Facundo Molares Schoenfeld, who died this Thursday after being detained by the Police in the middle of a protest at the foot of the Obelisk in Buenos Aires, was an Argentine who had become involved in the Colombian conflict and had been a member of the FARC guerrilla for fifteen years. . However, his death has nothing to do with his past, but with circumstances that are still being investigated.

The Government of the City of Buenos Aires maintains that it was due to natural causes or existing preconditions, while the leftist groups calling for that protest hold the Police of the Argentine capital responsible.

Molars Schoenfeld was 47 years old and was participating in the protest in the Plaza de la República, which surrounds the Obelisk. As it is customary for protesters to block traffic at the intersection of Corrientes and 9 de Julio avenues, as long as the crowd is of a manageable size, the City Police evict the protesters from the street and reopen it to vehicles. . This time the demonstrators did not block traffic, but the Police were present at the scene anyway.

Upon arrival, the Police began to disperse the demonstrators, who denounced that Molares Schoenfeld was beaten and detained and that he lost his life as a result of those blows. But for the City Government “the causes of death are related to cardiac arrest resulting from risk factors,” according to the official statement, although at the time of issuing it the corresponding autopsy had not yet been carried out to certify it.

A protester dies during a protest at the Obelisk in Buenos Aires
The protesters who were in the place point out when they were losing concentration, that agents of the City Police began to push them and hit them. They detained some people, including Molares Schoenfeld who, they say, fell to the ground after being beaten. The City Security Minister, Eugenio Burzaco, confirmed the arrests, but denied that those arrested had been beaten.

In the videos of the moment that have circulated so far through the Argentine media and social networks, it can be seen that one of the protesters is detained and kept by police officers on the floor and suffers a decompensation. After the requests of his colleagues, who alert that this person does not move or respond, police officers verify his decompensation and try to revive him until an ambulance arrives.

His death was certified at the Ramos Mejía Hospital, to which he was taken by the local emergency service. Now the investigation falls on the Justice and the Federal Police, dependent on the national government, because a local security force is involved.

The Argentine who got involved in the Colombian conflict
Beyond the incidents surrounding his death in Argentina, Molares Schoenfeld was a photojournalist and, as he himself confirmed in different interviews with Argentine media, had been a member of the now demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, where he was related for 15 years in the Teófilo Forero Column.

Due to his participation in the FARC, he was detained in Argentina for eight months, between November 2021 and July 2022, because Colombia was requesting his extradition accusing him of the kidnapping of councilor Armando Acuña, which occurred in March 2009 in the municipality of Garzón, department of Huila. in southern Colombia.

“I did not participate in that political retention, even the councilor said so. The only task I had was to hand him over to a humanitarian commission through an agreement with the State, within the framework of the peace talks already under way,” said Molares Schoenfeld in an interview with the newspaper Tiempo Argentino, conducted from the Ezeiza prison, in April 2022.

Three months later, while Molares Schoenfeld awaited the verdict in the trial for his extradition, he was notified that the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) of Colombia had suspended the extradition request against him and he was released. .

“The facts for which I was accused had to do with the armed conflict and only the JEP can investigate that,” he recalled in an interview with the official Argentine news agency Télam.

His passage through Bolivia
According to what he recounted in the interview conducted at the end of July with Télam, after supporting the peace agreement and dissociating himself from the FARC, Molares Schoenfeld left Colombia. He arrived in Bolivia at the beginning of 2018, where he worked as a photojournalist for a magazine until May 2019.

He returned to Argentina after being outside the country for 17 years, but in November of that year he returned with his camera to Bolivia in November 2019 after the fall of Evo Morales.

During the coverage of the repression of the protests of MAS supporters in Santa Cruz de la Sierra as a photographer, Molares Schoenfeld was shot three times. “I was about to die, 23 days in an induced coma, and the doctors