Natalia Castillo: what is known about the murder of the UN journalist

At dawn on December 24, the young journalist Natalia Castillo was admitted to the emergency room of the Palermo clinic, who minutes before had been seriously injured by a group of criminals who tried to steal her cell phone outside a bar in the Galerías sector. , in the town of Teusaquillo, Colombia.

Castillo, 32 years old, paradoxically worked as a communications advisor to the United Nations Organization on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

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Although the authorities have announced the deployment of an investigation operation to find the whereabouts of those responsible for this new homicide in Bogota and they offered a reward of 50 million pesos, the information collected is still incipient and the security cameras in the sector are unable to reveal the identity of the murderers.

There are no confirmed witnesses to the crime, according to authorities. The friends who were chatting with her that night were inside the celebration establishment at the time that Natalia went out to answer a call on her cell phone and, tragically, she found herself with death.

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General Óscar Antonio Gómez, commander (e) of the Metropolitan Police, indicated that “Together with the Prosecutor’s Office, we formed an inter-institutional team to find those responsible for this crime. We offer the sum of up to 20 million pesos for those who can provide us with relevant information in the case ”.

However, three days after the fact, it is as if the hustle and bustle on the eve of Christmas would have buried the murder case of Nataliawell, apparently, no one gives a reason for what happened.

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Cindy Natalia Castillo The SmallAs her close friends called her, she had achieved a long journey in the public communications sector in the country. Before entering the UNODC, Castillo She held positions in the National Agency for Reincorporation and Normalization, in 2019 she was part of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) and in 2015 she was a communicator for the National Television Authority (ANTV).

The event provoked the reaction of Pierre Lapaque, representative of the UNODC in Colombia, who shared the following message on Twitter: “It is with deep pain that I join the sentiments of my colleagues and the family of our beloved Natalia Castillo. We will always remember her as an excellent colleague and valuable professional who contributed to the mission of our Office with commitment and passion ”.

The repudiation and condemnation of the act have been the common denominator among the friends of the victim. One of the first to reject what happened was the CEO of the consulting firm Estrategia y Poder, Carlos Suarez, who said that the murder of Castillo is part of one of “Those thousands of robberies that cut short lives for a cell phone, a bicycle or a few pesos.”

Faced with this, the also friend of the communicator Carlos Arias, a professor at the Externado University, said that the blame for this homicide lies with the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá and its inability to stop the insecurity. According to the teacher, “The damn insecurity, which does not have a serious public policy to mitigate it, took Natalia”. At press time, when consulting the district authorities about this situation and the increase in homicides, there was no response.

Like CastilloThis end of the year, insecurity has taken other Bogota citizens violently. Diego Alejandro Pérez, 23, was assassinated on December 16 in the Gran Granada neighborhood of Engativá for stealing his bicycle. The criminals stabbed him in the heart. Harold Salcedo, 25, was also stabbed to assault him, on November 16, at the height of the North Highway with 127th Street. And on December 7, two men, under strange circumstances, died in the middle of robberies, one on the 26th street and the other in the town of Suba. Both were killed with firearms.

Homicides on the rise

The characteristics of Natalia, according to his friends, idealist, romantic and believer that everything in the country and the city could be better, perhaps they are the same ones who have described the 1,029 people who between January and November of this year have lost their lives due to a homicide, according to figures from the Ministry of Security of Bogota.

This number exceeds the reports in the same period of 2020 by 10.8 percent. Of the total number of homicides committed in the city, 13 have occurred in the town of Teusaquillo, and three of these, in the Galerías area, where it was Natalia Castillo attacked. It is the highest figure among the neighborhoods that make up the town.

The situation regarding the increase in homicides had already been warned by the councilor Marisol Gomez, who said that “this 2021 has been a very difficult year for Bogota citizens in terms of security and the increase in homicides is documenting that reality with very precise figures.”

But beyond the pain caused by the murder of the young woman journalistHis friends and relatives have stated that the Mayor’s Office and the Secretary of Security do not seem to have a clear public policy on this matter. In fact, the teacher and friend of this new crime victim, Carlos Arias, does not believe that offering rewards in exchange for information will solve a problem that is structural.

What the experts say about homicides in the city

The increase in homicides in the city was already a topic that worried some security experts. According to some of them, this scourge has been the result of the gap that exists between national and district authorities, “which have not been able to form a joint public security policy”, as mentioned by Luis Felipe Vega, an expert in security from the University of Leipzig (Germany).

For his part, Juan Sebastián Jiménez, a professor at the Javeriana University, said that the constant changes in the ownership of the Security portfolio in the capital “have suggested that there is no clear direction, a strategy. Because the figures are obvious ”. According to experts, the Mayor’s Office must reformulate its security objectives.

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Deshawn