In Cali, the capital of the province of Valle del Cauca, Colombia, last Friday Victor Escobar ended his life by euthanasia administered in a “legal” way two years after his initial request. For the first time in the country it was not a terminally ill person, as the 60-year-old Escobar suffered from chronic obstructive degenerative bronchopneumopathy, which, according to what his lawyer, Luis Giraldo, told Reuters, “greatly reduces the quality of life”, but is not terminal.
The next day, in Medellin, another Colombian citizen, Martha Sepulveda, suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALA), was killed by euthanasia.
Colombia’s Constitutional Court lifted sanctions for euthanasia “in certain circumstances” in 1997 and in 2014 ordered regulation of the procedure, which was first applied in 2015, on a person with a terminal illness. The year 2022 marks a further step toward an increasingly drastic implementation of this inhumane practice.
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