The United States is going through a wave of student protests, the largest anti-war mobilizations in the country since the Vietnam War in the late 1970s. Although pressure from pro-Palestinian student groups to put a ceasefire and call on Joe Biden’s government to stop its support for Israel began at the start of hostilities in October 2023, the mobilizations reached their highest point at the end of April. The police dismantling of a student camp established at Columbia University, in New York, ignited a powder keg of anti-war demonstrations that spread throughout the country and amounted to thousands of detainees.
On the night of April 18, the police evicted an incipient pro-Palestinian camp installed in Columbia at the request of the Government junta. The police raid only fueled the protests and sparked a second encampment that included the takeover of Hamilton Hall, an iconic campus administrative building with a recent history of student sit-ins as protests. The images of the eviction with hundreds of detained students provoked a wave of university indignation that spread to dozens of campuses with the demand to stop Washington’s support for Israel.
Which universities have joined the protest?
In addition to Columbia University, the echoes of the mobilizations have also reached Harvard and Yale, three of the eight members of the Ivy League, the select group of elite universities concentrated in the northeast of the country. However, the clamor to stop the Israeli offensive in Gaza has also been replicated on the west coast: at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), the police dismantled the pro-Palestinian camp installed since April 25 just one day after that supposed pro-Israel sympathizers clashed with students who were demonstrating peacefully demanding a ceasefire. The entry of the police and the subsequent arrests, which totaled more than 200 as of Wednesday, occurred after the university authorities decreed a curfew as a mechanism to prevent future camping. The protests have already disrupted university life with the suspension of in-person classes for the rest of the week.
The scene was repeated at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD), in the extreme southwest of the country, after the emergence of nearly 200 police officers in riot gear in a protest camp that had been set up on campus for five days. In an attempt to stop the demonstrations, university authorities declared camping illegal. The balance in the border city so far is 65 people detained, 40 of them students. The mobilizations on the west coast have also reached Oregon State University. To the south, Arizona State University, the University of New Mexico, the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Texas at Austin have also joined massive camping trips, which as of Wednesday are being replicated in at least 50 universities across the country. American territory.
The university protests that are beginning to multiply in Europe have barely found an echo in Latin America. In the Mexican capital, a hundred students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the largest public university in Latin America, set up a camp at the foot of the Rectory Tower that demands both a ceasefire and a rupture. total diplomatic relations between Mexico and Israel and the non-criminalization of the rest of the student protests that take place in other latitudes. In Brazil, an incipient pro-Palestinian group of students and workers from the University of São Paulo set up camp on Wednesday night with demands to stop the Israeli offensive, in addition to demanding that the University, the largest and most important in the country, break the collaboration agreements it maintains with multiple Israeli universities.
What is the balance of detainees?
The student protests in the United States have left more than 2,500 arrests in fifty faculties throughout the country as of this Wednesday, according to The New York Times.
What are the demands of the movement?
The common denominator among the university protests is the demand for a ceasefire in Gaza, an offensive that intensified this Wednesday with the Israeli army’s incursion into Rafah, the main entry point for humanitarian aid during the war. The focus of the mobilizations is also on demanding that study centers withdraw their investments in Israeli companies, especially those that have placed university endowment funds in industries that benefit from the war in Gaza, in addition to calling for transparency in the destination. of these funds.
Another key demand lies in the amnesty against dissenting students, especially after different universities such as Columbia or Yale sanctioned some of the protagonists of the camps with expulsions from the student residences and temporary suspensions that put their academic future in suspense. Divestment, along with readmission and non-retaliation toward student protesters, are part of open negotiations between some universities and pro-Palestinian students.
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