Soccer Grudge Match Helps Defuse Tense Standoff Between Protesters and Government Rafa Fernandez De Castro - Fusion
go to original July 26, 2016

When words fail, soccer becomes the common language in Mexico.

Jaime “El Bronco” Rodríguez, the cowboy governor of Nuevo León, understands that, which is why he challenged a group of protesters to a pickup soccer game last week as a way of defusing tensions over a teachers’ strike.

The grudge match pit government employees against sympathizers of the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE), a radical faction of teachers’ unions that has led an unpopular and often times violent nationwide strike against President Enrique Peña Nieto’s education reform.

CNTE protests in other parts of the country have resulted in full-blown riots, harassment of those who refuse to go on strike, and incidents of police repression.

But last week all that tension and energy in Nuevo León was redirected to the soccer pitch.

Read the rest at Fusion

Related: Why Teachers Have Been Occupying One of Mexico’s Most Alluring Public Spaces Since May (The Los Angeles Times)

Photo: @JaimeRdzNL

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