There is no evil that lasts 100 years, goes the popular saying. The maximum national university leader Max Mendoza Parra, the time has come at 52 years of age and at least 30 years of student.
On Saturday at noon, the Minister of Government, Eduardo Del Castillo, informed, through social networks, of the arrest of former university leader Max Mendoza for the crimes of usurpation of functions and uneconomic conduct.
The former university leader had reappeared after several days of being the object of strong accusations against him with 13 other leaders dressed in blue in a striking and hardly credible accusatory attitude through a video where, without answering what he was being accused of, he took a counterattacking attitude.
Faced with the barrage of criticism and the disrepute in which he found himself, accusing and attacking was his only defense, but it did not work. The deaf accusations that he allegedly made, backed by a team with awkward faces and postures, were not echoed, neither in the media nor in the courts, less so in the academic world where “his activity” was carried out for so many years.
In his curriculum it appears that Mendoza Parra has been president of the Bolivian University Confederation (CUB), the highest organization of university students, for more than ten years. That he was appointed member of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Bolivian University (CEUB) and that he traveled to eight countries (Argentina, Cuba, Peru, Spain, Venezuela, Mexico, the United States, Brazil) between 2018 and 2021, with travel expenses that totaled Bs 160,566.37.
As if that were not enough, he had two high-end vans available to move from one place to another, receiving a salary of Bs 21,870. But all this would have gone unnoticed if a misfortune had not occurred. Mendoza was linked to the tragic episode that caused the death of four students in Potosí during an avalanche in a student assembly that was to define the elections in the Local University Federation (FUL), caused by the activation of a gas grenade.
The Congress of Universities had to resume from 2018, the extension and the irregularities endorsed Mendoza that now the university establishment wants to expel. Today the university system is tearing the clothes from that profiteer, opportunist and functional subject to a corrupt system that dates back several decades and that has served dozens of other officials.
With Mendoza arrested, the XIII National Congress of Universities in Potosí begins today and wants to shuffle and give again. It will be more than necessary to sweep the broom under the rug of public universities to put an end to five years of inefficiency, corruption and political servility.
Universities will be centers of training, research and public service or they will be nothing. They add proposals to change and regulate the university system, among them, the evaluation of the stay of students with more than eight years in the university, the re-election of leaders and the tenure of teachers. Welcome are the reforms to recover institutionality, improve the system, the organizational structure and change the image, because the resources of all Bolivians are on the table. Education does not accept ‘privileges’, it must be for everyone and with the same opportunities.