Colombia’s Student Movement Resists

Colombia’s Student Movement Resists
Elizabeth G. Walsh
North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)
October 24, 2006

On the morning of Oct. 5, Julián Andrés Hurtado, a 29-year-old student leader at the University of Valle in Cali, Colombia, died from gunshots to the head. Julian, who was just one week away from graduation, served as a student representative to the academic council of his school, the largest public university in Cali. The attack on Hurtado, which occurred in his neighborhood at midnight the night before he died, marked the one-year anniversary of massive student protests following the assassination of Johnny Silva, another student leader who was killed—many suspect by the police—on the university’s campus.

Students at the University of Valle responded to the news of Hurtado’s death immediately, gathering on campus and releasing a communiqué declaring, “It is clear that this act is political … we are dealing with a crime of the state.” Three thousand students left the campus to protest, and immediately upon entering the street, found themselves fired upon by gunmen concealed in a black car with tinted windows. Fortunately, no one was injured in this attempt.

Colombian university student leaders such as Hurtado are no strangers to threats. In July threats arrived by email to members of the National University Federation, from a source calling itself “Free Colombia 2006-2010,” accusing them of being “guerrillas dressed up as students.” The threats expressed support for the hard-line policies of President Álvaro Uribe and warned the students to leave their universities and homes.

The same month student leaders and members of the Colombian Association of University Students at the University of Cauca received threats from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the country’s largest right-wing paramilitary group, which is supposed to have been completely demobilized in a peace process with the government. And just before Uribe won a second term in May, blacklists naming students, professors and alumni arrived to the University of Antioquia in the city of Medellín. These threats accused those named of being members of the FARC and ELN guerrilla groups and were signed by the “Self-Defense Forces of the University of Antioquia.” The threats follow a typical pattern in Colombia, in which the human rights activists critical of the government are accused of being guerrillas dressed in civilian clothes, an accusation that even President Uribe has made of civil society organizations opposed to his military policy of “Democratic Security.”
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http://www.worldpress.org/Americas/2534.cfm

But that would stop him from making a side-trip I'm sure.

Seriously, how come we are not hearing more about this?