As dirty a war as can be

For students the world over, South American revolutionary Che Guevarais a symbol of freedom. But now some believe his followers are killing academics in Colombia's vicious civil war. Tim Cornwell reports.

Last Monday, as Professor Jesus Antonio Bejarano Avila was leaving his economics class in the old accounting building at Bogot National University, Colombia, he bumped into two hooded men. They slid away when some students approached. In the parking lot he found that his car's tyres had been punctured and then saw three other men waiting for him. He got in the car and drove away.

At his house that night, he wrote an email to a friend in Europe telling him what had happened. He explained that he feared for his life, but did not know whether the threat came from the extreme left or the right.

Late the next afternoon, the hooded gunmen approached Bejarano on his way to a class. This time they fired before running away. A single bullet at point-blank range was all it took to end his life. It was his own students who brought his body to the clinic where he died.

Bejarano's death was more than just the murder of another public figure in a country at war with itself. It was the latest and most brazen in a series of brutal killings on the campuses of Colombia's universities.

Outspoken figures have always been at risk in Colombia's 40-year civil war. The violence embedded in its culture actually bred a strand of academic study nicknamed "violentology". Threats to freedom of expression do not come in the abstract. "Professor Jesus", a former peace adviser to the government and an outspoken proponent of peace, was killed, one Bogotan says, "because he had something to say".

At a time when Colombia appears both to be inching towards a peace process and tottering on the brink of renewed warfare, violence in its universities has reached new heights. Most chilling is its anonymity - no one claims the crime, not even the victims know who their killers are or what they have done to offend them. Bodies are found faceless, with severed heads and fingers.

European liberals, Colombians insist, should no longer assume that the obvious enemy of academic thought comes from right-wing death squads. Leftist guerrillas, in the field since the early, romantic days of Che Guevara, are equally suspected of having ordered the hits, using tactics they once denounced. Old ideological labels have lost their meaning in a brutal struggle for power.

Colombia has been locked in cyclical violence for years. The news stories noting that the country has suffered a 35-year civil war with some 35,000 dead tend to omit the period from 1947 to 1957 known as La Violencia, in which an estimated 300,000 people were killed. It is the world capital of kidnapping - nearly 2,000 people have been abducted so far this year.

There are four major players in the current fighting. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a guerrilla force estimated at some 15,000 strong, and the rival National Liberation Army (ELN), with probably 6,000 fighters, are said to control 40 per cent or more of the countryside. The government is represented in the field by the police and the army. The latter have long been considered in cahoots with the fourth player, the Self Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), or paramilitaries, although they are attempting to clean up their image.

The country is receiving renewed international attention because the United States is again sounding war drums in its never-ending war on drugs. Washington's new nemesis is the "narco-guerrillas", with all sides allegedly arming themselves using profits from protection rackets for Colombia's cocaine - still flourishing despite crackdowns in the 1980s. The US is pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars in financial and military aid. But an economic crisis and a perception that President Andres Pastrana has stumbled in the peace process have created an atmosphere of pessimism and growing demands for No M s, no more.

It is in this context that the universities have experienced a wave of campus killings and intimidation, the worst in a decade. The strife has been centred on Medell!n's University of Antioquia. There, in June, four masked assailants burst into the office of sociologist Hernan Henao, singled out the 54-year-old professor and shot him with pistols. Henao was reportedly conducting research on people displaced by the armed conflict.

The respected news-weekly Semana described Antioquia this summer as an "academic time-bomb" that could explode at any moment. All participants in the armed conflict, the magazine said, were organising at the university; its 28 blocks had become an epicentre of conflict between the ELN, the FARC, the paramilitaries and armed criminals. Antioquia's rector appealed to the leaders of the armed groups not to bring the war to the university. In 1987, six professors and 17 students were murdered there.

The fear is that the organising trend will spread from Antioquia to other universities. It is not clear whether that has happened. But faculty members at Bogot describe a threatening letter circulated by the paramilitaries, announcing a new "chapter" on campus. One group of students told me that they had heard of a death list circulating this month at the University of South Colombia.

On September 2, the mutilated body of Dario Betancourt, a social science professor at the National Teachers University in Santafe de Bogat , was found. He had been kidnapped on April 30. A professor for more than 15 years, he had published many articles on violence in Colombia and had reportedly included drug cartels in his area of study.

Bogot National University does not feel like a threatening place. Outside the gates, kerbside hawkers sell junk jewellry, woollen handbags and the occasional volume by a German philosopher. Inside, students play hackey sack and strum Nirvana tunes on a guitar.

There are Maoist and Marxist revolutionary slogans daubed across the walls of faculty buildings, denouncing imperialism in the old-fashioned way. But the morning after Bejarano's killing, a banner dripping with bright fresh paint was draped across the university's front gate, on a main Bogot road. "We denounce the vile murder of Professor Jesus within the National University," it read. "We regret our country's violence. One bullet will not silence the research, the criticism, the knowledge of a public university."

Bejarano was a major player in Colombia's stop-start attempts at peace. He acted as an adviser at international talks in the early 1990s and was a former ambassador to El Salvador. But he was also hailed this week as a researcher, who had recently been studying the literature of the peace process.

While right-wing vigilantes have been blamed in other campus killings, one theory lays the murder of the one-time Marxist at the door of the guerrillas, because he had publicly urged them to make concessions for peace. Among Colombians, the FARC is increasingly blamed for showing more interest in extortion and the cocaine trade than in seeking real reform or reconciliation.

The scene on campus after Bejarano's death was redolent of the shock and hurt that has followed recent bloody killings in America's schools. In Che Guevara Plaza, shaken faculty greeted one another with hugs. Inside an auditorium whose external wall boasts a massive portrait of the revolutionary hero, Bejarano's casket lay in state, draped in white, surrounded by huge bouquets and with an honour guard of four burly university security men. Tearful students delivered impromptu eulogies.

Students had plastered the walls of the economics department with testimonials. "Jesus," asked one banner, "should this be forgiven?" A girl held a sign saying simply: "This country stinks! No more." One of Bejarano's students, who asked not to be named, said: "People feel very defenceless because this could happen at any time. It seems that there is no protection of free thought."

Federico Gonzalez, a director of social research, said he did not know who would want to murder Bejarano or why, but the message was that "they can kill anybody". Summing up reactions to the murder, sociology professor Fernando Uricoechea, an alumnus of the University of California at Berkeley and the London School of Economics, says: "More than fear, it is a feeling of irrationality. He was a man of peace, he was not belligerent. To add to that you have the mystery. Who ordered it? Why him?" Uricoechea subscribes to the theory that the FARC is behind the killing because Bejarano was "extremely critical of the guerrillas' position concerning the peace process". He bitterly condemned "naive" European intellectuals for their persistence in seeing the guerrillas as progressives. "It is said that the FARC, because of its involvement in drugs, has been 'lumpenised'. No longer does it have an ideology."