Massacre at the National University in 1984: 40 years without truth or justice
In May 1984, police entered the National University of Colombia and violently repressed students. Four decades later, impunity persists.
The day police opened fire on students at the National University
On 16 May 1984, agents of the National Police entered the campus of the National University of Colombia in Bogotá and opened fire on students, in one of the darkest episodes in the country's university history. According to pares.com.co, more than forty years later no one has officially counted the dead and the truth continues to be suppressed.
The events did not emerge out of nowhere. For months beforehand, the police had intensified their pressure on the student community. On 7 October 1983, a Dentistry student known for his work in University Welfare was assassinated while protesting on Carrera 30. The authorities accused him of belonging to a guerrilla group. Days before 16 May, on 9 May 1984, a student leader was assassinated in Cali; the crime was initially attributed to a motorcycle theft, a version that the autopsy contradicted by revealing signs of torture.
The campus was already burdened with a history of institutional harassment. From September 1982 until Easter 1984, student residences were illegally occupied by the public force. In each confrontation, agents opened fire on students; an Archaeology student also lost his life in this manner.
The outbreak of 16 May
Past one o'clock in the afternoon on 16 May, a group of hooded students burned a bus in Plaza Che in response to months of repression. Following the explosion of a makeshift device, the public force — including plainclothes police officers — took over the campus and repression began. Testimonies from students describe classmates killed on the ground and trampled by military boots.
The rector at the time, Fernando Sánchez Torres, publicly claimed that the authorities conducted a sweep of the campus and found no dead. The students who lived through the events contradicted that version.
After the intervention, the National University remained closed for eleven months. When it reopened its doors, University Welfare services — which guaranteed food to low-income students — had disappeared, as had the university residences.
What the archives reveal
An investigation by the archive El Búho of the National University, whose results were published by the newspaper El Espectador, established that 80 students were detained and tortured, even within the campus grounds. In March 2021, a group of students submitted a report on that day to the Truth Commission.
That report documents the transformation the university was undergoing: from being a centre of study for privileged classes in the nineteen-sixties, it moved to receiving students from the provinces and lower strata. This change politicised the academic environment and fuelled mobilisations such as the 1976 strike over the closure of residences, or sustained protests against the repressive policies of the Turbay government between 1978 and 1982.
That same activation of critical thinking was met by successive governments with systematic brutality. The events of 16 May 1984 are, for the university community, the most extreme expression of that response. The truth, four decades later, has still not found justice.
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Source: Google News CO — Crime