ABSTRACT
The Argentina of 1918 had abandoned the oligarchic and elitist political model of the 1880 regime through universal suffrage, which reflected the interests of the rising middle class through President Hipolito Irigoyen, leader of the Radical Civic Union (UCR). After 1918 the Argentine student movement became synonymous with the Latin American student movement. The coup of General Uriburu in 1930 was the first in a long series of military dictatorships in Argentina. Between 1930 and 1945, the church, along with the other more conservative sectors of society, began to take control of the universities. The 1955 government defined itself as the Liberating Revolution and had as its explicit objective the "restoration of the university's autonomy"; its implicit objective was the "de-Peronization of the universities". The politicization that characterized the university student movement between 1955 and 1966 resulted in its relative independence from the government's ideology. The university student movement is one of the social movements of today's emerging democracy.
