Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe at Georgetown HUGH O’SHAUGHNESSY
Distinguished – or discredited?
Many Jesuits have expressed outrage at the presence of the former president of Colombia as a guest lecturer at Georgetown University, run by their order in Washington DC. Human-rights campaigners claim that Alvaro Uribe is responsible for the murder and disappearance of 14,000 people
The lack of winding gear or machinery indi- cates that groups of miners are underground carving out coal without much equipment and in medieval conditions. At the age of five, boys go down ladders into the dangerous, narrow coal seams. Not strong enough to wield a pick, they bring sandwiches and do errands for their brothers of eight or nine who can. Their wages are often paid in cocaine. This is a country marked by widespread political violence, bloodletting and corruption that accompany its so-called “war on drugs”, and by the existence of up to four million refugees fleeing war within its borders. Given this situation, many have puzzled how Colombia over the decades has gained favourable foreign press coverage. In the last four months that puzzle has dis- appeared. The chaos that is Colombia’s politics has been exposed to public gaze, paradoxically in a Catholic forum dedicated to the United States diplomacy used so strenuously to proj- ect a positive image of what has become a political and military ally of Washington. As a cooperative military partner in a region in process of sloughing off US hegemony, Colombia and its bases give the US the poten- tial to attack every country in the hemisphere. The exposure started on 11 August at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in Georgetown University, the Jesuit-run insti- tution in the US capital, when it named Alvaro Uribe, the former president of Colombia, a “Distinguished Scholar in the Practice of Global Leadership”. Until four days previously Uribe had run his country for eight years and was widely identified with its chronic ills – indeed he was facing many calls for his arrest and trial on serious and detailed charges. Nevertheless he took up the post and began delivering lectures. His is a conspicuous pres- ence on the Georgetown campus as he goes around accompanied by five bodyguards. The school boasts of its associations with
M
the US Establishment through a number of figures who have taught or studied there. Those in its orbit include ultra-conservatives such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, who as US per- manent representative at the United Nations
8 | THE TABLET | 13 November 2010
arking the road to the Colombian town of Angelópolis, the City of Angels, are heaps of coal awaiting collection by lorry.
was nervous of upsetting General Leopoldo Galtieri, the torturing dictator of Argentina during the Falklands War. Others have included George Tenet, a CIA director, and General Alexander Haig, President Reagan’s Secretary of State. Bewilderment and anger have invaded
Georgetown. Few of the teachers seem to have been consulted about the appointment, which, according to some, was made on the sole authority of John DeGioia, since 2001 the first lay head of a Jesuit university. A promi- nent establishment figure, DeGioia is a Knight of Malta, and a member of the World Economic Forum and the Council on Foreign Relations. The impression on campus is that DeGioia drinks from the same intellectual wellsprings as Kirkpatrick: his adviser on Latin American affairs is José María Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister and partner with Tony Blair in bringing their respective countries into the war on Iraq in 2003. Students have demonstrated against the former Colombian leader. The first major condemnation of the appointment in Colombia came from a Jesuit, Fr Javier Giraldo, a leading social thinker and activist. In a damning letter to his US Jesuit colleague Fr John Dear, he said Uribe had sponsored death squads, who murdered and “disappeared” 14,000 people and displaced multitudes. “The corruption during his administration was more than scandalous, not just because of the presence of drug traffickers in public positions but also because the Congress and many government offices were occupied by criminals,” Fr Giraldo wrote. “Today more than 100 members of Congress are involved in criminal proceedings, all of them President Uribe’s closest supporters.” The purchase of consciences in order to manipulate the judicial apparatus was dis- graceful and, said Fr Giraldo, “it ended up destroying, at the deepest level, the moral conscience of the country”. The corrupt machi- nations he used to obtain his re-election as President of Colombia in 2006 were sordid in the extreme. In conclusion, said Giraldo, “the decision by the Jesuits at Georgetown to offer a professorship to Alvaro Uribe is not only deeply offensive to those Colombians who still maintain moral principles, but also
Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe with Pope Benedict XVI in 2009
places at high risk the ethical development of the young people who attend our university in Washington. Where are the ethics of the Society of Jesus?” Giraldo’s letter, published in September, has unleashed a flood of new protests directed at Dr DeGioia. From El Salvador, theologian Fr Jon Sobrino SJ expressed his shame at Georgetown’s decision. “Uribe is a symbol of the worst that has happened in the tragic con- flict in Colombia. There is a great deal of blood involved here, a very great deal.” In his column in the US weekly newspaper
the National Catholic Reporter, Fr Dear accused Georgetown of having a long history of supporting warmongering, taking subven- tions from the Pentagon and cultivating a range of people from Henry Kissinger to the Shah of Iran and Ronald Reagan. Then came a letter of protest against Uribe’s appointment, signed by more than 100 aca- demics including Professor Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Professor Anthony Bebbington of Manchester University. That was followed on 3 November by lawyers for Colombian victims of death squads serving Uribe with a subpoena relating to paramilitary activities. The plaintiffs are seeking damages from the American coal-mining company Drummond, which is accused of supporting death squads, allegedly with Uribe’s knowledge. Georgetown’s leaders have kept their peace. But in the light of the subpoena, many are wondering whether Uribe will keep his next appointment in the lecture hall in a few weeks’ time.
■Hugh O’Shaughnessy is the author, with Sue Branford, of Chemical Warfare in Colombia: the costs of coca fumigation (Latin America Bureau).
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40