Q
ue Debanhi has been live for so many days and that Luz Raquel has been threatened with impunity for so long, are cases that show the inability or indolence of the security apparatus in our country. Not to mention even the complicity of many of them with forces such as drug trafficking or corrupt levels of the State. If a government – federal or state – systematically does not guarantee something as elementary as that its citizens and especially women are not raped, disappeared or murdered, it is an apparatus that is eating away from within and irremediably will be called to account.
When, in addition, it is not uncommon for that same apparatus to consider that it is a better task to go out into the streets to repress teachers, as in Tabasco, where they dealt a tremendous beating to the teachers who demand payment of their salaries. A repression of historical importance, because it confirms the thesis that also in this six-year term the same dark and repressive State subsists and acts that, without missing a single decade in the last 100 years, has been cruel in beating students and teachers.
All this, beatings, murders, disappearances and a century of State violence against educational actors, has an important background: the educational apparatus, the universities and higher education in general have been created and educated
to let go, let go and thus fulfill its designated role of ensuring that all that violence is seen with indifference. The last thing governments want, and the current one is no exception, are the big university marches and protests and those of the teachers. Why, without any major problem, can the authorities say in the case of Luz Raquel that she was indeed taken care of because a patrol periodically passed by her house? Or why can those of Nuevo León proclaim as definitive that first and convenient autopsy of Debanhi that implied that there was nothing to investigate and no one to prosecute? The answer is simple: because they act on the assumption, consciously or not, that no one will have the stubbornness of their parents to question everything. And because they know that the University of Debanhi – the Autonomous University of Nuevo León – will also say very little. They also know that we teachers teach children not to question the word of the adult or teacher, and we teach that we came to university to learn and not to mix with unpleasant and painful topics.
The teaching of indifference is also carried out by the rectors who, in the face of any disappearance or murder, take a bureaucratic response from the drawer: the display, the laments and the passing demand for investigation and punishment. However, when a young girl disappears at another university, her classmates and her family report her immediately, and, without waiting a day, from the institution itself they create brigades that tour the area where the young woman worked, lived and studied. . They knock on all the doors, show her photo and invite her to report it. At the same time, there are press conferences where authorities are repeatedly and officially called for immediate action. The directors of the university accompany the relatives in the arduous day of procedures and review of corpses, a protest march is organized with the public invitation to other institutions to form a broad front in defense of the students. All this made public opinion begin to return to the subject in networks and journalistic notes, and, at the time, and in this case at least, the student appeared alive. Thus, in at least one case, the climate of passivity promoted by the curriculum of indifference was circumvented and the effectiveness of participation was tested.
The arrival of the neoliberal university project brought another pressure towards indifference. The proposal to raise tuition fees at UNAM in 1999 was accompanied by a change: students should no longer be considered members of a community that participates and cares for its own. they should be called users
, a concept that strengthens the idea of a clientele, an atomized mass of buyers. Fortunately, the word, along with the rise, went down the drain, but not the tendency to strip schools and universities of their essence as a community that cares for its own. And turn it into an efficient entity in the sale of courses and services. And the paradox: in the Metro – where we are all users
– Today there is more possibility of being attended effectively by the police than by the school institution in the case of the death or disappearance of a student. In the universities, in fact, neither authorities nor defenders feel thoroughly alluded to the death or disappearance of a student. And the State can then take lightly any case; he knows well that learned indifference backs him up.
* UAM-Xochimilco
