University Auditorium in Mexico Has Been Occupied By Political Protesters for 17 Years Kirk Semple - The New York Times
go to original June 20, 2017

The Justo Sierra Auditorium at the National Autonomous University of Mexico has been occupied by political protesters since 2000 (Rodrigo Cruz/The New York Times)

Exams are over and classrooms have gone dark as summer comes to the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the pride of the country’s public education system.

But as students and professors melt away, there remains one strange and lively corner of the university’s main campus where nothing much will change, where tomorrow will be a lot like yesterday, and next month a lot like this one.

Since 2000, the university’s Justo Sierra Auditorium has been commandeered by political protesters, making it one of the longest-running occupations of a university building in history and putting more famous college takeovers to shame.

The student occupation at Columbia University in 1968, for instance, lasted only about a week. At the National Autonomous University of Mexico, known by its Spanish initials UNAM, the occupation has stretched for nearly 17 years and shows no sign of flagging.

It remains unclear exactly who occupies the building and how many members compose the occupying force. Insular and mercurial, they refused repeated requests for interviews.

“We’re against the mass media,” explained one occupier, who declined to give his name, saying it was a policy of the occupation not to grant interviews without consent of “the general assembly.” He was standing in what was once the lobby of the auditorium, its walls now covered with insurrectionist stickers, graffiti, posters and murals. “I don’t want to be assimilated into the mass media,” he said.

But what is absolutely clear is that the administration of UNAM, the largest university in Latin America with more than 230,000 undergraduate and graduate students, lost control of the building nearly two decades ago.

And despite the occupation’s widespread unpopularity on campus, the university authorities seem incapable of, or uninterested in, regaining possession and returning it to the general use of the UNAM community.

Read the rest at The New York Times

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