Bogotá (EFE).- The Colombian government will once again talk with the miners from the department of Antioquia, who have been protesting for ten days, when “the acts of violence cease” and the food shortages caused by the demonstrations that have more than of 250,000 people confined in that region of the northwest of the country.
This was stated by the Presidency in a statement in which it stated that the dialogue “will only be reopened once the acts of violence cease, we have normalization in the territory; the shortage is overcome and the population can count on food, medicine and the full functioning of hospitals, schools and child care centers”.
The Ministry of Health requested this Sunday to activate the humanitarian protocols to guarantee the protection of the personnel and equipment of the Medical Mission in the Bajo Cauca region, blocked since March 2 by miners who reject operations against illegal mining.
Concern in Antioquia
The Antioquia authorities denounced on Saturday that two ambulances were burned on a highway, whose occupants managed to get to safety.
“Given the operation and state presence in Bajo Cauca, criminals burned two ambulances tonight (Saturday). As a society we must energetically reject, united, this very serious and cowardly attack against the Medical Mission that serves our people so much. Enough is enough!” The governor of Antioquia, Aníbal Gaviria, wrote on his Twitter account.
According to the Ministry of Health, the demonstrations also affect “the transport of patients in ambulances in the municipality of Cáceres, where six patients later referred to Caucasia were injured.”
Due to their clinical condition, four of these patients require air referral in a pressurized aircraft.
Conditions for trading with miners
In its statement this Sunday, the Government insists that “only in conditions of freedom and full security for the inhabitants (…) is it willing to return to the dialogue table” suspended last Friday due to the lack of commitment of the protesters .
After this, violence increased in the region, for which the Minister of the Interior, Alfonso Prada, assured on social networks that “they are not acts of small unemployed miners” but of criminal gangs, such as the Clan del Golfo, who are supposedly behind the protests.
That same day the authorities began operations to clear the roads affected by the blockades.
The protesters ask for the formalization and recognition of ancestral mining, a plan to eliminate the bureaucracy that prevents mining formalization and respect for the use of machinery and that it is not destroyed by the Public Force.
The Government has said that the first point that must be agreed upon at the dialogue table with the miners is to “jointly reject any act of violence.”
It also conditions the resumption of the dialogue to lift “immediately” the blockades that have caused shortages of food, medicine and gas, in addition to the restriction to access hospitals in the area.
“The Government confirms that this has been, from the beginning, an agreement with the mining strike table,” the information added.
criminal hands
For his part, the governor of Antioquia denounced that the mining strike is being “pressured” by the Clan del Golfo, the largest criminal gang in the country.
Gaviria said that the miners’ protest is a “retaliation” by illegal groups for the burning on March 1 of five dredges by the Army and the Police.
In this regard, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said in a Twitter message that those who attacked the ambulances “received money from the Clan del Golfo to do harm and pass off this violence as a social strike” with which they “harm their own people and his family”.