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What was expressed by Claudia López the previous Friday, after the murder of the waiter Oswaldo Muñoz was known at the station on Calle 85 de Transmilenio, in the north of Bogotá, unleashed an avalanche of reactions that have been aligned between those who, like the administration itself, say that the president did not say anything bad, and those who think it was serious.
“I don’t want to stigmatize Venezuelans, but there are some immigrants involved in criminality who are making our lives in squares. We have to bring Migración Colombia back. Anyone who wants to come and earn a decent living here, welcome. But, whoever comes to commit a crime, we must deport him without contemplation, “said López.
The ranks of those who disqualify such statements have been joined by the media. This Saturday, the first to demonstrate was Semana magazine, which, in an opinion piece by way of an editorial, told the mayor that “words matter” and criticized her for “using dangerous language again,” this time pointing out “Offenders by their country of origin.”
Although several Internet users disqualified what was said by that publication, to which they attribute a uribista tendency, It is striking that it is now El Espectador, a completely liberal medium (from a philosophical point of view, not a political one) that reproaches the capital’s president in its editorial.
But even this topic has not been approached only by the media. The Xenophobia Barometer concluded that López’s statements triggered xenophobic conversations in networks. This digital platform identified an 83% growth in these expressions, in various areas of the country. And the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) expressed concern about the mayor’s statements and questioned whether she “linked the Venezuelan migrant population with crime”.
Individuals such as the controversial lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella, who chooses the path of personal attack against the president, have also spoken out against it. By the way of making his criticism, De la Espriella has fanned the flame of the confrontation between detractors and affections to the mayor.
For El Espectador, the precision that López wanted to make in his speech (“I don’t want to stigmatize Venezuelans, but …”) is one of those that “cause a lot of damage”. The newspaper maintains that “her own phrase betrays her, since it begins with the recognition that she is going to contribute gunpowder in an issue that has caused a lot of pain in recent years in Colombia.”
“It should have stopped before the ‘but’, before the precision, before mixing again in the imagination migration with the occurrence of violent acts”El Espectador reproaches López.
In addition, remember that in Colombia “there is contempt for Venezuelan refugees and migrants,” that there are politicians who “have taken advantage of that hatred to promote xenophobia and obtain electoral revenues”, and that with that “they have caused many migrants to suffer discrimination and mistrust of Colombians.”
The serious thing is that, for this medium, López “fell” “into that game”, “regardless of his intentions”. And he recriminates him that, in the face of criticism, the following day “he redoubled his position: ‘Colombian law provides for the deportation of those who commit crimes in Colombia. That law is not xenophobic, it is logical. Asking for it to be applied is not xenophobia either. ‘ That is, he preferred to go off on a tangent to admit his mistake “.
“The tricks in discriminatory speeches allow those who express them to pretend that they were not saying anything wrong,” adds the editorial, and stresses that what López did was give “a useless, irresponsible statement that stigmatizes the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants living in the capital.”.
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