February 10, 1999 THE POOR FIGHT FOR THEIR UNIVERSITY, THE RICH GO ELSEWHERE By David Bacon 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.