Journalist died after a traffic accident in Santa Marta

Samaria journalist Raquel Carolina Barrios Mejía died after suffering a traffic accident in the city, in the Los Alcázares neighborhood.

The events occurred on April 6, while the young woman was moving as a barbecue on a motorcycle to go to her residence, but on the way she was rammed by a van, in the 18th race between 27th and 28th streets, in Santa Marta.

Raquel was immediately helped and taken to the Bahia Clinic, where she was given several surgical intentions, due to the severity of the blows.

Later, due to the agreement with her EPS, the young woman was referred to the Avidanti clinic because the insurance for the vehicle had expired and she was transferred. In this care center he remained in the Intensive Care Unit until the day of his death.

The social communicator-journalist received the blow to the head and it had significantly affected her brain, despite the surgeries she underwent.

Barrios was very close to her house, where her children and other relatives were waiting for her. Apparently, the driver of the other vehicle did not notice the stop sign, violently impacting the motorcycles where the young journalist was being transported.

For their part, the relatives of the deceased girl claimed that the van that ran over the journalist was driven by Matilde Ester Maestre Rivera, who worked as head of the culture office of the Government of Magdalena during the Rosa Cotes term.

The mother of the deceased woman assured that she will file a complaint against the District Mobility Secretariat and the Metropolitan Police of Santa Marta.

The Ministry of Mobility has been carrying out investigations to identify the person who was driving the vehicle that hit the victim.

The accident is the subject of investigation, by the authorities, due to the circumstances of the events.

In the rural area of the municipality of Ciénaga (Magdalena), there are warnings about the fighting that the self-described Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, better known as the Gulf Clan, and the Conquistadora Self-Defense Forces of the Sierra or Los Pachenca, which have been fighting over the territory since the beginning of Holy Week to continue to commit crimes with drug trafficking.

The village of La Secreta is the most affected, they reported in the Barranquilla newspaper El Heraldo, where hostilities between the two drug trafficking groups have intensified, as a result of which several families have abandoned their homes and moved to the urban areas of the town, and the neighboring municipality of Zona Bananera, as well as as well as the cities of Santa Marta and Barranquilla.

Meanwhile, on the Caracol Radio station they consulted with an anthropologist Lerber Dimas, who is an analyst of the conflict in that region of the country, who explained that those affected do not recognize themselves as displaced persons, since they left their homes voluntarily to prevent any incident in the midst of the clashes among the criminal structures.

“They have not reported, nor will they. They do not understand that this is forced displacement. For them it is serious, but it does not imply that it is displacement because no one told them: -leave this area-, but they left of their own free will because they saw risk and this is displacement and even if they interpret it differently, crime is happening”, he explained on Caracol Radio.

He added that these two groups, which emerged from the extinct Auc, are regrouping which has led to the wave of violence in that area of the Colombian Caribbean. “No one is telling them to leave, but there are no guarantees of safety or peace of mind,” he said.

KEEP READING: