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Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 12:05:47 EST
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Subject: [mayday2k] A Mexican Village, in Clash,
     Brings the Police to Their Knees 

From: [log in to unmask]

>From New York Times, 02/21/2000

By JULIA PRESTON
MEXICO CITY, Feb. 20 -- It was not a sight Mexicans see every day, the 60 
riot policemen, stripped of their clubs, shields and a good part of their 
clothes, bound together with the ropes they normally use to bind criminals, 
down on their knees and shivering in the chill air of a public square. 


That panorama of humiliation of the forces of order was on view Saturday in a 
Mexican village. Enraged townspeople there rose up against police who 
conducted an early morning raid to end a student strike at a local teachers' 
college. 

Tensions from far away fed the confrontation at the college, which trains 
teachers in the rural state of Hidalgo. Shock is still reverberating across 
Mexico from the police takeover of the national university on Feb. 6 to end a 
student strike there. Like the university, the teachers' college near the 
village of Tepatepec is a public school that charges no tuition, has 
dwindling state financing, and is struggling with a decline in academic 
standards and a rowdy student movement. 

The village revolt against the state troopers, some of whom were left with 
nothing but their undershorts, was mainly an explosion of the resentment 
people around the country feel toward police officers, who are regarded as 
venal, violent and overbearing. 

In the day's battles in Tepatepec, one policeman was shot, seven people -- 
including police officers and protesters -- were injured and possibly a dozen 
police patrol cars were burned, said the state government spokesman, Luis 
Kaím. Although 350 students were arrested in the initial raid on the college, 
all but 15 were released during the day, he said. 

In January, students demanding financing for 200 new places to increase 
enrollment occupied the college and ousted the director and half the faculty. 
At dawn Saturday, some student strikers traveled to the state capital, 
Pachuca, and threw rocks at the governor's mansion, breaking some windows. 
The police dispersed them. 

State authorities then decided to move immediately to carry out an order 
issued by a judge last week to evict the strikers from the college. The 
police were carrying only nightsticks and shields, and state officials 
contended that no strikers were injured in the police raid. 

But townspeople reached a different conclusion. Incensed by a rumor that one 
young woman had been raped, several hundred villagers carrying clubs, 
machetes and not a few pistols surrounded the school and subdued 60 policemen 
still inside, forcing them to remove their shirts, shoes and in some cases 
their pants. 

The villagers tied ropes around the police officers and paraded them, with 
their hands on their heads, through the streets to the central square, where 
they forced the officers to drop to their knees and then lie face down on the 
pavement. 

After a nippy evening in which the half-naked officers were quivering with 
cold, the villagers finally released them when the majority of the strikers 
were freed by state authorities. 

Like the nine-month strike that devastated the national university in Mexico 
City, the conflict at the rural college erupted when the state authorities 
began a campaign to raise the academic level without increasing funds. 
Governor Manuel Ángel Núñez Soto sought to require students to show they had 
attended class on at least 85 percent of school days in order to graduate, 
Mr. Kaím said. 

In a student body made up of the offspring of hard-pressed country farmers, 
who often cannot attend school unless they also work full time, fewer than 
one-third could meet this requirement, the government spokesman said. 

Last month striking students at the college hijacked a state-owned gasoline 
truck with a full tank. They returned the truck but the gasoline vanished, 
officials at the state attorney's office said. 

As a measure of the paucity of money for education in Hidalgo, the cost of 
enrolling one student for a year is only $300, state officials said. 

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