... Mexico is populated with hundreds and hundreds of problems that have reached their limits, and it's now or never that we, the government and society, must undertake their genuine solution. And this is not because the present situation is opening a door of especially relevant opportunity for us, but because the problems have reached their limits.
By exceeding the limit I mean: we are entering a growing, ungovernable area. Various signs are visible; they are not threats, but facts.
The logic of social behavior, which most likely is found in the head of a broad sector of society is pretty much summed up in the answer given by one of the hooded young delinquents who raided the ground floor of the rectory [administrative offices] of the UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico]. To a question from another presumed student, the hooded one replied:
"... But we already held several dialogues with the authorities and nothing resulted. We use these methods because only then do they give way to dialogue, like when we took the administrative offices of the CCH [National College of Sciences and Humanities is the High School associated with the UNAM]."Dialogue is clearly the best policy that the authority can use to slow down protesters--against anything. But no matter the intensity or the toughness of the dialogue, it must occur within the framework of the laws.
How do we get out of the soft, unstable sand beneath the rule of law in Mexico, in which the realities of corruption and impunity have sat, an oxymoron that moves us towards ungovernability?
There is social injustice, the growing poverty, the discrimination by the millions of quasi serfs who form a majority; the dense ignorance that, by force, has invaded their heads--today a bachelor's degree is not much more than a smattering of knowledge--the compulsory social resentment; the historical wisdom that, in practice, "the laws were made to violate", just as the very Mexican cynicism says.
There are the criminal laws that the very wealthy can avoid with money and that only apply to the destitute; the tax laws in which evasion, avoidance and the refund reign, except for salaried employees. There are the violence, extortion, kidnapping; the trafficking of drugs. All become the modus vivendi for thousands and thousands of these quasi serfs. What kind of social instruction is this? What mentality, what idiosyncrasies, what values do such living conditions produce?
A young student who lives in this context demands something. In CCH Naucalpan (or on any public campus), [he doesn't ask:] is it academically correct, is it possible, is it legal? He doesn't know, but if he doesn't get what he wants, his anger leads him to commit criminal acts. If the competent authority tolerates it, it does nothing except strengthen the hell to which I have alluded.
UNAM is not a republic; it only has the rules for governing the academy. The young offenders are violating criminal laws that govern all Mexicans; therefore, according to the procedures required by law, the competent authority must proceed--according to due process--to classify their acts as a crime.
The authority (this, the majority of Mexicans don't seem to assume) are the persons authorized by the law to make decisions determined by the law. The leadership of UNAM knows, of course, that there is no better policy than dialogue for maintaining the stability of an institution that has an intense focus on providing learning to hundreds of thousands from all disciplines, and to develop scientific and technological knowledge.
The atmosphere in which academia is able to work must be one of tranquility and serenity, of judicious and rational exchange among academics, and between the academics and the students. I'm not talking about utopias; that such universities exists in numerous parts of the world is reason to hope that in Mexico we can so work in academia. Far from having that environment, UNAM and many, if not all public universities, to varying degrees, try to work, but they do it amid chaotic surprises here and there, every day.
The wild episode of the young offenders is a child of the history that has shaped the tragedies of Mexico. But the worst answer is that if officials of the judiciary or the executive branch violate the law, then we can violate all of them. No! We require social and political movements that require the existence of a full rule of law. We must not send institutions to the devil; we must care for them, correct them, observe them.
Is the second part of Article 2 of the Constitution sufficient foundation, as some allege, to create community police? Are they not simply the product of vacuums never filled by the rule of law?
UNAM is an indispensable institution, an institution that must be jealously protected. A huge number of educational institutions are offspring of its graduates. A huge amount of great works in the country's general infrastructure, in medicine, architecture, literature and the arts, culture and history are the result of the work of its graduates.
We cannot continue with the myth, never spoken but acted out a million times, that crimes committed in UNAM by some of its own students can remain unpunished, protected by [the university's] autonomy. Spanish original