Students at a police training school in Colombia dressed up as Nazis during a cultural event on Thursday (18), in an episode that caused diplomatic unrest with the German, Israeli and US embassies and forced President Iván Duque to resign publicly demonstrate against the act.
Images of an event at Simón Bolívar School, in the municipality of Tuluá, southwestern Colombia, in which students used Nazi iconography, were posted on police social media.
Officially, the institution organized the act as a sort of “Germany week” to promote “cultural exchange” between cadets. But instead of addressing modern Germany, the school ended up promoting the Nazi period without any criteria.
The photos, which have since been deleted from the institution’s official pages, show students wearing swastikas on their arms and uniforms of the SS, the Nazi police. The images also show a policeman dressed as an Adolf Hitler alongside a German shepherd, a model German military jet from World War II, modern German flags and black, red and yellow balloons throughout.
Reaction by Germany, Israel and the United States
The German and Israeli embassies expressed in a statement “total repudiation” and called for punishment of those responsible. “Events like this are outrageous and directly offend Jews and all victims of the Nazi regime and its criminals,” the representations said in a joint statement.
The US ambassador to Colombia, Philip S. Goldberg, also issued a harsh condemnation. “I am shocked and deeply disappointed by the use of Nazi symbols and uniforms in Colombia’s police training facilities. No explanation is sufficient,” he wrote on the embassy’s Twitter account. Colombian police receive ongoing technical and financial assistance from the United States.
This Friday (19), President Iván Duque spoke on social media. “Any apology for Nazism is unacceptable. I condemn any manifestation that makes use or reference to symbols alluding to those responsible for the Jewish Holocaust that took the lives of more than 6 million people.”
Two weeks ago, Duke had paid a state visit to Israel, where he paid tribute to victims of the Holocaust at the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem.
school principal loses his position
Police removed school principal Simon Bolivar, Jorge Ferney Bayona, from his post, but did not fire him from the institution. He also apologized for what he called “an activity of a pedagogical nature about world history.” In a statement, Colombian police said they “strongly reject the decision taken within the school” and that the use of Nazi symbols was “unacceptable”.
“There was no tribute to Nazism, what the director of the school totally wrongly did was an academic activity to illustrate in the most absurd and wrong way the historic moment lived at that time,” said General Yackeline Navarro, national director of police schools , to Blu radio.
Photographs from the Nazi event were accompanied by the hashtag #TransformaciónPolicial.
Criticized internationally for abuses and the violent crackdown on recent demonstrations, Colombian police are undergoing a “transformation” campaign to try to improve their image, which has included a change in uniform from green to blue and more human rights training.
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