UPAU: a unique case of right-wing students in democracy

This paper examines the right-wing university group UPAU (Unión Para la Apertura Universitaria), which became the second largest student force at the University of Buenos Aires in the last third of the 1980s. With an explicit position towards the right and a proposal that the student unions should r...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Cristal, Yann
Format: Online
Language:spa
Published: Centro de Estudios Avanzados 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/index.php/restudios/article/view/42182
Description
Summary:This paper examines the right-wing university group UPAU (Unión Para la Apertura Universitaria), which became the second largest student force at the University of Buenos Aires in the last third of the 1980s. With an explicit position towards the right and a proposal that the student unions should refrain from «doing politics», UPAU was the reverse of the «democratic spring» at the university and a key case of the disenchantment experienced by broad sectors in relation to the initial expectations with the democracy of 1983. Based on these problems, we propose to analyze the growth of UPAU in the UBA during the eighties, its program and the characteristics of its militancy, as well as its impact over the student organizations and the university in those years. These characteristics made UPAU a unique case, not only in the Argentine postdictatorship, but also in the history of student movement in our country.