Colombians demonstrate in favour of football player Díaz’s father’s release

People in the Colombian town of Barrancas recently had a peaceful march holding candles. They were asking for the father of Liverpool footballer Luis Díaz to be set free.

Luis Manuel Díaz and his wife were forcefully taken by someone with a gun on Saturday.

The kidnappers left the player’s mother in a car when the police came closer, but they took away his father by force.

A specific kind of police team is using trained dogs to look for clues in the area.

Many people in Barrancas marched together, wearing white T-shirts with a picture of Luis Manuel Díaz, and shouted “freedom”.
“I am experiencing a strong feeling of pain within my inner self,” said Alis Amaya, a local resident, in an interview with Caracol news.

“It’s not fair that someone from our town, who is the child of a local family, should have to experience this pain and sadness,” she said.

Luis Manuel Díaz, or Mane, is a famous person in Barrancas who teaches young football players.

Videos from security cameras shown on the news seem to suggest that men on motorcycles were following the couple’s car right before they were captured at a gas station in Barrancas on Saturday.

The second-in-command of the Colombian police, General Nicolás Zapata, told reporters that “when something like this happens, it is not sudden, it is planned beforehand. ”

The Colombian government is trying harder to find Luis Manuel Díaz.

Barrancas is a town in the northern part of Colombia, in a province called La Guajira. This area has a lot of problems because there are many groups of guerrilla fighters and violent gangs operating here.

The police and soldiers are looking for something in the Perijá mountains. The mountains are in a dense forest that goes across the border of Colombia and Venezuela.

Police Chief William Salamanca said on Tuesday that they brought two sniffer dogs with expertise in searching for people in jungle areas to help with the search.

Special police teams are using helicopters and planes that have cameras which can detect heat to fly over the forest.

They have also passed out papers with a picture of Luis Manuel Díaz and a promise to give a reward of 200m pesos ($50,000; £40,000) if someone gives information about where Luis Manuel Díaz is.

On Monday, the police announced that they found some people connected to the kidnapping, but they didn’t reveal their identities.

However, they mentioned that it seems like a criminal gang took him instead of a guerrilla group.

There are many groups of bad people who do illegal things like bringing illegal things across the border, forcing people to give them money, and selling people to other places illegally. These groups are on both sides of the easily crossed border.