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Violence strangles Colombia intellectuals' voice

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) -- Eleven months after he was shot on a Bogota street near his university office, political scientist Eduardo Pizarro still speaks out about Colombia's halting steps toward peace.

But now he does so from a safe suburb in South Bend, Indiana, where he moved with his wife and son to teach at Notre Dame University.

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"I cannot tell you what it would be like to return to Colombia and risk entering into a permanent state of paranoia," he told Reuters. "The uncertainty there is total."

As Colombian society struggles to preserve reason amid intensifying internal warfare, academics and intellectuals have come face-to-face with what Pizarro calls the "machinery of silence."

"Academics are no longer evaluated for scientific rigor but for their real or presumed political posture," he wrote recently in Colombia's El Espectador newspaper. "To be classified as an intellectual of the right or the left amounts to a noose around the neck of a professor and can lead to death."

At least seven Colombian university professors have been assassinated in the past 15 months. The latest was outspoken Alfredo Castro, shot to death on October 5 while walking with his wife and teenage daughter in the Caribbean coastal city of Barranquilla where he worked. No one has been arrested.

At universities across the country, students, teachers, researchers, even a cafeteria director, have been kidnapped, attacked or murdered on the sidelines of a four-decade-old armed conflict that has claimed 35,000 lives since 1990.

In many cases, like Pizarro's, it was unclear whether the attacks came from Colombia's leftist guerrillas or right-wing death squads linked to the military.

"The university is being converted into a military objective," Pizarro said in a telephone interview.

"It is tragic that intellectuals are being silenced because they can lead a discourse in favor of peace, human rights, democracy. Without them the country is left in the hands of actors from the extreme right and left."

Pizarro, 50, has almost fully recovered from bullet wounds to his arm and leg suffered in the December 1999 shooting one block from his office at Bogota's National University.

Well before the attack, his family knew the risks of political involvement. Pizarro's charismatic brother Carlos was murdered in 1990 while running for president after his M-19 guerrilla movement laid down its arms. Another brother suspected of being a leftist rebel was killed two years later.

Last year Pizarro's well-known colleague Jesus Bejarano, a former presidential peace adviser, was killed in the economics department on the National University campus. Witnesses said his killers shouted slogans identifying themselves as members of the ultra-right United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), but the paramilitary group denied responsibility and blamed the Communist-led Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Whoever was responsible, the murder was part of "an uninterrupted chain of attacks on the academic community" in an effort to "silence our voice," a university administrator said.

The AUC had earlier publicized a list of professors and students who might be assassinated if they "continued spreading insurgent ideas." The next day a student council member was murdered. Other slayings followed.

The effect on campus life is both dramatic and insidious.

At the National University campus, designed in the 1930s as a bucolic urban oasis with livestock grazing its fields, office windows are barred up to the top floors. Guards check students' identification cards and vehicles as they enter the gates.

"We are living a contradiction between the role of the university as an open campus for society and culture and the need to adopt certain security measures," Vice Rector Gustavo Montanez said.

That contradiction reflects the growing schizophrenia of daily life in Colombia, where public awareness campaigns promoting peace, beauty pageants and city bicycle routes are broadcast alongside daily body counts and the grim statistics of a war fueled by the drug trade.

"This is a schizophrenic world with a regular discourse of peace in the face of daily warfare," said Gonzalo Sanchez, who has taught political science at the National University for 20 years.

Last year administrators of Antioquia University in the notoriously violent northwest city of Medellin hammered out an agreement with armed groups designed to make the campus a demilitarized zone, but it has been violated repeatedly.

For students such as Monica Huiza, 22, the question upon reaching college age was not what academic major to choose but whether to leave the country. "Here it's impossible to speak the truth," Huiza, majoring in social work at the National University, told Reuters. "I stayed here because I want to fight for change, not flee."

Classroom warfare

The most chilling effect of attacks on the intellectual community is the steady strangling of public debate over the social, economic and political crises facing the nation after nearly four decades of armed conflict, academic leaders say.

Sanchez was a leading member of the "violentologists" -- an interdisciplinary commission of academics studying violence that issued the 1989 report "Colombia. Violence and Democracy." But in recent years he has seen colleagues and students turn away from studying the conflict, its roots and impact, to specialize instead in long-dead epochs of Colombian history or far-removed current affairs topics like rock 'n' roll.

"The effect is the inhibition of mechanisms for building public opinion. There is less and less possibility to call things by their names. So I stop writing my opinion column. I study the colonial period," Sanchez said.

At the university's small campus in northeast Arauca province, territory dominated by the Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army, professors are said to work under constant threat, with even their lectures censored.

Fieldwork in the social and hard sciences has become increasingly dangerous. Last year, for example, a group of biology students from the National University was kidnapped while doing research in Antioquia.

Academics take care about what they write or say in public, even among colleagues. "In this country threats are carried out and the dead are quickly forgotten," Ricardo Rocha, an economist at Bogota's Universidad del Rosario, told Reuters. "I am not a figure on the national scene but if I were I wouldn't want to speak out in a way that put me in the sights of the extreme left or right."

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