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An appeals court in Mexico has found that there is insufficient evidence to prosecute former Mexican president Luis Echeverria in the 1968 mass killings of student protesters in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Square. Echeverria was the head of the federal police at the time of the massacre.
Federal agents fired on a peaceful pro-democracy protest in Tlatelolco Square on the evening of October 2, 1968, days before the start of the Mexico City Olympics. Five thousand students and others were participating in the rally, and estimates of the number of dead range into the hundreds. (The official government tally was just thirty.)
The killings provoked an appalled response from Mexico’s citizens, and helped to spur a new resistance to the country’s repressive government. Mexico’s current president, Ernesto Zedillo, has called 1968 “the watershed of the country’s political life, when a real public outcry began for a more democratic country.”
Echeverria served as president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976. Since 2006 he had been held under house arrest in connection with the Tlatelolco Square killings.
A statement from Amnesty International yesterday called the court’s ruling “a symptom of the failure of successive Mexican governments and legislatures, as well as the courts and prosecutors, to live up to Mexico’s international human rights commitments.”
Two campus police officers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been suspended without pay after they were caught dumping several hundred copies of the MIT student newspaper.
The March 17 issue of The Tech carried a front-page article reporting on the arrest of an MIT campus cop on charges of trafficking prescription painkillers. That officer, Joseph D’Amelio, had been arrested three days earlier in possession of nearly a thousand OxyContin Roxicodone tablets.
On March 18 two MIT police officers came forward to admit that they had been removed three hundred copies of the previous day’s edition of The Tech from stands in the university’s student center, depositing them in a recycling bin outside the building.
The two officers have each been working at MIT for more than a decade, and the Executive Editor of The Tech has been quoted as saying that he does not wish to see them fired over the incident.
April 4 update: The Tech reports that one of the two officers has been fired, and the other remains under suspension. MIT refused to comment on the reason for the difference in punishment, and has not released either officer’s name.
Kristen Juras, the University of Montana law professor who has been campaigning to force the UM Kaimin to dump its sex advice column, appeared at a campus forum with the Kaimin‘s editor last night.
Juras called student activity fee support for the paper “government” funding, and described that funding as “a privilege.” She has in the past threatened to intervene with the university’s trustees or even the Montana state legislature to attempt to get that privilege withdrawn.
At last night’s forum, Juras said that any Kaimin sex column should be written by a “sexologist,” though she acknowledged, when pressed, that other student columns — such as those on religion — do not require such “expertise.”
Kaimin editor Bill Oram defended the column’s lackadaisical tone. “We’ll stop talking casually about sex when students stop having sex casually,” he said. “We’ll stop talking about sex in a fun way when sex stops being fun.”
Juras took a less lighthearted stance. “I’m not opposed to sex,” she said at one point. “I’m happily married and it’s an important part of our relationship.”
Hans and Sophie Scholl have long been student activist heroes of mine. The Scholls were members of the White Rose, a tiny group of German opponents of the Nazi regime. Hans was a veteran, and he and his sister were both students at the University of Munich, where they were caught scattering pamphlets on February 18, 1943. Four days later the two were tried, convicted, and guillotined, along with their friend and ally Christoph Probst, a 23-year-old father of three.
Google Alerts sent me a link to a new article on the White Rose this morning, and I figured I’d pass it along.
Students at Anderson University in Indiana aren’t allowed to drink. Not even off campus. Not even if they’re twenty-one. Not even if they’re twenty-one and off campus.
So the day before yesterday a few of them staged an act of civil disobedience.
About twenty-five students left morning chapel services on Tuesday and walked as a group to Kroakerheads, a bar about a mile from campus. (They arrived there at about 10:30, half an hour before Kroakerheads usually opens, but they’d called ahead and asked the staff to open early.)
They entered the bar. Some ordered beers, some ordered sodas, some didn’t order anything. All were in violation of Anderson student regulations, however — the rules bar not just drinking, but also being in the presence of others who are drinking.
The protest was staged by a student group called Students for a Democratic AU. One protest organizer, Caleb Fletcher, said it was not merely about the alcohol policy, but also “how the student body, as part of the institution, has been left out of policy decisions and the decision-making process.”
According to the Anderson student handbook, disciplinary sanctions for first-offenses relations to drinking include probation, medical evaluation, notification of parents, and “educational assignment/follow-up treatment.” Sanctions for second offenses include all of the above plus a fine and loss of privileges, with suspension or expulsion for third offenses.
An Anderson security employee observed and photographed the protest, and a university spokesman told the Associated Press that the university would follow its standard disciplinary process in dealing with the students who participated.
Anderson’s student government held a forum on the alcohol policies last night, and about two hundred of the university’s 2700 students attended. At the forum, Anderson’s president, James Edwards, defended the regulations, noting that they have been in place since the university opened in 1917.
Edwards did open the door a crack to a relaxing of the rules, saying that there may eventually be changes regarding “how the community and our expectations are enforced.” Others noted that other restrictions on social activities At Anderson have recently been lifted, including bans on playing cards and holding hands.
The university’s ban on dancing was lifted in 2007.
studentactivism.net 
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