The Mexican uprising deepens with teacher’s strike

Less than one year after taking office, the administration of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto faces serious challenges to its core policies. Leading the opposition are tens of thousands of public school teachers protesting the new No Child Left Behind-like law they contend will cost jobs, aggravate educational inequities and lead to privatization.
The protest, which counts months now, is expanding in both scope and participation and more and more assuming the character of a multi-issue popular movement.
Increasingly, the teacher protest is transforming from a single-issue opposition to education reform into a broad movement against the cornerstones of the Pact for Mexico, the political program promoted by President Peña Nieto and the leaders of the Big Three political parties, which implements controversial educational, labor, energy and taxation reforms.

In Chiapas, for instance, teachers, labor unions, university students, farmers, and community activists have forged the Unitary Struggle Front from the fire of the teacher strike.

“This will help us because from now on every struggle will be shared by the working class and not just a particular sector,” said Alejandro Ovando Rodríguez, Front spokesman. “That’s because the education, tax and energy reforms will affect all the Mexican people.”

This week, even as sizable chunks of the country were reeling from the left- right double punch delivered by Hurricane Ingrid and Tropical Storm Manuel, teachers and their allies intensified their protests.

Thousands of educators blocked not only the glitzy hotel zone of touristic Cancun for a repeat time, but temporarily cut off the principal access points to the entire city. Fellow teachers in Tlaxcala did the same thing.

In Baja California, teachers infuriated by the state government’s initiation of firing procedures against 75 strikers and the levying of fines against hundreds of others, blockaded commercial export lanes in the border city of Tijuana and announced the expansion of protests to Mexicali, Tecate, Ensenada, and the agro-export region of the San Quintin Valley. In Chiapas, where an estimated 70,000 teachers and their supporters staged a September 14 protest rally, rank-and-file members of the official SNTE union issued a call for a “teacher and popular uprising” and later occupied a Pemex plant.

As the week wore on, rolling work stoppages were reported in Michoacán and other states. Contingents of pro-movement parents, students and small farmers turned out for marches in Veracruz and elsewhere.

“If there is repression, there will be revolution!” chanted students and teachers in Xalapa, Veracruz, where police violently broke up a protest on the city plaza last weekend.

\In Mexico City, thousands of public school teachers from around the country were undeterred by the government’s eviction of their protest encampment last week. Now reinforced by university students and faculty, the movement flexed its muscle with more street marches and demonstrations outside commercial television stations the protestors accuse of being behind a concerted campaign of teacher-bashing.

“The protests have made evident the enormous incapacity of politicians and media personalities to understand the nature, composition and behavior of the national teachers,” wrote La Jornada columnist Luis Hernandez Navarro. “Every two days, an imminent end to the problem and a return of the teachers to the states is announced.

The press even shows pictures of teachers packing their suitcases. Despite this, every day more teachers arrive in Mexico City and increase their protests in other places of the country.” Organizationally separate from but ideologically akin to the teachers’ movement, another anti-Pact for Mexico mobilization picked up steam this week when a group of prominent politicians, intellectuals and activists issued a four-point statement that rejected President Pena Nieto’s education, energy and tax reforms as harmful to national interests.

Among the personalities issuing the call for peaceful civil resistance were Coahuila Bishop Raúl Vera, former national university rector Pablo González Casanova and human rights activist Miguel Concha. The appeal was jointly supported by left opposition leaders Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas, two men who had long been politically distanced. In a statement, the group slammed a “media campaign of lynching” against the “just causes” of the teachers, and urged the Mexican people to resist the “sacking of the nation and of our people that the government and transnational oil companies promote.”

In recent days, Mother Nature tossed another ingredient into an already boiling political stew. “Biblical” rains and flooding unleashed by Hurricane Ingrid on the Gulf coast and Tropical Storm Manuel on the Pacific side of the nation disrupted the lives of more than one million people and caused nearly 100 deaths, with the number of fatalities likely to reach much higher. Neighborhoods and commercial centers were inundated, highways and bridges washed out, homes buried in mud, and rural communities isolated.

The storms laid bare the myriad social and economic contradictions always simmering beneath the surface of Mexican life: rural versus urban, rich versus poor, indigenous versus non-indigenous, developed versus undeveloped, government versus society.

Already, sharp polemics are raging over the alleged unpreparedness of the government to first warn of and then respond to the double disasters. In Mexico and Latin America, natural disasters, which always contain a large man-made component, frequently have significant political consequences, as witnessed by the 1972 Nicaraguan earthquake that spelled doom for the longrunning Somoza regime, or the 1985 Mexico City earthquake that is widely credited for eventually helping bring about an end to the domination of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Perhaps with history in mind, President Pena Nieto has been careful to visit Acapulco twice since Manuel slammed into the city. Manuel’s impact was hardest felt in the southern state of Guerrero, a stronghold of the teacher and other social movements.

“Chilpancingo is totally collapsed,” is how Mayor Mario Moreno described the situation in the Guerrero state capital in the aftermath of Manuel. In the countryside, scores of communities were rendered incommunicado and the threat of hunger and deprivation mounted. In a statement, the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center of the Mountain, a non-governmental organization which works closely with indigenous communities in the impoverished La Montana region, sharply criticized the government response to Manuel.

“There is a complete lack of coordination among the three levels of government and there is no political representation that is attending with speed the proposals and demands of the victims,” Tlachinollan charged. “Until now, the victims of La Montana are not receiving sufficient attention from government agencies, and the worst consequences of these natural disasters falls on the population of the region in extreme poverty. Once again, the most marginalized men and women are also the most forgotten.”

As the fall season kicks in, the after-effects of Ingrid and Manuel, the militancy of the teacher movement, protests against the upcoming energy and taxation legislative packages, and a host of other contentious local and regional issues are all carving out a quite surprising and explosive political landscape.

A variety of Mexican news media sources contributed to this report.

Frontera NorteSur is an on-line source for U.S.-Mexico border news, produced by the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. For a free electronic subscription, email: fnsnews@nmsu.edu.