Teachers in Mexico hit austerity
1989Scott Adams-Cooper 1989-06Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 10 →
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Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari is facing a militant challenge to his government's austerity measures in the form of wildcat strikes by half a million teachers. The striking members of Mexico's teachers' union (SNTE)—which, at 1.1 million members, is the largest union in Latin Americaare demanding a 100 percent wage increase, the ouster of a leadership they describe as "a Mafia," and the right to choose their own leaders.
The strikes began April 19. Teachers demanded the dismissal of SNTE president Carlos Jonguitud Barrios, who they charge has stolen $9 million from the union treasury in his 17 years of rule. Jonguitud is a longtime lackey of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), delivering teachers' support through votes and campaign donations.
El Norte, the leading newspaper in Moninstrument of fraud in Salinas's slim election victory last summer.
Jonguitud, in collusion with the PRI, has held teachers' wages below $200 a month, and has used terror tactics to keep SNTE members in line. Since 1980, over 150 dissident teachers have been murdered, mostly in the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, where the strikes have been most intense.
Salinas dismissed Jonguitud a week after the strikes began, but it was too late. Elba Esther Gordillo, a Jonguitud functionary named to replace him, was not acceptable to the strikers. And a government offer to raise salaries 25 percent was soundly rejected.
Teachers have seen their buying power decrease by more than 50 percent over the past 7 years, while the union leadership has padded its investment portfolio through $12 million a year in dues from the membership.
The PRI has, over many years, given the SNTE increasing influence over national educational policy and key official posts. Any interest on the part of the PRI or the teachers' leadership in educating children, however, has been subordinated to their interest in political control. The PRI's need for both votes and support for economic austerity has come first, and Jonguitud always complied. The SNTE was rewarded with Jonguitud's Senate seat, 16 seats in the lower House of Congress, 42 seats in state legislatures, and over 100 mayoralties.
The Mexican government has a lot at stake in this strike. The 100 percent wage-increase demand strikes at the heart of efforts to renegotiate Mexico's crushing $100 billion foreign debt. The capitalist lender nations are
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terrey, Mexico, recently reported that the SNTE had been used as the primary