New York Times February 7, 2000 A Peaceful Raid Ends Students' Long Siege in Mexico
By JULIA PRESTON
MEXICO CITY, Feb. 6 -- Forcing a sudden end to a nine-month student strike, hundreds of federal police officers took over the main campus of the national university today and arrested more than 600 students who had occupied Latin America's largest center for higher learning.
The operation, carried out without bloodshed, was the most important intervention by government forces at the National Autonomous University of Mexico since the student movement of 1968, which ended in a massacre that traumatized a generation of Mexicans and left them determined to make the country more democratic.
The end to the long strike showed how far Mexico has moved toward that goal. President Ernesto Zedillo and the university authorities resorted to police action very reluctantly, after months of on-and-off negotiations in which university leaders gave in to almost all of the strikers' demands, which included an end to a plan to introduce tuition fees.
Still, the operation today demonstrated the government's resolve to end the strike, which had in recent weeks become Mexico's premier political issue, eclipsing even the presidential election campaign.
Just before 6 a.m., hundreds of police carrying nightsticks and riot shields, but no firearms, rushed into the campus on foot and quickly surrounded the few buildings still occupied by strikers. The students did not resist but instead marched out peacefully, looking grim but raising their fists defiantly, to buses that carried them away to detention.
The university president, Juan Ramón de la Fuente, echoed sentiments of many Mexicans who hated to see uniformed troops on the campus, which is sheltered by law from intervention by government forces, but felt there was no other alternative. "As president, as an academic and as a Mexican, I am deeply sorry that we had to come to this extreme," Mr. de la Fuente said.
By its end, political leaders on all sides were exasperated with a stubborn, anarchic student movement, which refused to release the huge campus and spurned any compromise.
In an address televised nationwide this evening, Mr. Zedillo said that he had ordered the attorney general to obtain arrest warrants for hundreds of strikers last week after concluding that they would never agree to a negotiated solution. He said he had insisted that the police making the arrests not carry guns.
The strikers "converted our public university into their private property," Mr. Zedillo said, a gibe at the students, who had accused him of turning the university over to the private sector.
Acknowledging the emotional significance that the university -- with its 275,000 students -- holds for Mexicans, both national television networks carried five hours of continuous live coverage of the events this morning.
At midafternoon, Mr. de la Fuente announced that the university would cancel all the judicial complaints it had brought against the strikers in recent months. In what amounted to a partial amnesty, he asked for the immediate release of all minors arrested during the last week and appealed to justice authorities to prosecute only adult protesters arrested for violent crimes.
In a news release sent out by electronic mail, the strikers' steering committee said the police operation confirmed its suspicions that the authorities hoped all along to "use violence" to end the strike. The strike organization said it would not relent on its demands and called for supporters to organize protests across Mexico and at Mexican embassies overseas.
Federal officials, eager to draw a contrast with 1968, when President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz dispatched army tanks to the campus, stressed that the final order for the police operation was not given by President Zedillo.
Both the federal and Mexico City police, they said, were ordered to evict the strikers by a Mexico City district criminal court judge, María del Carmen Flores Cervantes. On Friday, Judge Flores issued 432 arrest warrants against strikers for illegal seizure of property, after ruling that the occupation of the campus was a crime.
In a nationwide address, Interior Minister Diódoro Carrasco said the university had been taken over by "a small radicalized group which had fallen outside the law," and added that the police had acted "to dissuade without repressing."
"A democratic society cannot permit the kidnapping of its national university," Mr. Carrasco said. Federal officials said they had informed Mr. de la Fuente, the university president, when the operation was under way.
Troops from the Federal Preventive Police, a new national agency, invaded the huge campus swiftly but quietly just before dawn. Most strikers were asleep in the classrooms that had become their home during the strike.
Escorted by the police, the strikers shouldered their backpacks and formed orderly lines to get on the commercial tourist buses the police rented to take them away. A few young women among them wept. One youth cradled a puppy he adopted while in residence on the campus.
The police found 6 homemade firebombs and 10 plants of marijuana growing in pots in the auditorium in the philosophy department, which was the strikers' headquarters.
In the classrooms of the department, books and papers, including many that appeared to be official records and students' papers, were strewn about the floor. Desks and chairs were battered and overturned to build barricades to block entrances. Computers were smashed or dismantled to remove their data storage parts.
Several well-known strike leaders were detained. Alejandro Echavarría, a political science student who was a chief strategist for the faction known as "ultras," was one of the few strikers to shout slogans as police officers led him to a separate black police van.
"This movement will never give in," he said.
Also arrested was Mario Benítez, an economics professor who was caught by the police and then escaped during a bloody clash between strikers and university custodians last Tuesday.
Those events proved to be a turning point. After the authorities took back control of Preparatory School 3, which is part of the university system, strikers armed with metal tubes and wooden clubs assaulted 37 university custodians who were installed to guard the grounds. The beating by strikers whose faces were well known to the public was captured in chilling television images.
Mr. de la Fuente summoned the federal police to quell the violence. More than 250 strikers were arrested, including some key leaders.
On Friday, Mr. de la Fuente called strike leaders to an emergency meeting. Face to face for the first time in six weeks, the authorities and the strikers negotiated for more than 12 hours but reached no agreement.
A senior official said that the government made a final, secret offer to the strikers on Saturday to induce them to leave the campus peacefully.
The students went on strike on April 20 to protest a plan by a former university president to charge tuition for the first time. The administration abandoned its tuition plan in June, and the president who proposed it, Francisco Barnés de Castro, resigned in November. Still, the strikers pressed demands to lower academic standards and hold a congress to reshape the organization of the university.