Mass mobilisation defends Mexico teachers’ struggle

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Mexico City last Sunday (26 June) to protest the killing of at least 11 teachers and student teachers who are fighting the government’s reactionary educational ‘reform’. Students and their parents joined the teachers, as did telecommunication workers, striking medical workers, oil workers and lecturers from UNAM, Latin America’s largest university.

Thousands of heavily armed police were mobilised to prevent the demonstrators entering the Zocalo, the historic central square in front of the presidential palace.

Sunday’s protests were followed by the blocking of roads and strategic bridges in the country and the beginning of a motorised caravan to Nochixtlan, Oaxaca state, where the worst violence took place last week.

During the June 19 massacre in Nochixtlan. 11 people were killed when police forces attacked demonstrators who had been blockading a road into the town with tear gas, shotguns and automatic weapons. Teachers had gathered strong support from local people and 5000 people were with the blockade. Police subsequently swept through the town randomly attacking people in the street and in their homes.

What explains this display of ultra-violence by the state authorities? The teachers and student teachers, among the most militant of Mexican workers and led by the CNTE – the most combative wing of the teachers’ union – have been engaged in a three-year battle against the neoliberal ‘reform’ of education. These reforms proposed by President Enrique Peña Nieto include privatisation of educational institutions, the licensing of non-qualified teachers and a nationally standardised programme of assessment for students and teachers.

As well as opening up education to the control of big companies, the reform also aims to break up the structure of Mexican education which often makes it a stronghold of radicalism. Peña Nieto particularly wants to close down the escuelas normales teacher training colleges.

These colleges each year take thousands of high school graduates with no university education, bolsters their numeracy and literacy, and imbues them with an ethos of helping the poor. Most graduates of these schools go back to their town and villages with a mission to bring education and hope to ordinary people. Teachers in Mexico are hugely popular among the poor and dispossessed. As a consequences some of the normal schools are seen by the government as hotbeds of revolt.

As part of the same struggle, in September 2014 a clash between police and students from the normal Ayotzinapa school in Iguala, Guerrero state, six students died and 43 were arrested. The 43 were handed over by police to a local drugs gang, who tortured and subsequently murdered them. This massacre resulted in a huge outpouring of grief and anger and helped build massive popular support for the struggle.

The leadership of the main teachers union, the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE) is however hugely corrupted and controlled by the right-wing PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party). They have bought into the government’s reform project. As a result the teachers’ battle has been led by the ‘class struggle’ wing of the union, the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE).

On June 12 key CNTE leaders Rubén Nuñez and Francisco Villlobos, were abducted in the street by plain clothes police and flown to the prison in Hermosillo in the far north west of the country, a long way from the key centres of the struggle in Oaxaca and Guerrero states.

Violence, kidnapping and murder are hardly new features of the class struggle in Mexico. In May 2006 the population of San Salvador Atenco, a small town near the capital which had been the focus of a successful struggle against building of a new Mexico City airport, was savagely attacked,  with dozens brutalised, tortured and imprisoned and two killed. Current President Peña Nieto was the governor of Mexico state in 2006, and he ordered the attack on Atenco.

Under Peña Nieto’s leadership, police at all levels have been involved in mega violence and deaths in response to protests. A UN report recently stated that “extrajudicial killings [by police] and impunity persist in Mexico.”

The struggle over education is the latest phase of the attempt to thoroughly neoliberalise Mexico, which in the last 10 years has involved prolonged fights over the privatisation of electricity and the state oil company Pemex.

Drug money and complicity with the narco gangs has completely corrupted Mexican politics at every level. No Mexican president leaves power with less than $100 million. All state governors and prosecutors, the army and the police tops, are up to their elbows in drug money. Complicity with the violence of the drug gangs, which has led to the deaths of upwards of 80,000 people, has meant the brutal degradation of public life. This has only worsened the climate of police impunity in dishing out massive violence against popular struggles. Only the struggles of the workers and rural poor are going to turn the tide against narco-neoliberalism. The Mexican teachers urgently need out support.

Some of the information here is taken from the excellent Teachers Solidarity site. Solidarity information below is provided by them.

Tweet support to Mexican struggle using hashtag #yoestoyconlosmaestros (yo estoy con los maestros: I am with the teachers)

Please send letters of protest to the Mexican President enrique.penanieto@presidencia.gob.mx

Secretario Particular Erwin Manuel Lino elino@presidencia.gob.mx

Presidente de la Suprema Corte de Justicia, México scjn_presidencia@mail.scjn.gob.mx

Please send copies of your protest emails to seccionmexicana.coali@gmail.com & mariluzarriaga@gmail.com