The SEP was born in 1921, but having already completed a century, it is possible to see that there is practically no decade in which the State has stopped exercising violence – bloody or institutional – once morest students and teachers at both the basic and higher levels. It is a phenomenon that is repeated so many times that it is difficult to deny that there is a basic substratum, almost structural, that feeds the repeated resort to even extreme violence by the State. And the question arises: why, for example, did the firefighters of Mexico City in 1942 block the way to a demonstration of polytechnics and kill the student Socorro Acosta with axes in broad daylight at the intersection of the street Madero and Palma from the Historic Center? Why, at the same time, with deputies and senators as witnesses, the police shoot once more and once more once morest the numerous march and their bullets “knock down” a waitress and a fortnight more students? And they only asked for full and legal recognition of the Poli and that the SEP endorse the professional titles, in addition to additional campuses and budget. And in the 1920s, the firefighters and the police violently attacked the students of the National University, which, now that the Revolution was over, wanted to shake off the conservative and authoritarian heritage of Porfirio Díaz and Justo Sierra, its creators in 1910. A legacy that prevented the community itself from electing the rector, that is, full autonomy. On the first day of the strike – May 23 – the students had occupied the Medicine building (next to the SEP) and were in an assembly when firefighters and police arrived. With the help of the neighbors, the students resist, but later, when going in commission to denounce the facts, they are attacked with bullets by the police. And shortly before, President Portes Gil accused them of “blatant indiscipline” and anticipated them: “they will be subject to police regulations and criminal laws to punish[los] with all energy.” (Silva Herzog: A story…: 44).
In 1956, an incursion of “1,800 soldiers from the 2nd, 8th and 24th battalions of the Army under the command of three generals” who violently expelled the polytechnic students from the boarding school in order to close it definitively. This makes the conditions that young people from other entities have to study much more difficult, especially for those – called “seagulls” – who have no place in the boarding school, sleep under the stairs and feed on the leftovers left by the interns. . The palpable result of the unequal distribution of budgets in the different public institutions.
In 1958, on April 12, the teachers of the then Federal District demonstrated in the Zócalo and were subjected to harsh repression by the police. Police shots are reported. In the 1960s, the students of universities such as the Michoacana, the Autonomous University of Sonora were “disciplined” by the Army, and later the demonstrations, with the rector Barros Sierra at the head, were also disciplined on the 2nd of October in Tlatelolco. A balance of hundreds of dead, prisoners and tortured of the UNAM, of the Poli, of the Normal, and more. Half of the rural normal schools are closed, and teachers and students are left out. The 1970s opened with the armed repression –organized by the government– of the hawks of June 10 once morest young people from various institutions who march in defense of the full autonomy that the students of the University of Nuevo León had achieved. Between 225 and more than 300 are killed that day of persecution and death, even in the clinics where they treat the wounded. In the following decades, the violence is more sophisticated, massive and silently institutional, but with much greater scope once morest children and young people. Thus, in the 1980s and 1990s, budget cuts expelled nearly 2 million children and young people from primary and secondary school. Since the 1990s and up to today, evaluations that discriminate once morest the poor and women not only deny access due to lack of quota, they add the stigma of a qualification that devalues them (when already with the right to education it is perfectly possible –and healthy– to assign without evaluating those already evaluated in years of school). At the beginning of the 21st century, 10 million children each year were declared “insufficient” with the Enlace test, by Calderón. And the 100 years of violence end with the thousand UNAM students imprisoned for going on strike, the normalistas murdered by the federal police on the Sol highway in 2011, the repression of teachers from 2012 onwards – tanks and helicopters in the Zócalo–, the 43 from Ayotzinapa and the more than 100 shot in Nochixtlán. Why the State, in education, once more and once more? Why once morest girls, boys and young people, still today in the 4T?
To César Navarro, who was able to give us an explanation of this violence.
* UAM-Xochimilco
