Translated by Sally Seward
An unruly spirit is seen as the instigator of loud, collective protest demonstrations, although in Mexico it is already being employed with actions of growing confrontation and aggression. The increased demonstrations of teachers, of those who claim to be teachers, have spread past Oaxaca, Michoacán and the Federal District. There have been violent fights recently in Cancún and in Mitla, Oaxaca.
In Quintana Roo around one thousand teachers arrived, at 8 in the morning, at the Municipal Palace of Cancún to ask the mayor to withdraw the agents that were guarding the headquarters of the Secretariat of Education and Culture, so they could block it. More than a petition, it was a provocation and a foolish act. With the insolent audacity of those who believe they have been wronged by a breach of the agreements made with governor Roberto Borge, they threatened to remain at the Municipal Palace permanently.
There was struggling and the municipal police took them on using tear gas. The teachers responded by throwing stones. The state attorney general's office began the preliminary investigation of charges of incriminating damages, injuries, riots and insults to authority. Those protesting complain that a plan has been hatched to make rearrangements in schools, involving the dismissal of teachers. They also require that the "movement" be given legal status.
Twenty-six angry protesters, according to the Committee of the Teachers' Fight, were detained and five suffered minor injuries. In most of the municipalities in the state, eight out of ten, there are no classes. To radicalize their actions, there were closures on the highway between Playa del Carmen and Cancún, for periods of 10 minutes, in the municipality of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, going towards Tulum, and in Chetumal, going towards Cancún.
This means that the peninsular state is trapped in quarrelsomeness, losses, violence and unavoided repression. A favorite region for international tourism and drug trafficking, Quintana Roo has already fallen into the pendulum of partial ungovernability, occasional, for now.
In Oaxaca, confusion and fights are daily. The people of Oaxaca, with their "traditions" of a thousand and one school strikes, have now made the unexpected return to classes. There has also been a response from the parents. In the municipality of Villa de Mitla they went to the extreme of keeping the teachers belonging to the chronically agitated Section 22 from returning; they didn't allow them into two elementary schools. And more: in the community of Valles Centrales, they established a squad to keep the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers from retaking their schools.
The rivalries and eagerness for cushy jobs, positions and powers, as well as marginalization, gave rise to Section 59 of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE). And this is how the events played out in schools like those in San Jacinto Amilpas:
"They (the CNTE) must understand that the schools don't belong to them, like they say. The schools belong to the children and the people".This is so true that Justice Olga Sánchez Cordero [this week] stated a judicial, constitutional thesis, pointing out that education is a right that a child has, and that there is no law that contradicts this key principle. Just as the teachers allege a violation of their rights, the violation of this precept has violated a human right.
The CNTE, as if it were a typical, common organization, is accused of resorting to forcing educators to participate in 80% of its mobilizations and activities. It is a good time for the teachers to make groups, to form unions, but it is backwards to impose behaviors and tasks. That is how they compel them, according to the "mobilizations" program, to challenge the order and the laws of Mexico City.
They assemble a press and propaganda commission: they liberate tollbooths in the country; commissions act in Veracruz, occupying shopping centers; regional meetings [are held] in San Luis Potosí; they march [in Mexico City] from the Monument of the Revolution to the Supreme Court of Justice; they surround Televisa and TV Azteca [the two broadcast networks]; they seize ports, border crossings, airports, refineries; [there are] gatherings and liberations of tollbooths in all of the states.
No pronouncements of revolutionary intent are known from this union section. They are not so excessive or outrageous. But the sum of their acts places them in unconstitutional territory, with riotous rebellion, with haste and impertinent demands. The changes to the education law require slow legislative reforms.
The rejection of their activism, of these ways and strategies, is not exhausted with the complaints, insults and rejections by other citizens. The Social Security union has refused to back them. [In return] the teachers accuse them of being boycotters. They keep fueling their fire. What a shame.
*Froylán M. López Narváez graduated from the Faculty of Law of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is a professor on the Faculty of Political Science (Prof. of University Merit 1994 and 2001) and in Philosophy and Sociology at the National Polytechnic School. He has lectured at universities and forums at the Universities of Salamanca, Miami, UCLA, ITAM, Iberoamerican, Rio de Janeiro. He is a self-described Marxist.
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