Political refugee Guillermo Cohen tried to dispel drug-heavy images of Colombia on Monday night, instead focusing on the nearly 50-year-old civil war

between peasants and wealthy landowners.

Cohen, who fled from Colombia and now teaches high school in Chicago, accepted the speaking invitation as a last-minute replacement for Jose Ramirez, president of the Oil Workers Union of Bogota. Proof of the Colombian civil struggle, Cohen said, is evidenced by Ramirez’s daily dose of death threats and the need for personal body guards.

“People are struggling for their integrity,” Cohen said. “They’ve been postponing changes of reform for years, and people don’t expect to be killed because of this. It’s a tragedy that’s touching all of us, and people in the U.S. need to pay attention to international communications.”

Recent newspaper and broadcast reports indicate more than 3,000 people are killed every year, and millions are forced to leave their homes because of conflict between leftist guerrillas, the military and illegal paramilitaries. This illegal group is funded by businessmen and ranchers fed up with a lack of military action, mostly from the local cocaine trade.

Members reportedly target peasants they suspect of aiding the leftist rebels.

“People every day are leaving the countryside because they’re victims of the most disinformed campaign since the second world war,” Cohen said.

“Officials in Colombia are not thinking about the well-being of the country.

“Our conflict has been depicted as dealing with drugs from the beginning. It’s more between those who have and those who don’t have. Peace versus social injustice. Those who support and those who challenge the establishment.”

When asked by one of about 30 audience members how local effort could be made, Cohen and Colombian Action Network representative Tom Burke said representatives should be notified about the public dismay for “Plan Colombia.” The United States recently added $1.3 billion for the Colombian President Andres Pastrana’s latest phase of the anti-drug war movement.

“Tell your legislators to oppose Plan Colombia,” Cohen said. “If we give any money at all it should be to build roads for the peasant areas. We need to

support a dialogue between the government and the people and eradicate the drug crops to suppress the need.”

Camilo Higuera, a geology graduate student who is from Colombia, said Cohen’s arguments included many generalities, but the overall picture of the country was correct.

“The U.S. doesn’t need to send money to Colombia,” Higuera said. “They need to keep it in the U.S. for drug programs here, to help inner-city kids and

other neighborhoods.”

Higuera and fellow graduate student Guadalupe Velazquez agreed on the importance of publicizing what’s going on in Colombia.

“I think it’s important that minority groups are represented,” Velazquez said. “It’s making a difference having an impact on campus. We have to make

Americans aware of the problem.”