NICARAGUA: Protesting students burn building

Students from Nicaragua's Caribbean university have doused a campus building in gasoline and burnt it to the ground, in an ongoing fight over university leadership. Their protests have also included a four-day hunger strike that landed two students in hospital and forced professors to cancel classes.

"We decided to radicalise our fight by burning this office because it has been converted into a centre for espionage and persecution against students who disagree with the authoritarian and despotic attitude of the university rector," Florencio Funes, one of the protestors, told El Diario Nuevo, Nicaragua's largest newspaper.

The most recent protests took place on 27 Octpber at the Bilwi campus of the University of the Autonomous Regions of the Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast (URACCAN), a public university with a strongly indigenous student body.

With more than 5,524 students spread over the four Atlantic coast campuses, URACCAN is the primary Caribbean university and has a wide range of career tracks including engineering, business administration and nursing.

According to the URACCAN Linkage Project, a Canadian centre for research on Latin America and the Caribbean based at York University, the Nicaraguan institution was founded in the mid-1990s to create "a new generation of professionals with the knowledge and the skills to enable the new autonomous regions to rise to the tasks of self-government and genuine autonomy".

It is exactly that self-governance that students are pursuing in their protests, said Miguel González, a former URACCAN lecturer who now works as a professor at York University in Toronto.

"Students in the URACCAN campus at Bilwi have been consistently criticising the current leadership of the university for interfering in the autonomy of the student movement," he said.

It was around 1830 when students poured out of a rented bus and proceeded to set fire to the Intercultural Communication Institute. Only hours later did firefighters receive calls about the fire, and by that time the building had already burnt to the ground, local newspapers reported.

González said he wished the students had found another way to protest.

"It was truly unfortunate to hear about the damage to the university, since each of our campuses has been built from scratch, by community members, individuals, and allied organisations," including via international cooperation. "Any damage done against the university property hurts the overall coastal society."

The recently-appointed rector, Alta Hooker, denounced the students' action, calling it "barbaric vandalism". Hooker said this was not the first time the same students had broken doors and windows and destroyed university property.

Cyril Omeir Green, secretary-general of the university, said the conflicts arose when a group of students decided to make themselves the leaders of the university. They did not go through the standard procedures of elections, which is to first gain approval from Nicaragua's large student union, UNEN.

"We have two groups of students claiming to be the representatives of the student body," said Green, who dismissed the hunger strikers from earlier in the month and those committing vandalism, saying they were "trying to create a climate of instability and to discredit current leadership".

The central Nicaraguan student union in Managua would not recognise the protesting students because their elected leader, Karla Zavala, was not enrolled as a full-time student. Under Law 89 of the National Student Union constitution, students must be enrolled as pre-graduate students.

But the conflict runs much deeper than processes, Zavala has argued. She said it is a fight over their right to independence from UNEN as well as autonomy from the university administration. "Our rights have been violated as students," Zavala told local papers.

While Zavala and her colleagues take to the streets in protest, Green is certainly looking forward to the day when things calm down: "Right now students are tense walking into classes," he said. "That's no way to learn."