A coed's path from poli-sci major to leftist guerrilla

Ivon Barragan Tovar seemed like a normal 22-year-old still living at home with her parents. Her bedroom in a lower-middle class Bogatá barrio still bore marks of innocence: a heart-shaped pillow and stuffed Winnie the Pooh.

But A.A. Milne wouldn't recognize the rest of Ms. Tovar's room decor. Police found intelligence documents, maps, and political propaganda supporting the Marxist-inspired rebels known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or by their Spanish acronym, FARC.

Tovar was allegedly a FARC rebel. Last October, she was shot in a police shootout during an attempt to assassinate a prominent businessman in downtown Bogotá. The assassination attempt failed, and young "Juana" - Tovar's nom de guerre - is now dead. But her story offers a glimpse into the shadowy world of FARC's urban recruitment and how a seemingly average young woman became an alleged terrorist.

"Juana is more or less the typical young person recruited" by the FARC, says a police captain who supervises antiterrorist probes. "That stage of youth is so romantic."

According to him and other police officials, Tovar was recruited at 18 or 19, during her fourth semester of political science studies at Bogotá's 26,000-student National University.

Shortly afterward, she disappeared, allegedly to receive weapons training in a FARC-controlled area in southern Colombia. Juana reemerged in March 2003, and moved back in with her family.

According to police, the FARC decided to bring their largely rural war to Colombia's cities 20 years ago, but the pace of urban action increased once the government dissolved the rebel safe zone in February 2002. But then FARC lacked the necessary street smarts to put their plan into action. "The FARC couldn't send guerrillas from the mountain into the city without help," says a police major, who also investigated the case. They turned to universities in the hopes of creating an urban "guerrilla factory."

"The most fertile terrain was universities," the major explains, adding that schools provided the potent combination of "impressionable young people," urban savvy, and an "established social structure that gave [the FARC] cover."

Indeed, university students - in particular those at the National University, known for its leftist student body - have allegedly played a key role in many of the larger terrorist attacks in Bogotá during the past two years. After three mortar rounds were launched toward the attorney general's office and the US embassy in November 2002, city police found grenades, weapons, and bombmaking materials on the National University campus. Police are seeking three students from Bogotá's private Catholic University in connection with the Aug. 7, 2002, rocket attack on the presidential palace the day President Alvaro Uribe was inaugurated. In March 2003, two National University medical students were arrested for supposedly planting firebombs on the local bus system known as the Transmilenio.

Bogotá police won't put a number on how many students are involved in terrorist activities, saying the matter is too "delicate" to speak on the record.

But neither the National University's rector nor Bogotá's antiterror police say that the problem is huge. (The antiterror police captain estimates at most 10 students per university become FARC recruits). Though more students might sympathize with the FARC's Marxist ideology, joining is another thing entirely.

Page: 1 | 2