Historic photographs of Mexico’s huge protest over the arrest of students and the invasion of its premier university
By David Bacon
The Stansbury Forum, 3/16/20
The student contingent from the Economics Faculty, one of the main centers of the strike.
Twenty years ago Mexico’s Federal government moved to end the huge student strike at the National Autonomous University (UNAM). The strike, which began in 1999, reverberated far beyond Mexico. Like the WTO protest in Seattle, which took place at the same time, it became a global symbol of resistance to pressure by international financial institutions for austerity policies and the privatization of public services.
Social protests erupting throughout that period adopted radical tactics of taking over public spaces and impeding business as usual. The UNAM strike, however, was not just a brief confrontation in the streets. It lasted almost a year, during which students occupied the campus and shut down the operation of one of the world’s largest universities.
The strike was organized to defend the historic principle of free tuition at Mexico’s premier institution of higher education – with 270,000 students one of the largest and most respected in Latin America. Their key demand was repeal of a newly-instituted tuition in an institution that had always been free. The International Monetary Fund was demanding economic reforms, including ending government subsidies for public services. The government claimed it intended to charge only a symbolic amount – 800 pesos a semester ($85).
But students and university unions feared layoffs and other cost-cutting measures. Even 800 pesos was hardly a symbolic amount for many in Mexico. According to Alejandro Alvarez Bejar, economist and dean of UNAM’s economics faculty, the average 5-member family at the time had an income of 5-6000 pesos (then $625-$750) a month, based on three of the five family members working full time. Millions of families earned less.
Students also charged that tuition and other reforms were part of a larger project to begin privatizing education. And in fact, over the next two decades Mexico’s national government did try to impose corporate education reforms modeled after those in the U.S., much as the students predicted.
In the twenty years following the strike, a virtual war was fought by teachers against the national government, not just over tuition, but to reverse the neoliberal direction of Mexico’s education policies. These battles culminated in the shooting of nine people at Nochixtlan, Oaxaca during a teachers’ strike, and the disappearance of 43 students at the teacher training school in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. Finally, the conflicts helped fuel the election of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, eighteen years after the UNAM uprising.
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