Listen to Raúl Ayrala's full report
Students of the Stanford University Joining the series of demonstrations taking place at various educational campuses in the United States, students have gathered to demand that university authorities cut their financial ties with Israel due to its war with Hamas.
Raul Ayrala visited this camp where, students protest Israel's attacks on Gaza; At the site they are camping on the grass of the so-called White Plaza of Stanford University, a space that the same university set aside for protests and demonstrations.
There are 20 camping tents, where students spend the day and night; Young people participate in various activities of what they call the Popular University.
Camilo Pérez Bustillos, Colombian and executive director of a national union of lawyers, was invited as a witness in the Popular Court that tried Stanford for its alleged complicity with Israel in what students call the genocide in Palestine.
?We think that the United States government, the Biden administration and his campaign are looking with great concern at this wave of protests that have been defined as a new student uprising from coast to coast, in the most influential institutions, but also in the less known and more remote, in rural areas, for example in northern California, in the states that will be decisive for the next election that comes in November?, This is what a participant said during an interview given to Ayrala.
On Friday, April 26, at 7:30 in the morning, five police officers who were traveling in a van that said Sheriff and below Stanford, observed the campers while the police officers drank their coffee, but at 11:00 In the morning they had already retired, without any intervention.
An organizer who belongs to the student group for justice in Palestine and who is studying law said that Stanford has a subtle way of exerting pressure on its group in a gentle way, without resorting to violence.
?What we see in Stanford is that there is no police pressure, but there is administrative repression; The administration has a way to apply pressure against students, such as disciplining them or giving them penalties.?, explained the organizer.
The majority are vulnerable students since they depend on the university for housing or even immigration status, as well as for financial or community aid.
The group of students is committed to staying at the university, so they did not want to give information on deadlines when asking how long they would remain in the Plaza Blanca.
Other protests have simultaneously occurred in other universities, for example in the Columbia University in New York where there were one hundred arrested, at Emory University in Atlanta where local police arrested 28 people and used their pepper bullets even against members of the university.
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