The student community of the University of Valle, the most important of the Colombian Southwest, announced cessation of indefinite activities and declared emergency for gender violence. This decision was made in an assembly on Thursday after the feminicide registered on the campus on May 8, when Sirley López and María José Barrero, two students, were injured after an alumnus opened fire against one of them inside the campus. Days after the attack, López died, and Barrero is still hospitalized. The community of other institutions in the country have joined the demand for justice this week and have also declared an emergency for gender violence.
Sirley Vanessa López was a student of the eighth semester of a degree in Literature and María José Barrero, from Accounting. Although relatives of the López have clarified that they were not friends, both were killed by the macho violence that allowed Bryan tovar – who is presumed to be the ex -partner of Barrero – entered the headquarters of Palmira, a municipality at one hour from the capital, of the Univalle. After the crime, the perpetrator committed suicide, and the institution of higher education issued a statement where they reject the facts and declared a week of grieving.
For the student community, the actions of the university have not been blunt and therefore decided to stop unemployment, convene assemblies and exercise different direct actions on the campus. On Monday, after the official death of López, several of his classmates summoned demonstrations and vandalized the rectory of the university. “Justice for Sirley” can be read in several of the pints that remained after the day of protests. In Bogotá, feminist groups and community of the National University did the same stopping the traffic for the thirty race in the framework of a Velaton. The same happened in Ibagué, at the University of Tolima.
“It hurts a lot that all this is happening because the university is like our house. That is why we have gone out, as feminists we have done our best so that the demonstrations are maintained and these problems are heard,” Lucia Ortega, delegate of the Regional Student Committee of Human Rights, and member of the Ultraviolet Feminist Collective, tells El País. “There is no feeling of security and has nothing to do with external people who can enter and exercise violence against me, but it is a violence that can even come at any time from the people of the university community,” he adds.
In an assembly, the students built a sheet of demands. Among them, they demand a gender policy with a budget and comprehensive reparation capacity in which the experience of feminist collective and gender dissidents of the university is have; Clear protocols that protect victims and prevent them from being revictimized by bureaucratic processes; permanent psychosocial accompaniment and not conditioned to formal complaints; Compulsory training in gender, violence and feminist justice not only for students but also managers, teachers, administrative staff; and an institutional cultural change that breaks with the covenant of silence, this with the final that combats the normalization of violence that, according to the specifications, “for years has normalized violence, protected as aggressors and silenced the victims” inside the Univalle.
In parallel, Michel Fernando Múñoz, boyfriend of the deadly victim, wrote a letter that was disseminated by social networks. “I make a sincere and urgent call to solidarity, to the union and the conscious resistance. We cannot be indifferent to the pain that has been sown in our lives or the fear that now runs through the halls. The magnitude of what happened forces us to raise our voice, look into our eyes and tell us: this will not stay like this,” wrote the young man.
What happened in Univalle follows the pattern that has been alerted in other campuses, such as the University of Antioquia, where last year they denounced a serious crisis for gender violence and the collapse of the route to attend hundreds of these cases.
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