As Andrea* speaks, she puts her hand tightly on her chest, over her heart, as if trying to stop the accelerated beats. Ten years later, she says, she still gets upset when she relives a situation of violence that has marked her life ever since. She was barely 18 years old when she met Luis Miguel Alfonso Peña, a professor of Performing Arts at the National Pedagogical University, where she was entering to study that career. She was living her dream. Alfonso, then 47 years old, repeated the pattern that he had dominated for years and managed to lead her into a sexual-affective relationship mediated by an abysmal inequality of power and harsh psychological violence. At least 10 more people accuse the teacher of sexual harassment, homophobia and mistreatment, in events that take place over two decades.
“I don’t know when you stopped being a student to me and became a woman,” was a phrase that left its mark on Andrea. For her, Alfonso was an artistic and professional role model. A professor at the University since 1992, he knew this and took advantage of it, she says now, with the advantage of the time that had passed. He began by calling her to his office weekly to advise her, then he invited her to meetings outside the University to discuss personal matters and that led to a relationship. She claims that he used his position to monitor her, prohibiting her from having contact with her male colleagues, even within the framework of academic activities. He made derogatory comments to her, Andrea recalls today, in which he insinuated her inability to be a professor, among other judgments that sought to undermine her self-esteem.
Andrea’s story is a carbon copy of others, as told to EL PAÍS by six people linked to the University. Dayan Rozo, a graduate and now coordinator of the Bachelor of Performing Arts, says that since her time as a student at the beginning of the century, Alfonso’s practices were well known among the university community. The modus operandi, she describes, was the same: identify young women in their first semesters who had some kind of economic, emotional, or academic vulnerability, harass them with insinuations until establishing a sexual-affective bond crossed by manipulation and blackmail. “Since I started studying, we all knew that he had ‘girlfriends’ among the students. At that time we did not have the words to define it as harassment,” Rozo recalls.
Diana* was Dayan’s classmate at the time and in an exclusive testimony that this media outlet learned about, she relates that for several years she was Alfonso’s ‘girlfriend’. She says that the relationship began when she was in her first semester and he was a professor in the area of pedagogy. In situations very similar to those described by Andrea*, Alonso offered her emotional support, then invited her to go on dates outside the university. The relationship lasted for years even though he was still her teacher. During the time they were together, as happened with Andrea, Diana learned of other parallel relationships he had with other students. “The University cannot be a space where women are vulnerable and completely helpless.” And, just as happened with Andrea, time has given her a new perspective. She is blunt when referring to what she experienced. “That was not love, it was harassment, manipulation, aggression, rape,” she asserts.
Carolina Merchán, also a professor who has worked at the University since 2003, remembers the same thing. She maintains that Alfonso’s behavior has been “the landscape” of the faculty. In her view, the silence has lasted for so many years because these situations were not questioned. Marta Ayala, a colleague of Merchán and Rozo and now a professor in the Bachelor of Visual Arts, says that four years ago a complaint against Alfonso arrived on her desk. A student sent her a letter pointing out the harassment of the professor who, in addition to being the acting dean, was her thesis advisor. The student refrained from formally reporting him because of this double condition of power.
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The sources agree that Alfonso’s behavior has been repeated for some time; Alejandro, his student in 2013, remembers the teacher’s lustful glances at his female classmates, the hypersexualized comments he used to make, and the invitations to “have a drink” that he made to the youngest in front of the entire class. The teachers say that they accused their colleague of having relationships with female students, and he argued that they were of legal age, omitting the position of power that he held at the University and in the city’s artistic circles. Alfonso, currently a full-time professor, has been the coordinator of the Performing Arts program and acting dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts. His victims detail that this trajectory has been used to manipulate young people who have seen in him an example to follow and has prevented others, witnesses and victims, from being afraid to speak out.
In 2020, something happened that managed to break the silence. During the process of appointing the dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, to which Alfonso applied, a group of students organized to expose him. They feared that a man with that history could occupy such an important position. In the middle of the virtual presentation of the then candidate’s proposals, the chat was filled with comments about his abusive actions. “More than 15 years of harassing students and he doesn’t have enough?” it reads. “I had to cancel his class because he told me that I would fail,” continues another comment. The escrache was recorded.
Fear and silence were left behind. The young women also managed to break the silence of their teachers, who looked at them with surprise and above all with admiration. “The great achievement of the escrache was to finally make this a public and sustained issue,” Rozo emphasizes. “This denunciation helped many of us to start talking, because we felt protected by the community. We took refuge in ourselves,” she adds.
That social sanction ended up being a fertile seed. On the one hand, Andrea reported Alfonso to the University and to the Prosecutor’s Office, where a process for the crime of aggravated sexual harassment is underway. At the same time, groups of graduates held protests against the professor. The snowball that does not stop growing. The disciplinary complaint at the University gave its first results on August 21. That day, a first instance decision sanctioned the professor with his dismissal and a general disqualification of 18 months for committing a serious disciplinary offense. Alfonso appealed. The document of his defense cites eleven testimonies of other alleged victims. Some of them, years before, had already sent to the institution’s management a document that adds 14 complaints for different types of violence exercised by Alfonso. The testimonies there include everything from alleged comments to the students, such as: “What beautiful legs, your stockings are very sensual,” to invitations to drink liquor in his apartment.
Homophobia and persecution
In 2013, the person who took classes with Alfonso was Alejandro*. The teacher inspired fear and aversion in him, recalls the young man who studied Visual Arts. He explains that he had to repeat the subject, in his opinion, due to a deliberate and ableist decision by the teacher. Alejandro is a gay man with a physical disability that, he says, Alfonso used against him. He recalls that his mobility occasionally prevented him from getting to class on time and the teacher, who was aware of his difficulties in getting around, forced him to take lessons from outside the classroom, through the window. “The lame one,” “the cripple,” he says he called him in a mocking tone.
Then, he says, homophobia appeared. “La marica” (the faggot) and “la mariquita” (the sissy) were the ways in which he and other homosexual students were referred to, Alejandro says. He describes each bullying in detail. “It hurt me a lot,” he says. He says that he asked the management for help several times. He filed a complaint and alerted other teachers. Nothing happened.
Alfonso has always denied the accusations, which means that there is still a long way to go before he receives any possible sanction. This newspaper contacted the professor to find out his response to these accusations, but did not receive a response after several days.
The complainants who spoke to this newspaper agree that the campus will not be a safe place while he is there. They stress that justice is key not only for him, but because, they said, Alfonso is one of several cases of deeply rooted sexist violence in the “Peda”. Ayala explains that Alfonso’s case can be an example for other men, whether they are teachers or students.
It would be a further development of the positive impact that the case has already had on the university community, according to the professors. They agree that the courage of their students made them face their own sexist imaginings. “The world has also changed for us. We had not theorized about what abuse, harassment and the legacy of sexism mean in education,” says Merchán.
She, like Ayala and Rozo, demands more efficient measures to address complaints of gender violence. She asserts that the current processes are often long and re-victimizing, and that a discouraging scenario persists. The prestigious state universities of Antioquia and Nacional, such as the Pedagogical University, have faced serious crises precisely because of these complaints, with cases ranging from sexual harassment to rape on campus. According to data provided by the Pedagogical University, so far in 2024 they have recorded 19 complaints of gender-based violence. In conversation with this media, the rector, Helberth Choachí, appointed in April, assured that he has been working to speed up the processes and recalled that the student body has the right to various tools to assert their rights and in recent years have made progress in improving these mechanisms.
Meanwhile, Andrea is still hoping that the case will prosper both in the Prosecutor’s Office and at the University, and she assures that she will not give up. And now, contrary to what Alonso had led her to believe for many years, she has become a teacher, one who seeks to make her students feel strong and secure, because she wants to prevent them from repeating her story. For their part, Dayan, Carolina, and Marta, the three teachers, emphasize that they feel guilty for not having spoken out before, or not having done so more forcefully, also remembering that the University is in charge of training future generations of teachers. On this occasion, it was these young women who set the pace. The roles changed and made the saying that students are called to surpass their teachers a reality. Now, together, they fight for fear to change sides.
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