Mexico University Strike Opens Another Dark Window

The 300,000 university and high-school students enrolled at Mexico’s National University went on strike last Thursday after weeks of mass demonstrations, negotiations and public debate over a proposed reform of higher education in the country’s largest and most prestigious learning institution. The unexpected reappearance of a widespread student movement in Mexico City, after nearly 15 years of apathy and resignation among the nation’s youth, is one of the most important developments in recent times in Mexico; its consequences could be far reaching.

The movement began last year with student opposition to a series of reforms put forth by the university’s rector, Jorge Carpizo, with the purpose of braking the institution’s steady decline. He proposed an increase in fees for registration and university services, changes in attendance requirements and standardized departmental exams. Most significant was his proposal to base admission on academic selectivity rather than the present automatic entry granted to all graduates of university-run high schools.

The reforms’ goals were to establish a minimum of academic excellence in the university and to raise badly needed revenues. As a result of President Miguel de la Madrid’s four years of budget-cutting and austerity, the university’s state subsidy had been falling in real terms, and its financial health had become precarious.

To a certain degree, the proposals resembled the “structural reform” policies that the government has been attempting to implement in the economy: cutbacks in subsidies, closing of money-losing state enterprises, trade liberalization. The university reforms were perhaps more thought out and perceived as more justified than other changes were, and they had the added advantage of having been proposed by the university’s most respected and praised rector since the early 1970s. To the extent that, in the name of modernization, they went against the grain of long-standing tradition and acquired rights--free higher education, unrestricted access to the university--the reforms were part of De la Madrid’s modernization blueprint for the country. In this sense the students’ surprising resistance and the resulting political unease have a greater meaning.

Certainly since 1985, and more emphatically since mid-1986, the government has said that “structural reform” can be pursued only if accompanied by economic growth. Rhetoric and promises by the international financial community notwithstanding, Mexico has in fact found itself in the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, “structural reform” is going forward, albeit at a moderate pace: Factories are being shut down, subsidies of food staples, public transportation and other goods and services are being cut, and protectionist walls are being brought down. But the economic growth to cushion the negative side effects of these measures is nowhere in sight. Preliminary figures show a drop in Mexico’s GNP last year of 3.5% to 4%, and estimates for this year are being revised downward; it is possible that the 1987 GNP will not even reach 2%.

The student movement is indirectly a symptom of this state of affairs. Clearly, many students would have rejected the reforms under any circumstances, as they are now refusing Carpizo’s significant concessions. But many students might have accepted the changes if they had been accompanied by a substantial increase in the government’s outlays for higher education, particularly in the subsidy granted to the National University. That has been one of the students’ foremost--and just--demands: re-establishment of the previous levels of government support, in today’s terms.

Ever since the economic crisis began in August, 1982, Mexican politicians and intellectuals have been warning that an indefinite absence of economic growth would in the long term threaten the country’s political stability. While true in the abstract, this has not yet occurred, and the student mobilization is undoubtedly not a direct and immediate consequence of the economic crisis. But it should serve as a welcome early warning. The despair over a future with no jobs and no hope is not exclusive to university students; the dangers of unpopular though possibly necessary reforms under conditions of economic stagnation extend far beyond Mexico City’s Ciudad Universitaria.

The 1987 student movement is not a resurrection of the 1968 movement, drowned in blood on the steps of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Platelolco. Its demands are different, its protagonists are not the same and, fortunately for all, Miguel de la Madrid is not Gustavo Diaz Ordaz. But student discontent in a country in which half the population is under 18 always means something, and if there is a lesson to be learned from 1968 it is to never underestimate the power and the glory of students in the streets. A heartwarming sight--but a sobering one, too.