Murder of Professor Baffles Colombia

Associated Press
By Jared Kotler
17 September 1999
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BOGOTA -- If the latest assassination of a prominent peace proponent was intended to send a message, Colombians are having trouble understanding what it was.

Many said they are losing all sense of the logic - if any still exists - behind the violence that has wracked their country for decades.

``I can't find the reasons, and the more I think about it the less I understand,'' said political analyst Rafael Nieto, a friend of Jesus Bejarano, the 58-year-old former peace envoy gunned down on Wednesday at the Bogota university where he taught economics.

``All I can see is that the dirty war is growing,'' Nieto told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The slaying of Berajano, who played a key role in peace efforts in his native Colombia and Central America, has heightened fears that Colombia's 35-year civil conflict has entered an even more vicious new phase.

``It's absolutely horrifying that someone of his experience and involvement and intellectual brilliance has gone down in this kind of way,'' said Cynthia Arnson, a Latin America specialist at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.

``This is a devastating blow to the peace process,'' she said.

Just a month ago, Colombians were stunned by the assassination of Jaime Garzon, a beloved humorist and television personality who tried to mediate hostage releases and poked fun at Colombia's elites. Police have yet to arrest the motorcycle gunmen who sprayed his jeep with bullets.

Less known to the public than Garzon, Bejarano was no less respected. A periodic oracle to presidents and politicians, he was valued for his sharp intellect, blunt style and experience as a former envoy to peace negotiations with leftist guerrillas.

About 2,000 people attended a memorial ceremony at the National University on Thursday, where the slain professor was displayed in a wooden coffin draped with a white flag.

Colombia's long-running conflict pits guerrillas against the military and landowner-backed paramilitary militias. It has claimed at least 30,000 lives, the majority of them civilians accused of collaborating with one side or the other.

The violence has raged unabated this year despite the start of peace talks between President Andres Pastrana and Colombia's largest guerrilla army.

But Nieto said the slain professor had no direct contacts with any of the country's armed factions or the peace talks. He said Bejarano ``was far from all that, dedicated to the university, to his academic work.''

Witnesses said the bearded professor was shot once in the forehead by one of two armed gunmen who approached him Wednesday evening as he descended a stairway full of students at the National University.

Two days beforehand, Bejarano had been followed off campus by hooded men. When he reached his car, he found his tires slashed, an official from the federal prosecutor's office said Thursday.

The professor managed to drive to safety. He later told his family he feared either leftists or rightists would make an attempt on his life, the official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Police on Thursday showed a sketch of a dark-haired man in his early twenties thought to be one of the assailants, and offered a $250,000 reward for information. However, they have made no arrests nor ventured a hypothesis about who shot Bejarano.

In a statement aired by Caracol television Thursday, a national paramilitary umbrella organization denied it was responsible for the killing, and blamed Bejarano's death on the rebels.

Colombia's media on Thursday batted about two principal theories: that leftist rebels wanted to silence an advocate of government toughness in peace talks, or that right-wing extremists were seeking to sow instability or torpedo the peace process.

Neither explanation satisfied those close to the man who represented the government in 1991 peace talks with Colombian rebels and who, as Colombia's ambassador to El Salvador, helped broker the 1992 peace accords ending that country's civil war.

``In this political environment, in this strange social context, any ruminating about who killed Jesus Bejarano is nothing more than speculation,'' said Ernesto Borda, an international relations professor at Bogota's Javeriana University.