Basically students around the country agreed to calling an academic recess, and finishing the semester later, in January. I don't know if it was a victory or a defeat, or not much of either. Especially sad was to see the student movement, which had been so united, rent into factions of official national student leaders who wanted to reconcile with the government given the fulfillment of certain demands, and other, regional groups that said they weren't satisfied with government concessions.
The campus of the university I work at had been closed for most of October, with kids camped out on the grounds. On October 31st they left, which was kind of sad, like the end of an era. That night they held a silent, peaceful march to the center of town, and then they played with trick or treaters in the main plaza. I thought this was a cool idea on their part. In general I
sensed a gradual transition on the part of the student movement, from self-righteous demonstrating and even destruction, to constructive demands, conversations, programs. Perhaps the latter were always present, but the movement became better about communicating them to the public at large.This article claimed that the whole thing was much ado about nothing, since the government had already removed the most contentious aspects of the law regarding the creation of for-profit universities. But this other article parses the privatizing spirit of the rest of the law, even without the most contentious parts of it.
In the end the government withdrew the controversial proposal to reform Ley 30, and by now students are back in classes after a long vacation. In the end I think things turned out well, and I hope students and others (me, perhaps?) will continue working towards a better, more inclusive education system. Nevertheless, whenever I see videos like this one, which is actually a pretty good summary of the students' demands, it raise my hackles. Essentially, I agree with the progressive goals of the movement, but I can't agree with their methods. I have two major problems with the student movement as it has played out in Colombia over the past year or so:
It's a movement of force. In order to fight a measure that they saw as unjust, students resorted to force in order to achieve their goals. They shut down public (read funded by the people) universities and created havoc in order to be heard. Their basic demands of allocating more funding to public universities and not allowing the market to intervene in public education seem sound to me, but they do not necessarily represent the desire of a majority of Colombians (maybe they do, maybe they don't--the students never asked anyone about it). Hence despite their claims of bringing true democracy through the streets, what the students participated in was mobocracy or yellocracy, in which not the majority but those who make the most scandal decide how the society will be. We've seen the awful effects on the US political system of granting influence to those who yell the loudest as opposed to the legitimate popular will.
Aside from this conceptual qualm of mine, the fact is that students used violence (in the form of explosives) and vandalism during their movement. Even today large swaths of Bogota retain the graffiti and broken windows that the protestors caused. Perhaps not everyone involved in the movement took part in the violence, but if the students wish to be heard as one solid block, they also have to accept responsibility for the actions of all elements forming part of the movement.
This is another point of cowardice in the movement--they insist (tacitly or explicitly) on their right to use force, but if the police use force against the students they cry injustice, or if concrete complaints are directed at student vandalism (breaking church windows, breaking windows of university buildings), they deny responsibility or claim it was the police trying to frame them. It is curious that the student movement leaders occasionally hark back to the Union Patriotica political party as an example of the type of political movement they want to become.
The UP was a party formed by the FARC guerrilla movement, whose members were subsequently executed by death squads. There's no doubt that this paramilitary elimination of a political party was a crime against humanity. But let's look at this objectively--the UP was essentially a strategy for the FARC to continue its illegal insurgent activity while also having a legitimate political branch to pursue its agenda. I don't see much difference between UP politicians, who supported and agreed with the FARC armed group and its violence, and the despicable members of the Colombian Congress who maintained ties with illegal paramilitary groups to help them pursue their agenda outside the halls of parliament. This cowardly strategy of advocating violence but then demanding treatment as good faith citizens is something I see hints of in the student movement.
In the end, I know that force is a part of political reality, perhaps especially in Colombia. I know too that if someone makes you do something (for example if students block off universities so classes can't be held), there's not much you can do about it. I accept the use of de facto force insofar as I've no other option. But it's not the way a society should work. And it's especially sad that these young students, who should be the most critical, the most apt to find a way out of Colombia's violent status quo, are just continuing the culture of imposition by force.
My second problem with the student movement, and perhaps less grave than its use of and advocacy of force, is an attitude of self-centered arrogance I sense in the students' way of doing things. The student leaders are basically part of a brotherhood of elites who talk a lot. In a country as rural as Colombia, it's a glaring omission that the student movement never mentioned the peasantry (except as a rhetorical trope to validate their leftist orthodoxy). These students are not aspiring to be farmers or to improve the lives of our poor masses. Their aspiration is that they and their peers can insert themselves into Colombia's circle of overeducated pedants that criticize the state while drawing their salary from it. I see the same yuppy kids from Bogota leading everything on the national level, though in our small town the students and the student movement are decidedly proletarian. Once again, if the student movement shows the same classist, Bogota-centric biases of the rest of society, why should I think it's going to create anything other than the next generation of leftist politicians-turned-elite-clintelists?
A good example of what I'm worried about is Gustavo Petro. This is a guy who just won the Bogota mayor's office, after dividing and discrediting his party (the Polo, the only real leftist party in Colombia) and creating his own personality-cult party. He still talks progressive, but his only real consistent value is the pursuit of his own self-glorification. I see the spark of Petro in some of these student leaders, and it worries me.
The movement calls for a complete overturn of our current society, and even a new constitution. The present constitution in Colombian was drafted in 1991 by a broad coalition of many sectors of society, including ex-guerrillas and the Communist party (and Gustavo Petro, in his more coherent days). But now the student movement is claiming that the constitution is one more rotten tool of neoliberalism. I don't know enough about the current constitution to appraise these claims, but even if the present constitution has flaws, what's to say that a new constitution would be any better? I wouldn't want to entrust my society to a bunch of 20-year-olds that, if past generations are any indication, will eventually tire of the "game" of radical social movements and just become more bourgeois, self-centered jerks.
It's perhaps natural for young people to think they have all the answers, but it's important for the rest of us to avoid such hubris. It seems that there will always be flaws in the solutions we arrive for societal problems, but it's folly to think that because of these flaws we should start from scratch. Likewise, it's never a good idea to entrust your society to a group of self-annointed (or even collectively-annointed) saviors. We've seen time and again in history that the most progressive goals can become distorted and wasted when we entrust them to one or a few fallible people, instead of a robust system of dialogue and popular decision.
Notwithstanding my aversion to charismatic political leaders, I think it will be good if the student movement begins to field candidates and undertake actions within the bounds of the existing political system, in addition to their popular protests. This is an interview with a Chilean student leader who talks about the next step being to gain power in the city councils, and perhaps eventually in national government. If student leaders become involved with elective politics, where they have to show a certain level of success (while adhering to certain rules) in order to keep on advancing with their agenda, then perhaps they will become more concrete and less violent in the actions they propose. I know it's one more example of radical movements being absorbed and coopted by the system, but I guess I'd prefer an accountable mortal working within a set of agreed-upon rules, rather than a radical demi-god spouting fire and discourse and answering to no one but his own ego.
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