They were the ones who wanted to be identified as anarchists, not only in their graffiti and flags but in the interviews filmed by the Collective Malatesta, particularly for their seizure of the ground floor of the Rectory Tower of UNAM (Errico Malatesta, for those who may not remember, was an Italian theoretical anarchist who died in 1932).
Yesterday they evacuated the building and accepted a May 9 open dialogue with university authorities. They wanted to present themselves as a social movement from their school: the CCH [College of Sciences and Humanities] Naucalpan, but the CCH has 56,000 students and this group is no more than fifteen individuals.
When they left the Rectory, they numbered twelve. They could not be a social movement: very few UNAM students joined them, and the few shows of support came from the outside. They turned out to be a few activists with little clarity on their proposals, or they were ill-advised.
In the video interviews with the Malatesta Collective, it interests me to highlight an interesting point, which was to vindicate their right to be anarchists at the UNAM. Perhaps they never discovered it, but our university has guaranteed full respect to all ideologies. Never, in the past fifty years, has the university ever persecuted anyone for ideological or political positions. Within the university, fascist movements like MURO and radical leftist organizations have emerged, all more or less accommodated by members of all parties that have existed.
In posters and graffiti, the 'ones who lisp' asked for a free and secular university, unaware that the UNAM has met these conditions for a very long time, even though some UNAM presidents have wanted to impose registration fees and tuition. Perhaps because they were very young or because they had not yet been born, they didn't realize that the curricula in both the undergraduate and graduate programs have been modified at different times, sometimes with leftist sectarian orientations (such as eliminating mathematical economics in the old School of Economics "for being bourgeois") and others nearer to the guidelines of the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development], especially under the administrations of Carpizo, Sarukhán and Barnés.
However, and for me this is an important fact, academic freedom and research have always been respected. Taken together, they are one of the pillars of university autonomy. Just to give two significant examples, the UNAM never stigmatized Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez or Bolívar Echeverría for teaching Marxism. On the contrary, both were honored and rewarded by our university, and not exactly under a leftist president.
Plurality, then, has been guaranteed at UNAM for decades. Even with these reforms, it cannot be said-- although it may be by comparison with the major private universities in the country--that the UNAM is a factory of rubber stamps to meet the business needs and those of the bourgeoisie in general. Both De la Fuente [past UNAM president] and Narro Robles have insisted that the curricular orientation should not be subject to the requirements of the market. But this should not be interpreted to mean the UNAM turns its back on these requirements, since it is obvious that professionals must be prepared not only to be useful, but necessary to those who have the ability to hire them, given the dizzying scientific and technological changes. Just as the UNAM factory should not be a factory of rubber stamps for the market, neither should it be a factory of the unemployed. This doesn't seem hard to understand.
Anarchist or not, the young people who took the ground floor of the Rectory were required, by simple honesty, not to exaggerate their demands, because they ran the risk of losing the credibility that supposedly they wanted and that, it seems, they did not get. In no part of the proposed reform of the CCH curriculum does it say, for example, that the new graduate profile "should be for people of middle and upper class". This was invented by the young people in order to, according to them (I guess), present it as evidence of attempts to privatize the UNAM. It will be very important for the May 9 dialogue that they prepare well and do not exaggerate or prejudge either the reforms that are underway and their own demands.
Another important point from the interviews is when they said that they cover their faces to avoid being criminalized. Certainly, governments tend to criminalize social protest; nevertheless, didn't it catch their attention--as Javier Flores pointed out on Tuesday in these pages--that on the December First,
"the authorities deliberately failed to act against some [masked] violent groups and ended up repressing others who were not involved in such acts"?
For supposed followers of Malatesta, this fact should be significant, since in one of his writings Errico Malatesta suggested that one of the reasons for the existence of the police is that if they don't find crimes to prosecute, they will provoke or invent them, in order to justify themselves.
Another of their demands, which yesterday they dropped in order to insist that their "movement" was for curriculum reform, was that sanctions of those expelled or suspended by the University Court be lifted. They say they are anarchists, but they did not consider that no consistent anarchist confronts the authority in order then to ask it to forgive the confrontation. It is a contradiction, because a good anarchist is not only against the authority but does not trust it. Could we imagine Bakunin or Malatesta asking clemency from the power that sent them to prison several times?
Starting from the offer of dialogue presented by the UNAM's general attorney, they agreed to vacate the Rectory Tower; that's good, but perhaps it might also have entered the minds of the activists, contrary to whatever they were thinking, that the movement they wanted to make neither prospered nor was it seconded by significant sectors of the university; they were virtually alone for twelve days.
The lesson that perhaps they learned was that the strength of the UNAM is grounded in dialogue and reason. Perhaps they also learned that it is worth defending, since few universities in the country are free, secular, pluralistic and autonomous. They should go peacefully to their homes and to their CCH campus knowing that with their attitude, ultimately, they prevented these values from being broken. Congratulations. Spanish original
*Octavio Rodríguez Araujo holds the doctorate in Political Science; he is Professor Emeritus in the Political and Social Sciences Department of the UNAM.