We laughed for several minutes at the joke but the fact is, it’s true. In the context of a decades-old internal conflict, dissent, opposition, and questioning are all repressed – often violently – here, and Colombian President Álvaro Uribe repeatedly attempts to draw civilians into the fray. The latest example, to which the lawyer referred with his joke, was a program announced in late January for students in Medellín to spy on each other and report to the Armed Forces in exchange for $50 a month.

Opposition to the program was quick and fierce. Teachers, students and social organizations protested. Opposition Senator Piedad Córdoba countered that “the solution to the security issue in Medellin is not turning university students into paramilitary intelligence agents,” but rather that the police “carry out its duty to protect the citizenry.”

The Medellín Youth Network, a youth organization that has supported conscientious objectors and campaigned against the militarization of Colombian society for over 20 years, criticized the proposal in a statement issued just days after Uribe’s announcement, declaring, “What measures like this do is reinforce the interests of the security policies of the current government, the aim of which is to militarize the civilian population… This implies a society that relies on violence for the resolution of all conflicts; a uncritical society, subjected to the rule of armies and mercenaries, that legitimizes war, because violence becomes people’s means of subsistence.”

Despite the outcry, a few days later Uribe reiterated his support for citizen sapos, and called on all Colombians to collaborate by turning over information to the armed forces. Uribe justified his proposal by citing rising crimes rates in Medellín. Although until recently the city was heralded as an example of the success of Uribe’s “Democratic Security” policy, in 2009 there was a 108% increase in murders in the city from the previous year, for a total of 2,178. Uribe also claimed that Medellin Mayor Alonso Salazar supported the proposal, but Salazar has made it clear that he does not, in fact, agree. “It is a monumental error,” he has said of the plan.

Though the student spy program raised many alarms and lots of opposition, leading Uribe to assure that the program will not involve minors, the fact is that this is by no means the first time that Uribe has promoted the use of civilian sapos. He introduced the idea while running for president (the first time), and officially called for Colombians to spy on each other at the National Municipalities Conference on October 4, 2002. Since then he has continued to promote the so-called “red de cooperantes” (collaborators network) of civilians collaborating with the military and police.

As a result, in Colombia one never knows who might be listening and watching. Taxi drivers, for example, are some of the main participants in the “collaborators network” program. On February 1st, Uribe invited the taxi drivers of Cali to add themselves to the list of informants, offering them a special cell phone with which to pass information to the authorities in exchange for a small kickback. Other cities already have such a program, like Villavicencio, where more than a thousand taxi drivers act as informants.

In a press conference just after the student sapo program was announced, Colombia’s Defense Minister Gabriel Silva explained that the army and police already count on 2.2 million “collaborators,” nearly 3,000 of whom are paid for their services. Among those he described as demonstrating “solidarity” by “collaborating” are security guards, housewives, shopkeepers, and peasants.

Soon after the announcement of the student informant program, caricatures circulated depicting students, upset about a grade, getting a revenge on the professor by reporting him to the authorities. But such satires reveal that the concerns about this “collaborators network” are serious and many.

Sebastián, an organizer with the Medellín Youth Network in his early 20s, explains. “The risk [of the program],” he says, “is that there won’t be a student culture of learning, art, and other diverse…spaces that one encounters in universities. Instead it will be a hostile culture of war, mistrust, and without diverse spaces for thought.”

Sebastian says the entire “collaborators network” program puts civilians, and particularly those whom oppose government policies, in danger. The government, he says, “uses the informants network to persecute, stigmatize and use different types of harassment and torture.” This is not only because the program can be used for personal revenge, but because it also can be – and has been – used to target political opponents. Because dissent has been largely criminalized in Colombia, information from such informants has led on many occasions to the detention of those doing legitimate human rights work based on trumped up charges. In addition, a similar rewards-based program – since changed after much outcry – led to the explosion of the so-called “false positives,” in which soldiers and civilians, paid to capture members of illegal armed groups, ended up killed hundreds of innocent young men.

And in a country embroiled in an internal armed conflict, such a program puts civilian informants in grave danger by making them potential targets, thereby violating international humanitarian law, which establishes civilian neutrality in armed conflicts. As the same lawyer who made the sapos joke explains, in Colombia the line between military and civilian life is being blurred. Programs like the student informants “create more risks for civilians by involving them into the conflict,” he says. The army justifies the “collaborators network” with comparisons to Neighborhood Watch programs in the U.S. and Canada, but the U.S. and Canada aren’t in the middle of an internal armed conflict in which civilians are targeted for interactions with one side or the other.

Though Uribe’s hopes of being reelected for a third term have recently been dashed, it is quite likely that one of his protégées, like his former Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, will be elected. There is even talk that Uribe will run as his vice president. It is therefore quite likely that such practices will continue. In fact, Santos has defended the student informant proposal, saying, “What’s the problem? Why the drama? The policy of using informants has been pretty successful.”

The dangers for civilians are clear, however. It is one thing to have a trained set of government functionaries tasked with collecting information on illegal activity – though in Colombia even that has been problematic, as strong evidence surfaces that the domestic intelligence agency that answers directly to the president has illegally spied upon Supreme Court judges, opposition politicians, prosecutors, human rights defenders, and journalists. But it is another to recruit untrained civilians to do such a job, and put them, and those they spy upon, at risk.

Instead, the Colombian government must stop criminalizing dissent and address crime and violence with real solutions that get at the root of the problems facing the country.

As Sebastián says, “The government has a way of directing and tranquilizing the people…what they need are submissive people who don’t think. Given this reality in which we live, you have to open your eyes to the many situations [in Colombia] that are problematic, and it inspires me to act. So I am organizing with the [Medellin Youth Network] to transform these ideas of authority, order and death.”



About the Author
Moira Birss recently returned to the U.S. after two years in Colombia as a Human Rights Accompanier with the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Since graduating from the University of Michigan, she has worked on researching community-based models of alternative economies, advocating for affordable housing, and promoting environmental protection. Moira's articles have appeared on Alternet, In These Times, and CommonDreams. She blogs at www.1peaceatatime.blogspot.com.