Mexico: Teachers Lead Mass Strike Against Bosses’ State Terror

OAXACA, MEXICO, June 1 — Led by Oaxaca Local 21, class struggle in Mexico once again has taken the form of a teachers’ strike. A week after the strike began on May 21, it was joined by the workers of Michoacan, Guerrero, and Chiapas, along with Locals 9 and 10 of the Federal District and Local 36 of the Mexico Valley, Sinaloa and Veracruz.

The main demand presented by the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educacion (CNTE), the teachers’ coordinating committee, is to eliminate the deceptively named Quality of Education Project, which is designed to privatize public education, take back hard-won labor benefits, and destroy the National Education Workers Union (SNTE).

U.S. imperialism’s economic globalization strategy, enforced by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and carried out in alliance with the national ruling classes of each country, has medium-term and long-term goals. It aims to control natural resources (oil, electricity, minerals, water), mass media (telephone, television), and public services (health, education, transportation).

Bosses’ Reform Attacks Labor

In addition, the bosses’ plan requires cheap, well-trained and docile labor to carry out mega-projects like the Puebla-Panama Project and the Turistic Corridor in the Tehuantepec Isthmus. To make these hugely profitable projects possible, the capitalists have implemented political reform, which changes existing legislation, and labor reforms, which attempt to take back the historical gains of the labor movement and destroy the unions. 

To defend their gross exploitation and accumulation of wealth, the bosses use state terror, or fascism, to discipline their own class and to keep the working class intimidated and under control. The ruling-class Confederación Patronal de la Republica Mexicana (COPARMEX), in collaboration with the group “Mexicans First” (led by Televisa and TVAzteca), launched an angry campaign to denounce and discredit teachers. As a pretext to take over the business of education, the campaign tries to blame teachers for the education system’s failures and for everything wrong in society.

Meanwhile, the Alliance for Quality Education (ACE), is attempting to privatize basic education (from pre-school through high school) and to restrict such basic labor rights as retirement and access to social services. Since 2008, 32 Mexican states (excluding Oaxaca) have been testing students with the universal evaluations Enlace and Pisa. New teachers undergo regular certification evaluations to determine the terms of their temporary contracts.

Teachers Block Airport 

The universal evaluations are not used in Oaxaca because the militant Local 22 organized large demonstrations to block the airport as well as PEMEX (the state-owned oil company) and other transnational and Mexican businesses. In Guerrero, Michoacan and Chiapas, dissident teachers have limited the use of these evaluations by seizing all printed copies.

The capitalist bosses of COPARMEX, CONACINTRA, CONACOPE, Televisa, and TVAzteca have used the media to furiously attack the CNTE teachers and try to turn public opinion against them. After teachers took over Oaxaca’s historical center, this ruling-class consortium called a citizens’ march to violently evict them.  On Sunday, June 3, only 150 people showed up for this reactionary march — a handful of businessmen, a few right-wing members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and some misled parents and students. Once it was clear that the bosses’ plan failed, they chose to retreat instead of looking ridiculous. Mexican President Felipe Calderón said, “Stop using the children and throwing tantrums, we’re going to enforce the law!”

Calderon’s Genocide

Calderon’s statement showed that he cares nothing about the education of poor people and could at any moment order the bloody repression of the CNTE, just as Vicente Fox did in Oaxaca in 2006.  He has already revealed himself as Mexico’s worst terrorist and criminal when he crushed the Electricians’ Union (SME), putting more than 40,000 workers out of work and causing the genocidal death of 60,000 people in the so-called War on Drugs.

Investors claim that no one will invest in Oaxaca because the new state government, led by Governor Gabino Cué, deceived them. In fact, the outside investors that came to Oaxaca created very few jobs, paid extremely low wages for 10- to 12-hour work-days. They took huge profits from this super-exploitation while expropriating natural resources, archeological and cultural centers, and many other riches. They have dispossessed the peasantry, turning them into poorly paid workers. 

New Politicians, Same Old Capitalism

Oaxaca’s workers, including its teachers, were tired of the PRI’s 70-plus years of theft, corruption, repression and death. They had high hopes when they thought they elected a progressive government in 2010. But nothing changed. Poverty and unemployment increased daily. The last two years have seen more workers disappeared and murdered. Amongst the disappeared are two teachers, Carlos Román Salazar and Guadalupe Perez Sanchez. Last December, Prof. Rafael Vicente Rodriguez, a former union leader, was murdered. More recently, Bernardo Sanchez, leader of the movement against a Canadian mining company established in San Jose del Progreso, was riddled with bullets.

All of these attacks against the working class — Calderón’s genocides, the repression of the worker and student movements, the forced disappearances and assassinations — expose how fascism is rising to maintain this rotten capitalist system. It’s also clear that the bourgeois parties that take turns running the government are all the same, all equally bad. Voting for these politicians brings only unemployment, poverty, betrayals and death. The only true solution to the problems caused by this system of wage slavery is to organize and to struggle for a new society that meets workers’ needs. Join PLP and fight for a communist future!