From the student movement in the National Autonomous University of Mexico of 1999 against the update of registration and service payments that caused the resignation of the rector Francisco Barnés de Castro, no record had been made university mobilization in almost a quarter of a century until the one that emerged last week in protest against the reform to the Judiciary raised by the President Andres Manuel Lopez Obradorwhich in a few days achieved a march of thousands students of Right in the country to ask for time to discuss it. So far, the response from the government has been mockery, disqualifications, and, in a risky way, a counter-movement to neutralize them.
The mobilizationwhich began in the UNAMwhere once again in history there is the placenta of a fundamental difference with the government, dislocated the President-elect Claudia Sheinbaumwho knows that if a movement in that institution, her alma mater, gains traction, it is very difficult to stop it. She knows this because she herself was part of one of them, in 1986, when as a member of the University Student Council – several officials from the federal government and Mexico City jumped from there to political life – they stopped the reform of rector Jorge Carpizo that sought to charge registration fees and eliminate automatic admission to high schools.
Various collaborators of Sheinbaum They tried to defuse the protest, but they were unsuccessful. The idea of some in his team, evoking what he has said Lopez Obradorwas that the left had lost the UNAMwhich had become right-wing. This, for those who know the institution, is not correct. Throughout its history, the UNAM It has been plural, although some of its faculties have been characterized by having clear ideological inclinations, as there have always been left and right.
What has decreased is the Obradorism – the deepening of the fall in the circulation of La Jornada in University City It is a reflection of this, due to the constant attack on the institution, the stigmatization that the president has attempted, and the idea of inventing a university system by taking resources away from public universities to create pseudo professionals who will not find work in the labor market. López Obrador’s rhetoric, the anti-knowledge policies that he promoted from the Ministry of Education and the anti-scientific ones that he encouraged from Conacyt, had generated a problem for Sheinbaum with the community, which was resolved during the campaign to win her vote – which was given to her by the university students.
But Lopez Obrador’s reformwhich resumes part of the proletarianization of society that the president has sought, deliberately or inadvertently, affected law students at UNAM and other public and private schools, who are asking to discuss the popular election of judges, magistrates and ministers, so that it is inclusive, without political and partisan filters, with respect for objective guarantees regarding the principles of the judicial career, the non-regression of human rights and respect for acquired rights.
The response from the ruling party has been worrying due to its lack of empathy and sensitivity in addressing the emerging problem. Sheinbaum made a mistake by asking university students to inform themselves before protesting, which provoked criticism from the protesters. López Obrador suggested that they were being manipulated by their professors, that they were being deceived (no one likes to be called stupid). The president of the Senate, Gerardo Fernández Noroña, mocked the university students and said that they never found out about the reform until they returned from vacation, inspired, perhaps, by their teachers. The author of the reform, the president’s former pocket minister, Arturo Zaldívar, says that it was widely discussed throughout the year, so, he says, there is nothing more to talk about. Total closure to dialogue.
But the government did not sit back. On Monday, 62 students from higher education institutions across the country published a notice under the signature of the group “Jóvenes por la Reforma” (Youth for Reform), where they expressed their support for judicial reform and called for “a day of peaceful activities and demonstrations” until next Friday, with a call to mobilize this Wednesday in the 32 states of the country. “It is a provocation,” said a senior official at a public university. “It is a mistake; they will confront them.”
It remains to be seen what kind of support these students have, who represent a very dispersed mosaic of students from public institutions, where among the undersigned no more than six students from the Polytechnic, three from UNAM, five from UAM, no more than one from the autonomous universities of the state of Mexico, Tabasco, Sonora or Zacatecas, and many others from technical schools in places like Zongolica, Cuautla, Los Mochis, appear.
In any case, it is a high-risk strategy because the official reaction entered a volatile terrain at the moment of acceleration of discontent. The university mobilization has joined, although in protest for different reasons, the mobilization of the workers of the Judicial Branch, and at least yesterday it was an important complement to the blockade that the workers made in the Chamber of Deputies, with which they prevented the session where the reform was to be discussed and voted on in general, while the students did the same with the alternate venue that was set up to comply with the president’s orders.
The mobilization brought university students out of the stupor they had been in for almost a quarter of a century, when they were confronted with the reality of a judicial reform that has managed to unite them, but that is not being addressed with intelligence and tolerance by the ruling party. The judicial reform will go ahead, and from what can be seen, it will be just as the president wants it, although it adds to the legacy of instability that he leaves to his successor, a potential university protest in the understanding that what happens from October 1st onwards will not be his concern, nor his responsibility or fault, but Sheinbaum’s.
X: @rivapa
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