"Cardenas and other leaders of his party seem
to have lost the influence over the strikers
they once enjoyed. Increasingly, the huge
all-night assemblies where the students
decide their moves have been dominated by
activists from small socialist groups, dubbed
"ultras" by other students within the strike
movement."
New York Times 6/25/99 Mexico Student Strike in Capital Jarring the Entire Country
By JULIA PRESTON
MEXICO CITY -- The student strike at
Mexico's biggest university began on
April 20 as a protest against a plan by the
administration to make those who could afford
it pay tuition.
Seven long weeks later, the university's
president, Francisco Barnes de Castro,
admitted defeat and agreed to make all
tuition payments voluntary.
Most people thought that would put an end to
the protests, but to the shock of the
administration, the strikers at the National
Autonomous University of Mexico, the largest
institution of higher education in Latin
America, were still not satisfied.
The strike, which closed down classrooms for
270,000 students, is now in its third month
and shows no sign of moving toward
resolution. Mobilizations for and against it
have spilled over from the campus into the
streets of the capital city. The strike
movement has escaped the control of national
political and intellectual leaders.
A sizable core of angry students is seeking
to use the strike to gain new power within
the university and resist Mexico's decade-old
shift away from a costly welfare state toward
lean government and private enterprise. Many
of Mexico's most prominent scholars, however,
have turned against the shutdown and warned
that it could permanently cripple the
university.
Thursday, President Ernesto Zedillo made it
clear that the strike at the university has
become a pressing national concern. He called
it "brutal aggression" against the university
that is "hurting the enormous majority who
want to study to get ahead." But Zedillo said
he would continue to support the
administration in seeking to solve the strike
peacefully.
Barnes' original plan was to require students
with economic means to pay about $150 tuition
for a year. The current fees amount to only a
few cents. But even though a governing
council at the university voted to cancel any
obligatory tuition payments, the strikers
refused to lift the shutdown until all fees
were eliminated. Many financially-strapped
departments collect small fees for the use of
laboratories and computers.
The strikers are also demanding elimination
of recently instituted admission and
graduation examinations, and lifting of the
limits on the time students can remain
enrolled before graduating. They also want to
restore automatic admission for students from
a network of high schools linked to the
university, which was canceled in 1995.
Their most ambitious demand is to convene a
congress to "refound" the university, giving
students equal power in decisions with the
administration and faculty.
"For us, education is not a commercial
service -- it is one of the social rights we
won in Mexico over the last decades," said
Higinio Munoz, a science major who is a
spokesman for the students' strike committee.
"Now the government wants to take that away
from us with a stroke of the pen."
Both sides resorted this week to public
displays of strength. On Wednesday some
15,000 high-spirited strikers, many with
their faces grease-painted in the red and
black strike colors, broke into the
university stadium and held a rally to
proclaim their determination to continue the
shutdown.
At one point two dozen young men stood up in
a chorus line in the bleachers, each with a
letter painted on his naked chest forming the
words "Long live the strike!" They raised a
frenzy of approval when they turned around,
spelling a vulgar insult to the mother of the
university president, Barnes.
Also on Wednesday, a group of faculty women
at the university hung banners from
overpasses on a major highway through the
capital, calling on drivers to turn on their
headlights if they opposed the strike.
Thousands of cars lit up.
Thursday morning another student crowd,
slightly smaller and more heavily middle
class than the crowd of strikers, turned out
in a central plaza downtown to call for the
strike to end.
"We have already done our part," Barnes told
them in a resolute speech. "We already
reached the agreements that could end this
conflict. There are no more excuses. The
strike has got to stop."
In a communique marking the end of two months
of the strike on June 22, the protest leaders
laid out their worldview, at once cocky and
defensive. They described Barnes and the
Mexican government as tools of a campaign by
global organizations like the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank to destroy
public education in Mexico.
They accused the administration of building a
"repressive police apparatus" within the
university, pointing to a network of video
cameras recently installed around the campus.
Administration officials said the cameras
were to help combat the wave of common crime
which has swept the capital city.
The strike has become a problem for
Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano, the
left-of-center opposition mayor of Mexico
City, who is expected to run for president in
national elections next year.
At first, leaders of Cardenas' Party of the
Democratic Revolution, several of whom were
once student activists themselves, openly
supported the strike, although they denied
that they aided it with resources from the
city government.
But on June 10 the strikers, led by some of
their most militant leaders, went outside the
campus in street marches that snarled traffic
for hours on several of Mexico City's busiest
thoroughfares. Many city residents, already
skeptical about the strike, were furious at
Cardenas, believing that he encouraged the
disruption.
Cardenas and other leaders of his party seem
to have lost the influence over the strikers
they once enjoyed. Increasingly, the huge
all-night assemblies where the students
decide their moves have been dominated by
activists from small socialist groups, dubbed
"ultras" by other students within the strike
movement.
Thousands of students continued their studies
in off-campus classrooms.
University officials said that at least
162,500 students, or about 65 percent of the
undergraduates, were able to complete their
work for the semester.