Volume 1, No. 2, April 2000

Before daybreak on 6 February this year, a few thousand elite Federal Police (PFP) under the express orders of President Ernesto Zedillo stormed the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). "Operation UNAM" was followed by the arrest of about 1,000 students and several professors. This action ended the historic ten-month long siege of the university by UNAM students and staff.

This struggle is a highpoint in the growing radicalisation of the student community across the world in recent years. It has sent ripples across the Latin American student community in particular and threatens the ruling comprador bureaucratic-feudal classes of Mexico represented by the reactionary Zedillo with long term revolutionary consequences.

The UNAM Uprising

On 20 April 1999, 2,70,000 students of UNAM, the largest university in Latin America, went on a strike protesting against the introduction of fees for the new semester. Instead of the token 2 cents that they were paying, they now had to cough up $ 220 per semester. Education, which was free in UNAM since 1911, had come under fire by the IMF structural adjustment regime.

On 20 April, thousands of UNAM students attended general body meetings to vote on behalf of the strike. The thunderous support for the strike was demonstrated on 23 April when more than 1,00,000 students and other supporters of their struggle gathered at the Plaza in Mexico City.

On 25 April students, with the participation of their parents, occupied an unrelenting UNAM’s administrative building.

On 29 April, representatives of 11 other national universities across Mexico, where fees stood at an exorbitant $ 2,000 to $ 3,000 per semester, expressed their solidarity for the UNAM uprising and commemorated that day as a "national day for the defence of free education".

In a little over a week, the UNAM student uprising had become the central political event in Mexico. It continued to remain so for the next 10 months and beyond. It threatens to outlast the Zedillo government’s forced entry into UNAM to suppress the struggle on 6 February this year.

The UNAM uprising was echoed in towns like Tepatepec where students resorted to similar take-overs.

Organising the Uprising

The rebellious mood of the students could be glimpsed in September 1995 itself, coming as it did, in the wake of the Mexican financial collapse of 1994. Hundreds of UNAM students occupied the administrative building demanding for a more accountable admissions process.

However, in 1999, students formed a General Strike Committee (CGH) comprising of 120 members, to lead the struggle. This committee also included UNAM workers and a few professors and some parents. After the take-over of the administrative office and thus the management of the university into their hands, Defence Committees were organised with students and university workers in order to foil attempts by the police from entering the campus and breaking the strike.

The Student Left Block (BUI) affiliated to the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)—a breakaway from Zedillo’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and a revisionist political coagulation of the parliamentary left—had a major role in co-ordinating the uprising. However, in the course of the struggle, the BUI and CGH had several times crashed through the revisionist fence the PRD had erected.

During the 10-month period when UNAM was in the hands of students, traditional course work was discarded. Instead, political discussions were organised on a daily basis ranging from the crisis of Mexican society to the armed struggles raging across the world. New developments in the struggle were debated. Banners and leaflets were released each day. Press conferences were held "almost daily". Frequent marches were held in which thousands of students participated. On 2 October, for instance, 60,000 students participated in a 15 km long march across Mexico City. Collective kitchens were run by mobilising food from trade unions, peasants, parents and other well wishers. In the short span of 10 months the mass of students had acquired more than what they had learned in all their lives: they were radically politicised.

Student Demands

The students had raised six demands:

The government refused to concede any one of these demands.

After elite police stormed the campus on 6 February, a seventh demand was included to this charter: Release of all the arrested companeros.

Among the earliest of statements of the CGH, the students proclaimed : "We the students of UNAM are in a struggle for a free education, so that everyone who has the desire can be able to enter, not just those who can pay."

The Mexican government replied that it had no money and therefore had to cut state funding of education. To this the CGH said: "If it’s true there is no money, why are more than 700 billion pesos [$ 65 billion] being used to ‘rescue’ the private banks?…. These funds, which are being paid by the people would support 80 UNAMs. Why is the army getting more than 50% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product? Why is education getting only 4 per cent, when it is the people who pay, and who are being charged again and again through these new fees?"

The CGH statement further said that the decision to impose fees came as a result of pressure from the IMF and World Bank which "expect from Mexico a cheap source of labour, not educated people with the capacity to reason".

Through these statements, the CGH openly exposed the fact that the repressive comprador bureaucratic character of the Mexican ruling classes was in the service of imperialism. They had the money to save the big private bank owners, by shoring them up with $65 billion (called the Fobaproa Plan) but not for the students. The CGH also exposed the fact that Mexico, which faced no external military threat, was spending about half the national budget on defence in order to implement its repressive schemes on the popular struggles—armed and unarmed—that have shaken Mexico in recent years.

The CGH released a manifesto, called The Road to Victory, in late April 1999. The manifesto clearly illustrated that the decision to impose a tuition fee was nothing but the first step in "the move to privatise UNAM" eventually landing it in the hands of Mexico’s big business.

The manifesto further said: "The charges against us are laughable and do nothing more than convince us to keep fighting against injustice and for free education…. Gentlemen of the government: the struggles of our people are a consequence of the despicable political, social and economic conditions in which the country lives."

On 10 February, only four days after the Zedillo regime established through armed action, its rule over the sprawling UNAM campus, the CGH component that evaded arrest issued a statement which said: "The government and the Chancellor are mistaken if they think that with the detention of almost 1,000 members of the CGH—political prisoners—and unleashing a witch hunt, they will defeat this movement…. The people have openly embraced the demand for free public education and freedom for our unjustly jailed companeros…. Those who clamoured for the use of repression against the movement…are the same ones who strip the people of their rights. They are the ones who have robbed us with the protection of the State [Fobaproa]. They are the ones who rip babies out of the wombs of their mothers in Acteal. Those who now accuse us of terrorism, robbery, injury, sabotage, criminal association, property damage and riot, are the real criminals, the murderers of the people. They are the ones who should be in prison."

President Zedillo might have scored a success in retaking the campus. "Operation UNAM" and initial attempts by "Cobra"—a government sponsored paramilitary gang to break the uprising—have only further angered the Mexican student masses even more. Repression through "Operation UNAM" has been the most important factor in radicalising the student masses of Mexico, teaching the more advanced among them the most important lesson in struggle—to beware of the fascist state and to seek the avenue of protracted people’s war to smash it.

The manner in which the campus was conceded after a historic 10-month take-over comes as a surprise. At first glance it appears that the conspiratorial PRD and some elements of its student wing might have had a role in it. Yet, it is clear after the forced take-over, that the government will meet none of the student demands. This is precisely what pushes the Mexican student to become explosive material.

On 6 March 2000, one month after the loss of UNAM without a fight, and the continued presence of their companeros in jail, the simmering anger of the UNAM student community broke out. Reuters reported on the same day:

Describing the loss of the administration building, a UNAM spokeswoman shrieked: "They have taken the building back".

The battle rages assuming more intense proportions. "Operation UNAM" refuse to be the last words in this struggle.

Remembering the Tlatelolco Massacre

The Mexican student uprising revives memories of the student upsurge of the late 1960s that rocked the world. The similarity between the student movement of Mexico today and the Mexican groundswell of 1968 are not drawn merely by radical political analysts. The Mexican student movement of today has breathed life into the 500 students that were massacred in Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City on 2 October 1968.

The largest march so far to commemorate the Tlatelolco massacre under the then PRI President Diaz Ordaz was undertaken on 2 October 1999 when "tens of thousands of UNAM students overflowed this huge plaza at Tlatelolco in Mexico City carrying red carnations and chanting political slogans."

On 2 October 1968, 5,000 students were joined by workers, their wives and children demanding democratic reforms including autonomy for the country’s universities, the freeing of political prisoners and social justice. By
6-00 pm, as day gave way to night, 2,000 army troops sealed off all exits of the plaza and fired on demonstrators butchering them indiscriminately.

A survivor of this massacre said last year on 3 October: "We will never forget that night. Through a corner...we saw how the soldiers threatened students with their weapons and arrested everybody they came upon. A little later many cargo trucks arrived, for the hundreds of bodies that were all over the ground. It was a night of engines, lights and sirens everywhere, the longest and saddest in my life."

500 were killed including the hundreds arrested without a trace of them till now.

In October 1997, 29 years after the massacre, the case was opened. Stray documents relating to the blood bath have been leaked despite the army’s refusal to release them. However, it is already evident that the massacre was pressured by the Central Intelligence Agency as part of US imperialism’s dirty war against Communism world wide.

When 60,000 students—most of whom were not even born at the time of the massacre—marched to the Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City last year, they demanded the Zedillo government to bring up all the secret files for public view. They were itching for justice. Apart from this demonstration, spurred by the militant contagion that had spread across Mexico from its palpitating heart in UNAM, students in several different towns of the country demonstrated on 2 October 1999 placing an identical list of demands before the fascist backers of the Tlatelolco massacre.

The students bore no illusions about the force they were up against. They clearly saw through the democratic veneer of the murderous PRI Zedillo regime.

Allying with the Workers and Peasants

The second significant feature of the Mexican student movement is the alliance and integration with the workers and peasantry and other democratic sections of Mexican society. The manifesto released by CGH demanded for a cancellation of the government "proposal to privatise the electric industry". These words of solidarity were translated into deeds when 30,000 students joined electrical workers in September 1999 in a massive show of strength against the Zedillo government’s policies of selling away national industry and services to the multinationals.

The composition of the UNAM student community, in contrast to the other universities of Mexico, comprises a large component of students from working class and peasant backgrounds owing to the fact that education in this university has been free. Furthermore, a fair number of students of UNAM are also workers themselves who labour a few hours in the day and attend college by night. Hence, behind the demand for free education, has been the lingering idea that education will become impossible for students of working class and peasant backgrounds. Hence a class angle has persisted in the student uprising all along.

Many organisations extended their support to the student struggle. On 10 February 2000, in a protest action against "Operation UNAM", attended by 15,000 people, more than 80 organisations from across the country extended their solidarity to the students. Prominent among them were: the National Liberation Front of Zapatista (FZLN) and the Revolutionary Popular Army (EPR)—both of which have been waging armed struggle in the south-west and south of the country basing themselves among the oppressed peasantry against the Mexican government; the Barzon, an organisation of farmers who have been ruined by the economic crisis as a result of the process of globalisation; the national alliance of teachers; and human rights and trade union organisations.

The UNAM student uprising has therefore led not only to the radicalisation of the students at large but has also stood out as a point of reference for demarcating the revolutionaries and progressives from the reactionaries. It has served as a rallying point as much as a dividing line between the people and their enemies.

A Deepening Economic and Political Crisis

The UNAM uprising gains significance because it has occurred at a time of unprecedented and grave crisis of semi-feudal semi-colonial Mexico. To resolve its problems the comprador ruling classes of the country went in for massive loans from the IMF in the 1980s consenting to its Structural Adjustment Programme. The joining of NAFTA by Mexico has further ruined its agriculture and industry and has pushed the workers and peasants into fresh bouts of struggle against the Zedillo regime.

Added to this unprecedented economic crisis, the Mexican political structure has begun to experience the worst instability in several decades. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which commemorated 70 years of its formation on 9 April 1999 was in fact reminiscenting over a bygone era of unchallenged plunder. It remains among the rabid few political parties in the world to have ruled a country without a break for seven full decades.

Established 10 years after the assassination of Emiliano Zapata, who led the Mexican revolution against feudalism, the PRI betrayed the revolution and emerged as the instrument of the Mexican comprador bourgeoisie. It led a corporativist programme after the Second World War and contributed to the consolidation of comprador-bureaucratic rule over a semi-feudal country. Since the 1980s, and particularly under the Presidentship of Salinas, the Mexican economy has been further integrated into the imperialist economy, specifically that of USA, and has led to the emergence of a new group of comprador billionaires who have monopolised the Mexican economy. In 1987 and 1993 the PRI split over the nomination of the successor Presidential candidate, leading to the formation of parties such as the PRD and PCD on each occasion.

Today, within the comprador PRI, presided over by Zedillo, there are at least half a dozen factions and there are at least two main streams of response as to how the economic crisis facing Mexico ought to be solved. While one trend wants closer integration with the USA, the other wants a nominal level of nationalisation to stay, albeit, subservient to imperialist domination. The strife between these groupings and political forces has grown intense. The political scene has witnessed assassinations and counter assassinations of leading politicians. Zedillo has to quit office and a new President has to be elected this year. 2000 comes as a year of intense political infighting for the Mexican bourgeoisie.

The Mexican student movement, coming at a time of the worsening of the economic crisis, has caught the Mexican ruling classes in the midst of deep trouble. An important factor that contributes to the political crisis of the ruling system is the emergence, since mid-1990s, of four organisations—the EZLN, EPR, ERIP and FALMPG—which have been waging guerrilla warfare against the Mexican government.

The students know that even if they miraculously manage to get free education, since the economy is in shambles, they will surely not be able to get jobs. The Mexican student community knows that it is up against a solid wall. It has little options before it. Death or Revolution—it will soon have to decide.

Student Resurgence

The last significant factor of the Mexican student struggle is that it is taking place in a global context where students have begun to play an exemplary role in fighting imperialism and domestic reaction.

Starting with the Chinese student uprising when one million students laid siege to the Tienanmen Square for more than a month in 1989, to the uprising against Burmese military rule, when students took Rangoon by storm, to the pitched street battles of the South Korean students, to the blockade of the Indonesian parliament in Jakarta, and the massive student upsurge in Tehran in 1999—students have reasserted their militancy and desire for real democracy.

More particularly, the student uprising at the biggest Latin American University, UNAM, comes in the midst of nationwide student outbreaks in Chile, Bolivia and Venezuela, and major struggles by students in Argentina and Peru.

For all these reasons then, the Mexican student uprising has the potential of drawing from and inspiring a new round of student radicalism across the globe.

In the late 1960s there was student radicalism no doubt. But then there wasn’t the economic crisis that confronted imperialism in the 1990s and threatens its existence in the first decade of the fresh century of the new millennium. The Mexican students have given serious thought to the struggles of the 1960s. But they should also give thought to the danger of revisionism in Mexico and simultaneously reflect on the people’s wars led by Maoists in Latin America itself and across the globe which beckon them with the proletarian invitation: Dare to Fight ! Dare to Win !!

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