Mxico D.F.

, November 22, 2012

Irina Bokova General Director United Nations Education, Science, and Culture Organization (UNESCO)

Dear Ms. Bokova: We are students, workers, and professors at the Autonomous University of Mexico City (Universidad Autnoma de la Ciudad de Mxico, UACM), founded in 2001 as a tangible result of a long cycle of struggles in favor of free, secular, democratic, scientific, and humanistic education in service of those who have traditionally been excluded. Our educational project, as expressed in the law that defines and governs us, takes into consideration many of the declarations of UNESCO regarding education for all, education as a public good, and education as a human right from which no one should be excluded. In the preamble of the aforementioned law, the four mainstays of the UNESCO report Learning: the Treasure Within: learning to know, learning to be, learning to coexist peacefully, and learning to do, are vindicated. But our university goes beyond this, as it admitswith no entrance examinationall applicants with a high school diploma. Their age doesnt matter, nor do their grades, the number of years that have passed since high school, their socioeconomic status, or racial, ethnic, religious or gender categories. The only limit is one imposed by budgetary considerations: when there is no space, students are admitted by lot, and those whose numbers are not chosen are guaranteed a place in the next admission period. For the same reasons, students progress in their studies without the sense of urgency imposed by other institutions. This urgency, this pressure, sometimes makes it impossible for students to take advantage of, enjoy, and reflect on their learning, and this diminishes the learning itself. Above and beyond private interests, the end that is sought at the UACM is the consolidation of acquired knowledge, the search for truth, and the formation of an academic community based on mutual assistance. The idea is that students and teachers learn to learn as a life option. For professors, there are no privileges and the vast differences in salary among academics who do similar work

2 dont exist here. The educational system of the UACM is grounded not only in classroom experience, but in individual and small-group tutoring and advising sessions in which students develop, in concert with their teachers, their maximum potential. Ours is the only university in Mexico that offers specific attention to blind students through the Letras Habladas program and the only one that offers a university degree program in prisons, the Programa de Educacin Superior en Centros de Readaptacin (PESCER). For all of these reasons and more, the UACM is an organizing victory at the national and, we dare say, international level. More than ten years after its founding, we know that our project works and changes students lives. Yet it is in danger. Why? Because the current city administration of Mexico City wants to domesticate it or make it disappear. Since 2006, with the arrival of mayor Marcelo Ebrard, we have been submitted to a process of budgetary strangulation which has compromised our growth and our very existence. Today, we can assert without a doubt that the actions of Marcelo Ebrard against our university contradict his own declarations as president of the United Nations Program for Human Settlements (UN-Hbitat), specifically those that he voiced on September 26 during the State of World Cities 2012-2013 address, in the sense that We need to increase wages beyond the inflation rate; we need to increase revenue by taxing those who have more, contrary to the expressed desire to extend the value-added tax to food and medicine, which would have an enormous regressive effect; we need to increase the average number of years of formal education and lower the drop-out rate. We lament that the actions of the mayor of Mexico City at the hour of reckoning in the conflict at the UACM is not consistent with his rhetoric at the United Nations. In 2010, with the arrival of Esther Orozco (a close associate of Ebrard) as rector of the UACM, things worsened at our university. Her mandate was to effect, at all costs, a counter-reform. To do so, she headed a media campaign to discredit the institution that she represents, she illegally retained union dues (deducted from salaries ostensibly to pass them on the union), unjustly dismissed workers critical of her regime, harassed students, and condoned homophobic attacks, as documented in Recommendation number 14/2012 of the local human rights commission, the Comisin de Derechos Humanos del Distrito Federal (CDHDF). The detonator of the current crisis is an electoral fraud committed in August in elections of the Consejo Universitario (University Council, the universitys most important government body, above the rector). In these elections, 64 percent voted for candidates who are critical of the rectors management of the university. In protest against this fraud, students occupied and closed all five campuses in a strike that has now lasted more than 80 days.

3 What do we ask? Respect for the vote and the legal installation of the representatives of the Consejo Universitario. What do we defend? Our project for higher education which reflects and assumes, like no other in Latin America, the five Strategic Focuses of the Regional Education Project for Latin America and the Caribbean (PRELAC): Focus 1: Educational content and practice that constructs meaning about ourselves, others, and the world in which we live. Focus 2: Empowerment of teachers so they can respond to learning needs. Focus 3: School culture: create communities of learning and participation. Focus 4: Procedural changes and flexibility to facilitate effective life-long learning opportunities. Focus 5: Social responsibility in education to create commitments for development and results. As UNESCO asserts, Latin America and the Caribbean constitute the region with most inequality in the world. This inequality includes lack of Access to social services including education. Mxico not only is no exception; its a paradigm of inequality, and therefore an institution like the UACM, which is doing everything possible to confront the enormous gap between rich and poor, has a right to exist. We, the members of the UACM community, are convinced that education is a treasure, but we also know that to educate ourselves and to educate others for democracy is an arduous task. We have experienced directly what happens when we decide our future regarding what would seem to be banal and local matters; our actions clash with massive corporate interests that we may not see in their full dimension but that we know exist and are behind attempts to destroy our universitys educational project. In spite of the obstacles, we are firm in our defense of the UACM because, though it is imperfect, we want to evaluate it and criticize it from a position of love and a sincere desire to improve it, not from a posture of fomenting the destruction of the university. Given the gravity of the situation, we have decided to write to you, Irina Bokova, as director of UNESCO, the most important educational organization in the world, to encourage you to join in the defense of the Universidad Autnoma de la Ciudad de Mxico. Specifically, we ask: 1) that you exhort the outgoing mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, and the incoming mayor, Miguel ngel Mancera, not to engage in police actions against our students in an attempt to solve this conflict and to do all in their power to respect and safeguard the

4 original project of the UACM in the context of reaching the goals of the aforementioned PRELAC, of which Mexico is signatory. 2) For the same reasons, we ask that you urge the VI Legislatura de la Asamblea Local del Distrito Federal (the local city council) to respect the original project of the UACM and to refrain from interfering in its self-government via modification of the universitys law. 3) We ask that you exhort the rector of the UACM, Esther Orozco, to accept and implement completely recommendation number 14/2012 of the city human rights commission, the Comisin de Derechos Humanos del Distrito Federal. 4) We solicit that you ask the rector Esther Orozco to respect and comply with the conclusions of various mediating bodies, all of which point toward the legal installation, without further delay, of our third University Council.

We await what we trust will be a sincere response to the information that we have provided and to our requests. Sincerely, Consejo Estudiantil de Lucha (CEL) Trabajadores en Lucha (TEL) Consejeros en Defensa de la Legalidad Foro Acadmico, organizations of striking students, workers, elected members of the university council, and academics.