Leftists under assault at Colombian universities

BARRANQUILLA, Colombia -- Suspicion has infected the classrooms, corridors and faculty lounges of the University of the Atlantic. Professors who have spent decades in the gray concrete classrooms of one of Colombia's finest public universities look out over rows of students and choose their words carefully. Students considering a rally think twice.

"There are students here who never take a test, never write down a thing," said a 21-year-old science student from Cartagena. "They are only here to identify student leaders, who the teachers are who might be from the left. I can't walk up to a student and say, 'This policy is wrong, let's do something about it.' I don't know who I am talking to."

Across Colombia, the decades-old ideological battle between left and right in the classroom has become a violent campaign against students, professors and administrators. The country's 32 public universities have long been a recruiting pool for leftist guerrilla armies, whose rhetorical blend of class struggle and social justice has found receptive audiences in the middle- to lower-class student bodies.

Colombia's public universities reflect the deep class and ideological differences that have helped perpetuate the country's civil warfare for almost four decades. Here and across Latin America the public university has traditionally been the wellhead of leftist thought and activism, a training ground for leftist leaders who often emerge from the disenfranchised lower classes. Private universities, too expensive for most Colombians, train the children of the conservative elite.

Now, as part of their effort to seize not only territorial but ideological control from the guerrillas, the rightist paramilitary forces have arrived at Colombia's public universities. They're located in key geographic areas most contested by the leftist guerrillas and the rightist forces who have taken up arms on behalf of land and business owners who feel the government isn't protecting them.

Paid informers monitor student activities and lectures for leftist overtones. Lists of those targeted for death surface and disappear in campus corridors. In the past two years, at least 27 professors, students and administrators have been killed, usually gunned down near their homes, according to the National Union of University Workers and Employees.

The most recent student to die was Miguel Puello Polo, a 24-year-old representative to the university's governing board. He was shot five times in front of his home by two men on a motorcycle, who called out his name before killing him.

As professors censor their lectures and students abandon left-leaning organizations, the paramilitary campaign is choking off leftist activism. Professors and students, who rarely give their names and stop all conversation when a stranger enters a room, say the paramilitary campaign has stifled debate, changed the way they teach and learn, and undermined the universities' traditional role as a sanctuary of free expression.