At 7:28 p.m., Jan. 16, five student reporters sat in a Mexican newsroom discussing their newspaper’s future. At 7:30 p.m., that future became defunct.As student reporter Astrid Viveros told it, that’s when the controversy started.

Four administrators from la Universidad de las Americas, TCU’s sister university in Puebla, Mexico, accompanied campus police into the headquarters of La Catarina, UDLA’s student newspaper, and the reporters were ordered to leave.

Viveros said the La Catarina staff immediately moved everything, including archives, posters, books and personal belongings out of the office.

“Professors who were fired during Christmas or summer break weren’t allowed to come into their offices and gather their stuff,” she said. “We didn’t want the same thing to happen to us.”

But the administrators didn’t stop at forcing the La Catarina staff out, she said.

“We weren’t allowed to back up our computer files,” Viveros said, “and the administration went to the extent of cutting off the electricity in our office to prevent us from doing so.”

Campus police also stopped reporters as they were taking pictures of the event, Viveros said.

The reason for the closure is still unclear.

DIFFERENT EXPLANATIONS

Many UDLA students and alumni consider the closure of La Catarina to be the UDLA administration’s way of punishing the newspaper for its recent criticism of the university and its chancellor, Pedro Palou.

“La Catarina used to be a unique model in Mexico,” Viveros said. “No other university in our country has a newspaper that is administrated and managed editorially solely by students. We were able to generate critical thought among our peers regarding the administration’s decisions.”

University spokesman Felipe Flores, however, rejected the students’ and alumni’s indictment of the administration.

Flores, UDLA’s Director of Social Communication, said La Catarina was not closed, but “its publication was postponed to adapt the newspaper to the profile of the university’s social service projects.”

Other versions of the story that have been circulating, Flores said, and have been poorly intended and, “frankly, absurd and lacking substance.”

Viveros said she heard otherwise from UDLA Provost Luis Foncerrada.

“To this day the administration has given a bureaucratic reason for the reorganization of La Catarina to the rest of the students and local media,” she said. “Nevertheless, a few members of our staff had a meeting with Foncerrada, who admitted the decision to close the paper was made last semester. The explanation he gave was that some articles were overly critical and had a lack or respect for the university.”

Foncerrada did not return e-mails seeking comment on Viveros’s version of what he said.

While the controversy gets sorted out, TCU is re-evaluating its ties to its sister university, Provost Nowell Donovan said.

But Viveros and her fellow reporters don’t stand alone in their skepticism.

Show of support

In a letter to The Skiff, a group of 27 UDLA alumni and former La Catarina reporters made clear their suspicions about UDLA’s reasons for the newspaper closure.

The group, whose members reside in places from Kentucky to England, rejected the university’s implications that La Catarina is a community service project that will be restructured to fit the mold of similar social service institutions at UDLA.

Former La Catarina Editor in Chief Maria Cruz explained the administration’s justification.

Cruz, a graduate student at New York University, said there is a special community service requirement for college students in Mexico. Students are obligated to devote a certain number of hours to a service job related to their majors, she said.

“People can do their social service anywhere, so some people could do it at La Catarina,” Cruz said. “I think it was like five students per semester that did their social service there, and La Catarina has much more than five students working there … That’s the only relationship that we hold with the Social Service Department.”

The group of UDLA alumni joined Cruz in her take on the situation.

“La Catarina was never a social service project and does not work as a part of the Social Service Department … it is for these reasons that we find both surprising and suspicious the arguments given by the UDLA authorities to shut down the paper,” the group said in the letter.

A UDLA faculty member agreed, too.

“My response to the events has been anger and complete disappointment,” the professor said. “I believe this has been an arbitrary decision made by the current administration because they did not like the critical spirit of the newspaper.”

Government Involvement

Among the administrative decisions that La Catarina criticized, the most was Chancellor Palou’s decision to associate with Mario Marin, governor of the state of Puebla.

Marin has been the center of controversy as of late, since the Mexican national media exposed audio tapes of the governor’s precarious conversations with Mexican textile magnate Kamel Nacif.

According to La Jornada, a Puebla newspaper, Nacif is recorded thanking Marin for his action against a journalist who accused him of child molestation, and Nacif praises him with words such as, “My governor, you are the hero.”

Later in the recording, according to La Jornada, Nacif also promises to send Marin “a beautiful bottle of cognac in appreciation.”

Viveros said Palou invited Marin to give a speech during the chancellor’s annual report to the UDLA community last semester.

After a transcript of the recording hit the newsstands, La Catarina published numerous cartoons and articles criticizing Chancellor Palou’s relations with the governor and a photograph of Palou and Marin walking together through campus.

Even in spite of the controversy surrounding her school, Viveros maintains her pride in UDLA.

“I think there is a reason we refer to the Chancellor and his staff as ‘the administration’ and not as ‘the university,'” she said. “I love this school… A university is not an administration. It is its teachers, workers and students.