Freedom of Thought in Colombia: the Story of Miguel Angel Beltran

February 23, 2016
Freedom of Thought in Colombia: the Story of Miguel Angel Beltran

by W. T. Whitney

Miguel Ángel Beltrán, teaching at Colombia’s National University, studied armed conflict and social division in Colombia. His ideas displeased Colombia’s rulers, and he’s been imprisoned intermittently since 2009. He’s presently in maximum security at La Picota prison in Bogota. Beltrán began a hunger strike on February 15. He was doing so, he explained, out of solidarity with fellow political prisoners, hunger strikers among them, who’ve been protesting anti-human conditions in Colombia’s prisons. He indicated also that he was defending critical thinking, his own cause.

Beltrán recalled that the government of President Juan Manuel Santos had recently promised to ease conditions for FARC prisoners of war and to arrange for evaluating their personal situations in order to prepare them for civilian life in a Colombia at peace. He also cited demonstrations three months earlier by political prisoners in 20 prisons who were demanding the release of prisoners who were very sick, elderly, or handicapped.

He denounced government inaction, adding that, “I join with these men and women that today are on hunger strikes [protesting] overcrowding, no sunlight, scanty meals … and sub-optimal medical services.” He noted his own “commitment to defending critical thinking, to have it articulate theory along with transformative practice.”

Left-leaning historian Renán Vega Cantor is a supporter of Beltrán and in a recent interview explained what “critical thinking” may have to do with his imprisonment. According to Renán Vega, the Colombian intelligence service during the presidency of Alvaro Uribe, “maintained a list of activist intellectuals to be assassinated and did kill several of them. It was in that context that persecution of Miguel Ángel Beltrán was initiated … because he simply had a different point of analysis as to the Colombian conflict.”

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/23/freedom-of-thought-in-colombia-the-story-of-miguel-angel-beltran/

(My emphasis.)