Mexico Strike Extends Beyond Academics

When students first went on strike last April to protest new fees at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, there was an air of righteous struggle for free education at public universities in this poor country.

More than nine months later, as strikers at the barricades fight bloody skirmishes with students who want to go back to classes, that original lofty purpose is a fading memory. The shutdown at what was once one of Latin America’s most prestigious universities has degenerated into a sullen, increasingly polarized and dangerous standoff.

For the first time since the strike began, federal riot police entered a university building Tuesday night and broke up a daylong battle that left 37 people injured. Police arrested 248 people, most of them strikers and sympathizers--and later brought criminal charges against 171--in a major escalation of what has become the most vexing political conflict in Mexico.

With negotiations still deadlocked after the latest talks between strikers and university authorities ended early Saturday, some fear that the strike could end in an explosion of violence. The university administration might lose patience as the dwindling cadre of strikers--leftist activists known as “mega-ultras”--grows ever more hard-line.

Regardless of how the strike ends, both sides agree that it reflects a much larger dispute over the purpose of university education in Mexico. That debate is only likely to begin in earnest once the strike is over, when university students and faculty at last sit down in a planned congress that could shape public tertiary education for decades to come.

The strike has already exacted a heavy price. Some of the 271,000 students at UNAM, as the largest university in the Western Hemisphere is known, have lost an entire academic year or have enrolled elsewhere. Others have attended clandestine classes off-campus, working without computers or libraries.

Demands Grow in Strike Over Fee Hike

The strike erupted April 20 after Francisco Barnes, then rector of the university, raised annual fees from 2 cents to about $145. Barnes soon agreed to rescind the new fees, but the strikers’ demands grew.

“The tuition fee at UNAM is like the price of bread in revolutionary France. It is our equivalent of the issue that framed the French Revolution,” said Sergio Zermeno, an education analyst at the university’s Institute for Social Science Research. “UNAM is the nucleus that reflects the whole universe of problems in Mexico.”

Zermeno opposes the strike but foresees grave consequences if negotiations fail and the campus is retaken by force. Radical strikers “could even withdraw to become urban guerrillas if they are denied a space,’ he said. “Nobody is seeing the danger we face in the country.”

The strikers’ broad goal is to reclaim a system that they feel is increasingly designed to provide a quality education for a small elite while training the majority of students for such jobs as running factories and tourist hotels. In this group’s eyes, the fight for UNAM is part of the wider war against the market economy and perceived disparities it foments.

For opponents of the university shutdown, the post-strike objective is nothing less than restoring the academic quality of an institution that they feel has largely been surrendered to populist, left-wing ideologies at the expense of intellectual rigor.

The battlefield for this confrontation is the 3-square-mile campus that opened in 1954 in southern Mexico City as an educational mecca for the nation’s brightest youth. The buildings are adorned with patriotic murals by David Alfaro Siqueiros and Juan O’Gorman. For now, though, the campus is almost deserted except for the few hundred strikers still camped out in buildings within.

Makeshift barriers of building rubble and old tires block the entrances and a spray-painted warning adorns the wall outside a hall renamed Che Guevara Auditorium: “If we lift the strike now, we will never get off our knees.”

Miguel Sanchez, a student in the philosophy and letters department, was among the strikers waiting outside the hall for the weekly meeting of the General Strike Council.

“We are the dike; if the dike breaks, all the rest of the universities in Mexico will be flooded too,” Sanchez said. “A defeat here will mean that we give the state an opening. . . . They will dismantle what is the essence of a public university and establish a system that only feeds the needs of the big corporations in the private sector.”

He sees better prospects if a deal is struck, whereas “the costs of a unilateral solution would be enormous, not just for UNAM but for Mexican society.”

1968 Massacre Remains a Poignant Memory

That view harks back to the October 1968 massacre of scores--some believe hundreds--of protesting university strikers by the army in Mexico City. That event is seared into the public memory, and President Ernesto Zedillo has said the government will not use force to end the current UNAM strike--angering those who complain that he is abdicating responsibility.

Outside the blocked gate near the engineering department, graduate student Alberto Rivera said he had sympathized with the strikers at first, “but what we wanted to achieve we have achieved. The university has withdrawn the payment scheme. Now the great majority supports ending the strike. A lot was won, but at this point it’s just all losing and losing.”

The 27-year-old student has attended engineering classes off-campus, but “I have to travel far to get there, and I don’t have access to a library or computers. It is a real problem.”

Though the university backed down on fees, the strikers also insist that it withdraw time limits imposed in 1997 for completing degrees. (Some students, known as “fossils,” have been studying for a decade or more.)

More controversial is the demand that the university reinstate the automatic admission of students from the network of huge “prep” schools that account for 102,000 of UNAM’s student body. These automatic admissions meant that spaces for students from outside that system were sharply limited each year. In 1997, automatic entry was replaced with minimum achievement levels.

Deadlock in Plans for a University Congress

University Rector Juan Ramon de la Fuente, who took office in November after Barnes resigned, agreed late last year to hold a university congress on the issues. But the two sides deadlocked over its makeup. The strikers say that the numbers will be stacked against them and that the congress could even roll back agreements such as canceling the increase in fees.

Trying to regain momentum, De la Fuente last month held a “plebiscite” among students, faculty and employees. About 90% of those who voted--including 125,000 students--favored an end to the strike. De la Fuente then tried to deliver the results personally to the strikers at the campus gate; they refused to let him in.

The moderates within the strike council have clearly lost ground to the “mega-ultras.” De la Fuente contends that left-wing groups with names such as the Proletarian Bloc have infiltrated the council and that nonstudents are bolstering the strikers’ ranks.

The same day that strikers and university negotiators agreed on an agenda for the congress, protesters marched to the U.S. Embassy and smashed windows. That sparked a brief battle with riot police and helped quash further talks.

Since it was founded as the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico in 1553 by the Spanish Crown, UNAM has been a focal point of political as well as intellectual fervor. UNAM was restructured in its modern form in 1910, the first year of the Mexican Revolution. For decades it has been an ideological battleground between those who want a vast people’s university and those wanting a smaller, more exclusive educational center.

The current University City campus, complete with its own fire station, was designed for 25,000 students, said Gilberto Guevara Niebla, a professor here and director of the Mexican Institute of Educational Research. The student body soon doubled, and attempts to slow its growth in the 1960s ended in clashes. By the early 1980s it had grown to 300,000 students, said Guevara, who was jailed for two years for his role as a leader of the 1968 strike and now is a conservative advocate of rigorous academic standards.

Power at the university is overly concentrated in a single governing council, he said, and the prep schools have excessive say over university policies. “The challenge for the coming debate is to confront these monstrous structures.

“The crisis has hit rock bottom with the strike, and those of us who want to recover educational quality are organizing for the first time,” he said. “We believe we have to fight for democracy and to combat irrationality and the ‘magical irrealism’ that has invaded Mexico.”

While some of the university’s liberal arts faculties are denigrated, other schools such as medicine and law are regarded as among the best in the country. The university has produced six of Mexico’s last nine presidents and is a major producer of academic research.

‘A Crisis Over the Model of the Country’

Hugo Aboites, an education professor at the separate Autonomous Metropolitan University and an advisor to the strikers, argued: “The hard-line [conservative] sector speaks of academic quality as their banner, but there are various definitions of academic quality. They postulate it as a university with a small number of students, very well selected, which in Mexico means chosen by a certain social class. So their definition of quality has a lot do with an UNAM that has been perpetuating itself in power.”

Aboites called the dispute “a crisis over the model of the country as well as the model of the university. They want to educate just 10% to 15% of the work force and make the rest technicians. . . . [The debate] is closely related to the issues of Mexico’s role in the world economy, of free trade, of globalization.”

Researcher Zermeno believes that both sides could agree on some basics, including that higher education opportunities need to be extended from the current 14% of Mexicans ages 20 to 24, which is far below the average of 45% to 50% in developed countries.

“Between now and 2010, Mexico should raise higher education participation from 14% to 20%,” Zermeno said. “This could be a demand that all of us share. We could recompose the structure of higher education in Mexico.”