The Argentine student movement, a laboratory of democracy between 1982 and 2001

In the 1990s, brawls would often break out at the Argentine University Federation (FUA) congresses and during committee debates. There were chants and running matches. These could be due to clashes with the police or even between supporters of different groups . The most far-sighted leaders, in addition to always maintaining open dialogue with all parties, discussed the preventive safety measures that should be taken: wearing scarves around the neck—in case tear gas was fired—and always wearing sneakers—in case one had to escape quickly from somewhere.

Outside of these scenes, the Argentine student movement has always enjoyed a high level of organization and a particular prestige. So much so that artists such as Mercedes Sosa, Luis Alberto Spinetta, and Charly García himself—among a long list of names—have participated in recitals on open classroom stages under banners with slogans like "Academic Excellence" or "Public University Always." The 1990s are just a few scenes from a long history.

For Yann Cristal , author of Public and Free: The Student Movement at the University of Buenos Aires Between 1983 and 2001 (Eudeba), there is a short but decisive period from July 1982 to December 1983. This is an interregnum period, which could be called the post-Malvinas War period or the pre-inauguration of Alfonsín. It is an electoral period: with the organization of the presidential elections for the return to democracy.

But also, the organization of elections in all university student centers. In those effusive months, the student movement emerged as a laboratory for a modern democracy in the making , or for a new civic life to come. With the influence of words like "anti-imperialism" and "revolution" exhausted, the apogee of a new era began to take shape behind the scenes, with words like "elections" and "participation."

Around that time, in early 1983, the names of the detained and disappeared students from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) were written on the walls of the Exactas y Naturales (Exact Sciences and Natural Sciences) for the first time. The first assemblies were also held , and checkbooks were burned in front of the UBA Economics Department to the sound of chants in unison: "Entrance exam / It's going with the process."

While all political spaces of that time experienced moments of unusual effervescence , it was especially the Radical Youth and the reformist student group Franja Morada who experienced, like never before, a true process of mass affiliation.

In 1983, for example, the Franja Morada won 8 of the 13 faculties at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA ). Political participation at that time was a virtue, a true prestige-builder. But this would be a rare phenomenon, weakening over time, eventually sinking into a discredit that was often well-founded and, at other times, unjust.

The interesting thing about that period is that while the student movement never had a large academic bibliography –where its history is studied in detail–, nevertheless, the appearances that the student movement began to have in the press were immeasurable . Between August 1982 and August 1983 alone, Yann Cristal lists 73 records of student actions in the city of Buenos Aires: sit-ins, assemblies, demonstrations in faculties, public denunciations or marches to the Ministry of Education.

The student movement declared itself an imposing political entity, multifaceted and with its own voice. On September 11, 1982, for example, an assembly brought together 200 students at the Faculty of Engineering. Twenty days later, in the same place, another assembly brought together 400 students, convened by the unresolved issues of the dictatorship that were beginning to become public knowledge and, at the same time, by current issues whose renewed agenda included the return of professors from exile and, following the military interventions, the normalization of academic life.

These were the first university assemblies recorded in Argentina after the 1976 coup, with its notorious ban on gatherings of more than two people. By May 12, 1983, 1,500 students gathered in the Law Department, summoned to organize the elections for student leaders in the law program. "Philosophy Assembly for the Normalization of the Center," was the headline on page 5 of a story in the newspaper La Nación on May 6 of that year.

Yann Cristal's book devotes significant sections to reflecting on the rise and decline of the university student movement as a whole, and of radicalism and the Franja Morada in particular . "From Spring to Disenchantment (1984-1987)" is the title of one of its chapters. The conceptual field of the student movement, then comprised of concepts such as "Democracy," "Liberation," and "Revolution," is another object of his analysis, highlighting the pivotal nature that many discourses must possess in order to capture their constituents. And all this without failing to mention, within the pages of the book, the Rojas Cultural Center, a hub of the Buenos Aires underground, the birthplace of prominent artists, and a place that foreshadowed a cultural scene that, over the years, would become legendary.

The 1990s were the years of marches against cuts, against the Higher Education Law, and with the city of Buenos Aires as the epicenter of the country's major mobilizations. These were the years of the White Tent—which remained in place in front of the National Congress for 1,003 days between April 2, 1997, and December 30, 1999.

These were the years in which a large poster with the word "REMATE" appeared on the front of Exactas (Exactas School) in 1992. These were also the years in which the student group TNT (a metaphor for dynamite, but also the acronym for Tontos pero No Tanto) carried out a performative affront to the art of poster-posting.

A few months earlier, around the same time (in May 1999), the student movement filled the front pages of newspapers . In Clarín, on May 5 and 11, for example, headlines announced the imminent closure of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA): "Due to cost cuts." University protests spread across the country.

On May 12, another headline highlights the students' victory: "Menem gave in: back down on the cuts." The education movement – ​​with its uncompromising mobilizations of the 1990s – carved the highest backbone that buried Menemism . And it led the UCR-FREPASO Alliance to victory in the presidential elections of October 1999. Just as they had been the electoral laboratory of the new democracy between 1982 and 1983, in its new chapter – May 2001 – the student movement closes the parable between the politicization and the prestige of the universities.

With de la Rúa's helicopter plastered across the posters of every UBA faculty, the Franja Morada (Morning Strip), which had triumphed electorally in the classrooms of the 1980s and 1990s, lost all of its student centers in the country after the 2001 crisis. A survival, following the conclusions drawn from Yann Cristal's book, finds reformism recovering many of these centers at the UBA in the 2000s, thereby generating much cause for debate and reflection.

It is striking that, despite its undoubted capacity for training cadres, the Argentine student movement for the restoration of democracy has never elected a president.

This is a sign of how little preparation or knowledge of the arena is sufficient to secure a place in the turbulent Olympus of national politics. While the importance of the UBA in the formation of the country's ruling class is undeniable—17 presidents graduated from the UBA; Law is the school that has produced the most presidents in the world, etc.—however, the direct participation of the student movement in the next link in the chain is rather scarce or nonexistent.

This fact could be striking, even more so in the history of a movement like the student movement, which has always played a key role in key moments in Argentine history. It's as if, for some reason, the split between the leaders as individual "political subjects" and the student movement to which they belong as a "collective historical subject" has reached such a level of fragmentation that, over time, it makes it difficult for these individuals to integrate into the very history they shape.

Photographs of students in classrooms or university lobbies, period brochures and pamphlets, and statistical data with line graphs add tone and depth to a unique book about the parable of student participation and demobilization at the University of Buenos Aires.

Everything, as it should be, with its due dose of acronyms, unique passwords valid only for the eternal frequenters of classrooms of a certain era, but already unintelligible to those who have never passed through that world strewn with its own rules. And adorned with signs with inscriptions such as, some more musical than others, UPAU or FUNAP.

Public and free. The student movement at the University of Buenos Aires between 1983 and 2001, by Yann Cristal (Eudeba).