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.”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/hylton02162010.html 
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