All these tensions that were hidden for a long time - like class, inequality, exclusion - just reached the point of critical mass. Usually the protests called by the unions last a couple days. Now we are having 20 days, and it's a spontaneous movement, horizontally organized... Basically people are just desperate, angry, and with nothing to lose. It was a perfect storm of the unpopular tax reform plus all these other situations.

Urban planning scholar Alejandra Marín Buitrago on Colombia's mass protest movement around deep economic and social inequality, the state's repressive police response to protesting citizens, and her article Colombia on the Brink for Counterpunch.