The strike has taken on new meaning since it started April 20 as a protest over a plan to raise annual tuition from four cents to $145. At first, it enjoyed widespread support among students and the public. But after the administration abandoned the tuition proposal, the most radical strikers–dubbed “mega-ultras” by the Mexican media–came up with a new list of demands aimed at giving students more control over the running of the university. As the strike has dragged on in a series of failed negotiations and traffic-stopping protests, many strikers who consider themselves moderates say they have been squeezed out of the debate. Now a hard-core group of a few thousand students–out of a total of 270,000–remains barricaded inside the campus, holding it hostage in an already lost battle for the nation’s ideological soul. “I always thought the world’s last Marxist would die in a Latin American university,” says historian Enrique Krauze.
Even as Mexico has privatized state companies and opened its borders to U.S. goods, UNAM has clung to its radical past. Throughout the 1970s, the university expanded its enrollment and academic standards dropped. More companies started hiring from private schools. (In the last 13 years, management jobs in small and medium manufacturing plants filled by UNAM graduates have fallen 42 percent.) Today buildings are spray-painted with slogans like only socialist revolution is real change.
The strikers have one advantage in the standoff with the government: 1968. That year soldiers opened fire on a demonstration in the Tlatelolco Plaza in downtown Mexico City, killing hundreds–some say thousands–of UNAM students. That massacre is why President Ernesto Zedillo says he will not use force to retake the campus, despite growing pressure from some students and professors to send in troops. The strikers themselves want a martyr, says Joel Ortega, a ‘68 leader with two daughters at UNAM. “There is a grand nostalgia over the1968 movement. The strikers long for tragedy.”
As the battle has worn on, the radicals have enlisted new allies. Recent rallies included electric workers who oppose privatization of state utilities and Zapatista guerrillas, who took up arms in 1994 to defend Indian rights. But the majority of UNAM students no longer support the strike. Late last month 187,260 students braved intimidation to register for the fall semester in hopes it will start. Most of them paid the voluntary tuition.
