[News] Columbia - Uribe the Teacher
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Fri Oct 5 15:15:21 EDT 2007
Uribe the Teacher
http://www.narconews.com/Issue47/article2814.html
A Few Things the Colombian President Forgot to
Mention in His Speech in New York Last Week on Education
By Laura Del Castillo Matamoros
Managing Editor, Narco News
October 4, 2007
BOGOTA: Last Thursday, one of the great
luminaries of contemporary Latin American thought
graced New Yorks Sharaton Hotel with his
presence. The occasion was the Clinton Global
Initiatives annual conference, led by
ex-president Bill Clinton, that same
philanthropic figure who devised one of the
noblest initiatives in the history of social,
military and economic aid that a great power has
ever offered an underdeveloped country: Plan Colombia.
We are speaking, kind readers, of nothing more
and nothing less than the philosopher-president
Alvaro Uribe Vélez, who, with his speech at the
September 27 forum on education in conflict and
post-conflict zones, has reached a new milestone
in reflection on the education problems facing Colombia.
What follows is the brilliance with which the
president left the auditorium stunned:
In my country we have a great obstacle to
education: illicit drugs. That is why we need to
eradicate illicit drugs, because terrorist groups
force rural families to cultivate coca and not to
send their children to school.
Of course. Why didnt it occur to anyone sooner?
All the experts on the subject have been wrong:
the problems in education lie not in the lack of
opportunities, nor in economic inequalities, nor
in the lack of resources that the state provides
to public schools and universities. No, President
Uribe hit the nail on the head. The problem of
education is another product of the great evil of the contemporary world: coca.
This concern over the countrys educational
situation was what brought Uribe to the United
States last week, hoping to meet up with his old
friends and win over some of the holdouts in the
Democratic party. Fortunately, many ended up
seeing Colombia from a new perspective, as a
country where there is really no armed conflict
or civil war, where there are
<http://www.narconews.com/nmonth0900.html>no more
paramilitaries but rather guerrillas and drug
traffickers, as the president claimed on Thursday
before the UN General Assembly. These are more
than enough reasons for one to realize that the
president has done nothing but guard the
countrys future; a future in which foreign
multinational corporations play a deciding role
(many of them, in return for tax breaks, create
foundations that give notebooks to poor kids).
This is why we must fight those terrorists, who
dont let the corporations work as comfortably as
they deserve. And for that to happen, more
resources are needed so that the second phase of
Plan Colombia can happen. That way, everybody
wins. It is truly incredible that some resentful
people go through the trouble to question the social component of this project.
In fact, today new and innovative pedagogical
learning models are being built, led by soldiers
from the Colombian army. In many rural areas of
the country, it is quite common for military
troops, funded by Plan Colombia, to commandeer
school buildings as security checkpoints,
temporary barracks or shelters to protect
themselves from the terrorists. Surely, Uribe
must have been proudly thinking about such
actions when he spoke at the conference of how
important it is for children to cultivate values
like living within a community and solving
problems peacefully. In Colombia, despite the
tension it might provoke, the army doesnt
hesitate to approach children through
recreational activities. Just look, kind readers,
at this moving story, taken from the Prensa Rural
website, and which clearly shows how harmonious
the coexistence is between the troops of the
armys 15th Brigade and the children who live in
the municipality of El Tarra (department of Norte de Santander):
That same day (August 18, 2007), at 9 pm, in
the village of El Milagro in the municipality of
El Tarra, Mrs. Ofelia Oscuro sent her three
children to the local school. At the school,
troops from the 15th Mobile Brigade set up a
military checkpoint. When the children arrived,
the soldiers forced them to remove their cloths,
verbally mistreated them and finally did not let
them continue into the school to receive classes
normally, but rather sent them home after these
outrages. The oldest of the children was just 10 years old.
And if the children cant go to school due to the
fighting, no problem. The Colombian Army is
always willing to make it up to them with fun
activities like excursions to military bases,
with sweet incentives, supported by the
government. Activities like Club Lancita (in
military jargon, a diminutive form of lanza, a
work many soldiers use to refer to their
comrades), or practical training sessions where
the children are prepared to serve as informants
in their own communities. Of course, the
non-governmental organizations, devoted to
dirtying the good image of the armed forces,
criticize activities like these that complement
rural childrens education. Just read this
article from last year by the Coalition Against
the Involvement of Children in the Colombian
Armed Conflict, to get an idea of how they complain.
It seems like these activists are unable to
understand that in a country like this one
where there is no conflict, just terrorist
attacks fear and shock therapy can become
great didactic learning tools. And thats not to
mention that these activities aim to convert
those peasant children into the soldiers of
tomorrow. One must realize that in the long term,
just like in natural selection, only those who
deserve to enter university (that is, those who
can pay for it) will be able to. In that sense,
those children out there dont have many options.
And so the best thing is for them to continue
educating themselves as adults in our armed
forces, conveniently defending the interests of
those luckier than them. In this way, we will be
able to live in harmony and, while were at it,
avoid them turning into social leadera, trade
unionists or other such communist abominations.
I should add that with these activities, the
armed forces help children to remain optimistic
amid the offensive against terrorism, like all
the good Colombians who believe in the
government. Not like those foreign organizations,
who only see the dark side of everything. Just
look at this quote that accompanies a drawing of
an upside-down pig that the psychologists of
something called the Ecuadorian
Inter-Institutional Committee had Diego Maldonado
a boy who lives on the border with Ecuador do
as they were carrying out a study on the supposed
damage that fumigations cause in that part of the country:
My piggy died and I loved him very much. He was
going to help me buy a uniform so I could go to
school. Whoever reads this and sees my drawing,
please help me finish elementary school. All the
plants and animals are gone and nothings left.
Poor boy! Hes been traumatized. All right, the
government just recently concluded that the
fumigations strategy was not as effective as had
been thought and causes some minor damage to the
environment. But one must look at the positive
side of things: for example, in this particular
case, if the pig dies, he can go work in the
school garden. If the fumigations destroy the
school gardens, they can plant them again, and if
the boy gets sick from the herbicide sprays,
well, let him put some effort into getting better
and getting back to cultivating vegetables and
raising animals so that he can study. Its all a
lesson in perseverance and tenacity another way
that Plan Colombia supports rural education.
But of course, the non-governmental
organizations, the infamous NGOs, try to
convince the poor that they should complain and
promote underdevelopment. If they keep at it,
Colombia is going to turn into another nation of
bums, just like all the countries pulled down by
Marxism, where education is free for all, where
everyone follows the law of least effort.
Fortunately, the presidents understands well that
in a democratic country, education is an
investment, not a public service, as he stated at Clintons conference:
People should know that democracy provides
opportunity for them to raise their social level.
And the way that those people can raise their
social level is education. In addition to that,
education creates opportunities for more
productivity, more competitively, and more income.
Those people dont understand a thing, and even
want to turn their children into enemies of the
state. Later on, those children cant be stopped,
and they begin to turn to subversive acts like
the National Strike for the Defense of Public
Education that took place last May. The situation
was nearly out of control: classes were suspended
in schools and universities for a month and a
half. High school and college students occupied
public educational facilities, and many teachers
stopped giving classes and went out into the
streets. All in protest of the cut in transfers
(national funds sent to pay for regional public
services) and the measures taken in the National
Development Plan (including a cut in pension
payments for university professors, forcing the
universities themselves to assume the costs).
Fortunately, the Colombian government has
experienced pedagogical teams in place to put a
stop to all this ignorance: the ESMAD (Spanish
initials for the National Police Mobile Antiriot
Squad). They made sure to put those people back
in their place in the only way it can be done:
with a firm hand. Just read this fine example of
coexistence from a communiqué of the District
Educators Association, published in those days
when the dangerous and uncultured masses tried to destroy the nations order:
police squads under presidential orders,
without warrants or prior accusations, violently
invaded educational institutions using teargas,
jumping over walls, breaking down doors and
intimidating everyone present in which ongoing
assemblies were being held, and proceeded to
evict the students by force, amid protests by
defenseless neighbors. Several youths were
injured in the course of these events and had to be hospitalized.
The above occurred in one of the high schools
occupied by its own students protesting the
mediocrity, lack of resources and despotism that,
they claim, are common in such institutions. Poor
little things, surely they were being as
President Uribe said at the time manipulated
by political interests, because the children and
youth of Colombia cannot, of course, think for themselves.
Maybe the pedagogues of the ESMAD were a little
rough on them, but those people have to learn
to appreciate what they have. How is it possible
that they dont know of the great sacrifice the
government makes when it invests 20 percent of
the United States generous aid to this country
in social and economic programs, reducing the
funds for eliminating terrorists (who surely must
be leading those protests) and for the war on
drugs to 80 percent especially when the drugs
are the real culprits in the educational crisis the country suffers?
The chapter on the Colombias educational
situation in the report Lifting the Curse
(Desaher el embrujo, published last year by the
<http://www.narconews.com/Issue31/article881.html>Colombian
Platform on Human Rights, Democracy and
Development) recognizes that the educational
coverage for young children rose from 82 percent
in 2002 to 88 percent in 2005. But despite this,
as President Uribe would put it in one of his
famous sayings instead of contributing, they
have to criticize. For the dissidents, the rise
in coverage means nothing as long as the family
is often unable to pay the costs of
transportation, school supplies, lunches and
uniforms. How can they be incapable of paying
those nearly symbolic costs? The problem lies in
the fact that they dont know how to invest their
money (they spend it all on food). As such, they
dont want to progress, compete, or rise
socially. That is the real problem and one of the
causes of the countrys underdevelopment.
Ahh, yes. And they also complain in this report
about the supposed lack of investment in quality
education. What do they want? For the public
schools to have the same level of teachers as the
private schools, where children really are
educated with the goal of productivity and
competitiveness? Please that kind of advanced
education is a privilege only for the children of
the good families that have written the history
of this country in the color red. Those same
children who will study in the best universities
of the United States and Europe when they grow
up, in order to come back later to Colombia and
assume their positions of power. The other
children, the ones who, politically and
economically speaking, are the sons and daughters
of nobody; the only thing they really need to
learn is to read and write, in order to vote for
the others come election time. And for that,
there is no need for investment in quality education.
President Uribe definitely could not have
explained any better how the education system
works in Latin Americas oldest democracy.
Surely, after the conference he was able to share
a moment with President Clinton to remember the
old times, when Plan Colombia was nothing more
than an idea what would one day guarantee an
education for both mens grandchildren at
Harvard, Oxford, Princeton or whichever one of
those universities, where their childrens
children can and deserve to end up
especially
when this war between the ignorant shows no signs of letting up any time soon.
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