Mexico’s drug war has claimed the lives of more than a dozen university students and professors over the past two years, while others have become victims of kidnappings and armed robberies, university presidents said at a conference this week.
The violence has forced university officials to double or even triple spending on private security and to suspend travel and other activities for students and professors, participants said during a meeting in the central city of Morelia, the newspaper El Universal reported. The gathering drew presidents from the country’s 150 main public and private universities.
Conference leaders called on President Felipe Calderón—who has deployed some 30,000 soldiers and military police to battle the narcotics gangs since taking office three years ago—to take measures to protect civilians.
At the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, 11 students and professors have been killed as a direct result of the drug war in the past two years, the university’s president, Jorge Quintana Silveyra, was quoted as saying in El Universal on Wednesday. In addition, two students have disappeared and one has been kidnapped at the university, he said.
Ciudad Juárez, a teeming manufacturing hub across the border from El Paso, Tex., is embroiled in a bloody turf war between rival drug gangs and is the epicenter of the government’s offensive against organized crime. In March, two graduate engineering students were slain in the crossfire between the army and drug traffickers outside the private Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Studies, in the northern industrial city of Monterrey. The incident, which came a week after the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning for Mexico, prompted several American universities to suspend their exchange programs in Monterrey and Ciudad Juárez, among other cities.
Amid the climate of violence, however, it is often difficult to tell what crimes are the direct result of the drug war. In April, a visiting psychology student was beaten to death outside the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, in Monterrey. And last week, an architecture student from the same university was stabbed to death in the city.