MEXICO CITY -- (AP) -- Police who ousted striking students from Latin America's
 largest university found trash barricading streets, classrooms turned into
 campgrounds and laboratories serving as kitchens.

 As officials on Monday surveyed the damage -- and the graffiti -- at the National
 Autonomous University, they faced an even more daunting task in calming
 passions at a school with 270,000 students and a crucial role in Mexican life. A
 day after a police raid that apparently ended a 9 1/2-month strike, university
 spokesman Roberto Vivanco said classes could resume after officials clean up
 the campus. He gave no date.

 It isn't clear how many students might show up. Some said they would boycott
 classes until the more than 700 strike supporters arrested Sunday were freed.
 And many other students had already abandoned the university for jobs or other
 schools.

 The strike was driven by radicals who saw it as a struggle against global
 free-market economics. It began as a protest against tuition increases but
 continued long after officials canceled them. Interior Secretary Diodoro Carrasco,
 who oversees the police who carried out the raid, conceded Monday that the
 crisis was not over.

 ``I think the recovery of the installations is a fundamental step, but it seems to me
 that it has to be followed by an enormous effort of reconciliation in the university
 community,'' he said in a television interview.

 That caution is partly due to the importance of the university known as UNAM.
 With almost no tuition, its classrooms mingle the children of Mexico's elite with
 promising teenagers from the slums. Most of Mexico's academic scientific
 research is done at UNAM laboratories. Its schools of law and economics have
 produced four of the past five presidents.

 President Ernesto Zedillo studied elsewhere, but the candidate favored to
 succeed him this year, Francisco Labastida, is an UNAM graduate. Most key
 figures in Zedillo's administration also attended UNAM. Even the leader of the
 Zapatista rebels studied at UNAM.

 Memory of a 1968 government massacre of students was one reason why the
 government avoided intervening for so long -- and why the eventual use of police
 was so traumatic to many.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald