[News] Colombia Mimes CIA - Students as Spies

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/hylton02162010.html
February 16, 2010


Colombia Mimes CIA


Students as Spies

By FORREST HYLTON

On January 27, bucking for a third term in spite 
of Washington’s objections, Colombia’s president 
Uribe announced his goal of putting a thousand 
spies in college classrooms: “We need citizens to 
be the ones who commit to informing the police 
and armed forces, and if young people over 18 can 
help us in this by participating in networks of 
informants, it would help us a lot.” Uribe 
offered to pay students $50 per month to report 
any suspicious ideas or behavior to the Colombian police and armed forces.

The police and armed forces, of course, are 
institutions whose crimes have been many and 
varied on Uribe’s watch, as evidenced by the 
“false positives” scandal in 2008, in which it 
came to light that since 2002, the Colombian army 
has given officers and soldiers incentives and 
rewards to disappear and murder perhaps 1,700 
unemployed young men across the country and dress 
them up to look like guerrillas. In January, 46 
officers and soldiers charged with these crimes 
were freed on a technicality and confined to a 
base just south of Bogotá, where they will remain 
awaiting trial. The army gave them a welcome-home 
party featuring therapeutic workshops and 
aromatherapy, massages and makeovers for their 
wives, and clowns for the kids. This is the army 
that has received the bulk of the $7 billion that 
the U.S. government has dispensed through Plan 
Colombia and its successors under Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama.

As anthropologist-historian David Price reports 
for CounterPunch, Uribe’s drive to recruit 
informants among university students is similar 
to what is taking place in the United States, 
where Washington has served as a pilot project. 
With operations on 22 campuses set up since 2006, 
the so-called Intelligence Community Centers of 
Academic Excellence represent the largest 
recruitment drive on U.S. campuses since the 
early Cold War. As Price describes, here in the 
U.S.  faculty protests at the public level as 
opposed to in-house memos and meetings, has been inaudible.

In Medellín, the public response from professors, 
the teachers’ union, students, and youth groups 
was immediate, and sufficiently concerted to make 
Uribe backtrack in 24 hours. When his secretary 
touched on the issue from police headquarters on 
January 28, he did not mention students in 
particular, but rather citizens in general: 
“Cooperation to combat crime is the duty of all 
citizens. We cannot remain indifferent in the 
face of murder.” This is the same rhetoric Uribe 
has used since his first campaign in 2002, 
derived from Cold War counterinsurgency: The 
citizenry is seen either as an extension of the 
FARC guerrillas, organized crime, or the 
Colombian armed forces. Leading politicians, 
intellectuals, and media outlets have been quick 
to speak out against the measure, signaling the 
obvious, namely that student-informants will be 
in danger of incurring reprisals, and so will 
their families. The fate of informants in 
Colombia is frequently a gruesome one, and by 
involving university students in intelligence 
gathering, Uribe’s proposed policy could help 
bring the war, now high up in the hillside 
neighborhoods of Medellín, down into its city 
center where universities are located.

Columnist Alfredo Molano thinks Uribe will try to 
extend the pilot program nationwide, especially 
if he “wins” a third term in May (scare quotes 
apply to the winners of games that have been 
rigged), but if he does, he is likely to meet 
with more resistance from students and 
professors, especially from public universities. 
Nevertheless, Uribe might welcome the occasion as 
an opportunity to introduce further neoliberal, 
counterinsurgent measures into higher education. 
Of course it is too early to say where he will 
take the pilot program or what he will do if 
faced with further resistance, but Defense 
Minister Gabriel Silva told the BBC, “There is no going back.”

Back in the United States, as Price’s report 
makes clear, Trinity Washington University has 
been an easy target because it is a cash-strapped 
school dependent on tuition; one assumes that the 
new climate of austerity in U.S. higher education 
will make many schools vulnerable, particularly 
state schools. In Medellín, the situation is 
considerably worse than in the United States 
because more than 65 per cent of inhabitants are 
poor, and many public university students come 
from humble backgrounds, which is to say that 
sheer necessity is much more pressing in Medellín 
than in the United States. Uribe’s initiative is 
designed to help the police and the army fight 
organized crime and youth gangs in the 
president’s home city, which witnessed 188 
homicides in January alone, and after several 
years of relative peace, is back on track to 
recover its place as the world capital of homicide and youth crime.

Officially, there were over 1,800 homicides in 
2009 (though the BBC reports 2,178), more than 
double the number for 2008. Some 60 per cent of 
the dead were under 30. Mayor Alonso Salazar has 
set up mobile offices in some of city’s most 
dangerous hillside neighborhoods, like Manrique 
and Santo Domingo No. 1, but his security detail 
has been accused of committing abuses against 
neighborhood youths, and those who have dared to 
speak out about crime are threatened, displaced, 
and/or murdered by neighborhood gangsters. More 
than 2,000 people were forcibly displaced in 
Medellín between January and October 2009, and 
along with homicide and forced displacement, all 
forms of organized crime are on the rise 
following the extradition of Diego Fernando 
Murillo, alias Don Berna, the don of dons, to the United States in 2008.

Since Uribe sees universities, at least public 
ones, as warrens of crime, anarchy, disorder, and 
terrorist subversion, it is logical that he would 
try to recruit informants to strengthen the 
repressive state and para-state presence there. 
As usual, former minister of defense and current 
presidential candidate Juan Manuel Santos spelled 
it out: “What’s the problem? Why the drama? The 
policy of using informants has been pretty 
successful. It seems to me that the idea of 
involving young university students wherever 
there is a lot of crime could help to calm 
situations . . . like the one in Medellín.” 
Ironically, Bella Vista prison would be the 
obvious place to recruit informants, since 
organized crime on the outside is largely 
coordinated from the inside. But prisons will 
remain the nerve centers for the execution of 
youth crimes, while (public) universities may be 
criminalized, militarized, and subject to further budget cuts.

Though similarities between Colombia and the 
United States are alarming, there may be 
connections as well as parallels. According to 
the annual report that then minister of defense 
Santos presented to the Colombian Congress in 
2008, Washington and Bogotá have coordinated 
intelligence efforts closely. Santos stated, 
“Between April 16 and April 27, advisers from the 
U.S. Embassy ran a seminar about running 
informants in which two officials, six 
sub-officials, and two civilians from U.S. Naval 
intelligence participated. This allowed us to 
re-train intelligence personnel, and update, 
strengthen, and complement the tactics used 
against the internal threat.” Indeed, Colombia is 
held up as a model of what successful 
counterinsurgency would look like in Afghanistan 
and Iraq, and in March 2009, Admiral Jim 
Stavridis from the U.S. Southern Command attended 
a two-day conference in Bogotá to study lessons 
from Colombia that could be applied elsewhere.

Along with luminaries of counterinsurgency like 
David Kilcullen­former chief adviser to generals 
David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal­Santos was 
a featured speaker at the conference. Reflecting 
on the progress made since Plan Colombia was 
implemented, Stavridis wrote, “This year, Bogotá 
is on the New York Times ’must see’ tourist 
destinations, and the cruise ships are packing 
the gorgeous Caribbean port of Cartagena. 
Colombia has come a long, long way in controlling 
a deep-seated insurgency just over two hours 
flight from Miami­and we could learn a great deal 
from their success.” One can only hope that in 
the future, university student spies do not 
become part of the recipe for success in global counterinsurgency.

Forrest Hylton is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844675513/counterpunchmaga>Evil 
Hour in Colombia (Verso, 2006), and with Sinclair 
Thomson, of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/184467097X/counterpunchmaga>Revolutionary 
Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics 
(Verso, 2007). He can be reached at 
<mailto:forresthylton at yahoo.com>forresthylton at yahoo.com.

This article appears on the NACLA site 
(<file://localhost/index.php>https://nacla.org/index.php).




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