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	Workers Vanguard No. 1030	20 September 2013

Mexico City

Brutal Crackdown on Teachers Struggle

On September 13, thousands of federal police backed up by anti-riot tanks and Black Hawk helicopters brutally cleared an encampment of teachers in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s central plaza. Members of the National Coordination of Education Workers (CNTE) and their supporters had for four months maintained the encampment—which grew to tens of thousands in August—in protest against Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) president Enrique Peña Nieto’s education “reform.” The new law threatens tenure and imposes performance evaluations—a means of scapegoating teachers for the dismal school system—while eliminating union control over hiring.

Knowing they faced imminent attack, the teachers had already decided to take down their camp and make an orderly retreat. This did not stop the riot cops, unleashed by federal authorities and the Mexico City government of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), from attacking atomized groups of teachers and others. At least 32 protesters were arrested and many more injured. News broadcasts showed cops attacking a contingent that included leaders of the Oaxaca and Mexico City locals of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE).

The context for this crackdown is Peña Nieto’s “Pact for Mexico,” which was endorsed by the bourgeois populist PRD and the right-wing National Action Party (see WV No. 1019, 8 March). The Pact is a declaration of war against unions and the poor. Among its primary targets are the powerful oil workers union, which is directly threatened by the efforts of the Mexican bourgeoisie and its imperialist masters to privatize the state-owned PEMEX oil company, and the SNTE, the largest union in Latin America, of which the CNTE is a dissident faction. While the Movement for National Regeneration (Morena) led by former PRD presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador has protested the recent repression, it joined in the anti-labor campaign by criticizing the education “reform” as too soft on the union.

The authorities claim that not one teacher was arrested in the sweep—only “infiltrators.” In past weeks they have launched a vicious media campaign against those supporting the teachers—from student youth to members of the defunct Mexican Union of Electricians—declaring them “vandals” or “masked anarchists.” Groups of students, teachers and workers from the National School of Anthropology and History, joined by students from UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico), have called a strike. As our comrades in the Grupo Espartaquista de México stated in a leaflet issued the day after the assault on the teachers’ encampment:

“We call on the workers movement to mobilize against this new attack. An injury to one is an injury to all! Free all those arrested immediately! The need to defend the teachers against repression goes beyond solidarity. The teachers have mobilized essentially on their own for months against the education reform—a reform that is aimed not only at the SNTE and the union gains of the teachers but also against public education itself. It is in the interest of the entire working class to mobilize against the education reform and the attack on the SNTE and CNTE, a new chapter in a long anti-union offensive.”