Colombia- June 26th, 2021

Greeting by a joung woman of the First Line "carrilera 70", Cali, Colombia

I introduce myself as a representative of Carrilera la 70 as First Line. My announcement is that, as women, we gave ourselves the courage to go out into the streets to say everything we felt, because we are of legal age and we do not have a job opportunity because we do not have experience, because we have not reached a grade in a technical college, because we have not learned in universities or have good performance so that they would give us a job.
Because we are tired of the government getting rich and filling its pockets, while our mothers, our grandparents, our grandmothers are suffering and we have nothing to eat. As young people we cannot have a formal job.
We go out to the streets to be listened to by the government, however, instead of giving us a solution or reaching an agreement or something, what they do is chase us to our homes, make us disappear, dismember us, take us to the police stations without anyone knowing , where they torture us for hours. Some run with luck and are released, others are not.
We have been in assemblies and, in those moments, the police arrive with the gases, to shoot us. What are we doing? Defending ourselves with anything we can, unfortunately with stones, sticks, anything we can knock down with to protect ourselves and make barricades. It is the only thing we can do against a government in the country that only wants to end what the people want, that seeks to make itself known, and everything we young people say.
Please, we need solutions, don't let them keep killing us, keep making us disappear. Please stop all this.
It is not fair that everything they have been doing us goes unpunished, all the deaths. Give us a solution Mr. Mayor, if you hear this.