Note #9248 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:
06215 April 13, 2006
Students reconsider invitation to ex-president of Colombia
Andreas Pastrana may or may not be commencement speaker at Sterling College
by Alexa Smith
LOUISVILLE - Students at a Presbyterian-related college in Kansas will hold a public forum next Tuesday to decide whether they want the Colombian ambassador to the United States to speak at their graduation.
Former Colombian President Andreas Pastrana - the country's current ambassador to the United States - is scheduled to deliver the May 13 commencement address at Sterling College, a liberal arts school in Sterling KS, with an enrollment of 515 students.
"We're going to decide, as students, whether we want him to come onto our campus to be our commencement speaker," said Karin Lederle, a Sterling sophomore who is the president of the school's Student Government Association.
Questions apparently were raised about Pastrana's human-rights record as president and about the policies of the current President Alvaro Uribe Velez, who is running for re-election May 28.
Uribe's first term focused on attracting investment in Colombia's natural resources, including oil, and trying to crush three illegal armed groups that repeatedly violate international humanitarian law by committing kidnappings and other atrocities.
Critics of Uribe's policies say that, while curbing civil liberties has reduced some crime and guerrilla activity, he is neglecting grave social problems, including the plight of millions of poor Colombians displaced by violence and abuses committed by the armed forces.
Sterling's students do not have the authority to dis-invite a commencement speaker. But the college president, Bruce Douglas, told the Presbyterian News Service (PNS) that he will heed the students' advice if they speak in a unified voice.
The forum will include presentations by faculty on Colombia's political and human-rights history so that students may ask questions before speaking to the administration.
Pastrana was hand-picked by Douglas. The college describes him in a press release as an "international hero" with a "commendable" career in public service. A student apparently asked that a former president be invited to address the students.
Douglas told PNS that he believes the students will not veto Pastrana's appearance. "I believe they will invite him and say, 'Let's have a dialogue,'" he said, adding that Colombia is a chaotic country rife with crime and narco-violence.
e said Pastrana has been "a force for good, a force for change in Colombia," and noted that he has been lauded by the Bush administration.
Because of repeated death threats against clergy and other church leaders in the Presbyterian Church of Colombia, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) keeps teams of volunteers among the churches along Colombia's north coast, where massive numbers of poor farmers have been forcibly displaced from their land and pushed into shanty towns along the edges of major cities.
The Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, an organization committed to finding non-violent alternatives to war, recruits and trains the teams; it is now reporting an increase in U.S. volunteers.
A Sterling student contacted the Presbyterian News Service about Pastrana's address after reading a letter on the agency's web site from a team of "accompaniers" expressing alarm at new threats lodged against two church leaders and calling for U.S. Presbyterians to write Uribe in protest.
At least three Presbyterian church leaders who work with Colombia's displaced have faced death threats from clandestine paramilitary groups, who claim many of the poor are guerrilla fighters. Similar allegations have been leveled against some church leaders; the Presbyterian church's office in Barranquilla has been under what appears to be military surveillance.
The church has insisted that it works only through legal, non-violent means, and has no ties to guerrilla groups.
Ecumenical church leaders in Colombia have repeatedly asked the Uribe administration to defend human-rights activists and to stop jailing suspected dissidents for lengthy periods without filing charges.
Pastrana is now the Uribe administration's ambassador to the United States.
Pastrana campaigned for the presidency of Colombia by pledging to negotiate peace with Marxist rebels, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and to try to end more than four decades of civil conflict.
Despite Pastrana's bold political moves and concessions to keep negotiations open, the FARC never made an explicit commitment to end the conflict, and the process collapsed, sending the president's approval ratings into free-fall, rendering him a lame duck and paving the way for Uribe's presidency.
In a bid for peace, the Pastrana administration ceded a Switzerland-size safe haven to the FARC. Some Colombians say the gesture only enabled the rebels to build strength and grow cocaine trafficking, which funds the operations of both guerrilla and paramilitary groups in Colombia.
While battling high unemployment and deep social inequities, Pastrana initiated the controversial Clinton-era Plan Colombia, which used billions of dollars in U.S. military aid to try to eradicate drug production in rural areas.
Church groups have pushed the U.S. government to escalate developmental aid, rather than military support, so that Colombia's poor farmers can grow and market alternative crops to cocaine.
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