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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/hylton02162010.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/hylton02162010.html<br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">February 16,
2010<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Colombia Mimes
CIA <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
Students as Spies
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By FORREST
HYLTON <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">O</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>n 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
As anthropologist-historian David Price reports for <i>CounterPunch</i>,
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.
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 <i>New York Times</i> ’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.<br><br>
<b>Forrest Hylton</b> is the author of
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844675513/counterpunchmaga">
Evil Hour in Colombia</a> (Verso, 2006), and with Sinclair Thomson, of
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/184467097X/counterpunchmaga">
Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics</a> (Verso,
2007). He can be reached at
<a href="mailto:forresthylton@yahoo.com">forresthylton@yahoo.com</a>.<br>
<br>
<i>This article appears on the NACLA site
(<a href="file://localhost/index.php">https://nacla.org/index.php</a>
).<br><br>
<br><br>
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