Ousted Mexican students ponder their next move

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From staff and wire reports

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Dissident students kicked out by police from Latin America's largest university are pondering their next move.

The dissidents, ejected Sunday from the campus, met Monday. No details about their plans were known.

University spokesman Roberto Vivanco said classes could resume after officials clean up the campus. He gave no date.

It isn't clear how many students might show up. Some said they would boycott classes until the more than 700 strike supporters arrested Sunday were freed. And many other students had already abandoned the university for jobs or other schools.

The strike began more than nine months ago as a protest against proposed tuition increases.

Police who ousted striking students from the campus found trash barricading streets, classrooms turned into campgrounds and laboratories serving as kitchens.

As officials on Monday surveyed the damage -- and the countless scrawls of graffiti -- at the National Autonomous University, they faced an even more daunting task in calming passions at a school with 270,000 students and a crucial role in Mexican life.

Matter's not ended, official says

Interior Secretary Diodoro Carrasco, who oversees the police who carried out the raid, conceded Monday that the crisis was not over.

"I think the recovery of the installations is a fundamental step, but it seems to me that it has to be followed by an enormous effort of reconciliation in the university community," he said in a television interview.

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That caution is partly due to the importance of the university known as UNAM, which is far more significant to Mexico than the Ivy League as a whole is to the United States. With almost no tuition, its classrooms mingle the children of Mexico's elite with promising teen-agers from the slums.

Most of Mexico's academic scientific research is done at UNAM laboratories. Its schools of law and economics have produced four of the past five presidents.

President Ernesto Zedillo studied elsewhere, but the candidate favored to succeed him this year, Francisco Labastida, graduated from UNAM. Most key figures in Zedillo's administration also attended UNAM. Even the leader of the leftist Zapatista rebels studied at UNAM.

Campus politics can have long-term effects on national politics. And many anti-strike UNAM students and faculty were outraged by the use of police to end the strike, seeing it as a blow to the university's cherished autonomy.

Mexicans wanted university stormed

Memory of a 1968 government massacre of students was one reason why the government avoided intervening for so long -- and why the eventual use of police was so traumatic to many.

Zedillo took responsibility for the decision to storm the university, but some critics were not satisfied.

"The government has failed to solve problems politically," said political analyst Jorge Castaneda. "This is a failure on the government's part."

Hoping to appease the students, Rector Juan Ramon de la Fuente urged officials to drop most charges against those arrested and to be lenient with those who are convicted.

The attorney general's office announced that 18 university workers and 20 other people arrested in the sweep but who were not involved in the strike have been released.

Mexicans favored the police action by a 2-1 margin, according to a poll published Monday by the daily newspaper Reforma.

Before the strike, UNAM had about 120,000 students in its system of high schools and another 150,000 in university-level programs.

All students live off campus, and the total enrollment includes several research centers far beyond UNAM's sprawling University City campus in southern Mexico City. The sheer size of the school overshadows any in the United States. The University of Texas-Austin, one of the biggest American universities, has just over 49,000 students.

Strike has diminished student ranks

The strike prompted many students to take jobs or shift to other universities. Officials have no idea how many will show up for classes once they resume.

"I wanted to study at UNAM, but now, knowing how little prestige a degree is going to have, I am going to have to go somewhere else," said Victor Manuel Cabrera, an 18-year-old UNAM high school student waiting Monday outside the federal attorney general's office for word of his sister, an arrested striker.

Some vowed to boycott classes until the arrested strikers are freed from jail.

"We cannot return to class and leave our comrades inside," said Lorena Estejel, 17, a high school student who wants to study dentistry.

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