MEXICO CITY -- Police raided three teachers colleges in the western state of Michoacan Monday, where dozens of students had been hijacking buses and delivery trucks for a week to protest curriculum changes.
The protesters threw rocks and fireworks at police and burned dozens of trucks and buses as the authorities swept in and detained strikers. The massive police raids early Monday indicate patience is running out with campus takeovers, which have become common and often violent in Mexico. In recent weeks, hundreds of students at two other occupied campuses in Mexico have battled protesters to free their universities from occupation.
The standoff at the teachers colleges began over a week ago, when students seized the campuses to protest plans to require them to take English and computer science courses. The protesters say the colleges are meant to prepare teachers for rural areas where basic skills are more of a priority.
The protesting students fanned out, forcing bus and delivery truck drivers to move the vehicles to the occupied campuses. Protesters ended up holding the vehicles and several of their drivers for more than week.
Michoacan state spokesman Elina Ambriz said one of the three campuses had been recovered without incident. But state Government Secretary Jesus Reyna said 120 students were detained in another of the raids, and local television showed scenes of police battling masked, rock-throwing students, with burning buses in the background.
It was the latest in a round of pushbacks against campus takeovers, which have long been tolerated in Mexico because authorities are often loath to interfere. Police are wary of entering many colleges because of the concept of university autonomy, which protects academic independence by allowing colleges to run their own affairs. Memories of student massacres in 1968 and 1971 make cracking down on campus protests politically unpalatable.
But with common citizens and other students being affected by the takeovers, police and even students themselves have begun to act.
Last month, rejected students demanding admission to the University of Michoacan took over the campus. After two weeks without classes, dental and medical students donned motorcycle helmets, leaped the walls around the campus in white lab coats and battled to take their university back. Rocks and fists flew, sticks and baseball bats were swung, a fire extinguisher was turned against the medical students, and finally the squatters fled the school of medicine. Classes reopened days later.
This month, about 100 students at Mexico City's Autonomous University rushed the gates of their seized campus and briefly forced out striking students, who later returned with a pickup truck to bash in the gates and retake the school. The two sides are now in talks to end the standoff.
With only a dozen or so masked students holding some campuses at the school, frustration has boiled over among hundreds of locked-out students who tried to take make-up classes in improvised classrooms. The strikers were backed by some professors and university employees.
"We are now holding classes in tents, at the soccer field next to the campus, and the conditions are deplorable," said Gustavo Martinon, 23, a media arts student at the university's Cuautepec campus. "When it rains, the tents flood."
"The engineering students need labs and computers, and they don't have them. We (media arts) students need the radio station, the video facilities, and all the equipment we need."
Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/10/15/3051061/mexico-raids-seized-campuses-battle.html
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