As Strike Drags On, Issues Grow Fuzzy

For decades, Mexico’s National University was a Latin blend of Harvard and UCLA, educating both the elite and the masses. Its alumni include past presidents and Mexico’s three Nobel laureates, as well as the country’s most famous rebel, Subcomandante Marcos.

But the university is now at the center of the country’s most bitter strike in years. It threatens to damage the university’s already fading reputation--and could provoke violence.

The strike has shown the enduring power of the left wing in a country that has turned to the right, embracing free trade and free markets. But as the protest--which has shut down the university--enters its third month, some critics believe it is turning into a stalking horse for radical and guerrilla groups.

“There are no more reasons to continue the strike,” the university’s rector, Francisco Barnes, pleaded at a rally of about 5,000 opponents of the strike in downtown Mexico City on Thursday.

The strike began April 20 after the university raised tuition from 2 cents to $200 a year. University officials argued that they needed funds because the cash-strapped federal government had trimmed the subsidy for the university, known as UNAM, the Spanish acronym for the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

But the problem went deeper than a budget cut. In the past 30 years, enrollment at Mexican colleges has quadrupled as the population ballooned and governments encouraged universities to accept young people with few job prospects. More than 268,000 students attend several campuses of the Mexico City-based UNAM, the largest university in Latin America.

Unable to maintain sufficient facilities and teachers, universities like UNAM have declined as private colleges have blossomed.

Government money “is insufficient to continue building the university that the country requires in the new century,” Barnes said in a speech proposing the tuition increase. He promised to exempt poor students from the tuition increase.

But to many Mexican students, free education is one of the key achievements of the nationalist governments that emerged after the 1910 revolution. Reflecting deep suspicion of recent free-market governments, the students protested that authorities were trying to apply to universities the same principles of privatization they had applied to industry.

Their cause became a lightning rod for other opposition groups, such as the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party and unions opposed to privatization.

“I think the policy is to eliminate, slowly but surely, the students who don’t have money,” Roberto Ortega, a 22-year-old business student, complained at a recent demonstration in Mexico City.

This month, facing strong opposition, Barnes backed down, saying the fees would be voluntary for all students.

To his surprise, however, the concession didn’t end the strike.

Protesters are now insisting that the rector loosen entrance requirements and hold a meeting to increase students’ power in the university’s operation.

As the strikers have pressed their cause, often blocking highways for hours, many Mexicans have lost sympathy. On Wednesday morning, thousands of motorists joined a protest against the strikers by turning on their headlights on a major Mexico City highway, the Periferico.

Most worrying to authorities is what they call the increasing radicalization of the strike leaders. University officials say a hard-core group with links to left-wing rebel groups in Chiapas and Guerrero states has seized control of the protest and is seeking confrontation with security forces.

In a confidential document leaked this week to the Mexico City daily Reforma, the government of President Ernesto Zedillo expressed concern that the strike could lead to violence and affect national security.

Some legislators are urging the use of force to take back the university.

“We don’t need bayonets, but we do need public force if we want to rescue our university,” Sen. Francisco Salazar of the conservative National Action Party said Wednesday.

But such a move could aggravate the situation. Mexicans still recall with horror the government’s use of the army to crush student protests in 1968, which resulted in hundreds of deaths. Many historians consider the massacre the start of the gradual decline of Mexico’s one-party system of government.

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Greg Brosnan in The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.