Mexico: Generation of '68
Escudero, Roberto & Rocca, Salvador Martinez Della
"All of us were reborn on October 2. And on that day we also decided how we are all going to die: fighting for genuine justice and democracy." -Rafil Alvarez Garin, member, National Strike...
...The origin of these demands are explained by events since 1968...
...In January 1973 the strike ended with the recognition of the STEUNAM and the signing of a contract which included most of the workers' demands...
...day care facilities and health benefits, low-cost housing programs, etc...
...1718 NACLA Report POPULAR DEMANDS/ POPULAR SUPPORT Throughout the strike, the demands of SPAUNAM were discussed and deepened, and became the basis upon which the union reached out for support...
...The second area of SPAUNAM demands were economic: more equitable salaries so that teachers wouldn't have to take a second job outside of the school, as was common...
...In October 1972, the ATAUNAMs, that had been radicalized by events since '68 and were likewise influenced by the rising level of trade union insurgency, decided to constitute themselves into one administrative workers union, the STEUNAM...
...Each of these deserves a page of history...
...The student base itself was subdivided into a large number of political brigades which claimed practically all of Mexico City as their arena of political action, especially during the months of July and August 1968, when the movement was at its peak...
...1977...
...There was a consciousness among many of the student leaders, even at that time, that, as students, they were not the appropriate sector to be directing a social movement for revolutionary change...
...6 10 YEARS OF STRUGGLE In spite of this temporary defeat, a year later, as we conclude this article on the tenth anniversary of Tlatelolco, the university movement has great possibilities of organizing the opposition, of creating a National Federation of University Unions, one great union for all university workers which will cooperate with the rest of the working class and the student movement in the process of liberation and revolutionary change in our country...
...There were two main differences with this date and October 2, 1968, however...
...To proceed with the demonstration without clear demands left the students open for repression...
...banners, locked the doors to the school, and with overwhelming student support, carried out a three month strike...
...and secondly, the Echeverria government inaugurated a new repressive method, similar to the porras but never seen before on this scale: expertly trained right-wing paramilitary squads known as Los Halcones (The Hawks...
...1974...
...4. "Enfermos en Sinaloa," Punto Critico, Vol...
...Others, a great many in fact, confined themselves to a sort of Mexican-style "hippyism," with drug usage prominent, and a proliferation of "back to nature" lifestyles - popular with many who saw that to participate politically promised beatings, prison or death...
...It took time to find a common language, but haltingly we began to communicate with the people - and in the process there developed a rich exchange that brought the students closer to the reality of our people - and brought the people, by the tens of thousands, into the streets in support of our shared demands...
...While far from a total victory, Echeverria's solution did change the political context of the Nuevo Leon movement and, consequently, confuse the support movement of students in Mexico City...
...After the repressive methods utilized by the government had forced university students and professors to retreat and concentrate their activity in the centers of higher education, they began to detect and feel with special intensity all the regulations and political juridical measures which reflected the larger, antidemocratic political structure of Mexico...
...In 1960, 1500 police attacked a demonstration in support of striking school teachers...
...hundreds were arrested, including strike leaders Demetrio Vallejo and Valentin Campa, who remained in jail during the 1968 Movement...
...on Olympics * Student movement grows, gains popular support * Oct...
...The vast majority of urban guerrilla groups that arose in Monterrey, Guadalajara and the Federal District after 1972 were made up of university professors and students who were extremely isolated from the emerging labor struggles of that time.* (Although an evaluation of the guerrilla movement is outside the limits of this work, it must be noted that, through repressive tactics, the police forces have been able to dismember the most important rural and urban armed groups that existed between 1972 and 1975...
...In fact, though many of the students, especially from schools like the Politecnico, were from the working class, the majority of students themselves belonged to this "middle class," which had seen the possibilities of upward mobility greatly reduced over the years...
...The morning of July 7 saw 150,000 supporters demonstrate in favor of the university union...
...An alliance of the Maoists, based mainly in the Politecnico, and the student members of the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) pushed for carrying the demonstration forward and "winning back the streets at whatever cost," a position which we feel contributed to an adventurist policy...
...There were long and heated debates within the march coordinating committee before it was decided to proceed with the mass demonstration planned for June 10th, and to add some very general political demands to the main objective of supporting the Nuevo Leon students...
...This control had been imposed over the years by systematic repression of workers' struggles, and this factor, too, made many workers hesitant to participate - except as individuals - in the mass student mobilizations of 1968...
...unemployed * Strikes repressed at Datsun, Uniroyal, VW * 24,000 telephone workers strike * 6,000 farm workers strike U.S.-financed growers in Sinaloa * Mexican immigrants resist Carter immigration plan * Ajusco squatter settlement burned with U.S.-supplied helicopters * Tenfold increase of U.S...
...And this was one of the movement's greatest weaknesses...
...3 Under these conditions, not only did the Mexican working class and the great majority of the campesinos carry the burden of dependent development of the economy, but it also fell on the great majority of the so-called underprivileged "middle classes," whose impoverishment had been underway for sometime...
...Some full-time tenured professors received over $1,000 per month, but the majority of professors received considerably less and most investigators earned under $300...
...One of the most infamous was the "Pancho Villa" porra in the National University (UNAM) that beat up members of the fight committees in the Science and Engineering schools and occupied the School of Economics at machinegun-point in 1969-70...
...The Nuevo Leon conflict was the first of many tugs-of-war that have occurredup to the present day throughout the nation's universities, pitting leftist students and professors against conservative university administrators and the state and federal government...
...1, 1972...
...The other level of anti-student propaganda was emphasized by Diaz Ordaz in his 1968 Presidential Report when he maintained that the cause of the disturbances was the liberal universities themselves and thus the need for "educational reform" - a recommendation later adopted by the succeeding Echeverria administration...
...the power of spontaneous mass movement, yet its pitiful weakness against the state when not equipped with organization, ideology and strategy...
...There was no process of discussion with the rank and file members of each union, so that each member could weigh the political importance of creating one union...
...REPRESSION & THE CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY The Movement of 1968 began as a result of the savage repression unleashed by the Mexican police to put down a street scuffle between two high schools in downtown Mexico City...
...In an effort to counteract the momentum created after the SPAUNAM victory, the authorities began to promote the creation of so-called "Autonomous University Associations," pressuring many professors and researchers to affiliate with these classical petty-bourgeois professional guilds...
...Upon returning, he became a founding member of the Punto Critico news magazine, with which he still works...
...68 - 72: CONFUSE AND CONQUER The massacre at Tlatelolco was not the end of government repression against the student movement, but rather the beginning of a several-year drive to exterminate the independent opposition movement altogether...
...But undeniably missing from the movement was the organized participation of the vast majority of the traditional proletariat...
...At its peak, the National Strike Council was made up of delegates from local "fight committees" of more than one hundred striking schools...
...POPULAR SUPPORT FOR THE STUDENTS The student movement began, after the initial repression of the street fight, with very simple demands: the dissolution of the Cuerpo de Granaderos (a police force frequently used against popular demonstrations), the firing of the principal police officers who had led the repression, abolition of the penal code section detailing punishment for political crimes, indemnification for the relatives of dead and wounded comrades, and, lastly - a demand stemming from the whole of the Mexican left - freedom for political prisoners, including the two working class leaders, Valentin Campa and Demetrio Vallejo...
...posts or supporting Echeverria as a "left ally" within the government...
...It was the culmination of a generalized social discontent festering over the previous three decades of rapid economic growth - decades of urbanization and creeping "consumerism," of expectations unfulfilled, of an "institutionalized revolution," of an increasingly authoritarian, repressive and brittle state...
...As the state became ever less able to politically mediate the class conflicts resulting from the decades of dependent capitalist development, it resorted more frequently to repression as the response to social demands in the years preceding the 1968 massacre...
...For this reason the SPAUNAM requested and received the support of both the student movement and the STEUNAM workers' union...
...Sensing that the Nuevo Leon movement could build into a national confrontation and disrupt attempts to rebuild the government's image through "dialogue," Echeverria intervened in favor of the students a few days prior to the planned march...
...spends $160 mn...
...But they also predict the embryo of a total change for our country...
...1978 15 The government used military-trained gangs known as "Los Halcones" to repress a student-worker demonstration on June 10, 1971...
...In our judgement, this social base constitutes the most important factor to take into consideration when characterizing the politics of the movement...
...The decade has paid a heroic price in order to form worker and peasant organizations...
...The following demands were also fulfilled: (1)job security for all university professors...
...As the march rounded the Teachers School, flanked on one side by rows of granadero police and on the other by a metal and cement wall, several hundred civilian youths armed with bamboo poles and screaming "halcones" fell upon the marchers, beating them mercilessly and methodically while the granaderos looked on...
...2. Cited by Robert McNamara in Los Angeles Times, Oct...
...1977...
...The union's final area of concern was that of supporting and participating in the struggles of the exploited masses...
...from the peasants of Topilejo who came to the students for help in their fight...
...In reality October 2 was not a political defeat, but a defeat by the force of arms...
...He is also a founding member and current staff writer of Punto Critico...
...The PRI's first move immediately following the massacre was a massive political-ideological campaign to shift the blame from the government to the students themselves...
...The new President, Jose Lopez Portillo, had recently signed a binding "austerity agreement" with the IMF limiting wage hikes and government spending...
...The first attributed the origin of the movement to a youthful desire for an "illogical imitation" of the 1968 French student movement and pretended to expose how the youths had been taken over by a political leadership controlled by a "foreign conspiracy...
...THE CLASS BASE As we have said, the main base of popular support for the students was among the underprivileged middle sectors...
...Next came a rain of gunfire from the rooftops overlooking the streets, instantly felling several dozen demonstrators, while the rest of the march took refuge in the interior of the school...
...In sum, Echeverria's "democratic opening" was a desperate attempt to rebuild the shattered public image of the PRI after the Tlatelolco massacre...
...It was not only the conditions of brutally eroded democratic rights which paved the way for popular support of the student demands, but also the economic factors that determined the specific development of the movement...
...The state had actively stimulated that period of economic growth, and its heavy borrowing from foreign banks had already caused the foreign debt to grow five-fold in the sixties...
...1978 be they intellectual, administrative or manual workers, were an exception to workers in general...
...THE STUDENT BRIGADES One of the key factors enabling the students to mobilize popular support for their demands was the crucial work done by the student brigades...
...This was another major step forward, for in our country it has been a permanent policy of the ruling class to maintain the exploited classes divided and atomized.* It was one thing to propose the fusion, however, but another to' force the authorities to accept it...
...There were numerous examples of this labor solidarity, but perhaps the most significant was the National Front of Popular Action (FNAP), formed later in October 1976 among SPAUNAM, STEUNAM, the independent electrical workers movement (SUTERM), the Mexican Communist Party, the National Alliance of Sugar Producers, dozens of colono slum-dweller organizations and many other independent unions...
...To carry out this farce Echeverria met with organizations such as the Confederation of Mexican Youth and the National Politechnical Institute (groups created and controlled by the government), and he brought many young people into his cabinet and made numerous speeches about how the youth of '68 had incorporated into his regime, adopting the rhetoric and symbols of '68 to the needs for political reform in the '70s...
...border plants * Professors' union (SPAUNAM) formed * Peasants occupy lands throughout country * Peasants massacred in Sonora 1976 Destabilization campaign escalates * Rightist attacks on universities * Army breaks electrical strike * Peso devaluation * Land occupations continue...
...5. For more on the electrical workers movement see "Power Struggle: Labor and Imperialism in Mexico's Electrical Industry," NACLA Report on the Americas, Sept.-Oct...
...Some 50,000 people, mainly students, gathered for the occasion, showing the vitality and spirit of resistance that still existed...
...2: Tlatelolco massacre 1969 Halcones (rightist thugs) emerge 1000% Dec...
...The student movement drew its main social base from the latter - which included the lower and middle strata of the petty bourgeoisie as well as middle-income workers, like teachers, government employees and medics...
...He was exiled in Chile from October 2, 1969, to June 6, 1971...
...And 1968 was the beginning - of economic crisis, of a resurgent labor movement, of class conflict etched so sharply as to be indisguisable even by the best of bourgeois demagogues...
...The authorities wasted no time in making clear that they refused to sign the contract or recognize the newly unified union, arguing that it did not represent the majority of academic employees and that government rules limited raises to 10 percent...
...The lack of a strong participation from the working class is to a large extent the result of the class backgrounds of the students themselves, who, as we have said, came largely from the petty-bourgeoisie and the middle-income families of government employees, teachers, etc...
...Like all dividing lines of world history, the '68 Movement was both end and beginning...
...17, May 1973...
...GENERATION OF '68 1. Punto Critico, Vol...
...This was the demand for democratic liberties that were being trampled by the Mexican Government...
...The University of Nuevo Leon in Monterrey, Sept./Oct...
...The seriousness of the present economic crisis, and the lack of mechanisms to solve it, predict many deprivations and sacrifices for the next decade...
...1978 15NACLA Report Mexico 1968 -1978 1968 Govt...
...8, 1972...
...The great demonstrations of August and September, when 200,000 people joined our marches, showed that the squeezed "middle class" could become an incredibly important element in a process of social transformation - including a revolutionary one - since the movement of '68 was laying the foundations for even more radical demonstrations...
...But unfortunately this was taking place within a climate of political confusion brought about by the Echeverria solution to the Nuevo Leon conflict, a climate that led the students to underestimate the likelihood of government repression...
...These were the main objectives of the movement...
...It was partial because the authorities did not agree to the collective bargaining contract, but they did sign a document which guaranteed the bilateral nature of labor-management relations...
...4) financial benefits...
...Their profit remittances helped boost the Mexican balance of payments deficit to $800 million by the end of the decade.' Yet the years of rapid economic growth within the context of world capitalism had also resulted in an increasingly monopolized economy and an increasing concentration of wealth...
...SAL VADOR MAR TINEZ DELLA ROCCA wasa member of the Fight Committee from the School of Sciences and a political prisoner from August 1968 to March 1971...
...At this point it is important to note that any political or academic action which directly affects the interests of the university community must be discussed with all sectors of the university...
...The strike began on June 16, 1975, with a support rally .of approximately 30,000 participants from the university community...
...The brigades were responsible for organizing the huge mass of students, and at the same time, received the utmost solidarity from the people - solidarity expressed in the most moving and simplest of ways, such as through the frequent contributions of chickens, corn and beans "to support the movement...
...On June 20, 1977, a strike was called by professors and workers at the UNAM demanding recognition of their union and a 20 percent wage increase to fight the spiralling inflation and the previous 100 percent devaluations of the peso...
...They understood the violence in store for such a spontaneous and loosely organized movement...
...I, No...
...strike 83 days * Guerilla leader Genaro Vazquez killed 1973 Monterrey industrialists attack LEA...
...But it is precisely this characteristic that demonstrates the uniqueness of the '68 Mexican movement: the inclusion of a broad sector of the middle class in a democratic and progressive movement, whose organic development could and 1112 NACLA Report After the 1968 massacre parents searched the morgues of Mexico City for their children...
...But underneath, there was a central demand broader in scope and shared by the Mexican people...
...ERRORS TO THE LEFT & RIGHT The 10th of June marked the beginning of a new period of crisis for the student movement, a crisis that derived from the still predominantly petty-bourgeois conception of the student movement, a crisis that was eventually to give way to a more rooted political practice in the future...
...1: Echeverria (LEA) inaugurated President 1970 U.S...
...The movement was born and died as a result of the government's policy of repression...
...It revealed the fighting spirit of the students, as well as their tendencies to right and left deviation...
...The facile promises of a presidential "dialogue" with the students and a "democratic opening" were already leading some individuals and organizations to collaborate with the state by accepting government 14 NACLA ReportSept./Oct...
...This article by Escudero and Martinez is scheduled to appear in Spanish in a forthcoming issue of Los Universitarios, official magazine of the National University of Mexico: c/o Torre de Rectoria, 10 Piso, Ciudad Universitaria, Mexico 20, D.F...
...in the Yucatan.10 NACLA Report By 1968, then, the state had lost much legitimacy in the eyes of the Mexican people, who repeatedly saw their democratic rights shatter under the blow of police batons...
...In some schools where the union was still in the minority, the students stepped in and actively supported the strike...
...These political brigades explained to the people, wherever they happened to be, the reasons for the students' struggle and, in our estimation, were the most important political factor and the one which the movement came to rely on most heavily...
...The rapid and relatively high degree of economic growth that the country had experienced during the previous thirty years had been attained within the strict framework of U.S...
...This guaranteed democratic participation by the base, but also prevented the creation of a centralized organism more dynamic, flexible and efficient than the National Council...
...1978 1314 NACLA Report a northern industrial city and bastion of conservatism, took center stage in the educational-reform struggle from 1969 until June 1971...
...In the heat of the university strike a new teachers' organization also was born, the Labor Board (Consejo Sindical...
...LEA expropriates land in Sonora * New President Lopez Dnrtilln ( II P1 M nnn...non hillinn rlnllr IMF Innn anrl 1977 Inflation, wage freezes, unemployment e JLP discusses loans, oil and immigration in Washington * State of siege to repress growing student-workerpeasant alliance in Oaxaca * Massacre of peasants in Juchitan * Police smash university workers strike . Undocumented Mexican workers strike agribusiness ranches in Arizona * Carter announces repressive immigration plan 1978 11 mn...
...Authorities pointed to books by Mao and Che owned by student leaders as evidence of this...
...But in June 1971, the isolation and confusion led sectors of the student movement to make serious errors of both reformism and ultra-leftism...
...The most important results, however, were the consolidation of a teachers' organization that would continue to struggle for a collective contract and a university union that was finally integrated into and supported by the Mexican working class...
...The big question was how the demands and valuable experience of the student movement could be linked arm-in-arm with those of the working class - especially its most advanced rank-and-file sectors...
...But the moment was not ripe for a union victory...
...1978 1974 Major strikes at General Electric, Volkswagen * 6,000 workers strike U.S.-owned assembly plants on border * Labor leader Calderon Lara and guerilla leader Lucio Cabanas assassinated * CIA leaks existence of vast oil reserves 1975 World recession * Democratic Tendency expelled from electrical union (SUTERM) * 150,000 march in support of electricians * 20,000 workers laid-off by U.S...
...With the student leaders behind bars and an ideological blanket thrown over public opinion, incoming President Luis Echeverria offered in 1971 to "dialogue with the students," as part of a so-called "democratic opening...
...In spite of the multi-faceted offensive by the state, some efforts were made to reorganize the student movement, in particular to politically confront the right-wing porra bands and to counter Echeverria's false "educational reforms" with a radical program to make the universities serve the masses...
...The revolutionary youth and the generation conceived in the fire of the 1968 movement will march together with the other popular forces in Mexico in the struggles to come...
...DIEZ DE JUNIO SANGRIENTO The demonstration on June 10, 1971, began in an atmosphere resembling the great mobilizations of 1968...
...No one doubts that the government was the only one to blame for the massacre of the 10th of June...
...The "efficient" political machine of the ruling party, the PRI, used legal maneuvers and provocations, prisons and torture, bribery and death on the one hand, and cooptation, reforms, ideological manipulation of the media and infiltrators on the other hand to achieve its end...
...the positive role that could be played by disenchanted middle sectors in a popular movement, yet their incapability of leading a revolutionary movement...
...Given the fact that the great majority of the pro-union teachers claim 1968 as the beginning of their political commitment, when they were still students, the teachers movement is the legitimate political offspring of that year...
...On the basis that it was their inalienable right, the professors, researchers and students demanded the right to elaborate their own program of administration, study and research - a program aimed at breaking the bureaucratic and ideological control of the state over the university and converting it into a center of critical education and popular mobilization for the mass movement...
...Instead the leadership decided it...
...They wanted a union that would fight against the undemocratic administration of the university and its bourgeois orientation, a union that could win better wages and working conditions for teachers and researchers, and above all, a union that could actively participate in class struggle...
...These ten years of struggles by campesinos, workers and students have formed the backbone of the oppressed classes' struggle for a new radically different nation...
...Five years of intense political activity and severe repression had taught many * The general ultra-left tendency is also responsible for the proliferation from this time on of provocateur and sectarian groups, that not only held back the organization of the students, but even attacked and killed several left leaders, including the well known leader Carlos Guevara, machinegunned in the back to the cry of "death to reformism" in the city of Culiacan, Sinaloa, in May 1973.4 Sept./Oct...
...arms sales to Mexico ,0 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 Statistics sources: IMF...
...Thus there was a burning desire to make contact with the people - with the workers, peasants, urban squatters, market vendors, and bus drivers...
...The corrupt and undemocratic nature of the bureaucratic unions - and the lack of strong independent trade unions or other working class organizations - made mobilization of the workers extremely difficult, even for labor organizers themselves, let alone for the students...
...financial troubles signal world economic crisis * 1968 political prisoners sen500% tenced up to 17 years * Army occupies Guadalajara University * University strike for amnesty 300% 100% 1963 = 100% 1971 Collapse of world monetary system * First mobilizations of democratic tendency of electricians * Mass demonstrations in Mexico City, Gualajara, Puebla * June 10: student protesters massacred 1972 Nixon restricts Mexican imports * Major strikes throughout Mexico * Strong rank and file movements emerge in key industrial unions * University workers organize STEUNAM union...
...ROBER TO ESCUDERO represented the UNAM School of Philosophy's Fight Commit- tee in the 1968 National Strike Council...
...A similar group at the University of Guadalajara, the Federation of Students of Guadalajara (FEG) maintained a climate of terror in that city...
...for the first time the university movement marched side by side with its allies in the labor movement...
...He abolished the Ley Organica and removed the governor, though he did not reinstate the democratic gains made earlier by the students and professors...
...The essential problem for the students was to convert the universities into rearguards of political criticism and revolutionary mobilization against the system...
...Rafil Alvarez Garin, member, National Strike Council 1968 The Mexican Student Movement of 1968 was without a doubt one of the most broad-based and powerful of the similar movements that shook many countries around the world that same year...
...The 25th of October they called a strike, demanding union recognition and a new contract...
...whose primary objec- tive was to organize a union for professors and researchers...
...It has conceived political parties, civic groupings and mass organizations...
...However, not only did this alliance not materialize as a result of the inherent weaknesses of the movement itself, but it was precisely as the movement began to make some headway toward such an alliance, that the government decided to destroy the movement...
...1, July-Sept...
...The university authorities later agreed to accept STUNAM as the sole bargaining agent, but required separate legal statutes for academic and administrative workers, thus keeping them divided...
...The movement ended thus, drowned in its own blood - more than 350 dead and its main leaders jailed...
...3. Carlos Pereyra, "Mexico: Los Limites del reformismo," Cuadernos Politicos, No...
...and (6) improved health care...
...The students did not, for the most part, have the same level of organic ties and experiences with the majority of the working class...
...On October 2, with several thousand people gathered together at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, surrounded by the towering low-cost apartment buildings of Tlatelolco from whose windows the people NACLA Report 12Sept .IOct...
...5) housing programs...
...destabilization of government begins * 200,000 workers strike more than 1,000 companies invaluable lessons, as well as revealed serious contradictions in the movement...
...There were many specific and important examples of working class support of the movement as well: solidarity messages published in the newspapers by workers of the Federal Electrical Commission and different independent unions...
...Several days later the government jailed the famed muralist Siqueiros for his political activities...
...So the brigades enthusiastically made their daily incursions from the university into the markets, work places and barrios...
...Political groups, including ourselves, which pointed out the error of insisting on the demonstration within that context were systematically labeled "reformists...
...2, No...
...And so another day, June 10, 1971, was recorded with blood and fire in the history of contemporary Mexico - diez de junio sangriento...
...Many understood that only the working class could play such a role...
...And throughout the sixties there was one electoral fraud after another, in Baja California, in Sonora...
...Even more serious, however, was the danger of ultra-leftism...
...It is no exaggeration to say that the contemporary history of Mexico can be divided between events before and after 1968...
...Banners waved past the Normal Teachers School and apprehensive youths shouted "Nothing will happen, No Pasa Nada" as if to conquer their fear...
...And the movement ended, fittingly, on October 2, when hundreds of comrades, both students and workers, who had gathered together for a peaceful demonstration, fell victim to the cross-fire attack of the army and plainclothes police at the now sadly famous Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the capital's Tlatelolco section...
...These ten years of struggle by students, teachers and university workers have contributed to the forging of thousands of activists and radical trade unionists, intellectuals and poets, artists and leaders...
...The participation of the increasingly impoverished and discontented "middle class" was seen by many sectarian and liberal intellectuals merely as proof of the totally petty-bourgeois and narrow character of the movement...
...This unfolded on two levels...
...In the second place, this meant responding to the needs of other struggling unions and popular movements outside the university, with solidarity marches, contributions, public announcements of support and common fronts...
...In the first place, this meant support and solidarity for the STEUNAM administrative workers and other university unions that would organize elsewhere in the country over the next few years...
...UNIVERSITY LABOR MOVEMENT Until 1972, the only workers and teachers organizations that existed at the UNAM were the Associations of Manual and Automotive Workers (ATAUNAM) and the Associations of Professors and Professional Researchers (APIC...
...3) child care centers...
...The policy of permanent and systematic repression by the state and the knee-jerk reaction of many students contributed to the considerable growth after June 10th of the urban guerrilla movement...
...They were key to the organizational structure of the 1968 movement, which was very elementary, one of its greatest assets as well as one of its most pointed weaknesses...
...For, as of 1971 - the first year of severe economic crisis in Mexico - these sectors were initiating important democratic struggles in the electrical, railroad, auto, mining and other industries...
...However, it is our opinion that the students committed a serious mistake by insisting on the demonstration even after the government had, in fact, resolved part of the conflict...
...The "conspiracy" also became the legal basis for sentencing the arrested student leaders, an estimated 50 of whom received sentences averaging 15 years...
...the forefront of the labor movement in the mid-70s...
...A precious victory was thus won through the unity of workers, students and professors, colono slum dwellers and independent trade unions who had supported the strike - a model that in the following years would be repeated in a score of universities across the nation...
...The year immediately following October 2, 1968, gave a clear indication that the repression and ideological confusion had a great impact on the students, even in a psychological sense...
...NY Times...
...and perhaps most dramatically from the housewives who threw pans of boiling water from their apartments onto the heads of police who were harrassing the protesters...
...And the objective of the rightist campaign was to limit the universities to preparing scientists and technicians with neither critical ability nor social conscience...
...These, then, were the demands of the SPAUNAM strike...
...and finally, the deepening class consciousness of students yet the fundamental lack of leadership from the working class itself...
...Both right and left errors, the result of isolation from the working class, left the student movement in a state of crisis and deep reflection...
...The different maneuvers by the Rector's office, especially the one which denied SPAUNAM the official representation in a contract and gave it instead to a sell-out association, accelerated the fusion of the STEUNAM and SPAUNAM into one union for all university workers, the STUNAM...
...The outcome of the strike, after mobilizations and economic and political support from the democratic electrical workers and other groups, was a partial but a very important victory...
...1978 general assemblies by direct vote, so that within each school the local fight committee was responsible for organizing and advancing the movement among the base of its respective center...
...During that time, the brigades distributed nearly a million leaflets daily throughout the city...
...For these reasons and with these objectives, the Union of Academic Personnel of the UNAM (SPAUNAM) was formed, and in June 1975 called for a strike demanding a contract which would establish and guarantee the recognition of bilateral relations between workers and management - a right which would apply to both academic and administrative employees...
...1978 13 shouted their support for the students, the army opened fire...
...The first area of demands called for a university that was "critical, democratic and popular...
...2 Despite the massive influx of foreign loans, by the end of the sixties the Mexican government spent a yearly average of only 1.4 percent of its GNP on education - as compared to 3 percent in Peru and 4 percent in Venezuela - and only 19 percent of the Mexican work force received social security benefits - in contrast to 66 percent in Argentina and 76 percent in Chile...
...An answer was forthcoming, not from the students or professors at first, but from the workers of the university - the laborers, secretaries, gardeners and janitors - and their own organic intellectuals and leaders...
...5 Consequently, on the same morning of the university demonstration 12,000 heavily-armed police and army troops invaded the University City, arresting and imprisoning 530 striking workers and professors, and occupying the UNAM campus after ransacking many buildings and offices...
...Foreign investment, likewise, doubled in the '60s, and in the process the multinational corporations came to control the strategic sectors of the Mexican economy...
...Another very significant barrier to the development of full communications between the students and workers was the semicorporate structure of the Mexican labor unions, which are rigidly controlled by the state...
...2) study programs to be elaborated by democratically elected organisms...
...It was within this political context that the students were able to gain broad popular support for their movement in 1968, a factor that would distinguish it from many of the other student movements around the world...
...In the twenty years between 1950 and 1970, the poorest 40 percent of the Mexican population saw their share of the national wealth drop from 14 to 11 percent, while the richest 10 percent upped their share to over half...
...Another crucial element of the government campaign to divide and disorganize the student base was its support and use of porras, right-wing campus groups who for the next years conducted a campaign of terror and intimidation against all forms of radical political activity...
...The delegates were all elected in 10 NACLA ReportSept./Oct...
...While the students of Nuevo Leon fought against a reactionary law (Ley Organica) increasing the Monterrey oligarchy's control of the university, fellow students in Mexico City began to organize a massive solidarity march scheduled for June 10, 1971 - the first public, anti-government protest since Tlatelolco...
...The STUNAM strike received immediate and massive support from independent unions as well as the massive solidarity from the majority of students of the most important Mexico City universities...
...The University Rector Pablo Gonzalez, however, refused to recognize the union or discuss a contract, arguing that the University was not an enterprise nor the Rector a manager...
...The following years would see the halcones appear time and again, from Yucatan to Baja California to repress students, campesinos, striking workers and urban squatters...
...The SPAUNAM defended this right, arguing that such programs should be designed by those involved in the actual educational activity and not by bureaucratic organisms lacking knowledge and experience in the fundamental aspects of academic life...
...ATTACK AND COUNTERATTACK The university authorities learned from the struggle of STEUNAM and SPAUNAM...
...In 1959 the army was brought out against the striking railroad workers...
...This was a qualitative step forward...
...But the combination of dicta-dura (hard rule) and dicta-suave (soft rule) did confuse, divide and isolate the student movement in the immediate years following Tlatelolco...
...Only a few small student groups, often sectarian, sustained local isolated struggles that had little effect on other schools or life outside the campuses...
...The strike was approved in general assemblies throughout the various sectors of the union...
...The authoritarian state thus proved itself incapable of administering a solution to the political demands it faced and instead resorted to the alternative common to any bourgeois state that cannot call upon popular consensus: the implementation of violence...
...should lead to the elaboration of a socialist program and whose principal actor and leader would be the Mexican proletariat, in a valuable alliance with the middle sectors...
...The SPAUNAM held firm against the argument that university employees, 18 NACLA ReportSept./Oct...
...In the final analysis the PRI failed to crush the opposition altogether for, as we will see, from its seed has grown a more advanced workers' movement in recent years...
...The associations sided with the authorities in their fight against SPAUNAM, maintaining, with the authorities, that university workers did not have the right to strike and that political activities of university unions should be limited by federal law...
...The character of these organizations had not been well defined, but through them, workers and professors could, to some extent, defend their rights and professional interests...
...Only months before, the government had also broken the strike of electrical workers who had been in * Even though the STEUNAM-SPUNAM fusion represented a positive step, the specific way in which it was carried out was, for many sectors, a serious tactical error...
...In 1964, President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz took office with the slogan "Order and Progress" and in the following year his government repressed striking medical workers, who had organized one of Mexico's most important mobilizations of public employees...
...6. See "Mexico: Assault on Labor," NACLA's Latin America & Empire Report, July-Aug...
...support from the teachers' union, from the medical workers of the different hospitals...
...imperialism...
...The participation of the workers would have completed the alliance formulated from the beginning with the middle class, and would have clarified the direction of the revolutionary strategy...
...It has fostered major democratic movements in the universities, not only in Mexico City, the focus of this article, but in the past three years in Sinaloa, Queretaro, Zacatecas, Nayarit, Puebla, Monterrey, Guerrero and Oaxaca...
...On the 10th of June there were dozens of students killed as opposed to hundreds in '68...
...So the workers erected their strike 1969 1970 1971 1972 16Sept./Oct...
Vol. 12 • September 1978 • No. 5
