Mexico University Tries Recovering for nytcamer@ursula; Fri, 11 Feb 2000 20:13:56 -0500 Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Mexico University Tries Recovering By John Rice Associated Press Writer Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2000; 1:40 a.m. EST MEXICO CITY - Cleaning up the garbage and graffiti left behind by a 9-month student sit-in at Latin America's largest university might be the easy part. The more daunting task will be calming passions at the 270,000-student National Autonomous University. Interior Secretary Diodoro Carrasco, who oversees the police who carried out Sunday's raid on the campus, conceded Monday that the crisis was not over. "I think the recovery of the installations is a fundamental step, but it seems to me that it has to be followed by an enormous effort of reconciliation in the university community," he said in a television interview. University spokesman Roberto Vivanco said Monday that classes could resume after officials clean up the campus. He gave no date. It isn't clear how many students will show up. Some said they would boycott classes until the more than 700 strike supporters arrested Sunday were freed. And many other students had already abandoned the university for jobs or other schools. "We cannot return to class and leave our comrades inside," said Lorena Estejel, 17, a high-school student who wants to study dentistry. The strike was led by radicals who saw it as a struggle against global free-market economics. It began as a protest against tuition increases but continued long after officials rescinded them. The long standoff at the university, known as UNAM, has shaken the traditions of Mexico's system of higher education. With almost no tuition, UNAM's classrooms mingle the children of Mexico's elite with promising teen-agers from the slums. Most of the country's academic scientific research is done there and UNAM's schools of law and economics have produced four of the past five presidents. President Ernesto Zedillo studied elsewhere, but the candidate favored to succeed him this year, Francisco Labastida, is a UNAM graduate. Most key figures in Zedillo's administration also attended UNAM. Even the leader of the leftist Zapatista rebels studied at UNAM. Campus politics can have long-term effects on national politics. And many UNAM students and faculty who were opposed to the strike were also outraged by the use of force to end it, viewing the move as a blow to the university's cherished autonomy. Memory of a 1968 government massacre of students was one reason why the government avoided intervening for so long ? and why the eventual use of police was so traumatic to many. Hoping to heal those wounds, Rector Juan Ramon de la Fuente urged officials to drop most charges against those arrested and to be lenient with those who are convicted. UNAM's size overshadows any in the United States. The University of Texas-Austin, one of the biggest American universities, has just over 49,000 students. But the strike prompted many students to take jobs or shift to other universities. "I wanted to study at UNAM, but now, knowing how little prestige a degree is going to have, I am going to have to go somewhere else," said Victor Manuel Cabrera, an 18-year-old UNAM high school student waiting Monday outside the federal attorney general's office for word of his sister, who was one of the strikers arrested by police. Copyright 2000 The Associated Press ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytcamer-02.11.00-20:13:48-13162