the five friends, Sara Maria Garcia Rodriguez, Valentina Arias Gonzalez, Juan Pablo Marin, Nicolas Suarez Valencia Y Jacobo Alberto Perez Vasquez they had laughed, played frog and had bathed in the pool and in the jacuzzi.
They were on that weekend of January 23 and 24, 2021, at Jacobo’s farm, where they used to meet, as they did on other days off. They saw each other in that or in some other of the houses of the other young people in Buga, his native land.
Santiago Tascón came to the meeting because he was a friend of Sara María.
And it was in the early hours of January 24 that death surprised the five young people, in that property, half an hour from the town of Buga, in the Cerro Rico village of the Chambimbal district, after bursts of gunfire that took away their dreams of fall in love, be professionals and form families.
Santiago Tascón and the butler Ramiro Martínez, 61, were injured and survived the attack.
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Sara María, Valentina, Juan Pablo and Nicolás died at the scene. Jacobo died the following Sunday at the San José hospital due to an impact on the head.
The families point out that there are still no convictions, despite findings of evidence and arrests last year.
“We don’t want it to be just another piece of news without action,” the parents and other relatives and relatives of the young victims in this raid that shook the entire country have been repeating since last year, submerged in a simple question: Why what?
That is the same question that the families ask themselves today, which is why they undertook a crusade with two objectives: first, that the five murdered young people are not forgotten and second, that there be justice.
Carlos Alberto Arias, Valentina’s father, pointed out that despite the clamor to the National Government and the announcements and measures, this crime He is unpunished, although the authorities offered a reward of up to 250 million pesos.
The father recalled the words of President Iván Duque and Defense Minister Diego Molano last year, between television cameras and photographs from dozens of media outlets with journalists who gathered in Buga due to the shock of a slaughter that years before had never lived in this population that does not exceed 130,000 inhabitants.
The families consider that the crime was more than a mistake and that it would have been a planned armed raid.
Funeral moments, a year ago.
Santiago Saldarriaga. Archive THE TIME
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They have the information that the judicial process continues. In 2021 there were 12 captured, the first three were identified as allegedly responsible for the attack on a humanitarian demining unit of the army and the ambush of a patrol Police, time ago.
Despite the hypotheses that were raised at the time as an attempted theft, this was discarded, because the area of the farm has not been characterized as a robbery area.
The hypothesis of an attempted kidnapping of Jacobo Pérez was also raised, and an extortion of 12 million pesos from his father remains in the pipeline.
In addition, complaints that landowners made a year ago about threats and possible extortions in the region before the Buga Personería increased the alert among inhabitants of the high mountainous area, in Havana and in El Placer, added to the murder of former Buga councilor Carlos Erlid González Cortés, of the Cambio Radical party.
That crime happened on January 10, 2021, that is, 14 days before the massacre. The politician was in a farm in the La Carolina site, in the same Cerro Rico village.
Given these facts and despite the fact that the murder of the former lobbyist and the massacre were not related, there are peasants who fear the return of armed groups, such as paramilitaries that 20 years ago were the authors of one of the largest massacres in Colombian history.
At that time, members of the Calima Bloc of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia assassinated 24 peasants in Havana, in Buga, and provoked a gigantic exodus of other plot owners.
According to the authorities, although in the urban area of Buga there are armed groups dedicated to distributing drugs and committing other crimes, such as robbery, the discovery of a cell phone from an older model and a suitcase with a cord with adhesive tape fed the hypothesis of an attempted kidnapping of Jacobo, who was 18 years old.
In turn, according to the Police and the Army, the residual group of the Farc ‘Left Adam’ It has a presence in the upper part of where the farm is located.
At the time of the massacre, Jacobo’s father and some friends from the same family were present, and they were unharmed. Jacobo’s mother was not at the time.
Two hours after the event, at about 4 in the morning on Sunday, January 24, the Police called the families of Sara, Juan Pablo and Nicolás to inform them of the tragedy.
This explains the prosecution
The Prosecutor’s Office spoke about the case and what has been done in the last year and indicated: “Continuing with the investigation against this organization, it is possible to obtain from a guarantee control judge, 12 arrest warrants, among which was that of the second ringleader alias Hugo or Camilo”.
The investigative body adds: “In order to materialize and make effective the aforementioned orders, coordination is carried out with the Military and Police Forces, for which there is knowledge of several military operations in the rural area of the department of Valle, mainly between the municipalities of Seville and Tuluá”.
“In an operation carried out by the National Army, on November 5, 2021, Leiton García Uragama or alias Kevin was neutralized, on whom it was possible to establish the quality of material author of the act,” they say in the Prosecutor’s Office.
Likewise, it was reported that on the 9th of the same month and year, in the village of Ceilán, in the municipality of Bugalagrande, two presumed members of the company ‘Adan Izquierdo’ were neutralized, among them the second ringleader alias Camilo or Hugo, who for the investigation was determinative of the unfortunate event.
“On the part of the Prosecutor’s Office, a response has been given to various letters sent by the relatives of the five victims, as well as meetings with some of them, who have been informed of these results and of the investigative actions carried out” , they argued in the body, in a statement.
They celebrated farewell and the beginning of a new stage of life
The five young people, aged between 17 and 18, have known each other since they were very young, most of them since kindergarten.
As on other occasions, the meeting of these friends between January 23 and 24, 2021 was organized for a special reason.
They were celebrating their high school degrees, but above all, they were saying goodbye to Juan Pablo Marín, because the following week he was going to Medellín, in love, because his girlfriend was in the capital of Antioquia, with whom he had a relationship of two and a half years.
I was going to study law there. Although Juan Pablo, 18, had already started this career, in the second semester and under the virtual modality at the Santiago de Cali University, he enrolled at a university in Medellín.
His mother, Gabriela Pérez, who is a dentist with the Artillery Battalion No. 3 Battle of Palacé de Buga, was proud of the person who told her that he wanted to be the best lawyer in Colombia and that is why she supported him in this dream of making his way in other land.
He was Jacobo Pérez Vásquez.
They were children and members of professional families.
Juan Pablo was the son of a civil engineer and planned to follow in his father’s footsteps. His dream of entering the first semester at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana was frustrated.
Nicolás, for his part, wanted to be a mechanical engineer. Nicólas and Jacobo graduated from the same school, the Liceo de los Andes, and then undertook study trips abroad.
Nicolas Suarez Valencia.
Jacobo was in 2020 in an exchange in Canada, and Nicolás, who had turned 18, had returned to Buga, after a stay in Australia. His fondness for hockey on skates he also united these two youngsters and they did so since they were in kindergarten, representing Buga in departmental and national tournaments as members of the Hurricanes Sports Club.
Valentina Arias was the youngest of the group.
Sara was an animal lover and, like the other friends, had values, said relatives of the young woman.
She was Sara María García Rodríguez.
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Nicolás, also the son of a dentist, was very close to Valentina, who was the youngest of the group at 17 years old and was the last to receive her bachelor’s degree.
Valentina and Nicolás arrived at around 7 pm on Saturday, January 23, at Jacobo’s meeting to go down to Buga again on Sunday night.
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Juan Pablo Marin was 18 years old.
Valentina dreamed of being an architect at the University of San Buenaventura, in Cali.
She was the niece of businessman Nicanor González, founder in 1954 of the company Transportes González, in Sincelejo, Sucre.
Although Valentina and Juan Pablo Marín were initially at the Liceo de los Andes de Buga, they finished their studies at other schools in that city.
Juan Pablo graduated from Las Marianas, from Buga.
In the case of Sara María García, she was the daughter of the doctor César Iván García.
Sara was going to start her second semester of Veterinary Medicine and Zootechnics at the Technological University of Pereira in the first week of February 2021.
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