Paraguay Students Protest Governmental Suppression

Complaints about government suppression and growing student unrest in Paraguay reached the National Student Association's International Commission in Cambridge Tuesday, Luigi Einaudi '57, New England chairman of the NSA, revealed yesterday.

An unsigned letter and enclosed clippings from Paraguay state that the nation's Federation of University Students declared a general student strike in protest of the arrest and mistreatment of over 250 students by police since April 10.

The letter asked Clive R. Grey, NSA Vice-President on International Affairs, to publicize their complaint through the international press, inform UNESCO and the Commission on Human Rights, and send an investigating commission of the International Student Conference to Paraguay.

"Latin American dictatorships frequently suppress students," declared Einaudi who traveled to Argentina after the overthrow of the Peron regime. "Dictators are naturally apprehensive of the opinion of university students," he added, "since the intelligentsia has a great deal of influence in underdeveloped countries."

Over 120 Wounded

Over 120 students were wounded, according to the letter, when Assuncion police arrested visiting Argentine and Uruguayan student delegates as "foreign subversives inciting treason."

On Friday, April 12, police surrounded the conference site and made an unprovoked attack on the delegates with pistol butts, sticks, and knives.

The purpose of the visit by the Argentines and Uruguayans was to express their "solidarity" for university autonomy and to ask their respective governments for more competent professors instead of political appointees, freedom of choice in buying books, and an abolition of government spy networks in the universities.