The Argentine University Federation is the most important student organization in Argentina The FUA was created on April 11, 1918 within the University Reformstudent movement originated in Córdoba, which later spread through Latin America, that demanded an autonomous system in which teachers, graduates, and students would participate in the government of the universities. The FUA gathers the university federations of every local university, which are at the same time composed of student centres of each faculty, totalling a million and a half students throughout the country. The biggest and most important of such federations is the FUBA of the University of Buenos Aires with over 300,000 students. Other important federations include the FULP, FUR, FUC, FUT and FUL. In 1894 was founded in the Faculty of Engineering of the UBA the first student centre in Argentina, under the name "La Línea Recta". Medicine and Law had their own in 1940 and 1905 respectively. The most powerful student centre nowadays is that of the Economic Sciences of the UBA, with 50,000 students, followed by UBA's Law school and Medicine.
Latin America
Since its beginnings the FUA supported a politic of Latin American unity and international solidarity. In 1920 Gabriel del Mazo signed, on behalf of the FUA, an exchange and coordination agreement with the Peruvian Federación de Estudiantes del Perú's president Raúl Haya de la Torre. In 1921 the FUA participated of the organization of the First International Students Congress at Mexico City, from which the International Students Federation was born. In 1925 it participated of the organization of the First Ibero-American Students Congress also in Mexico city. In that congress Alfredo Palacios, Miguel de Unamuno, José Ingenieros, José Martí and José Vasconcelos are declared "teachers of the youth". In 1937 took place in Santiago de Chile the First Latin American Students Congress. In 1957 the FUA organised the Second Latin American Students Congress, in La Plata.
Throughout its history, there have been several and varied movements, ideologies, and parties that coexisted, and still do, in the Argentine students' politics: radicals, socialists, Peronists, communists, Maoists, etc. The Franja Morada, youth arm of the UCR, is the party that most often has directed the FUA since Franja Morada's creation in 1970, and has remained in the presidency from 1973 to 2016. Other important parties are the Juventud Universitaria Peronista or JUP and the Movimiento Nacional Reformista of the Socialist Party, who has ruled during the 1970s.
