Mass protests over education convulse Colombia

Mass actions begun May 23 culminated in the largest national mobilization in recent Colombian history on May 30. In Bogotá more than 220,000 people marched in the capital, effectively shutting down transportation for hours. Nationally, students occupied more than 300 colleges—130 in Bogotá alone—defending their right to free and affordable education, with hundreds of thousands demonstrating nationwide.

Since May Day, a day when workers demonstrate around the world, Colombia has been in a state of political convulsion. The suffering of the masses in that country is almost unimaginable. Yet despite massacres, displacement, selective assassinations, mass arrests and detentions, general repression and the always present threat of the paramilitaries, the unarmed social and labor movement keeps struggling against all odds, pushing a progressive agenda.

President Álvaro Uribe’s new proposed National Plan of Development (NPD) and the Law Project of Transferences (LPT) have provoked the anger and outrage particularly of teachers, students and college and university workers, who have been in a state of permanent mobilization opposing the measures since May 23.

The NPD—which is basically the financial plan for the nation until 2010—states that the schools and universities must pay pensioners from their own budget, thus ending the government’s subsidy. The LPT will reduce the amount of money that the national government allocates towards education and health care. The education system in Colombia is already precarious and these measures will further erode these vital services.

Analysts in Colombia say these measures will pave the way to the privatization of education and health care and consequently the ending of access to them for poor families who are the vast majority of the population.

Plan Colombia, the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the U.S. and the infiltration of the paramilitaries in the national and local governments had already aroused mass opposition. Now this new attack on education added a new layer of activism.

Prior actions and assemblies of teachers and students around the nation broke out on May 23 into a new social upheaval in Colombia. The Workers Federation (CUT), the Alternative Democratic Pole—which is the opposition center-left party in the Colombian Congress—and the Colombian Federation of Educators (FECODE), among others, called for a national strike on May 23 against Uribe’s policies, including the NPL and LPT.

That day teachers of primary and secondary schools initiated a strike that lasted until June 1. The May 23 actions also demanded a political, not a military solution to the internal armed conflict, the rejection of the privatization of the national oil industry (ECOPETROL), and for truth and justice in the scandalous case of the paramilitary ties with politicians.

In Bogotá alone 42,000 people marched on May 23. Students, teachers, workers, pensioners, the Indigenous and Afrocolombian communities, peasants, women and many other sectors of the working poor marched for more than six hours throughout the capital’s streets.

In most of the country the schools were paralyzed, with marches and other actions in Medellín, Manizales, Pereira and Pasto and road blockades elsewhere. Telesur reported that day that in the very poor western region of Chocó in the border with Panama, “the Indigenous communities closed the Medellín-Quibdó route and demanded the presence of organisms of control like the public defender and the office of the attorney general so that their demands, especially their social demands, are met.”

Teachers and students held assemblies and diverse actions nationally after May 23. The student movement coalesced and formed a united front in defense of public education, calling for the occupation of colleges and another day of national demonstrations for May 30.

The government’s response so far has been to go forward with the NPL and LPT, to close the National University in Bogotá and to use the riot police (ESMAD) against the students in some cities. Around 100 ESMAD agents violently invaded Caldas University in the early morning hours of June 5 breaking doors, throwing tear gas and shooting “perdigones” (pellets) at the 200 students that were occupying the campus. Students responded by throwing stones back at the police, who detained 22 students. On June 11, the Student Federation of Caldas University circulated on the Internet a statement requesting solidarity.

This repression has not dampened the struggling mood of the students nor the masses. Actions continue throughout Colombia and a call is on for the “occupation of Bogotá” on June 13.

The capitalist media in the U.S. have finally begun to report about the Colombian “parapolitical” scandal—the paramilitary infiltration of the National Congress and presumed paramilitary links with Uribe. This signals that a sector of the ruling class both in Colombia and in the U.S. is trying to distance itself from the near-fascist Uribe regime. The U.S. Congress picked up this signal and is at least delaying its vote for the FTA with Colombia, basing this delay on that country’s notorious human rights abuses.

Still, not a single article has appeared in the U.S. corporate media about the great strikes and large demonstrations by students and workers described above. Apparently these media have decided that publicizing popular resistance to a capitalist U.S. ally, even to Uribe’s government, is harmful to U.S. interests and that of the Colombian ruling class.

In contrast, the same media have given coverage ad-nauseam to the counterrevolutionary Venezuelan students’ demonstrations against the constitutional and completely legal closure of the pro-coup station RCTV. These very much smaller protests do represent the interest of the ruling class in Venezuela and the U.S.