On 1 October, one of Medellíns leading radical public intellectuals, historians and humanists, Campo Elías Galindo, was tortured and murdered in his apartment. There was blood everywhere. The neo-fascists who killed him burned a book on his chest to make their point. During a meeting in the Parque del Periodista on 8 October, organised by the Unión Patriotica to honour his legacy, there was an explosion nearby. The police ruled it an accident: no bomb was involved, they said, just a gas leak.
The original UP, founded by the Farc and the Colombian Communist Party in 1986, was all but wiped out by 1991, the year the new Constitution was passed, with somewhere between 3500 and 5000 militants murdered or disappeared. Today the UP consists of a tiny, courageous minority who are being hunted down and eliminated again.
One of the people in the park was Heidy Elizabeth Ocampo Granadas, a member of the UP and of the Asociación de Despedidos de las Empresas Publicas de Medellín, the union that represents three hundred cleaners fired from the mayors office in late September. The following day she disappeared. She was found dead on a farm in Copacabana, just outside Medellín, on 17 October.
I didnt know Heidy Elizabeth, and I hardly knew Campo Elías. He was a professor at the Universidad de Antioquia, across the river from my university. But we had been introduced at one of the dozens of marches during the student strikes of 2018-19, and I remember him from the general strike of November 2019. He was a regional leader of Senator Gustavo Petros remarkably successful Colombia Humana campaign, which pulled in 42 per cent of the national vote in 2018 no left-wing party in Colombia had ever obtained more than single digits before. A colleague of mine marched with him frequently, exchanging ideas and views about the city and the world, talking about plans for research and writing.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2020/november/victor-pena-s-odyssey