The Oaxaca Commune Spirit Lives as Striking Mexican Teachers Defy Repression Scott Campbell - Green Left Weekly
go to original July 4, 2016

An homage to the Oaxaca Commune, one of the most epic chapters in the annals of contemporary revolt. (stimulator)

Ten years after the Oaxaca Commune of 2006 — when for nearly six months workers, students, peasants, women, youth, indigenous peoples and urban poor brought the government of the southern Mexican state to a virtual standstill — teachers in the Mexican state are back on the barricades. Once again, the state has responded with brute force.

In a statement released on June 17, the Zapatistas posed the following questions regarding the ongoing national teachers' strike in Mexico: “They have beaten them, gassed them, imprisoned them, threatened them, fired them unjustly, slandered them and declared a de facto state of siege in Mexico City.

“What's next? Will they disappear them? Will they murder them? Seriously? The 'education' reform will be born upon the blood and cadavers of the teachers?”

On June 19, the state answered these questions with an emphatic “Yes”. The response came in the form of machine-gun fire from federal police directed at teachers and residents defending a highway blockade in Nochixtlan, a town in Oaxaca.

Initially, the Oaxaca Ministry of Public Security claimed that the federal police were unarmed and “not even carrying batons”. After ample visual evidence and a mounting body count to the contrary, the state admitted federal police opened fire on the blockade, killing six people.

Meanwhile, medics in Nochixtlan released a list of eight killed, 45 wounded and 22 disappeared. On June 20, the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE), the teachers union leading the strike, said 10 were killed the day before, including nine at Nochixtlan.

Teachers belonging to the CNTE, a more radical faction of about 200,000 inside of the 1.3 million-strong National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), the largest union in Latin America, have been on indefinite strike since May 15. Their primary demand is the repeal of the “Educational Reform” initiated by Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto in 2013.

A neoliberal plan based on a 2008 agreement between Mexico and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the reform seeks to standardise and privatise Mexico's public education system. It also aims to weaken the power of the teachers' union.

The teachers are also demanding more investment in education, freedom for all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, truth and justice for the 43 students disappeared from Ayotzinapa in 2014, and an end to neoliberal structural reforms in general.

The state has refused to even talk to the union. Instead, it has deployed thousands of federal police to areas where the strike is strongest — primarily Oaxaca, Chiapas, Michoacan and Mexico City, as well as in states such as Guerrero, Tabasco and Veracruz.

Read the rest at Green Left Weekly

Related: Investigators Have Yet to Visit Nochixtlán (Mexico News Daily)

Related: Teacher Protests and Blockades in Oaxaca Scare Off Tourism (El Universal)

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!