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French students escalated ongoing protests in advance of the Easter holiday this week, occupying offices on two campuses and barricading a Paris street.
Early in the week student protesters held university administrators in Orleans, Rennes, and Strasbourg hostage for a brief time. In Rennes, the president was forced to flee his office and call for help from a stairway, and in Strasbourg more than a hundred students forced their way into a room where thirty administrators were meeting, blocking their way out for a time.
On Wednesday protesters in Paris turned the Boulevard Saint-Michel into an impromptu beach, dumping sand into the road and blocking traffic. The beach was a nod to a slogan from the May 1968 protests that shook French society: “sous les pavés, la plage” — under the cobblestones, the beach. (For a discussion of the various shades of meaning behind this slogan, click here.)
Protests against changes to French higher education policy have been going on for two months, and administrators now say that if the disruption does not end after Easter, the spring semester may be lost entirely. Click here for a Reuters article from the newspaper Le Monde on the recent demonstrations, or here for Google’s English translation.
This post was updated on April 10 with new details on the Rennes and Strasbourg protests.
Before dawn on July 18, 1992, members of a Peruvian government death squad entered the dorms of Enrique Guzmán y Valle National Education University, known as La Cantuta. They rousted the students from their beds, abducting nine of them.
La Cantuta had a long history of radical Maoist politics, and the nine students were suspected of involvement in a recent car bombing.
The death squad members took the students, and a professor who they abducted from his home, to an off-campus location. There the ten were tortured and killed. The corpses of four of those killed were discovered in an unmarked grave a year later; the other six bodies have never been accounted for.
Yesterday a Peruvian court convicted Peru’s former president, Alberto Fujimori, of having ordered the La Cantuta killings, as well as a massacre the previous year in which fifteen people were killed. Fujimori served as Peru’s president from 1990 to 2000.
Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko Fujimori, a 34-year-old member of the Peruvian national congress, will be a candidate in Peru’s presidential elections next year. If elected, she has pledged to grant her father a full pardon.
“The employers will love this generation. They are not going to press many grievances. There won’t be much trouble. They are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be riots. There aren’t going to be revolutions.”
–Clark Kerr, Chancellor of the University of California, 1959.
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