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Al-Ahram Weekly 16 - 22 March 2000 Issue No. 473 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 16 - 22 March 2000 Issue No. 473
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles System breakdown
By Hisham El-Naggar
The students had been occupying the university campus for 10 months. Suddenly, the police stormed the campus and dragged some 175 student leaders to jail. Are the '60s back?
Not really, and certainly not in Mexico, where the mood of the times is decidedly conservative -- or at least it appeared so until very recently. Following the fiasco popularly known as the "tequila hangover" of December 1994, which saw the Mexican peso lose half its value in a few days and triggered a disastrous debt crisis, it seemed unlikely that Mexicans would tolerate fruitless conservatism. And yet, even after the family of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was found to be involved in large-scale corruption, the scent of revolution has remained surprisingly faint -- a weary eye turned northward, it seems.
"Too far from God and too close to the United States" is the way Mexicans often describe their country. Distance from God is subjective, but not so the proximity of the country's powerful neighbour to the north. Relations with the US have, undoubtedly, been a decisive factor in determining the course of the country's history and forming its national identity.
Mexico, though committed to a course of modernisation in tune with globalising times, has had a hard time shaking off its history; arguably the most memorable in the Western Hemisphere. This correspondent recalls being struck on his first visit to Mexico City by a subway station bearing the improbable name of "Niños Muertos" (dead youngsters). The station name commemorates the death of the young cadets who perished as they sought, unsuccessfully, to defend the capital against invading American troops.
Antagonism toward the United States has been a constant factor in any definition of Mexican nationalism; but there is much more to Mexico than the rather luckless circumstance of having an overbearing neighbour. At the close of the 19th century, Mexico's feudal social structure -- inherited from colonial times -- remained almost intact. A reaction was inevitable; and thus was born the Mexican Revolution.
The revolution's progressive ideals raised eyebrows all over the continent -- not the least of which was a most dismayed neighbour to the north. Revolution was not without its costs, however, and instability proved too high a price for the majority of Mexicans. The result was a historic compromise symbolised by the party that has held power ever since -- the Revolutionary Institutional Party (better known by its Spanish initials, PRI). This seemingly contradictory name (isn't the idea of revolution to make a clean sweep of existing institutions?) has come to summarise the very essence of Mexican political life: an idealistic quest for justice, balanced by an insistence on solid institutions. The relation between the two is precarious. Of late, it seems the latter has had the lion's share of emphasis; fear of slipping into the anarchy that nearly caused the country's collapse evidently remains rife.
It is in this context that the tragic turn of events at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) must be understood. UNAM, the country's largest and most prestigious public university, has long been the victim of not-so-benign neglect, as indeed have most public universities. Student unrest was first triggered last year by a decision to increase the university's fees -- from 25 cents to 1.20 US dollars a month. Hardly the stuff of revolution, one would think.
But students insisted that more than a few cents per month was at stake. The modest increase served as a catalyst, finally bringing to the fore an existing conflict between two irreconcilable views of tertiary education: that of the open university, which offers equal access to all social classes and provides high-quality university education; and that of "cost-recovery," based on the premise that all institutions must pay their way. The seemingly moderate increase was taken by students as a sneaky way of favouring the latter principle -- that those who want to get a university education had damn well better be prepared to pay for it.
This issue is being hotly debated all over the American continent south of the Rio Grande (to the north the issue is already settled, and paupers, for the most part, needn't apply). In many Latin American countries (not only Mexico, but also Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, to name a few), free university education has been an agent of social regeneration, responsible for the rise of a dynamic middle class and for the spreading of cultural awareness across a wide social spectrum. And, it might be added, the quality of public education has been good to excellent, as top-notch professors -- either out of commitment to public education or due to the prestige of teaching at their country's top institutions -- were once drawn to public universities despite chronically low pay and deteriorating physical conditions. But whether this is still the case is open to debate, particularly with international financial institutions that provide loans for "structural adjustment."
The students who occupied the campus of UNAM protesting the increases did so in the midst of an environment where Globalisation & Co. is the order of the day and the country's formerly strident agitators are on the wane. The rebellion in Chiapas, led by the Zapatistas (named after a hero of the revolution) appears to be fizzling out and despite numerous signs that the country is tiring of PRI rule, opposition to the PRI appears to be collapsing. Most observers predict that PRI's candidate will settle comfortably in the presidential chair after all.
The UNAM students were a stab in the side for a government gone soft on its revolutionary roots. After nine decades in power, PRI is much closer to the so-called "establishment" than to the ideals of the revolution that brought it into existence. PRI is, after all, the party which crushed the (much more massive) student uprising in the 1960s -- not a minor consideration -- and certainly a signal that tolerance for revolutionary fervour has its limits. It is also the party which negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada, giving birth to what many consider to be a "new Mexico."
But how "new" does Mexico want to be? The sight of the students being dragged to jail has clearly proved too much for a great many Mexicans. Intellectuals, who had remained rather aloof before the crackdown, vehemently attacked the government's strong-arm tactics -- particularly shocking when one considers that the government had been negotiating for many months with the very student representatives it has now consigned to prison cells. Elena Poniatowska, one of the country's great novelists, appeared on television in tears, bitterly regretting not having spoken up in support of the students earlier. And a small town even went so far as to hold its police force hostage in protest of the jailed students.
The students of UNAM are an echo of a past which no longer fits into the supposed new Mexico -- the Mexico globalisation built. But whether this is the Mexico that will prevail is a question that still hangs in the balance. To ignore the seditious history of this restive nation is to miss the point. Globalising forces tell us that there are few places in the world where history matters any more; but Mexico, heir to the Aztecs and the Mayas, harbinger of the ever-elusive ideal of social justice, is still one of them.
