Women from various feminist groups went to the Government Palace to protest gender violence.Gabriela Pérez (CUARTOSCURO)
The students of the largest public university in northern Mexico study with fear.
Not even where they go to class do they feel safe from the gender violence that plagues the country.
The Autonomous University of Nuevo León (UANL) is at the center of the controversy over harassment and sexual assault that students have been denouncing for years.
At least a hundred cases have come to light on social networks and forums created by the students.
A new wave of accusations, led by the youngest who are studying high school, has set off alarms and has put the institution on the ropes.
"I don't want a pedophile for a teacher," exclaimed a sign hanging in High School 1. "UANL covers up harassers," said another.
In the women's bathrooms of High School 2, the adolescents wrote the names of the teachers and students who had violated them.
The same thing happened in college.
"In the Faculty of Biological Sciences they take care of their harassers and not their students," warned another message posted on campus.
On the sides, more names of aggressors with whom the students share the classrooms.
As a cry for help in the face of the silence around them, the students filled the walls of various high schools and colleges with their complaints in the heat of the 8M demonstrations.
From cases of sexual violence to threats of femicide, they were exposed on the walls of at least 28 middle and higher level schools, as confirmed by the students of the Tendedero de Agresores UANL collective.
The denunciation activities were organized to "expose the harassment and abuse, both of students, teachers and other administrative positions", affirm the representatives of the group, in an interview with this newspaper.
It's a joke, right???
High school teachers 7 bridges removing posters of teacher names pic.twitter.com/Tnk4D5sSW3
— darrleeenn (@darlenalaniss) March 10, 2022
Among the sexist reactions to the girls' remarks, a campaign of threats began on social networks.
A Facebook account warned of an alleged shooting at the 22 Juárez High School, while messages forwarded over and over again by Whatsapp warned of the entry of weapons into various campuses, and of physical and sexual assaults against those who placed signs or wore any purple clothing.
"In the high schools where the greatest number of threats were presented, the same students had planned to set up their own clotheslines," warns the group.
The response of teachers from various schools was to dismiss the complaints.
Some tore down the posters and threw them in the trash, as seen in photos and videos shared by the students.
“We cannot fire an employee just because you put up a poster or because you are demanding that they be fired, because we are going to run out of teachers and lawsuits are going to rain down on us,” the tutor from High School 1 told a group of students who protested the contempt for the complaints.
Recorded with a cell phone, the sermon of that teacher, who has been identified as José Juan Miranda Torres, went viral while the threats terrorized the student body and provoked the mobilization of police in at least five high schools, according to local media reports.
the @uanl OVERLAPS abusers and aggressors teachers and students.
THEY ARE DISGUSTING!!!!!
pic.twitter.com/ppaCDTmoOV
— ☆ (@danielaruizgmz) March 10, 2022
The students point out that administrators and teachers have recommended that they establish a legal claim against the exposed aggressors, but they have not been offered advice or support to do so.
“How is a girl going to know how to move in that world, given that most of them are minors?” emphasize the students.
"Especially if the same Secretary of State Security, Aldo Fasci Zuazua, publicly underestimated that they did not attend a robbery of a watch in San Pedro [one of the richest municipalities in Latin America] because they were seeing non-existent shootings in the high schools" , quote.
To shelve the scandal at the state-funded university, the State Prosecutor's Office stated that the threats were false and that they came from "radical groups from the center of the country."
Prosecutor Aldo Fasci assured that this same group was responsible for breaking some windows and setting fire to the door of the Government Palace, after the March 8 demonstration.
"Behind very different events, such as the attacks on the palace and this campaign to provoke fear in the population and distract the authorities, there is a radical group," he said at a press conference.
The UANL Feminist University Front highlights that "the veracity of the threats, regardless of whether they were not carried out within the facilities in the following days or announced, does not diminish the seriousness of the facts and the acts in search of intimidation and censorship" .
"It is very important to emphasize that the threats were made by teachers and students who were being denounced to intimidate the complainants," the group stresses.
Despite everything that has happened, the UANL denied that its students are in danger, through a statement released on social networks.
“No situation has arisen that represents a risk in the high school facilities,” the university said.
The university has reported that since March 8 it has received five formal complaints that are being addressed by the Gender Unit.
"In addition, the demands that were pasted on cardboard to follow up on petitions and complaints are being observed," a spokesperson for the institution told EL PAÍS.
With more than 123,000 students, 50.1% of them women, the UANL does not have public figures or published indicators on cases of sexual harassment and abuse.
According to the spokesperson, a report is currently being prepared in this regard "to capture the history of the Uniigénero [university gender unit]".
This newspaper called on several occasions the hotline of that unit that receives complaints of sexual violence, but no one answered the call.
'They changed my place, but many girls are going to keep coming'
The problem of harassment at UANL is not new.
When Ana—who prefers not to reveal her identity for protection—read what was happening at her alma mater, she couldn't help but relive the trauma of being harassed 10 years earlier by a math teacher from High School 1. She was 17 when the teacher of Some 50 offered to pass the subject in exchange for "a head-to-toe massage," the UANL international relations graduate told EL PAÍS.
"I felt too uncomfortable, the truth was I was shocked," she narrates.
“The teacher told me: 'Look, nothing's wrong, I'll pass you by, but you have my number for when you feel alone,'” she recalls.
The bullying did not stop.
On the first day of classes of the fourth semester, the same teacher approached his bench and started making passes at him in front of the entire class.
She left the room on the verge of tears and took refuge with her friends, but when she left, the man was waiting for her on the stairs and insisted on asking her how she would go home.
Ana steeled herself and the next day she went with her mother to the address to report what was happening.
"My mom was by my side and the secretary told us that the teacher already had many complaints, but that the only thing they could do was change the room and file the report," he says.
A decade later, the former student regrets that the UANL's response remains the same.
"They changed my place, but there are many girls who are going to keep coming," she warns.
"Just as it happened to me, who was very young, I imagine so many situations that happen and it is not worth supporting the harassers," she emphasizes.
When Ana was in high school, there was no institutional protocol to deal with sexual harassment and violence, nor the Gender Unit in charge of receiving and monitoring complaints at the UANL.
These mechanisms were created in 2018 as a result of the first outbreak of complaints that shook the universities of Nuevo León with the impulse of #MeToo and force any complaint by underage students to be investigated ex officio.
The first cases were exposed a year earlier on a web page that added hundreds of accusations, but also threats and hacking attempts.
The co-founder of the Acoso en la U collective, Priscila Palomares, recalls that despite the fact that there were more than a hundred complaints at the UANL, the institution did not take action until a year later.
"There was nowhere to report because they had no protocols," she says.
"Now, there is no transparency in the protocol, it does not seem to me that there is due attention," she exposes.
"What's more, I think that here it is worth asking ourselves who this UANL protocol is for, why does the institution look good or to serve people?" She questions.
The failure of the protocol has caused the protests to continue, such as the clotheslines that the students have put up.
In less than a week, only the social networks of the UANL Clothesline for Aggressors have received about 40 accusations, some of them made by underage students.
Among those mentioned are teachers, students and graduates.
“We know, both from our own experiences and from those of others, that we are not given due follow-up as victims.
Many cases are frozen, many more are not even taken”, warn the students of the group.
The complaints in Nuevo León are not an isolated event.
Students from other universities in the country have raised their voices to put a stop to the violence they experience.
For example, at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), the Autonomous Metropolitan University, the Juárez Autonomous University of Tabasco, the Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP), the Veracruzana University, the University of Guerrero, the University of Sonora and the University of Guadalajara, among others.
In many of them, the women's movement forced the creation of mechanisms for dealing with, monitoring and punishing harassment and abuse.
In response, some of these universities have expelled several of the aggressors, including professors, students and technical staff.
"The universities,
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