The mayor of Bucaramanga, Jaime Andrés Beltrán, expressed concern about a series of communications he has received in recent days, in which some citizens have warned him that they are willing to take up arms and take justice into their own hands in the face of the critical conditions of security that the country is experiencing and the alleged inattention of the national government in this matter.
“People are already talking about arming themselves because they do not feel that there is capacity on the part of the leaders.” to protect their families. People want to defend themselves. The citizen feels that they are being left alone. “People feel that criminals are making fun of them in their faces,” said the local president in WEEK.
He believes that, under the leadership of President Gustavo Petro, the Public Force would be losing presence in the territories and that void would be taken advantage of by criminals to commit crimes with greater force, plus the congestion that exists in the Judicial Branch to prosecute them and the collapse in the prison system to put them behind bars.
“It is very easy to tell the leaders: ‘You answer to me for security, but I do not send you police, you cannot use the Army, you cannot carry out searches, you cannot prohibit drug consumption.’ That is, they tell us to govern, but with our hands tied,” alleged the mayor of Bucaramanga.
“With the president it has been very difficult. When you govern from ideology, decisions are made from romanticism and not from the reality of the territory, that has been my fight: go to the territory, let decisions be made from there. If the Government hides the problem, we are going to have a civil war,” added the Colombian Bukele, as Beltrán is also known in public opinion.
Fearful, the mayor suspects that confrontation between citizens is about to break out, so he recommends refocusing national security policies that involve crime prevention, arrests, and effective judicialization without contemplation.
But the problem would be deeper. In the case of Bucaramanga, there are people who have up to 20 charges for robbery and, if they are arrested, they easily manage to avoid jail and then return to criminal activities. This scenario is the one that is causing the greatest outrage in the land of Beltrán.
