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	Workers Vanguard No. 1019	8 March 2013

Hands Off Mexican Teachers Union!

The following is a translation of a leaflet published on March 4 by the Grupo Espartaquista de México.

On February 26, the Enrique Peña Nieto government arrested Elba Esther Gordillo Morales, “La Maestra” [the teacher], leader “for life” of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE). Peña Nieto’s immediate goal was to eliminate any obstacle to the “education reform,” which he had enacted the previous day and which represents an attack on the teachers union and the gains made by its members [see article on this page]. Having declared her opposition to the “reform,” Gordillo—for decades a trusted ally of every government administration—became an evident target of the new state onslaught. “La Maestra” has been accused of “money laundering” and “organized crime,” and two other SNTE officials, Nora Guadalupe Ugarte Ramírez and Isaías Gallardo Chávez, have also been arrested.

Gordillo’s arrest is an attack on the teachers union and the workers movement as a whole, as was the 1989 Quinazo, when President Carlos Salinas of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) imprisoned oil workers union leader Joaquín Hernández Galicia, known as “La Quina.” We Spartacists oppose on principle the intervention of the bourgeois state in the affairs of the unions, which are the elementary defense organizations of the working class. State intervention into the unions has nothing to do with “democratizing” them; the bourgeoisie’s goal is to place them ever more firmly under its control. Defending the union movement must include the demand for the immediate release of Gordillo and all arrested union officials.

It took the rest of the SNTE national leadership barely a few hours to go from promising Gordillo “loyalty, affection and solidarity” to replacing her and declaring that they were “being born again.” After receiving Peña Nieto’s approval, one Juan Díaz de la Torre was “elected” new SNTE leader. Without wasting any time, he asserted in his inaugural speech that the SNTE will support the “education reform.”

As was to be expected, the main bourgeois parties—PRI, PAN [National Action Party], PRD [Party of the Democratic Revolution] and Morena [Movement for National Regeneration]—cheered the news of Gordillo’s arrest. Martí Batres, [Andrés Manuel] López Obrador’s sidekick in Morena, demands that [Carlos Romero] Deschamps, leader of the powerful oil workers union, be arrested as well. For its part, the National Coordination of Education Workers (CNTE), the pro-PRD opposition in the SNTE, criticizes the Elbazo [the ousting of Gordillo] as too partial. For the CNTE, Gordillo’s jailing is “a ‘settling of scores’ that will have no effect on union transparency and democracy, because in any case the new leader is part of the same clique, which ought to be investigated” (La Jornada, 1 March). The CNTE has called for a “megamarch” on March 5 against the imposition of the new bootlicker. But on the other hand, the logic of their statements is to demand greater state intervention! Similarly, Artemio Ortiz Hurtado of the National Democratic Executive Committee—another SNTE opposition—speaks of a possible indefinite teachers strike against the imposition of the new leader and against the “education reform,” while at the same time he “takes [Peña Nieto] up on his word” and demands that the state go after “the entire Gordillo Morales clique”! These union opposition groups thus prove their political bankruptcy and fundamental affinity with the pro-capitalist perspective of the venal, gangster-like leaderships they seek to replace. We oppose such groups’ appeals to the bourgeois courts in their efforts to gain leadership of the unions.

“La Maestra” became SNTE leader by Carlos Salinas’s own appointment, and for over two decades she stood out as a professional gangster and a traitor to the proletariat. But as a union leader, she should be judged by the workers movement. The working class must clean its own house! The struggle for the genuine democratization of the unions is inseparable from the struggle to forge a class-struggle, revolutionary leadership that fights for the historic interests of the proletariat. Workers must forge their own party, a revolutionary party that champions their own interests and those of the oppressed in the struggle to once and for all end the bosses’ regime.