Cause for the Rebels

Next month's Olympic games are the first to be held in a Spanish-speaking country, the first in Latin America, and the first in a developing nation. They are also Mexico's first big opportunity to put its stable prosperity on inter national display. A two-month-old strike by Mexico's normally docile university students is threatening to spoil that triumph. Last week President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz ordered the army to end the strike by taking over the National University campus on the outskirts of Mexico City.

The action shattered a 40-year tra dition of university autonomy. As armored cars rumbled onto the almost-deserted campus, several thousand sol diers fanned out and arrested the first 500 students they could find. They also seized 34 professors. When other stu dents demonstrated against the invasion, riot cops cracked down with billy clubs, tear gas and nausea gas, clapped an other 500 demonstrators into jail. Thousands of students retreated to the cam pus of the huge Polytechnic School. They were so certain that the army would invade there, too, that they put up signs reading WELCOME, SOLDIERS.

Caught in the middle of the dispute, Javier Barros Sierra, the National University's respected rector, protested the government's "excessive use of force, which our institution did not deserve." He held no brief for the young rebels, either. "Likewise," he said, "the university did not deserve the use made of it by some students and outside groups."

Four Demands. It was the second time the government had given its student rebels a cause. The riots started in July, when city granaderos, or riot cops, quelled a fight among prep-school boys and briefly occupied one of the school buildings. When the students protested, paratroopers moved in with tanks, armored cars and bazookas. They temporarily stopped the riots, but at the price of turning most of Mexico's students against them.

During two months of orderly demonstrations in Zocalo, the central plaza opposite Diaz Ordaz's mansion, the students made four demands: that the government disband the granaderos, dismiss Mexico City's police chief, release all so-called political prisoners, and revoke an antisubversion clause in the penal code. The government promised to re-examine the law, but otherwise remained aloof. Mexico's press blamed the riots on "Communist agitators," but the demonstrations seemed more to reflect the influence of an activist New Left. Increasingly, the students threatened to "stop the Olympics," and directed their attacks against Diaz Ordaz himself.

Amoeba with Food. The ruling Party of Republican Institutions (P.R.I.) also found itself under direct attack --something to which it is not accustomed.

Some of the P.R.I.'s most powerful men were student rioters themselves in the revolution of 1910, but the party's tolerance for dissent has withered markedly. When the opposition Party of National Action won two state elections last year, the government simply an nulled the elections. "The P.R.I, doesn't know how to bend," said a foreign diplomat. "When it encounters an obstacle, it engulfs it, like an amoeba with a piece of food." But 58% of Mexico's population is now under 25, and while only a fraction of the youths are waving black and red flags, there are enough sympathizers to make even a brobdingnagian amoeba balk. In any case, whether the students demonstrate during the games or not, the sight of troops occupying the campus across from the Olympic stadium may well blight Mex ico's proudest hour.

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