Thousands of university students filled the streets of Argentina this Tuesday to repudiate the cut in funds to the public university, which was declared in a state of budgetary emergency within the framework of President Javier Milei's adjustment policy.
In the Argentine capital, Large columns gathered around the headquarters of the 13 faculties of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) to march in the afternoon towards the Plaza de Mayo.
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The protesters carried books as a sign of protest and posters with vignettes from the emblematic comic strip “Mafalda.”
One of them, Pablo Vicenti, 22 years old and in the third year of Medicine at the UBA, said he was outraged by “the brutal attack by the government” on the public university. “They want to defund it with a false story that there is no money. Yes, they have it, but they choose not to spend it on public education,” he told AFP.
In the city of Córdoba, the center of the country and headquarters of the prestigious university of the same name, tens of thousands of students filled the streets also carrying books.
“Do not wait for public spending to emerge,” Milei warned on Monday when announcing on national television that public accounts recorded a surplus in the first quarter, although at the price of thousands of layoffs and the collapse of economic activity and consumption. .
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Last week, and in the heat of the university protests, Milei agreed to “increase operating expense items by 70% in March and another 70% in May”, in addition to an extraordinary sum for university hospitals, with which the government considers that the discussion “is settled,” presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni said on Tuesday.
Operating expenses exclude teaching salaries, which represent 90% of the university budget.
“Of the four teaching categories, three have fallen below the poverty line,” said the rector of the National University of San Luis, Víctor Moriñigo, when reporting on a teaching salary scale whose floor is 100,000 pesos per month (112 dollars). ).
“At the rate at which they are giving us money, we will only be able to function for two to three months,” said the rector of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), Ricardo Gelpi.
For Rubén Arena, professor and graduate of the Faculty of Economic Sciences, The protest seeks to “defend the future of Argentina and many generations who will be able to access an education of excellence.
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The spending cuts are necessary, said the 48-year-old protester, “but not in the way that is being adjusted in the universities, which allow an upward social movement.”
Milei questioned the transparency of the use of funds and the quality of teaching by suggesting that public universities “are used to do shady business and indoctrinate,” as he wrote on the X network over the weekend.
Some 2.2 million people study in the public university system, chosen by 80% of students over private institutions, in a country with almost half of its population of 47 million people in poverty.
The state higher education system enjoys great academic prestige and was the birthplace of Argentina's five Nobel Prize winners -three of them in hard sciences-, in addition to scientific and technological developments recognized worldwide.
Last week several buildings dependent on the UBA They had to ration the use of elevators, turn off lights in common spaces, limit library hours, reduce the use of hot water and limit university extension programs, as part of the emergency measures.
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The Faculty of Medicine operated in half-light, with classrooms and hallways in darkness, and elevators limited to the use of people with reduced mobility.
AFP
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