RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – It is 2 AM and university professor Sara Fernández is lying asleep in bed when she feels the stabbing in her left breast. She wakes up and sees the assailant, pushes him away. The man falls to the ground, the knife too. Before she can grab him, he flees through the balcony.
That same night, March 4th, the 49-year-old is rushed to hospital. The knife pierced her lung. Sara Fernández has had three operations since then. One of her lungs was about to collapse.
No one was allowed to visit her except her partner and a nurse. Fernández was discharged from hospital two weeks ago and is now in a state apartment with personal security.
Her story is recounted to the press by her close friend María Rocío Bedoya. Bedoya is an attorney and vice president of ‘Asoprudea’, an association of professors at the public University of Antioquia in Medellín, of which Fernández is a member of the executive committee.
The members of the association have been fighting for months to preserve public universities: “We are underfunded, we have to provide more and more services, we have to take on external consulting assignments,” says Bedoya. “This is not our job.”
For Bedoya and her comrades-in-arms, the crumbling public universities and schools are a consequence of the neoliberal policies that have become more noticeable under the government of President Iván Duque.
Hate figure for the far-right
“I’m obsessed with the right to public education and health care, with the notion that the state must guarantee access to education,” says Sara Fernández in a low but firm voice in one of the audios she still sends from the hospital to the newspaper. She is a social worker, with a doctorate in sexual and reproductive health.
She has been committed to human rights for over twenty years. She is known not only as an advocate of public universities, but also throughout Latin America as a feminist who fights gender violence. She is also committed to the rights of indigenous peoples – and to the fulfilment of the peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas, which Duque’s predecessor Juan Manuel Santos enforced in late 2016 against considerable resistance at times.
As advocates of the peace treaty, the professors made enemies in Colombia. Two days before the attack on Sara Fernández, leaflets with death threats were hung on the walls of the university buildings.
They were intended to “cleanse” the university’s infiltrated committees of people who belonged to subversive groups, to the “communist plague”, to stand up for the “illegitimate peace of Santos”. The names of several professors and students were listed.
The name of Fernández’s association of professors, the Asoprudea, was also on the list. The death threat was signed by the ‘Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia’ (AGC), a paramilitary drug cartel. One day later, the leaflet was described as a forgery.
Violence by police
However, this does not render the situation at the University of Antioquia any less menacing. “The threat does not come from outside, but rather from within,” believes professor Rocío Bedoya. “The university is as polarized as the whole country.” After the assassination attempt on her friend, human rights groups reported to her about the far right-wing group ‘Agora’, which existed in the university. “We believe they are working with the Esmad.” This is the police’s anti-riot unit, which is deployed during protests.
Due to the crisis in public education, there have been repeated protests in Colombia in recent months. The public universities, as well as their students, professors and presidents, have been the driving force behind them. The peak was on November 21st, 2019, when a mostly peaceful surge of strikes against the government began, the likes of which the country had never experienced before.
The notorious Esmad police anti-riot unit responded with extreme brutality, using tear gas and water cannons. The death of student Dilan Cruz is a symbol of this: a policeman shot him in the head at close range. He died. President Iván Duque, who had earlier stigmatized the demonstrations, relented after weeks of protests and called for a national dialogue. Little has changed since then.
Quite the opposite. In Medellín, for one, the new mayor, Daniel Quintero, who many considered a modern beacon of hope, announced a protocol in February allowing the Esmad to enter the campus. He regards the university as a haven for militant hooded men who hurl explosives at demonstrations. The heads of the University protested strongly. After all, in the past, such operations on campus had led to damages and, above all, many injured bystanders.
Appeal from the hospital bed
Sara Fernández appealed from her hospital bed in a video: “Please remove the Esmad from the university. Do not touch the university. It is a sacred place.” The attack on her was an attack on the public university. “The main danger is that we become a fascist regime”, says Sara Fernandez. Because it is becoming increasingly difficult to disagree, to defend the secular state, to address social injustices. And above all: the state does not protect its citizens.
According to ‘Fecode’, an education union, over 1000 professors and teachers have been murdered in Colombia in the last thirty years. In 2019 over 970 were threatened, 14 were murdered. In 2020 there have been 270 threats, one female professor was murdered.
Sara Fernández’s attacker grabbed the neighbors as he fled over the balcony. They had heard Fernández’s cries for help. An 18-year-old hit man, clean-shaven and with a fresh haircut. He is now under arrest. “Now the challenge is to prove who’s behind it,” says María Rocío Bedoya.
The university has offered legal aid
Since the assassination attempt, the atmosphere at the University of Antioquia has changed. “I don’t want these people to achieve their goal: to silence us all who think critically,” says Rocío Bedoya. “But the consequences are beginning to be felt.” Colleagues no longer came to work, no longer come to the association’s meetings because they are afraid. “The psychological impact was very intense.”
The university had offered to provide legal assistance to those threatened and to escort them to the prosecutor’s office. There is no support from the state. Requests for personal protection are routinely rejected, criticizes the regional professors’ representation.
The rector of the University of Antioquia has at least guaranteed that he will support all professors and students who want to change universities or go abroad temporarily as a result of threats. Fernández plans to take this step, Bedoya also wanted to leave the country for three months to gain some distance.
“I had already been invited to a European university – but the coronavirus thwarted my plans.”
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