Facundo Molares Schoenfeld, former member of the Farc, photojournalist and member of the Popular Rebellion group, died of cardiorespiratory arrest after being arrested after a confrontation with police officers when he was participating in a demonstration at the Obelisk in Buenos Aires.
(You can consult: The ‘Argentino’, ex-FARC captured in Bolivia, fell for a photo).
“We were finishing the act and losing concentration. The police came in to evict us. There they detained a compañero. When they detain a compañero we are going to get him out and they all come to repress us. In that situation, they detain four more compañeros and Facundo Molares who decompensates” , denounced the referent of the Fogoneros group Luciano Lupi to the Télam agency.
From the Buenos Aires security forces they reported that “they wanted to set fire to an urn. They were not allowed and they began to attack.” While, the Ministry of Health reported, an hour later, that the man “died of cardiac arrest.”
“For more than half an hour, resuscitation maneuvers were carried out, until death was confirmed” and he maintained that “the causes of death are related to cardiac arrest resulting from risk factors.”
The ‘Argentine of the FARC’
The 47-year-old man had started his life as a militant in the mid-1990s and, after the 2001 crisis, emigrated to Colombia, where he joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). It was his passage through the South American country that marked him and even led him to be imprisoned in Argentina until July of last year.
(In context: In Argentina, they capture a dissident of the Farc of the ‘Second Marquetalia’).
From the Ezeiza prison, while awaiting the resolution of the extradition trial, the photojournalist said in an interview with Revista Crítica: “I am currently detained in the Ezeiza first prison unit. I am a social fighter. From a very young age I embraced the ideas of solidarity and the progress of society”.
“In my youth, I was a member of the FARC guerrilla ranks in Colombia. I am accused of kidnapping a Colombian councilor. Kidnapping in which I did not participate, but that I was in the release of that councilor, which was public knowledge for appearing in a number of media worldwide,” explained Molares Schoenfeld.
The photojournalist added to his defense: “In 2017 the Dialogues for Peace between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla concluded with the signing of an agreement. I am part of the signatories of that agreement and that is what determines my return to the country, my return to Argentina”.
“From a very young age I embraced social solidarity, international solidarity, because there is no human being in the world that is foreign to us. In that, the revolutionaries, the communists, the Christians, we have the same origin and we have the same: conviction that ‘there is no suffering in the world committed or against a human being that does not touch us as individuals or as peoples’”, he explained about his militancy.
(Expand here: Who is the ‘Argentino’, ex-FARC captured after protests in Bolivia?).
His fight did not end in Argentina and Colombia, he also traveled to Bolivia in 2019, when the government of Evo Morales left.. Upon arriving in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, while working as a photojournalist, he was injured while covering a confrontation in Montero.
There he was shot three times. About that fact he remembered critical magazine: “I was about to die, 23 days in an induced coma, and the doctors who saved me ended up in prison. I lost almost all the vision in my right eye and I have a heart problem from the bullets from the coup plotters. I ended up imprisoned for 13 months accused of being a terrorist in Chonchocoro, the maximum security prison, almost 5,000 meters above sea level in the Altiplano. I got sick twice with Covid-19, I slept for months sitting against the wall.
The release and return to Argentina came at the end of 2020. Less than a year later, on November 7, 2021, Molares Schoenfeld was arrested in the Chubut town of Trevelin, based on an international arrest warrant issued by the Colombian extradition order. Two months later, on January 7, 2022, Molares appeared before the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) of Colombia to request amnesty, which arrived in July of last year.
(Read: The story of an Argentine who was a member of the Farc and will be extradited to Colombia).
The Nation / Argentina (GDA)
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