MEXICO CITY, April 6 (NNN-EFE) — Some 2,000 teachers marched here Friday to once again show the Mexican government their dissatisfaction with what they see as a reluctance to completely undo the 2013 overhaul of education.
It was the latest in a series of protests organized by the militant CNTE teachers union, which says that President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s plan to replace the program enacted by predecessor Enrique Peña Nieto six years ago does not go far enough.
Making their way from the Zocalo, Mexico City’s giant main square, to San Lazaro, the seat of the lower house of Congress, the teachers waved banners and flags and chanted slogans.
“Let them understand that we are not going to back down in our quest for the total abrogation (of the 2013 reform), not pretense,” Pedro Gomez, spokesman of Section 7 of the CNTE, told the media.
“We are going to set out a mobilization in the short, medium and long term for the total abrogation of the reform,” the union’s national press secretary, Wilbert Santiago said.
He added that if members of the lower house meet again to debate on this issue without first speaking to the CNTE, union members wouldn’t hesitate to resume the blockade of the entrances to the chamber they carried out last month.
Lopez Obrador pledged during his 2018 presidential campaign that he would roll back, a promise that teachers have etched in their minds.
On March 27, the relevant committees of the lower house approved the current administration’s initiative by a cumulative vote of 48-3 with 9 abstentions.
Lopez Obrador’s bill eliminates the element of the 2013 reform that most angered teachers: rules that made hiring, continued employment and promotions contingent on performance in compulsory evaluations.
Even so, the CNTE accuses the government of offering only cosmetic changes to the Peña Nieto program.
“If they are not going to reverse this so-called educational reform, there will surely be a strike by education workers,” union member Pedro Gomez told EFE at Friday’s protest.
Israel Lopez, also present at the march, told EFE that his concern is that, although the “punitive evaluation” has been eliminated, the process for hiring new teachers remains the same.
“The lawmakers of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, the former president’s party) have acknowledged that 80 percent or 88 percent of what was done with Peña Nieto is preserved,” he said. — NNN-EFE
