Gareth Steven Sella, who lost an eye in protests, will be Petro’s new deputy youth minister

2023-09-19 02:32:24

The appointments continue in the Ministry of Equality and Equity headed by Vice President Francia Márquez. This Monday it was learned that Gareth Steven Sella Forero, one of the young people who was affected during the 2021 demonstrations by the Police, will be the head of the Vice Ministry of Youth.

The resume of Sella, who was injured in his left eye – according to his testimony – by members of the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (Esmad) of the Police, was published by the Presidency on the applicants’ website.

The young man will be responsible for three directions: for the Effective Enjoyment of Rights and the Promotion of Opportunities for Youth, Social Barristerism and Youth in Peace.

At the beginning of last August, Petro himself revealed that he wanted the anointed person for the position to be a young man who had been a victim of injuries during the National Strike demonstrations. At that time, he defended that the idea was to cut through bureaucracy and “fill the public administration with people.”

“We are thinking about who will be the person to lead this. “I have proposed that it be a person who has lost an eye during the social outbreak and who is capable of directing the youth with all the clarity that is needed, like a lighthouse, despite the fact that they wanted to turn off the light,” he declared in his moment President Petro.

During an intervention in Congress, the next vice minister explained in 2021 that Esmad shot him in the left eye, completely affecting his vision just for raising his voice against police brutality: “Hours later they ran to sell a false story to the people, to to discredit my image, to say that I was a vandal, to justify in some way that they have the right to mutilate Colombian youth,” he claimed.

The young man, 26 years old, studied film and television at the School of Arts and Letters. Although he has experience as an audiovisual producer from work in the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá in the era of Claudia López and in Social Prosperity, between 2019 and 2021 he served as creative director of his own production company, called La Resistencia, from where he made complaints about social nature.

Last Thursday, September 14, Vice President Francia Márquez appointed anthropologist Diana Marcela Gómez Correal as Vice Minister of Women.

This is a portfolio that will be in charge of developing policies aimed at promoting women’s rights, emphasizing their demands and seeking to eradicate gender-based violence.

In this sense, the Government highlighted that the new vice minister, who has a master’s degree in history from the National University and is a professor at the Andes and Javeriana universities, has a doctorate in anthropology from the University of North Carolina (United States). At a professional level, the incoming official has carried out work in the Women’s Secretariat of Bogotá and in the Women’s House.

Recently, before Congress, the vice president revealed that the Ministry will have a budget of $500,000 million this year, $30 billion for entry into operation and $470 billion, executed through the Fund for Overcoming Population Inequality and Inequality Gaps Territorial, for three programs: Water is Life, Young Guardians of Nature and Economic Autonomy of Women.

For the year 2024, $1.3 trillion is budgeted, mostly – around $800 billion – for financing programs through the Gap Bridging Fund.