UNAM Student Strikes, 1929-1968
UNAM Student Strikes, 1929-1968
© 2001 Donald J. Mabry
The numerous student strikes in the National Autonomous University of Mexico have
involved matters of university governance, fees, curriculum and have usually been confined
to university precincts; the government rarely has had to intervene. Three strikes (those
of 1929, 1933, and 1968) illustrate how and why the national government got involved in
university issues. In 1929 and 1968, governmental misuse of violence infuriated the
university community and caused a confrontation with the national government. The key to
understanding these three strikes is the role of the government in causing and ending a
general strike. Although the national government played the essential role, it used
different means because of the circumstances.
The incidents leading to the general university strike in 1929 were very parochial and
limited to the National Preparatory School and the Law School. In February, 1929, before
the beginning of the term, the prep school director, Antonio Caso, announced that the
degree program would henceforth take three instead of two years. Angry, the students tried
to get the university administration to rescind the change, but it refused. The Secretary
of Public Education supported the director. They then declared a strike and took over the
prep school building, but Caso sent mounted police into the school patios to drive them
out. All they could do was seethe at what they perceived to be the injustice with which
they had been treated. A few months later, the Law School decided to use periodic written
instead of oral exams. This testing policy had been adopted for the university in 1925,
but the law students had blocked its implementation in their school. The use of the
written exam system not only meant that they would face much tougher exams but also that
they would have to attend class regularly, for one had to have attended 60% of the classes to
take the first exam and 75% to take the other two. The students protested, of course, but
Antonio Castro Leal refused to budge.
The students resorted to violence to try to get their way. On May 4th, a group of
students named a strike committee authorized it to physically attack any student who tried
to take exams under the new system. That same day, they invaded the national public
education building. Then on May 7, they took the law school building only to be driven out
by firemen. President Emilio Portes Gil and Education Secretary Ezequiel Padilla said
that, if they had to close the law school because students refused to take the
examinations, the monies would go to polytechnic or rural schools. People got the message.
Most law students were willing to accept the new exam system and students from the other
schools refused to join, for they had been using that exam system for years. Prep students
were sympathetic since they had their own grievances against the university administration
but they, too, were stymied. Popular sentiment ran against the idea that students should
determine what they should study and for how long and how they would be tested on the
material.
Students and public authorities continued to skirmish on occasion over the next few
weeks, but a fierce battle on May 23rd brought the entire university into the
strike and forced a showdown with the national government. Police fired shots into the air
and they and firemen fought their way into the law school and drove the students out. The
students immediately spread false rumors that six students had died in the assault and
asserted that the police were unjustifiably attacking students. Converting the incident
into a student versus government issue was necessary to attract students from the medical
and other conservative schools students into the strike, for the exam policy issue was
irrelevant to them. With their entry into the fray, all 8,154 UNAM students were involved.
Students in other institutions expressed sympathy, creating the possibility that the
movement might spread to other parts of the nation.
The Mexican government could not afford to ignore these student actions. The government
had squashed an armed rebellion led by General José Escobar in March and April. An end to
the three-year-old Church-State conflict, part of which involved armed rebellion in part
of the nation, was being negotiated. The special presidential election between Abelardo
Rodríguez, the government's candidate, and
José Vasconcelos, who had strong support in the university and among intellectuals, was
underway. It had been called because the president-elect had been assassinated the year
before by a Catholic fanatic. Since a number of students, including some of the most
prominent strike leaders, were active partisans of José Vasconcelos, granting partial
autonomy to the university would undercut some of Vasconcelos support from the university community. Battles
between students and municipal authorities therefore exacerbated the national political
situation.
President Emilio Portes Gil removed the university as a problem by granting it partial
autonomy, converting it into the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Portes
Gil had attended the national university and been a student strike leader himself. He also
understood that the faculty and administration as well as most students were not angry
because of curricular issues but would welcome making the university an autonomous state
agency. So he gave them autonomy, but with so many strings attached that the national
government still controlled who became rector and the purse strings. Students were allowed
to elect their representatives to school and university councils and to participate in the
election of administrators. Both sides could claim victory and Portes Gil could address
more important issues.
The 1929 movement set both a precedent and a pattern for subsequent student strikes.
Numerous young men became prominent political actors in national politics, encouraging
later students to try to use university politics to launch political careers. The myth of
a national student movement was given credence. Students saw themselves as paladins
against an oppressive state. Even conservative students of the 1930s advocated social
reform, social justice, and anti-imperialism. Student political activists commonly argued
that the state was corrupt, but that "pure" Mexican youth would fight to save the Mexican
Revolution. The 1929 strike assumed a legendary place in Mexican history.
Full autonomy came in 1933 when President Abelardo Rodríguez had Congress withdraw all
funding from UNAM except for a small one-time endowment and make it an independent
university because UNAM refused to support the goals of the Mexican Revolution. This
decision came because of an internecine fight between those who wanted to preserve
academic freedom and those who demanded that all teaching be socialist or Marxist. As part
of his presidential campaign in 1933-34, Lázaro Cárdenas supported a constitutional
amendment to require socialist education below the prep school level and some of his
supporters wanted it extended to UNAM. Socialist, in this instance, sometimes meant
Marxism but more often meant little more than teaching science, social sciences, and
technology, subjects in which traditionalists within UNAM had little interest. Government
officials believed that UNAM could not survive the lack of government funding and would
beg to suck the public teat once again and, when this happened, the government could
dictate the curricula and select the faculty needed. The traditionalists kept the
university going, however, until President Cárdenas, deciding that the university was too
important in terms of its educational role and that its alumni were powerful, arranged a
compromise in 1935. In return for a regular appropriation, UNAM accepted Luis Chico
Goerne, a strong Cárdenas supporter as rector. As expected, Chico Goerne gave UNAM a
pro-Revolutionary posture, making deals with student leaders and paying student gangs to
police student politics when necessary. This rapprochement lasted until 1968. The
government also created the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in 1937 to provide the trained
personnel the nation so desperately needed. The IPN was totally under government control.
Student political activity changed in the late 1940s because UNAM enrollment increased
dramatically in the post-WWII years and the government had built a modern campus ten miles
south of the heart of the city. Student demonstrations on the new campus were less likely
to be met by police repression, the spark that created general student strikes, since they
were isolated from the bulk of the population. Students became more likely to protest
service from bus companies than they were curricular issues. Even the increase in student
violence in the 1960s had little effect on the city or the nation as a whole.
The origins of the 1968 strike differed from its predecessors because they were
external to the university. University and city government had been issuing warnings for
months that student violence, especially by gangs, had to stop or strong measures would be
taken. On July 22, 1968, two rival gangs of male adolescent students fought each other in
the Ciudadela neighbourhood of Mexico City; the next day the city government responded by
sending policemen to stop the accompanying vandalism and to arrest the perpetrators. These
riot police attacked the students, pursued them into a school building, and
indiscriminately hit anyone they saw, including teachers. A howl of protest arose, for the
police themselves had become a riotous gang. The Federación Nacional de Estudiantes
Técnicos (FNET) staged a protest march on July 26th, which passed by Alameda
park in downtown Mexico City, where a pro-Castro group, was also holding a rally. The
Castroites praised the Cuban Revolution and called for a similar revolt in Mexico. Instead
of proceeding to the IPN campus, the marchers stopped to hear the harangues. No one can
prove whether students began to vandalize neighbouring businesses or the police stationed
in the area attacked the demonstrators. What is known is that students and police fought
each other as the students fled through the narrow streets towards the National Palace and
then to the old university quarters a few blocks from the Palace. The students burned a
bus and overturned other busses to form barricades. Students and police were injured and
some students were taken to jail. Sporadic fighting continued for a few days.
The national government called in the army. Much of the fighting was occurring only a
few blocks from the National Palace, too close for comfort for those who ruled. Early on
July 30th, an army officer, frustrated by the inability of his troops to enter
the precincts of the historic National Preparatory School #1, the school from which
generations of national leaders had graduated, ordered the firing of a bazooka to blow
down its wooden doors. With that act, the 87,462 students and the thousands of faculty of
UNAM who had not been part of the movement shut down the university and joined the
anti-government protests. Strikes and protests quickly spread to other universities in the
city and across the nation. To many, it appeared that the government had too little regard
for human rights, for higher education and the national tradition that UNAM was off-limits
to public security forces.
Javier Barros Sierra, rector of UNAM, led a protest march of 100,000 persons through
the city on August 1st. That same day, President Díaz Ordaz, speaking from
Guadalajara, promised that his government would engage in a dialogue with the students.
IPN students and faculty held their own mass march four days later. For the next few
weeks, both sides would try to negotiate the agenda and the site of dialogue. To create a
united front, students from these institutions and others organized a National Strike
Council, an organization so large and unwieldy that it could never effectively represent
student interests.
In spite of such actions as protest marches, street theatre, public appeals, fights
with police and soldiers, and the takeover of buildings, the students had no hope of
winning. The government was too powerful, and it, not students or educational
institutions, was guiding the spectacular economic growth which was raising living
standards. It represented law and order while the student movement meant disorder. Most
people gained nothing from the student movement. Further, the longer the student protest
movement lasted, the more it threatened the success of the Olympics to open in Mexico in
early October. Hosting the Olympiad was a source of great national pride and would
generate jobs and income. The public was unlikely to be sympathetic to anyone who
threatened to sabotage it, especially to persons who were privileged compared to the bulk
of the population. So Díaz Ordaz brought the movement to an end. When it became clear
that the student movement would not stop, the army was ordered to fire on a protest
demonstration being staged in the Tlatelolco apartment complex. Although no one knows for
sure how many were killed that night of October 2nd, the military action ended
the movement and the Olympics were successfully staged.
The underlying causes of the strike are hard to identify. Alienation from the mass
society which both the nation and the university had become, the popularity of New Left
ideology among many students, the fact that comités de lucha inside UNAM were anxious to
exert influence , the conservative and iron-fisted policies of President Díaz Ordaz, and
anxiety about the job market by students from the humanities and social sciences in a
society which demanded scientifically- and technically-trained employees all served as
causes.
The 1968 strike was unprecedented in Mexican history. Never before had hundreds of
thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets of the capital denouncing the
government nor had UNAM and IPN cooperated so closely nor had the government so blatantly
used violence against its elite youth. Squabbles within the university had rarely reached
the presidential level. The Mexican president is supposed to be the ultimate mediator of
conflict within society. This traditional role was one reason why the president was never
attacked in person (until the students did it in 1968). As long as he was above the fray,
he could be an honest broker or at least appear to be.
A comparison between the 1929 and 1968 strikes illustrates this point well. In 1929 the
decision to use force was made by local officials; Portes Gil, who was out of town when
the repression started, was able to mediate the dispute because he had no personal
responsibility for what Federal District or National University students had done. In
1968, however, Díaz Ordaz could not be the mediator since he was the one who had ordered
the army to attack the demonstrators and the university. Recognizing this, the 1968
students demanded public negotiations, which could not be done without the government
negating its authority. What the students were demanding was subversive and would invite
rebellion. So the government gave a definitive answer: continuance meant death. Portes Gil
would not have used such a tactic, for he was an interim president during an unstable
political situation. Díaz Ordaz, however, controlled an authoritarian state which was
enjoying a booming economy. Moreover, the sheer magnitude of the 1968 movement with its
hundreds of thousands of participants from virtually every secondary and university-level
school in the Federal District meant that the local governmental authorities might not
have been able to control events, thus prompting Díaz Ordaz and his government minister,
Luis Echeverría, to use the army.
Echeverría tried to gain university support but when that failed also took steps to
reduce the power of UNAM. The age requirement to be a member of Congress was lowered,
increased educational opportunity became a national goal, and Mexico became more leftist
in its foreign policy statements. The government funded new college preparatory schools
for UNAM in 1973, partly because of enrollment demand and partly to appease the
university. In 1974, the national government created the Autonomous Metropolitan
University. It also began subsidizing the private El Colegio de México and built a new
campus for it. Both were steps to reduce the power of UNAM.
Mexican students rarely engage in revolt against the government. Much of what casual
observers interpret as student revolt is student violence. Violent acts of students
against each other or against police who are trying to stop student vandalism and fighting
are rarely efforts to revolt against the government. Mexican university students rebel
against police repression, tuition increases, class attendance requirements, tougher
admission or graduation requirements, and tougher exams. This has been the history of UNAM
student activism. When the local government uses too much force in dealing with student
demonstrations is it likely that they will call a general strike at the university. If the
general strike spills into the streets, then it becomes an issue which the president has
to resolve.
This absence of a revolutionary student movement in Mexico has meant that governments
do not have to increase budgets substantially to pacify university people. Ambitious
student politicians who hope to enter national politics and government officials who teach
part-time in the university can warn the government of any serious threat from within
UNAM. Modest budget increases will be given and university administrators will continue to
control admissions policy, academic requirements, and expenditures (all subject to student
acquiescence) as long as UNAM or any other institution does not become a staging ground
for efforts to overthrow the government. The universities receive enough funds to operate
at a modest level, but those programs which address national priorities receive extra
funding. In the meantime, the two agreed to leave each other alone. The universities
understand that it is the national government which has the power.
2001
