By Nurit Martínez
How many kilos of tortillas can be bought with more than 45 million pesos? The question is not idle if at the same time the rectors of the country's public universities unite their voices to accuse political interests behind this demand for the Autonomous University of Sinaloa to be accountable for public resources.
The 30 synchronized marches in 20 municipalities of Sinaloa that brought together more than 105,000 people two weeks ago to defend the now former rector, Jesús Madueña Molina, who was dismissed by a judge, was the red light among the country's rectors to join voices and demand respect for university autonomy.
But what is happening in that institution is only a sign that the opacity of public universities is still a pending task, without a doubt. But also that the governors, installed as small regional viceroys, seek the economic control of billions of pesos and, above all, to extend their political presence among those academic and student communities susceptible to electoral mobilization.
In recent years, as a sample, this has occurred in the public universities of Durango, Chihuahua and Hidalgo. At another time we will explore other types of political control of the university groups that have taken root in the institutions for decades, creating true fiefdoms of state and federal budget management, but for now, we will review what happens in the institutions that under the harassment of the governors, in alternation, resort to old practices of harassment to remove rectors and place their close ones.
In the case of the UAS, it is real that there are doubts about the exercise of 45 million 546 thousand 180 pesos that three suppliers tried to collect in 1,501 invoices. Some of them for the purchase of corn tortillas, tortilla chips, flour tortillas and other products such as chicken. Only that the purchase was from grocery stores that do not sell these products or from phantom locations.
While there are eight student houses that depend on the institutional budget, the bills from 2020 to 2022 had charges of up to 60 pesos per kilo of tortillas in times of pandemic, when classes were suspended in the country.
This was the beginning of the investigation by the government of the Morenista Rubén Rocha Moya, who himself denounced the fact in May. From there, the State Superior Audit Office started the complaints and the investigation, then the Patrimonial and Economic Intelligence Unit joined in. However, this was on the way to investigate the destination of public resources until two of the governor's political adversaries, the former rectors of the UAS, Héctor Melesio Cuen and Juan Eulogio Guerra Liera, appeared on the list of those accused.
The former has been a gubernatorial candidate on several occasions and Guerra Liera, it is known, provided political support against Rocha Moya in the election in which he became governor.
Another fact is that both former rectors undertook reforms in their administrations that ended with concessions in benefits to UAS workers that Rocha Moya himself granted, first as secretary general of the institution and then rector between 1989 and 1997, among them retirement after 25 years of work with the possibility of obtaining a second position. In his idea of "democratic universities" based on his master's thesis, Rocha Moya established that aspiring rectors could campaign for more than three months with the best musical bands in the entity, which could include high school and undergraduate students being offered beer, money and shows with women. This placed the university, at the end of the 90's, in a financial crisis from which it has not emerged.
If anyone knows about student and worker mobilization, it is Rocha Moya. He is a graduate of the Oaxaca Normal School (1968), secretary general of the Federation of Socialist Peasant Students of Mexico, that is, he led the 29 organizations of normalistas in the country at that time in the 70s. At the end of the following decade, already in the UAS as an academic and political leader, he sought the governorship. In 1998, with the support of the leader of the PRD, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, he sought the governorship for the second time without success.
The arrival of Rocha Moya to the governorship makes him want to recover the leadership of his group within the UAS and to do so he uses one of the tools that has worked best for Lopezobradorism: corruption accusations.
In addition to the millionaire purchase of tortillas, the rector also refused to audit another 2,545 million pesos that the Federal Government gave to the UAS in 2022, arguing that the local audit has no authority over these resources.
A total of nine complaints were filed against the rector by the Audit Office, and the judge's decision was to indict rector Jesús Madueña (on September 15) for the crime of irregular performance of public functions and improper exercise of public service, and (on October 17) a request for precautionary measures to prevent him from leaving the country.
The Rocha Moya administration took advantage of this scenario and the Sinaloa Attorney General's Office requested the removal of Madueña as rector for the crimes described in case 918/2023. In the same case, the procurement committee was dismissed and the two former rectors of the UAS are named in the investigation.
Today, the 211 rectors of the country, grouped in the National Association of Universities and Institutions of Higher Education defend the position of former rector Madueña on the intervention of local government in institutional autonomy, which means self-determination in the exercise of public resources. This means being accountable to whoever provides the resources. If the budget was granted by the federal government, they will be accountable to the Federation, before the Chamber of Deputies.
This practice of political harassment is not exclusive to the left, in Chihuahua it was experienced a year ago in the Autonomous University of Chihuahua, at the arrival of the current governor Maru Campos.
The now former rector Luis Alberto Fierro Ramírez was accused of not solving the problem of payment of pensions to workers and of increasing the institutional debt from $128 million to $1,158 million in five years. In his defense, the rector assured that the cancellation of extraordinary funds from the Ministry of Public Education to face this crisis had impacted them in this way.
With one year left to run, the rector resigned after local media leaked information that in the last year he had bought a house worth 4.3 million pesos, that his salary with bonuses and compensation exceeded 285 thousand pesos, that he committed the university in a bidding process to lease a lighting system for eight years and the sale of the university's assets to pay the pension debt.
Jesús Villalobos was appointed as head of the institution, while the succession process was being carried out before the University Council. The governor's intervention was clear when the former director of the Law School practically presented himself as the only candidate: Luis Alfonso Rivera Campos, the governor's first cousin.
After the designation, professors and researchers questioned it in court and filed 24 injunctions against it, until the Second District Court of the Federal Judiciary granted it and ruled out the conflict of interest of the new rector, so that since October 15, 2022 Rivera Campos is rector of the UACH and accompanies his cousin Maru Campos in the governorship.
The universities in the entities continue to be a space for opportunistic political control of political-electoral and budgetary interests that every day find an engine to strengthen regional power groups in the style of medieval fiefdoms. For the time being, the question is still in the air: what kind of meeting requires the purchase of more than one million 730 kilos of tortillas?
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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