The sign reads: “Abrogation of the Education Reform. If there is repression in Chiapas, the just thing is to finish with the parasites.” Drawings of (president) Enrique Peña Nieto and Aurelio Nuño, Secretary of Education, are on either side of the banner.
Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, August 27.
“The Mexican State sets the stage for openly repressing the teachers’ movement; therefore the government is realizing an atmosphere of lynching that generates a certain endorsement of police brutality in public opinion,” warn teachers adhered to the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) in a communiqué. They have been on strike for the abrogation of the self-named “education reform” since last May 15.
“The explanation for this new media lynching that we can read and hear every day, is that the Peña Nieto regime knows about the population’s discontent with its policy, and that an organization the size of the CNTE fighting can push the political awakening in the working class even further and throw out its structural reforms that have a privatizing character,” the teachers say in the face of the increasing media attack against them, and upon continuing with their strike and not starting classes last August 22.
“The lynching against the education workers is carried out daily by mandate of the Peña government, or through the servile action of the state governments,” the dissident educators evidence. “The Mexican State has unleashed a media lynching against the CNTE, making use of all its corporate communications media, aligned with los interests of the national and international oligarchy,” the teachers abound.
“To the people of Chiapas and the country we tell you that we will not cede in out defense of public education,” affirm the striking educators of Sections 7 and 40, and they demand that the federal government immediately reinstall the negotiating table with the CNTE, because “dialogue is the space for reaching agreements, and not the violent response that Peña Nieto wants to give to those that demonstrate peacefully,” they emphasize.
“We declare ourselves on permanent alert and in struggle against the misnamed education reform and against this authoritarian regime and we demonstrate for the joint construction with society of a real educational transformation,” CNTE members report.
Nevertheless, despite the media campaign against the teachers, the number of parents that are against the strike is minimal, as they have demonstrated in assemblies held all over the state where they continue offering social support to the teachers’ movement. At the same time, it has been evident in social networks that those supposedly in disagreement with the school closings are close to the government as in the much-publicized case of the state’s secondary school in the Chiapas capital.
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Originally Published in Spanish by Pozol Colectivo
Saturday, August 27, 2016
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Chiapas Support Committee 