by Angela Roger
I visited Colombia in April to take part in a trade union delegation to find out about the current situation in higher education. Throughout the visit I gathered numerous accounts of curbs on the autonomy of universities as well as hearing about devastating human rights abuses and threats to individual lecturers, teachers, and students. None of these stories are reported in Colombia, and none reach us in the UK. Those Colombian academics who enjoy an international research profile say that at least they have some space in which to speak but on the whole they view their situation as hopeless. None betrayed any optimism whatsoever.
The government is intent on privatising the entire education system, from school to university. Educationists are prominent in their opposition to such a move. Universities are regularly occupied by security forces and closed to staff and students. On my visit to the Bogotá Campus of the National University, I heard staff and students protesting at the political interference from the President himself in the appointment of a new Rector - the University's Chief Executive. As I left, the campus was being cleared by heavily armed riot police and there were tanks at the gate. It was explained that secret service agents would point out the student leaders who would be arrested and never seen again. I had a similar experience at the Valle University in Cali. This time I arrived for a meeting with staff and students but could not get in. The military had closed the campus and stood guard at the gates. Their tanks were armed with water cannons on this occasion. I spoke to a professor of mathematics who had turned up for work. He told me that this happened very frequently. He feared the university would shortly be closed for ever. His own department had no resources left. They could not appoint any new staff. The already dire situation was going to get worse next year. 'Staff who speak out against the authoritarian government have a difficult time. In the universities there are still people who have a conscience and they are targeted. It is worse for those who are also trade unionists.'
Attacks against public education employees have intensified under the government of President Alvaro Uribe Velez as he attempts to stifle dissent surrounding plans to privatise state education in Colombia. Academic staff who have dared to protest have been mercilessly hunted down and assassinated. Hundreds of university staff, have been threatened, disappeared and killed by paramilitary death squads. In the past year, in the University of Antioquia, one professor and eight students have been assassinated. A janitor was followed home from work, and shot twice in the head, three times in the body, in front of his wife. A 20 year old law student in Neiva, who was also a student leader, was harassed as he walked the twenty minutes to his home. Four paramilitaries on motorcycles circled him and despite the police being called, they shot him dead outside his home.
University bosses are rightly concerned at the level of violence on their campuses. One might hope that they had the moral courage to denounce such atrocities. Instead, I only heard of their meetings with paramilitaries to see how university policy be changed could conform to their demands.
Teachers, as leaders of their local communities, are also a special target of the paramilitaries. On 25 April 2003, while I attended the 10th Annual Conference on Human Rights, news came in that a teacher had been assassinated on her way to work. She had been dragged off the bus at 7.30 am and shot in public. The assassins warned the other passengers, 'Let that be a lesson to the rest of the teachers'. These stories are never reported. I spoke to a freelance journalist who interviewed teachers at the conference who recounted their own stories of abuse and murder for an article for the Times Education Supplement. She was visibly shocked. Despite having lived in Colombia for a year, she had never heard of any of these stories before.
What our counterparts in Colombia asked us to do is to speak out, to give them a voice in the international community. They need direct contact with university staff and students in the UK and Europe to ask them to exert any pressure and support on our government to investigate these human rights abuses in education.