While
Teaching
Resistance
has frequently addressed the many problems with so-called public
school “reform” efforts, it
is important to note that the hypercapitalist and neoliberal forces
which have forced teachers to defend themselves and their profession
from destruction are not restricted to the
United States.
In
Mexico, the teachers of Oaxaca state are
in a state of open conflict with the government over its efforts to
privatize the public school system there. This conflict, which has
recently turned openly violent (generally violence inflicted by the
state), has flared into the global news cycle a few times over the
last several months – but while attention from the rest of the
world comes and goes, the violence and repression by capital in full
collusion with the Mexican state continues unabated.
The
author of August 2016's Teaching Resistance is Scott
Campbell,
a radical writer and translator based in Oakland, California. He
previously lived in Mexico for several years, including Oaxaca. His
pieces appear frequently on El
Enemigo Común
and It’s
Going Down.
He can be found online at fallingintoincandescence.com
and @incandesceinto
on Twitter. Solidarity
to our Mexican colleagues, and power to the people everywhere against
hypercapitalism and imperialist hegemony over public education.
In
the fall of 2008 while in the city of Oaxaca, I walked with David
Venegas in the plaza in front of the Santo Domingo Cathedral, a
massive four-block church and former monastery whose construction
first began in 1572. We were returning from the courthouse nearby,
where Venegas had to report every 15 days. A prominent member of the
Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) and the
anti-authoritarian group Oaxacan Voices Building Autonomy and Freedom
(VOCAL), Venegas was arrested, beaten and tortured in April 2007,
held for eleven months on charges of “possession with intent to
distribute cocaine and heroin, sedition, conspiracy, arson, attacks
on transit routes, rebellion, crimes against civil servants,
dangerous attacks, and resisting arrest,” and eventually
conditionally released. Until he was found innocent in April 2009,
one of those conditions was his semi-monthly presentation at the
courthouse. As with any trip he made in public, Venegas had at least
one person accompany him to provide some security against being
arrested or disappeared.
During
this walk he recounted a story from July 2006, about a month after
the people of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca rose up in open
rebellion against the state government. From the plaza in Santo
Domingo, which served as the center of the social movement in 2006
after it was forcibly removed from the city center – the Zócalo –
one can see an auditorium on a nearby hill called Cerro del Fortín.
This auditorium was built by the state government specifically for
the annual celebration of the Guelaguetza. Guelaguetza is both an
event and a concept. It is an indigenous Zapotec word meaning
reciprocity or mutual aid, an important tenet of communal indigenous
life. It is also a state-run occasion which brings dancers from
Oaxaca’s seven regions to perform “traditional” dances,
modified from indigenous festivals which marked the beginning of the
planting season. The state’s biggest tourism draw, tickets to the
annual July Guelaguetza cost around 400 pesos (at the time around $40
US dollars), beyond the means of the average Oaxacan, thereby
excluding them from a celebration of their own culture.
Just
before the state-run Guelaguetza was to be held in July 2006, Venegas
told me, “During those days of freedom, I was walking here in front
of Santo Domingo and saw people up in the auditorium painting ‘FUERA
ULISES’ in huge letters on the seats.” (“Ulises Out,”
referring to then-governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz.) Opposition was so
great that the state ended up canceling the commercial Guelaguetza,
while the APPO organized its own, free People’s Guelaguetza.
The
above anecdote of an anecdote serves as a microcosm for a story still
unfolding. A story told standing in the shadow of a building which
serves as a reminder of the 500 year legacy of colonialism, by a
survivor of state repression, about a social movement not only
fighting against a despotic regime, but at the same time working to
reclaim and reimagine life and culture outside of the structures of
an authoritarian state and an impoverishing neoliberal system. While
the 2006 Oaxaca Commune was crushed by federal police and military
force five months after running the state government and police out
of power and administering affairs via popular assemblies, the embers
which led to that rebellion remained smoldering. Fast forward a
decade later, and the resistance in Oaxaca has just finished
celebrating its Tenth Annual Teachers-Peoples Guelaguetza. For good
measure, they also set up blockades around the Cerro del Fortín at
6am the morning of the second of two commercial Guelaguetza
performances, causing the festivities to occur in front of a largely
empty auditorium.
Just
as in 2006, what started this year’s revolt was a teachers’
strike. Teachers belonging to the National Coordinator of Education
Workers (CNTE), a more radical faction of about 200,000 inside of the
1.3 million-strong National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), the
largest union in Latin America, have been on indefinite strike since
May 15. Their primary demand is the repeal of the “Educational
Reform” initiated by Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in 2013.
A
neoliberal plan based on a 2010 agreement between Mexico and the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the reform
seeks to standardize and privatize Mexico’s public education
system, as well as weaken the power of the teachers’ union.
Publicly supported in his efforts by pro-business lobbying groups
such as Mexicanos Primero and the Employers Confederation of the
Mexican Republic (COPARMEX), Peña Nieto set out to implement the
OECD agreement and then some, changing Articles 3 and 73 of Mexico’s
Constitution. Together, they create a standardized system of teacher
evaluation, as well as granting schools “autonomy” — that is,
autonomy to raise funds from the private sector — in other words,
to become privatized.
A
standardized evaluation system that is imposed from above without the
input of teachers, yet at the same time placing the fault for low
scores solely on teachers’ shoulders, is extremely problematic. The
attempt to create a monoculture, one-size-fits-all education system
that produces a certain type of student, as Gallo Téenek noted,
“doesn’t, knowing the cultural diversity that exists, take into
account the reality and local conditions of each of the regions,
municipalities, communities and states in the country, as well as the
inequality and poverty that prevail throughout the nation — for
example, in regions of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero, contrary to the
better conditions that exist in cities such as Monterrey, Guadalajara
and the Federal District.”
The
second major aspect of the reform, making schools “autonomous,”
opens up each school to be directly influenced by capital. As CNTE
Section 22 from Oaxaca explained in a letter to parents, “Parents
will have to pay for the education of their children, since the
federal government has disowned its responsibility to maintain
schools, meaning it will not send funds to build, equip or provide
teaching materials for schools. It also clearly states that parents
and teachers will manage the financial resources to maintain the
operation of the schools, which will lead to the establishment of
compulsory monthly, bimonthly, or semiannual fees.”
By
forcing schools to continually fundraise in order to exist, CNTE
Section 9 in Mexico City points out that the legislation “opens the
door for, in the name of autonomy, and with the pretext of involving
parents in the management and maintenance of the schools, the de
facto legalization of fees, allowing the entrance of businesses into
schools and turning the constitutional provision guaranteeing free
public education into a dead letter. This has a name: privatization.”
The
teachers are also demanding more investment in education, freedom for
all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, truth and
justice for the 43 disappeared students from Ayotzinapa, and an end
to neoliberal structural reforms in general.
While
the CNTE has been fighting against the educational reform for the
past three years, a teachers’ strike in and of itself is fairly
uneventful. It occurs annually in Oaxaca as a tactic used by the
union leading up to the beginning of the school year in the fall.
Usually the strike happens, followed quickly by negotiations with the
state. A compromise is reached and everyone goes home. This year,
however, the CNTE upped the pressure by announcing a national strike
instead of on a state-by-state basis. And this year, like in 2006,
the state refused to even talk to the union, instead deploying
thousands of federal police and gendarmerie to areas where the strike
is strongest — primarily Oaxaca, Chiapas, Michoacán and Mexico
City, though also in states such as Guerrero, Tabasco and Veracruz.
In
another echo of 2006, it was a brutal act of state repression that
turned a labor dispute into a widespread revolt. Ten years ago, it
was the pre-dawn raid and destruction of the teachers’ encampment
in the Zócalo of Oaxaca on June 14. Following the beginning of the
strike this year, there were several police actions against teachers
in Oaxaca, Mexico City and Chiapas; as well as the arrest of the
Oaxaca union’s leadership.
In
response to police attacks, teachers in Oaxaca began setting up
barricades and highway blockades around the state. By mid-June of
this year, the CNTE controlled 37 critical spots on highways
throughout the state, blockaded in part with 50 expropriated tanker
trucks. The blockades were so effective that ADO, a major first-class
bus line, indefinitely cancelled all trips from Mexico City to Oaxaca
and federal police began flying reinforcements into airports in the
city of Oaxaca, Huatulco (on the coast), and Ciudad Ixtepec (on the
Isthmus).
Given
the climate of escalating state repression, in a statement released
on Friday, June 17, the Zapatistas posed the following questions:
They
have beaten them, gassed them, imprisoned them, threatened them,
fired them unjustly, slandered them, and declared a de facto
state-of-siege in Mexico City. What’s next? Will they disappear
them? Will they murder them? Seriously? The ‘education’ reform
will be born upon the blood and cadavers of the teachers?
On
Sunday, June 19, the state answered these questions with an emphatic
“Yes”. The response came in the form of machine-gun fire from
Federal Police directed at teachers and residents defending a highway
blockade in Nochixtlán that for a week had been successful in
preventing hundreds of federal forces from reaching the city of
Oaxaca.
Initially,
the Oaxaca Ministry of Public Security claimed that the Federal
Police were unarmed and “not even carrying batons”. After ample
visual evidence and a mounting body count to the contrary, the state
admitted federal police opened fire on the blockade. In total, eleven
were killed that morning in Nochixtlán. At the time of this writing,
a total of fourteen have been murdered by the state in Oaxaca during
the course of the conflict, including Salvador Olmos García, aka
Chava, a community radio journalist and pioneer of the anarchopunk
movement in Huajuapan, who was kidnapped, beaten, run over and left
for dead by police on the streets of that city on June 26.
Following
the Nochixtlán massacre the struggle has taken on an increasingly
popular dimension. This has looked like direct actions, marches,
material support and expressions of solidarity from across Mexico and
beyond, in numbers far too large to recount individually.
By way of example, here are some of the actions that have occurred
since. Parents and teachers took over toll booths in both Mexico City
and Durango for a day, allowing cars to pass through for free. On
July 3, an explosives device was detonated at the headquarters of
business associations in Mexico City who have been lobbying the
government to crush the uprising. There were three days of intense
mobilizations from July 5-7 in Mexico City. On the first day, there
were at least 70 simultaneous blockades and marches, followed by four
mass marches on July 6, and at least ten blockades on July 7.
The
Zapatistas have continued releasing statements in support of the
teachers’ struggle, stating, “To say it more clearly: for us
Zapatistas, the most important thing on this calendar and in the very
limited geography from which we resist and struggle, is the struggle
of the democratic teachers’ union.” They also went further and
announced that they were suspending their participation in the July
17-23 CompArte Festival for Humanity, which they had called for
earlier this year. Instead, they sent delegations from all the
Zapatista caracoles to donate the food they would have eaten during
the seven day festival to the teachers in resistance in Chiapas. This
amounted to 290,000 pesos (15,600 USD) worth of food.
In
recognition of the contribution of the people to their struggle and
the fact that the people have demands which extend beyond the
immediate concerns of the union, on July 9, Section 22 of the CNTE in
Oaxaca called for a gathering of teachers and indigenous leaders to
“build a peoples’ agenda against structural reforms.” The union
met with authorities from 90 municipalities in the state. Important
to note is that these authorities are selected as the moral
leadership of their communities not through a vote based on political
party, but through nominations, discussions and agreements reached in
community assemblies. A second such gathering was held in early
August.
At
the same time that all these actions have been occurring, the CNTE
and the Interior Ministry have been holding negotiations –
negotiations which the state agreed to following the massacre. They
have met a total of seven times, addressing political, educational
and social issues. At each meeting the teachers come prepared with
specific proposals and ask the government to do the same. After each
meeting the end result has been the same: no progress on the core
issues.
With
the beginning of the school year fast approaching, the union and the
parents committees that have been forming to support them, state that
classes will not start and the strike will continue if the demands of
the movement are not met. As the movement has grown beyond the
initial framework of a teachers’ strike to object to the
functioning of the state and neoliberal capitalism as a whole, the
likelihood of an agreement reached around the negotiating table seems
improbable. The conflict is far from being resolved and the peoples
of Oaxaca have shown they will not be silenced in the face of the
weapons of power, ten years later providing another lesson in
dignified resistance. As the popular slogan goes, “A teacher
fighting is also teaching.” --Scott Campbell
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