Fw: [BRC-NEWS] The Poor Fight for Their University,the Rich Go Elsewhere/UNAM

[Michael Pugliese <debsian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: David Bacon <dbacon@xxxxxxx>
To: <brc-news@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, February 12, 2000 4:10 AM
Subject: [BRC-NEWS] The Poor Fight for Their University, the Rich Go
Elsewhere


> February 10, 1999
>
> THE POOR FIGHT FOR THEIR UNIVERSITY, THE RICH GO ELSEWHERE
>
> By David Bacon <dbacon@xxxxxxx>
>
> MEXICO CITY (2/10/99) - A hundred thousand people
> marched through Mexico City Wednesday, clamoring for the
> release from prison of the strikers who shut down the
> National Autonomous University of Mexico for nine months.
> Many called the huge demonstration the birth of a new
> consciousness - a rejection of the mano dura, the
> traditional use of force instead of dialogue to solve social
> problems.  But the march and strike also are dramatic
> evidence that the huge fissures which divide Mexico - into
> rich and poor, urban and rural, those who benefit from
> economic reforms and those who are its victims - are deeper
> than ever.
>
> Until the Federal government arrested 745 students
> and teachers over the weekend, accepted wisdom held that the
> strike, one of the longest and most bitter in Latin American
> history, had lost its popular support. Authorities clearly
> counted on using the mass arrests to boost their election
> strategy of appearing as the guardians of social order.
> But they may have created more support for the strikers than
> ever.
>
> In 1994, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary
> Party (PRI) campaigned successfully to elect Mexico's
> current president, Ernesto Zedillo, by identifying its
> leftwing opposition, the Democratic Revolutionary Party
> (PRD) of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, with the armed Zapatista
> rising in Chiapas.  A vote for the PRI was portrayed as a
> vote for social stability, and one against armed conflict
> and social unrest.
>
> Today, Cardenas is once again the PRD candidate for
> president, running against the PRI's Francisco Labastida, in
> a race which will conclude in the national election in
> August.  Labastida has already portrayed the student arrests
> as a response to growing social chaos, much as Zedillo used
> the attempted suppression of the Zapatista uprising in 1994.
>
> For the last four years, the PRD has governed Mexico
> City, a period the PRI has also attacked as one of social
> disintegration.  Cardenas, the city's first elected mayor,
> gave up the post to campaign for president a year ago, and
> turned the office over to Rosario Robles, who is now
> Mexico's most powerful woman office holder.
>
> When the Federal government moved to suppress the
> strike, Robles was ordered to use the city police to occupy
> the campus and arrest students.  She refused, since it would
> not only have violated the Mexican constitution, but would
> have been viewed by PRD members as a political betrayal.
> Instead, the PRI was forced to use a new Federal strike
> force intended to combat drugs, as well as army troops in
> police uniforms.
>
> After the arrests, Labastida criticized the mayor,
> saying "someone who's the head of the government shouldn't
> shrink from their responsibilities."  The strike seemed to
> give the PRI the opportunity to show a firm hand in a
> situation in which it sought to claim that the PRD was
> unable to resolve.
>
> In Mexico City, however, one of the world's largest
> urban centers with over 20 million residents, the massive
> arrests and occupation of the campus backfired.  The move
> cut short a process of dialogue which sought to end the
> strike without confrontation.  People were shocked by the
> military and police occupation of the campus, which held
> reminders of the violent and bloody massacre of students in
> 1968. Mexico, like most Latin American countries, has a
> tradition of university autonomy, which prohibits presence
> of government armed forces on the grounds of UNAM.
>
> The charges against the students were extreme as
> well.  While the government admits there was only minor
> damage to classrooms in the course of the strike, 85 student
> leaders have been charged with terrorism and denied bail.
> Arrest warrents have been issued for another 400.  During
> the march, large labor union contingents were interspersed
> among the students, in an effort to make difficult the
> arrest of those the government still seeks.
>
> All of these are sharp issues to city residents.
> But the underlying reason for the outpouring of support is
> economic.
>
> The key demand of the strikers was the repeal of a
> newly-instituted tuition in an institution in which
> education has always been free.  They claimed that the move
> to charge for admission was part of a larger project to
> begin privatizing education, an economic reform tied to
> others imposed by loan conditions by the International
> Monetary Fund.
>
> The government said that the amount it intended to
> charge, 800 pesos a semester ($85), was so small as to be
> symbolic.  A recent government survey of family income,
> however, gives a different picture. The average 5-member
> family in Mexico, it found, has an income equivalent to four
> times the minimum wage, or about 5-6000 pesos a month.
> That income is based on three of the five family members
> working full time.
>
> "This really means that families aren't making
> enough to live on," explains Alejandro Alvarez Bejar, and
> economist at UNAM.  "It's normal now that young people, when
> they get married, still live with their parents since they
> can't earn enough to live independently.  This was the key
> argument during the UNAM strike, and the reason why it had
> so much support."
>
> When Robles was confronted by PRI criticism of her
> refusal to use city police to arrest students, the head of
> the PRD legislative delegation, Marti Batres Guadarrama,
> responded by reminding reporters that "we should remember
> who has tried to impose these economic reforms on the
> university for the last 18 years."
>
> The move by the PRI to end the strike may kill its
> chances of winning the city for Labastida, or of toppling
> the PRD city administration in the coming municipal
> elections.  The most popular chant in the huge march was
> "Not one vote for the PRI!"
>
> But the Mexican countryside outside of Mexico City
> is much more conservative, and the government's message may
> not have been intended for chilangos (Mexico City residents)
> anyway.  Rural incomes in Mexico are much lower than those
> in the cities.  The government estimates that 40 million
> people live in poverty, and 25 million of them in extreme
> poverty, almost all in the countryside.  In those small
> towns and villages, the message of maintaining social
> stability is the key to winning the continued loyalty of a
> small, wealthy elite and the votes they control.
>
> Since 1994, the wealth of the top 10 percent of the
> population has grown, according to Alvarez, while that of
> the remaining 90 percent has decreased.  UNAM used to be the
> place where that elite educated its children, and also the
> one place in Mexican society where they mixed with the
> children of the working and middle classes.  Free tuition
> and open access were guaranteed in the Mexican constitution,
> in the wake of the revolution at the beginning of the
> century.
>
> Over the last decade, however, the wealthy have
> increasingly sent their children to private universities,
> which have grown rapidly.  They often go on to postgraduate
> work in the U.S., a choice unavailable to those without the
> money to pay for it.  As they abandon the public university,
> still one of the largest and most respected in Latin
> America, Mexico's elite is in the process of abandoning its
> commitment to maintaining its prestige and accessibility as
> well.
>
> Copyright (c) 2000 David Bacon. All Rights Reserved.
>
>
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