The Mexican Teachers' Long Struggle for Education, Workers Rights, and Democracy
Dan La Botz, New Politics, August 3, 2016 The last few years of repeated strikes and demonstrations by the teachers of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Michoacán, and the government’s violent repression of these protests--including forced diseappearance of students, massacres of supporters, and assassinations of individual teachers--has led to interest in the background of the teachers’ movement. The following article is meant to provide a long historical overview of the Mexican teachers’ movement, together with a bibliography for further reading. The Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) has 1.4 million members, while 200,000 or more of them are active in the dissident National Coordinating Committee (la CNTE) which has for four months been engaged in strikes and direct actions that have at times paralyzed the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Michoacán. La CNTE has been leading such massive movement now for 37 years in a struggle to win teachers higher wages, to protect public education, and more recently in its battle against the government’s Education Reform Law, it has proposed a new educational model. How did teachers in Mexico acquire their very central place in the country’s social and political history? How did they become such an organized force both in the government’s corporative labor and political system, as well as in the working class and social movement that challenge the government? What is the dissident teachers movement and what does it want? More
