Mexico Teachers Strike: CNTE-SNTE, What's the Diff? And Why It's Important

Striking teachers of Section 22 CNTE march in Mexico City, May 29. The SNTE was, and still is, scabbing, (Photo: Excelsior) 

CNTE-SNTE,  What’s the Diff? And Why It’s Important

I want to comment here on a point that came up at the AFT convention last month, about teachers struggles in Mexico. Jia Lee in her report-back noted that there was confusion sown by the AFT leadership concerning the CNTE (National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers), which has been leading that struggle, and the SNTE (National Union of Education Workers) which has been a key support for the government that is repressing the struggle. We need a clear understanding of this, because it directly impacts on the struggles of teachers everywhere.

I recently returned from six-months sabbatical in Oaxaca, Mexico. I had the opportunity there to join with teachers in solidarity with their struggle against the so-called “education reform” which seeks to privatize public education and victimize the combative teachers and their union, the CNTE. This is the same corporate “reform” model being foisted on teachers here and throughout the world. In the United States it is being pushed by the likes of Bill Gates, the Walton family (owners of Wal-Mart) and other leading capitalists. Internationally, these plans are sponsored by the World Bank, the OECD and other outfits controlled by the U.S. government.

The teachers in Mexico have been on strike since May 15. This has been a huge struggle, with thousands of teachers camped out in tent cities in Oaxaca and Mexico City. They have faced constant repression and violence. Teachers and parents in Chiapas have been bombarded by tear gas dropped from helicopters and have been attacked by paramilitary squads organized by the ruling PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party). The anti-strike violence came to a head on June 19, when an army of 1,000 federal and state riot cops opened fire on a bloqueo (barricade) in the town of Nochixtlán, Oaxaca blocking the superhighway from Mexico City. In the Fathers’ Day massacre, police killed at least ten protesters, both teachers, community activists and youths, and over 100 were injured.

So the stakes are very high. And the teachers have successfully held out against these seemingly overwhelming odds. They have effectively cut off highway communications to Mexico City for weeks, with dozens of barricades, blocking trucks for Wal-Mart, Coca Cola and Pan Bimbo, as well as commercial buses. When I returned form Oaxaca, I traveled on the Autobus Magisterial (Teachers Bus), which was basically the only way to get to the capital. Last year, the governor complained that he couldn’t run the state because he only had 3,000 police against 82,000 teachers! So they brought in the army and the gendarmes (a paramilitary police unit), but it didn’t stop the teachers.

So what about the SNTE? It’s important to understand that the SNTE is not a workers union but a government-controlled outfit to prevent the rise of real unions, and to help repress them when they do arise. It is a “corporatist” labor agency, a heritage from the seven decades when the PRI ruled Mexico as a one-party state, whose labor laws were taken word-for-word from Mussolini’s fascist Italy. The SNTE has historically had squads of gunmen who have killed over 150 teachers who were dissident members of this pseudo-union. The SNTE is financed directly by the government, and its leaders are named by the president of Mexico, personally.

In 1989, the then president of the SNTE, Carlos Jonguitud, who was also a top leader of the PRI, was removed by PRI president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and replaced by Esther Elba Gordillo in a private meeting in the basement of the presidential residence at Los Pinos. Salinas had agreed with the international financial agencies to push through an anti-teacher “education reform,” and wanted someone more pliant in the SNTE to impose it on the teachers. Both Jonguitud and Gordillo were assassins, up to their necks in killing the members of the SNTE.  The CNTE was born at the beginning of the 1980s out of a rebellion against the killer SNTE.

Then in early 2013, the current PRI president, Enrique Peña Nieto decided to enact

 a new “education reform” aimed at breaking the CNTE.  To whip up public support, he ousted Gordillo and had her jailed in order to tar all teachers with the notorious corruption of the SNTE. (This was accompanied by the Mexican version of the anti-teachers-union propaganda film, “Waiting for Superman,” called “De Panzazo”.)  Gordillo’s deputy, Juan Díaz de la Torre, was summoned to Gobernación, Mexico’s Interior Ministry, to swear that he would support the reform and go after the CNTE, before he was installed as SNTE president.

At the AFT convention, a teacher from California objected that if the union supported the SNTE, the blood of the striking CNTE teachers would be on the hands of the AFT. This is quite accurate. AFT vice president Mary Cathryn Ricker responded saying that “the SNTE is not responsible.” Oh yes they are. 

For starters, from the beginning of the strike, the SNTE has been scabbing. In Oaxaca, after the teachers and indigenous population rose up against a murderous PRI governor in 2006, the SNTE set up its own shadow Section 59, which took over the few schools it controls at gunpoint. Those schools have been working, while the overwhelming number of schools staffed by the CNTE’s Section 22 are shut down.

Early on in the current strike, the federal education minister Aurelio Nuño threatened to fire 24,617 striking teachers, saying he had replacements lined up. And where were those would-be scabs coming from? The scab-herding SNTE offered to supply them. The fact that this hasn’t happened is due to the tenacity and militancy of the CNTE teachers, and the massive support from the parents and working people in general. The government badly miscalculated the effect that its deadly repression would have. Instead of intimidating, it galvanized the teachers and their supporters.

Then when on May 21 hundreds of teachers in the Mexico City plantón were rounded up by cops and put on buses to be sent under police escort back to their home states, the SNTE leadership supported this repression. The SNTE met that same day with the top command of the Army High Command, which handed out individual awards to teachers who had participated in the punitive teacher “evaluation” exams, which the CNTE is boycotting.

As the strikers dug in, their example inspired teachers in other states outside of the CNTE strongholds of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero and Michoacán. Teachers in Monterrey marched in defiance of the governor’s threats to arrest them and in defiance of the SNTE. They then struck on June 29 for the first time ever in support of the CNTE. Seeing its support crumbling in the SNTE, the government struck back.

When SNTE Section 34 in the state of Zacatecas held a convention on July 14, CNTE had a two-to-one majority of the delegates. Thereupon, the SNTE tops surrounded the building with hundreds of state police and brought in dozens of cops masquerading as private security who started beating up teachers with metal chairs, sending several to the hospital. The SNTE leadership then declared its candidate, a bourgeois politician, the new head of the section.

From the very beginning, the SNTE has functioned not as a union but as an adjunct of the state in trying to break the strike. This has been its role for decades, the same as other corporatist pseudo-unions, which frequently order the police to smash oppositionists, as was done in Zacatecas. This is not a jurisdictional dispute between two unions, or a fight between two factions of a union. The struggle of Mexican teachers for union independence from state control is a struggle directly against the SNTE.

Class-struggle unionists and supporters of the teachers’ struggle in Mexico must support the CNTE against the labor cops of the SNTE.

It is not surprising that the AFT supports the SNTE. Teachers and others should be aware of the sinister role that the AFT has played in aiding the CIA and the U.S. government in smashing left-led unions around the world. In 1973, the AFT International Affairs Department played a key role in promoting the pseudo unions used by the CIA in the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile.  For more detail, see the pamphlet by George Schmidt, “The American Federation Teachers and the CIA” (1978).  I can send the PDF to those interested. 

 In the 1980s, the UFT was a channel for U.S. funding of the anti-Soviet, Polish nationalist Solidarność pseudo-union that played a key role in the counterrevolution in Poland.

In 2009 there was a coup in Honduras. It was organized right out of the U.S. State Department, under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. My group, Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW), made contact with the Honduran teachers who were under siege by the coup plotters. We raised over $1,500 including from teachers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to help them out in their difficult moment. The UFT, on the other hand, sent money to the fake-union supporting Hillary’s coup. It is vital for oppositionists in the teachers union to understand the role of the UFT and AFT in aiding the repression of teachers around the world.

IMPORTANT: This coming Wednesday, August 17, there will be a demonstration at 5 p.m. outside  the Mexican Consulate, at 27 East 39th Street in Manhattan, of solidarity with the striking teachers in Mexico. It is called by the CSEW together with the Internationalist Group, the CUNY Internationalist Clubs and Trabajadores Internacionales Clasistas (Class Struggle International Workers). The protest is being held in conjunction with demonstrations in Mexico and by the Rio de Janeiro teachers union, the SEPE, which just waged a four-month strike. Educators in New York  can aid the struggle in Mexico by joining us on August 17.

--Marjorie Stamberg, August 13, 2016

Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed rather than, as it is at present, an instrument for the disciplining of labor in the interests of capital. See the CSEW program here.