.” “Our intention is to clarify what happened, collaborate with the police investigation and take the necessary measures,” they explain.
An investigative commission
Duce confirms that there are already some people assigned to lead the internal investigation. According to the Ecologistas protocol, this investigative commission must be made up of a person from the confederal secretariat, one from the legal area, one from the ecofeminism area and a worker. “We have also considered looking for an expert person who is completely outside the organization and with experience in these situations to have an external view, to see why it has not been detected or acted upon before,” explains Duce.
The decision comes after learning that a court in Arganda del Rey is investigating the complaint of sexual assault filed by a woman against Santiago Martín Barajas, whom she has summoned to testify on October 30. The reported events occurred at the end of July and reached the courts in two ways. Firstly, due to an injury report that the doctor from a health center sent after the woman, with the initials MGF, came with an anxiety attack and told her what had happened. Later, she herself filed a complaint in which she detailed the events, provided the contacts of several people to whom she told what happened immediately afterwards, and included the names and contacts of two other women who claim to have experienced inappropriate behavior on the part of Martín Barajas, who was the first general coordinator of Ecologistas en Acción in 1989.
The complainant did not previously know these women, who to this day have not reported the events, but rather it was one of the friends to whom she told what happened who put her in contact with one of them: she is a worker at Ecologists in Action that recounts various episodes that occurred over almost two decades.
Contacted by elDiario.es, Santiago Martín Barajas denies all the facts, which he assures are “completely false.” The environmentalist claims that this is a “hunt” against him for his activism, and mentions other recent “attacks”, such as the publication on social networks of a video with some of his “distorted” statements.
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