Following Up on Teachers, Sort Of

A quick scan of the headlines tonight at Noticias offers nothing new on the subject of teachers' bonuses, so I resort to sharing what I've got. What follows is hardly responsible journalism, but I've yet to make that claim here.

Among the random stuff in my inbox: this today, from somewhat known sources, acquaintances through the Oaxaca Study Action Group, a Yahoo group open to anyone with a Yahoo username. I don't know who added the English text summarizing each paragraph, but I figure it's worth a read. If nothing else, it's sort of fun to observe how information moves in this community. See for yourself:

14/12/2007 12:56:06 PM Autor: Rebeca Luna Jiménez Oaxaca, México. Diciembre 14- El Secretario General de Gobierno, Manuel García Corpus informó que el gobernador Ulises Ruiz logró canalizar recursos por el orden de los mil 350 millones de pesos para el pago de los salarios de los más de 70 mil trabajadores de la educación, luego de sostener reuniones de trabajo con los titulares de Gobernación y Hacienda del gobierno federal en la ciudad de México. He managed to find the money to pay salaries. Dijo que el mandatario destrabó la problemática derivada de la insuficiencia de recursos económicos para el pago de salarios y el correspondiente al primer pago del aguinaldo de los maestros. But there's not enough to pay the bonus En tanto, los maestros por segundo día bloquearon tres partes de la capital oaxaqueña, además que maestros de la región de la Cuenca cerraron la carretera federal en Tuxtepec a la altura del puente El Caracol con la finalidad de exigir el pago de su aguinaldo. Therefore the teachers blocked three fourths of the city of Oaxaca and closed the highway in Tuxtepec Ruiz Ortíz logró el pago correspondiente a las dos quincenas de diciembre, por lo que a partir de las 14.00 horas estaba subsanado el problema, sin embargo a las 15.00 horas las manifestaciones continuaban con sus bloqueos por trabajadores administrativos y educandos. Había bloqueos sobre la carretera federal Cristóbal Colón frente al Instituto Estatal de Educación Pública de Oaxaca (IEEPO), en el puente del Tecnológico, la gasolinera Bautista, la Secretaría de Finanzas. Dos puntos fueron desbloqueados el del monumento a la Madre y de la Universidad Pedagógica Nacional (UPN). García Corpus dijo que el gobernador sostuvo entrevistas con el titular de Gobernación, Francisco Ramírez Acuña, y el de Hacienda, Agustín Cartens para que de acuerdo a la normativilidad se les pagará el aguinaldo a los maestros el próximo martes, en tanto que los salarios del mes a partir de las 14.00 horas de este viernes. Pay the aguinaldo next Tuesday, is what the secretary general of government came up with Se hizo la inmediata gestión a efecto de cumplir en términos generales con el magisterio en su conjunto, por lo cual destacó que el jefe del Ejecutivo local así como los titulares de la SEGOB y la propia SHyCP, acordaron canalizar recursos por el orden de mil 350 millones de pesos. No hay un tema tan sensible que tiene que ver con el salario", razón de ello, subrayó, la atención inmediata del mandatario con los servidores públicos del Gobierno Federal quienes en una actitud de corresponsabilidad con la administració n estatal, hicieron una negociación extraordinaria para cubrir los adeudos por concepto de salarios y aguinaldos". So Ruiz is doing right by negotiating for the release of extraordinary funds

I couldn't easily offer the English in red, as it appeared in my inbox, so I bolded it. Lack of terminal punctuation is faithful to the original.

Christmas Cheer, Teachers Demonstrate

UPDATE:My friend Adam tells me that, as of Friday, the government scrambled up some money, borrowed from next year's budgets, to pay the teachers and get them off the streets. So crisis averted, for now.
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I've been pretty swamped this week between grad school applications, teaching and tutoring, and running around to all the holiday parties that have sprung up in Oaxaca this Christmas season. So when I read today that there's a teachers' demonstration in Oaxaca this week, I'm not exactly surprised that I didn't hear about it.

Demonstrations are not taking place in the zocalo, as did the strike of 2006. This article from Saturday's Noticias only says:

Las manifestaciones originaron un enorme caos vial en la ciudad capital, al establecer bloqueos en seis accesos carreteros y calles de la capital, algunos de los cuales se mantenían hasta anoche.

In a nutshell (and my translation is always questionable): "Demonstrations brought enormous chaos to the capital city, establishing blockades along six access roads and streets in the capital. Some protesters have been out since last night."

I didn't observe this "enorme caos" during my workday Friday, which took me from the south end of the Periferico at 20 de Noviembre, through the center, back out to Cinco Senores, passing by the road to the airport, and down Universidad to Plaza del Valle and Simbolos Patrios. As of 4:00 pm Friday I didn't have a sense that anything unusual was happening at any of these points, but that easily could have changed in the evening or during the day Saturday. If anybody knows where the demonstrations are happening, comments would be welcomed and appreciated.

I received this English language summary of events from Ronald Waterbury, of the Oaxaca Study Forum:

Conditions have indeed returned to “normal” (at least in the statistical sense) in Oaxaca. The government does not fulfill its obligations, and in response the teachers’ union blocks the streets and produces vehicular chaos. In this particular example of the ritual, the federal government (which provides the vast bulk of the money to pay teachers) didn’t release funds for the regular December paychecks nor for the first installment of the traditional Christmas bonus (due December 8). At least the state government appears to have learned a lesson from the 2006 conflict because rather than crack heads, as it did on June 14, 2006, it simply returned to the years-long practice of ignoring the protests. They didn’t even send out traffic cops to help the besieged motorists maneuver through the mess. This way the government hopes that the public will blame the teachers for the inconveniences, and from my own very unscientific survey of vendors in one of the public markets, the government was successful. Even people who sympathized with the APPO movement of last year, in frustrated anger used phrases like: “the teachers are at it again!”

Emphasis mine. Nancy Davies offers this, via the Oaxaca Study Action Group:

. . . we have another situation here with the teachers, who have been blockading the roads for two days to demand their pay AND their usual annual "aguinaldo", the Christmas bonus. The bonus for most workers is part of the pay package, not a nice gesture at the will of the employer. In this case, the governor-employer URO says he's so sorry but there's no money to pay it.

Emphasis mine. Jill Freidberg, of Corrugated Films, adds:

In addition to concerns people have about traffic and losing money, there may be some hard feelings left over from 2006. Folks might feel like the teachers are willing to mobilize on a large scale when it comes to them getting paid, but not when it came to sticking with the "fuera URO" mobilizations in the last couple months of 2006, after the teachers had lifted their strike. This is a long-standing complaint - that the teachers are usually only acting in their own interest when they take to the streets, not in the interest of civil society in general. I think it's important to remind people that, during 2006, thousands of teachers who DO place civil society's demands and needs above the teachers' union demands, saw the formation of the APPO and the subsequent mobilizations as an opportunity for teachers to finally rebuild that tie with civil society. But not all 70,000 teachers feel that way, and there are quite a few of them who really are much more likely to hit the streets over their salary than over any other demand.

Emphasis mine. Okay, that's a lot of information to digest. And here I am oblivious to all of it until I wake up Sunday morning and check two days of mail in my inbox.

Let me throw my two cents in, both of which might be highly uninformed at any given moment. It seems to me that Ronald Waterbury has it right, that Governor Ruiz would rather wait for public opinion to turn against the teachers than to send in troops to clear the streets. Especially now, when tourism is on a gentle but sustained uptick, and the festival season creates commercial opportunities for so many businesses. Even for a guy with his record, Ulises Ruiz can't want images of police in riot gear and protesters with bloodied heads on the news pages of the Mexican papers during the holiday season. I've heard (wildly) unsubstantiated speculation that Calderon may consider removing Ruiz from office before the end of his term, and another round of violence in the streets won't bode well for the governor's political future, assuming he even has one.

Nancy Davies points out that the Governor says he's "sorry but there's no money" to pay for teachers' bonuses this year, which are part of a negotiated pay package and not a true bonus in the first place. The issue of bonuses aside, the way I read Ronald Waterbury is that December 8 salary checks haven't even been issued, so we're not merely talking about a bonus problem but an actual failure to pay teachers what they are owed for work completed. Imagine a similar problem in, say, Michigan, two weeks before Christmas. I think we'd hear an uproar, and nobody would suggest that the teachers were in the wrong. As far as the "no money" thing goes, I point you to this article in today's Noticias, wherein the state reveals it has invested "tres mil 11 millones de pesos" in roadway improvements in 2007. (Can this possibly be right? 3,011,000,000 pesos? Over 300 million dollars toward roads in the second poorest state in Mexico!?) Some of that money has been used to tear up the existing streets in the center of town and replace them with historic looking, pedestrian friendly streets that don't appear to make anybody very happy, least of all shopkeepers who have lost all their drive-by traffic and deal with the daily construction process.

Finally, Jill Freidberg's observation that public opinion may see teachers as more likely to mobilize on their own behalf--and on their own bottom line--than that of the greater human rights sweep in Oaxaca, seems like a no-brainer to me. Teachers didn't come to the capital in 2006 to demand the removal of the governor. They came, 70,000 strong, to ask for wage increases, better health insurance, and more government support for impoverished students. While addressing human rights violations in Oaxaca has become the order of the day for many, it is preposterous to assert that this should be the teachers' main objective. That perception, however, plays nicely into what Ronald Waterbury points to as the government waiting for public opinion to turn against the teachers.

There is much to consider today in Oaxaca. Stay tuned.

Oaxaca, Revisited

So there's a little more on the Oaxaca teachers strike and social uprising of 2006. Click here to review my first post about the subject.

Reports I've read are spotty as to what exactly went on during the months of stalemate that hovered over the besieged city center. I can't tell if the majority of teachers stayed in the city or returned to their homes while the cause was taken up by political activists. Labor Notes reported that the teachers ended their sit-in on July 5, after 44 days, but that doesn't add up with information gleaned in even a cursory Google search on the protests. There was a dispute within the teachers union in October after the head of the union declared the strike over without presenting it to the teachers for a vote. The vote came later, finally, but with mixed results.

Several people were killed over the course of the summer, usually in confrontations with groups of armed men in plain clothes identified by local reporters as police, though I have not been able to confirm that they were indeed police. there appears to be skepticism about the likelihood the men were actually police officers. In only a few instances, people were killed in what appears to be targeted fashion.

From NarcoNews:

Indigenous elementary school teacher Pánfilo Hernández was murdered tonight with three gunshot wounds to the abdomen as he was leaving a neighborhood meeting of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO in its Spanish initials), in the El Pozo neighborhood of the city’s Jardín section.

I'm not sure how the standoffs progressed during this period, but the landscape changed radically on October 27, 2006 when Bradley Roland Will, an American journalist working with Indymedia, was killed during a clash between protesters and armed groups (sometimes called "paramilitaries"). At this point outgoing president Vicente Fox ordered federal troops to Oaxaca to disperse protesters and put an end to the rebellion.

And that pretty much sums it up what I've learned about the strike. This may be unresolved, as it seems the rebellion was quashed without answering the demands of the people. If teachers' salaries went up I haven't found reference to it, and if classroom conditions are any better I'd be shocked. Ulises Ruiz Ortiz is still governor of Oaxaca. One of his secretaries recently issued an apology on behalf of the state government, though Ruiz Ortiz has made no such statements himself.

I should make a note here that Oaxaca is a city know for its cultural pageantry and peaceful mien. While politically charged, it is not unsafe.