PAGE 6, THE BEHREND BEACON, FEBRUARY 11, 2000
NATIONAL CAMPUS NEWS
Police retake Mexican university after 10-month student strike
by Alfredo Corchado
Knight-Ridder Tribune
February 07, 2000
MEXICO CITY Thousands of
unarmed police officers stormed the
National Autonomous University of
Mexico on Sunday, promptly retak
ing the troubled university paralyzed
by a 10-month-old student strike.
The bold, early-morning raid was
conducted with few injuries and little
violence, aside from a few minor
skirmishes between strike support
ers and police. About 2,500 police
officers, wearing bulletproof vests
and armed with only clubs and plas
tic shields, participated in the opera
tion. They were accompanied by
dozens of human-rights observers.
More than 600 students were ar
rested in the raid, including key
members of a tiny group of self-de
scribed anarchists with names like
Mosh, the Devil, and the Snake.
Known as the Ultras, the radical
group had seized control of the cam
pus last April and halted classes for
the university's 270,000 students.
Many student strikers were asleep
when police moved in. Others were
attending an all-night meeting. None
offered resistance.
By mid-morning, authorities, who
staged the raid under court order, ap
peared in full control of the sprawl
ing campus as government authori
ties quickly declared the longest
strike in the university's 89-year-old
history over.
"A democratic society cannot al-
Bill would ban bets on college, amateur sports
by Rick Alm
Knight-Ridder Tribune
February 02, 2000
Betting on college and amateur
sports would be illegal anywhere in
the United States under a bill intro
duced Tuesday, February 1, 2000, by
Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of
Kansas and a bipartisan list of sup-
porters.
If approved, the measure would
outlaw any bet placed on a high
school, college, or Olympic sporting
event including through Nevada's
legal sports betting industry.
Proponents including Demo
cratic co-sponsor Sen. Patrick Leahy
of Virginia and Republican Presiden
tial candidate Sen. John McCain of
Arizona hope a ban will curb point
shaving and problem gambling on
college campuses. Opponents say the
bill would do no good and might ac
tually hinder law enforcement efforts.
Brownback said the bill was a re
sponse to last year's National Gam
bling Impact Study Commission re
port, financed by Congress, which
recommended a total ban on colle
giate wagering.
"This is not about winning and los
ing," Brownback said in an interview.
"The problem is large bets and people
approaching athletes about shaving
points.
"There have been more point-shav
ing scandals at our colleges and uni
versities in the 1990 s than in every
other decade before it, combined.
"For teenagers, sports gambling is
the gateway to get into more gam
bling,' Brownback added. "There's
a big concern on college campuses."
Leahy said, "A national ban on
amateur and college sports betting
may help prevent these ravages of
sports wagering."
The bill would expand the reach of
a 1992 law passed by Congress that
Kissinger cancels speech at U. of Texas
after threat of protest
by Julie Chen
Campus Correspondent
University of Texas at Austin
February 03, 2000
AUSTIN (TMS) Former U.S. Sec
retary of State Henry Kissinger can
celled an appearance at the Univer
sity of Texas at Austin Tuesday
evening after UT police and the Se
cret Service warned of potentially vio
lent protests.
"I regret the circumstances that
have caused the cancellation of this
year's Harry Middleton lecture cre
ated by [Lady Bird] Johnson and any
embarrassment suffered by this great
former first lady and valued friend,"
low the kidnapping of the national
university," said Interior Minister
Diodoro Carrasco, whose ministry is
responsible for domestic security
concerns. "Today we have restored
the university, so that its destiny can
be returned to the hands of the uni
versity community. Today we have
liberated the university. It's for the
well-being of the university. It's for
the well-being of Mexico."
President Ernesto Zedillo, in a na
tional address on Sunday, said that a
violent clash last week between
strike supporters and opponents
forced him to act. "This is a histori
cal conquest for all Mexicans," he
said.
The student strike began last April
after university officials proposed
raising student tuition from a few
pennies to an estimated $l4O per
year. The fee had not changed since
1948. The university later backed
away from the tuition hike. But
strikers changed their demands and
refused to give up the campus or re
turn to classes.
While government officials pro
claimed the strike over on Sunday,
strike supporters vowed retaliation
in coming days. Groups of angry
students threw eggs and oranges at
the police. Others pushed and
shoved, screaming obscenities out
side the Mexican Attorney General's
office, taking special aim at mem
bers of the news media whom they
accused of being in cahoots with the
government. One anxious mother,
Alta Armendariz, confronted a law
prohibited wagering on all amateur
and professional sports except in a
handful of states where the activity
was already legal Nevada, Dela
ware, Oregon, and Montana. In a
statement Tuesday, Feb. 1, the Ameri
can Gaming Association pledged to
fight the bill, which it termed it "an
ineffective Band-Aid on a campus
Lancer
The national casino lobby said the
National Collegiate Athletic Associa
tion acknowledged widespread bet
ting on its games. The casino lobby
urged the NCAA to devise a "long
overdue strategy" to clean up the
problem without penalizing a legiti
mate industry.
NCAA President Cedric W.
Dempsey endorsed the bill Tuesday,
Feb. 1, at a news conference with
Brownback and others in Washington.
But Gaming Association President
Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. said that le
gal Las Vegas sports books had helped
expose collegiate point-shaving scan
dals by alerting authorities to unusual
betting patterns. The NCAA ac
knowledges it maintains a computer
link to Nevada sports books itself to
monitor suspicious betting.
Those safeguards would disappear
if all betting on collegiate sports was
driven underground, Fahrenkopf said.
"The bill introduced today only
addresses the narrow legal issue of
Nevada's 'grandfather' status" under
the 1992 law, he said Tuesday, Feb.
1, "and will not make the slightest
dent in illegal sports wagering."
But Brownback said he didn't ex
pect the measure to kindle an under
ground Prohibition Era of sports gam
bling.
"Legal gambling increases substan
tially and provides legitimacy to ille
gal gambling," he said. Outlawing
betting on amateur sports will give
pause to many, he said.
And Brownback said a stiffer law
Kissinger said in a statement released
Friday, January 28, 2000.
Student activists and some faculty
leaders felt Kissinger, who also served
as national security advisor during the
Nixon administration, was unworthy
of an invitation to visit the campus as
a distinguished speaker. They criti
cized his winning of a Nobel Prize
despite his alleged clearing of Chil
ean dictator Augusto Pinochet from
human rights violations and fueling
of the genocide in East Timor and
Cambodia, among other reputed war
crimes
The university is now embroiled in
a tennis match of blame: who is at
fault for the cancellation?
yer who unsuccessfully tried to visit
the detained students.
"Please, Attorney, tell us what can
we do so we don't succumb to the
evil hands of the government that
wants to provoke more massacres
and more imprisonments,"
"Today we have
liberated the uni
versity. It's for the
well-being of the
university. It's for
the well-being of
Mexico."
-Diodoro
Carrasco,
Interior Minister
of Mexico
Armendariz said. "I beg an answer.
I beg you as a desperate Mexican
mother."
An eerie calm prevailed over the
university campus and surrounding
neighborhoods. More protests are
planned later this week.
It's unclear how long the police
presence on the campus will con
tinue or when students will return to
classes, said Mexican Attorney Gen
might persuade news organizations to
stop publishing Las Vegas
oddsmakers' college point spread pre
dictions, which he said underpin the
illegal bookmaking industry.
"I hope this sends a signal to the
public," said Brownback.
It probably won't, said Arnie
Wexler, a reformed sports gambling
addict, counselor, and national lec-
turer.
Wexler said the bill "won't hurt."
But it also won't curb gambling on
campus, which Wexler says is epi
demic and getting worse.
"You can find a bookie on a col
lege campus in 20 minutes," he said.
"I've worked with young kids who
have stolen things, sold their cars to
support their gambling habit.
"College athletes caught up in shav
ing scandals lose their scholarships.
I know one who's working in a gro
cery store today.
"I got a call Monday from [a stu
dent bookie] at a school in Florida,'
he said. "He lost $3,600 on the Su
per Bowl. He really liked St. Louis
and was giving 8 points."
But St. Louis won the game by 7
points, and the student doesn't have
the money to pay off all the bets he
was holding.
"There's more than a million kids
in this country with a gambling prob
lem who are under 21," said Wexler.
Kansas City has had its share of il
legal gambling scandals. In 1975 a
federal grand jury indicted 10 men on
charges of conducting an illegal book-
making operation following a five
year sting operation that included FBI
wiretaps of area businesses and resi
dences.
Among others, that case brought
down the late Nick Civella, longtime
boss of the Kansas City mob.
According to news accounts at the
time, the tapped telephone call that
sealed Civella's fate involved bets on
"It's a prevarication on [the
University's] part that safety was an
issue," said Romi Mahajan, a Radio-
Television-Film graduate student in
volved. "We were unhappy that
[Kissinger] was invited, but once he
was invited, we just wanted to engage
him in dialogue."
The cancellation is the university's
fault and jeopardizes free speech by
blocking access to the exchange of
discourse, Mahajan said.
UT's chancellor and president filed
the following joint statement Monday,
Jan. 31: "The two of us agree that
there were legitimate concerns over
public safety and over the ability of
Dr. Kissinger to deliver his remarks.
eral Jorge Madrazo in a televised in
terview. He said such decisions will
come later after a full investigation
to determine, in part, the extend of
the damages to the university.
University Rector Juan Ramon de
la Fuente pleaded for the release of
under-aged students and asked for le-
niency, where possible, for the oth-
"I lament that it had to come to this
extreme," de la Fuente said.
UNAM stands as a proud symbol
of free education for Mexico's
masses. Known universally as
UNAM, from its Spanish acronym,
it is the largest institution of higher
education in Latin America. But on
Sunday, the campus was in tatters.
Televised images by the Televisa
network, which broke the news
shortly after 7 a.m., showed a bat
tered, deteriorating university com
plex, its walls covered in insurrec
tionist graffiti and drawings of Cu
ban revolutionary ('he Guevara, and
containing what one TV reporter de
scribed as a nest of roaming rats.
Police officials said at least 10 mari
juana plants were confiscated and
other items, including Molotov cock
tails, some made with half-empty te
quila bottles.
In many ways, the student conflict
mirrors Mexico's vast economic and
political transformation, revealing
the vestiges of its socialist-like past
and its unsteady tread toward a new
world of globalization. While stu
dents initially targeted the university
for the tuition increase, they directed
the 1970 Super Bowl the year the
Kansas City Chiefs beat the Minne
sota Vikings.
In 1989, federal authorities raided
28 Kansas City addresses on the eve
of the NCAA's Final Four college
basketball tournament. That resulted
in the indictments of 16 persons in two
sports betting rings.
The Missouri General Assembly
that same year rejected legislation that
proposed converting Union Station to
a casino. In 1990 federal authorities
raided 11 Kansas City taverns, some
linked to organized crime figures, and
seized a dozen video gambling ma
chines.
Two years later Missouri voters le
galized such devices and more
when they approved riverboat casino
gambling.
Estimates of illegal sports betting
in the United States range anywhere
from $BO billion to $3BO billion a year,
said the Gaming Association's
Fahrenkopf.
Nevada's 145 legal bookies ac
cepted $2.3 billion in sports wagers
during the 12-month period ending
Nov. 30, according to the latest state
Gaming Control Board reports. The
bookies won $83.4 million on those
wagers.
Experts estimate that 25 to 40 per
cent of the total amount legally wa
gered in Nevada was on college
games and other amateur sports.
Office pools, Internet bookies, and
all other non-licensed sports betting
in the United States are already ille
gal under various federal, state, and
local laws that are rarely enforced.
But Brownback said even he was
reluctant to throw a criminal blanket
over friendly bets between co-work-
ers.
"Nobody's going after the office
pools," Brownback said. "If there's
a way to exempt that from prosecu
tion in this bill, we will."
These are the basic facts of the mat
ter. We see nothing to debate."
"I was pretty disappointed when I
heard, but I empathize with [the
school's] decisions," said Ryan Lam
bert, an economics senior who had
gotten free tickets to the sold-out ap
pearance two weeks ago.
Opposition to Kissinger's arrival
was expected, and the LBJ School
should have been capable of arrang
ing for such momentous visits by pub
lic figures, Lambert added.
This is not the first time Kissinger
has elicited such critical student ob
jections. Sixteen years ago, the UT
campus police arrested 53 people who
protested his visit to the university.
their rhetoric more and more at the
concept of a globally intertwined
economy and the free-market forces
that are changing Mexico to its core.
Forced to compete economically
with other nations, the government
has been forced to curtail its free
spending ways, impacting dozens of
subsidy programs, including educa
tion budgets that once guaranteed a
virtually free university education to
everyone.
The federal government now pays
90 percent of UNAM's $1 billion an
nual budget, and university officials
had hoped the new tuition proposal
would have raised $B4 million, or
about 8 percent of that figure.
In spite of growing restlessness by
the public and the government about
the duration of the strike, officials
were reluctant to take the campus by
force, fearing a blood bath. In a 1968
incident known simply as the
Tlaltelolco massacre, soldiers killed
hundreds of students, aan event that
has haunted Mexico for 30 years.
But as the UNAM strike dragged
on, some weary officials and politi
cal analysts privately predicted that
the image of a weak government
would harm the chances of the rul
ing party's presidential candidate,
Francisco Labastida Ochoa, in the
upcoming national election set for
July 2, 2000.
After the raid, public reaction was
largely supportive of the police ac
tions. But some questioned the tim
ing of the operation.
"It was about time that the gov-
Bush speaks at college that
prohibits
by Ron Hutcheson
Knight-Ridder Tribune
February 03, 2000
GREENVILLE, S.C. Texas Gov.
George W. Bush portrays himself as a
candidate who reaches out to minority
voters, but he was the featured speaker
Wednesday, February 2, 2000, at a
Christian school that prohibits interra
cial dating.
Bush's visit to Bob Jones Univer
sity underscored the lingering compli
cations of racial politics in the South,
a vital region for Republicans in na
tional elections. In going to the school,
the Republican Presidential hopeful
. . . they have
strong views that
they don't play
politics
They're not trying
to impose that view
on any of the can
didates running for
office."
-former South
Carolina Gov.
David Beasley,
Bush su . porter
reached out to southern conservatives
at the possible risk of alienating mod
erates, independents, and voters of
color in other parts of the country.
The visit was viewed as politics as
usual in South Carolina, where racial
tensions are focused on the Confeder
ate battle flag that flies over the state
capitol. Even the NAACP took a pass
when given the chance to comment on
the Texas governor's appearance at the
school.
At a news conference after his
speech, Bush said he opposes the ban
on interracial dating, but said he sees
no conflict between his visit and his
inclusive campaign message. Bush
often presents himself to voters as a
candidate who can appeal to all races
and ethnic groups.
"I went there to see 7,000 people. I
went there because I was invited to
go," he said. Bush's speech replaced
the normal Wednesday chapel service,
which is mandatory for students.
Although Bush's visit to the racially
separatist campus did not cause any
noticeable backlash, the school and its
policies have stirred passions in the
past.
The university, founded in 1927 by
ernment fought back," said 38-year
old Jorge Pineda Sosa, who worked
at a grocery store inside the vast uni
versity compound. "I hope that stu
dents can now return to class, and
we can put this nightmare behind
Rosario Sanchez, a travel agent,
watched the events unfold on her
television. "This is a relief for
Mexico, but why now?" she asked.
"I think the government did this now
to help its losing candidate. This is
horrible for Mexico's political oppo-
sition."
Last month, a university-spon
sored plebiscite, in which students,
faculty members, and workers voted,
overwhelmingly supported a plan by
de la Fuente, the school's rector, to
end the strike. The strikers, however,
refused to recognize the outcome.
Last week, striker opponents,
backed by university police, clashed
with supporters, leaving 37 people
injured and 248 under arrest. It was
the worst violence since the strike
began.
A 12-hour negotiating session had
ended Friday after both sides ac
cused the other of intransigence.
Students had asked for talks to re
sume Monday, but the university re
fused.
"Over the months, this cause had
lost its legal and constructive direc
tion," said Carrasco, the interior min
ister. Mexico City bureau chief An
gela Kocherga of KHOU-TV in
Houston and news assistant Javier
Garcia contributed to this report.
interracial dating
the Rev. Bob Jones, Sr., a popular evan
gelist and leader in the prohibition
movement, lost its tax-exempt status
in the 1970 s for refusing to admit
blacks. The school has since aban
doned its segregationist admissions
policy, but continues to prohibit dat
ing by blacks and whites.
In defending the ban on interracial
dating, school officials point to the Bib
lical story about the Tower of Babel,
where God divided the tower builders
by their different languages. Some
segregationists have interpreted the
story as a warning against mixing
It was unclear if the prohibition ap
lies only to blacks and whites and
not to Hispanics or Asians, for example
and school officials did not return
phone calls seeking clarification.
Interracial or cross-cultural dating
and marriage is becoming more and
more widespread in the United States,
particularly in places with diverse
populations such as California, Texas,
Florida, and New York. Census fig
ures from 1998, the latest available,
show that 5.6 percent of married
couples in the United States identify
themselves as interracial, up from 4
percent in 1990.
In 1998, school officials threatened
to arrest a gay alumnus for trespassing
if he came on the grounds, prompting
a demonstration by gay rights activ
ists.
with.
The university's mission statement
declares that the rules guiding student
life flow from a literal interpretation
of the Bible "whatever the Bible
says is so." The school's goal is to pro
duce graduates who are "Scripturally
disciplined; others-serving; God-lov
ing; Christ-proclaiming; and focused
above."
Despite its sometimes controversial
policies, the university is familiar turf
to Republican Presidential candidates.
At least two of Bush's rivals, publisher
Steve Forbes and radio commentator
Alan Keyes, are expected to visit the
campus and its 5,000 students before
South Carolina's Feb. 19 primary.
Keyes is African American.
"Republicans and Democrats have
been going to that campus for years,"
said former Gov. David Beasley, a
Bush supporter. "They're good folks,
they're good people, and they have
strong views that they don't play poli
tics with. They're not trying to im
pose that view on any of the candidates
running for office."
A spokesman for Bush's chief rival,
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, declined
to say whether McCain would accept
an invitation to the campus.
"Sen. McCain does not support that
policy or that viewpoint," spokesman
John Weaver said of the interracial dat
ing ban.