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LatinNews Daily - 12 October 2015

Mexico's teachers throw down the gauntlet to new minister

Development: Today (12 October), Mexico's Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE) teachers' union will stage a 24-hour national strike, complete with marches and road blocks, to protest against aspects of the federal government’s education reform.

Significance: This is the first test of nerve for the new national education minister, Aurelio Nuño. The CNTE is protesting primarily against the introduction of continuous evaluation for teachers, which forms an integral part of the education reform pushed through two years ago by the federal government led by President Enrique Peña Nieto to raise low education standards in Mexico. The locus of the strike will be the southern state of Oaxaca, where the militant Sección 22 of the CNTE led by Rubén Núñez holds sway, but there will also be a protest march to the education ministry (SEP) in Mexico City (DF), as well in as poorer southern states where the CNTE’s influence is strong, such as Chiapas, Guerrero and Michoacán. The CNTE has teamed up with other disaffected groups, such as the Asamblea Nacional de Enfermeros y Enfermeras de México, and relatives of the 43 training teachers abducted from Iguala, Guerrero, to try and bring the protests to 28 federal entities.

  • The CNTE aims to hold disruptive protests outside banks, transnational companies and facilities of the state-controlled oil company, Pemex, and, at least in Oaxaca, at ports and the local airport. Its message is not entirely consistent. While several state CNTE leaders are using the strike to demand talks with Nuño or the federal interior ministry (Segob) about the teacher evaluation process, Oaxaca’s Núñez insists that protests will not end until the complete annulment of the education reform in its entirety.

  • The CNTE strike is being backed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the twice former presidential candidate, whose radical left-wing Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Morena) finished second behind the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in the federal congressional elections last June in Oaxaca and is looking for a strong performance here in the gubernatorial elections in 2016. Morena is also now the largest party in the DF.

Looking Ahead: The federal government is standing firm at this stage. Any teachers who fail to go to class will have their salaries docked the SEP has said.

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