INTRODUCTION

As free trade and free markets sweep the world's workplaces and communities, perhaps the single most important labor struggle in North America is not taking place in factories or maquiladoras. Its workers do not assemble clothing or televisions or any other industrial product. They do not work with their hands. Nor do they work for multinational corporations.

They are Mexico's schoolteachers. The 1.2 million members of the nation's educational workers' union -- the largest union of any kind in Latin America -- have organized the biggest protest mobilizations in recent Mexican history. Democratic activists in the teachers' union have gained important victories, and they are consolidating a movement to oust their pro-government union leaders and defend their rights as wage-earners and educators.

The response from the government and the official union bureaucracy has been typical of the Mexican system: sometimes the bureaucratic run-around, occasionally a limited reform, and all too often repression -- from goon squads, police and the army.

At stake is not just the teachers union, but the core of the country's huge, powerful union bureaucracy. Since it was founded in 1943, the National Education Workers Union (SNTE) has represented the schoolteachers, administrators, janitorial workers and support personnel for grades 1 through 12 throughout Mexico. As with nearly all of the nation's unions, the SNTE has been a pillar of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Authentic defense of its members' interests has been ignored, replaced with the lock-step defense of the economic, electoral and ideological interests of the PRI and the government.

Yet in the past twenty years, the union's democratic reform caucus, the National Education Workers Coordinating Committee (CNTE), has gained control of key locals in Mexico City and in Michoacán and Oaxaca states. More than 250,000 teachers nationwide are CNTE members, and the number is growing. They have brought new democratic practices to the formerly top-down union structures that they control, and they have won important pedagogical reforms in topics such as bilingual education for the nation's indigenous peoples. Their activism also has forced the government and SNTE bosses to allow some limited reforms of the union apparatus -- grossly insufficient steps, to be sure, but a start toward the still-distant goal of a truly democratic union.

Yet since 1970, more than 150 teachers have been killed or disappeared by SNTE thugs or by government security forces. Despite a lull in violence in the early 1990s, repression now has returned. In the past year, the government has accused the CNTE of being a nest of subversion. In its attempt to assign blame for the appearance of guerrillas in the nation's southern states, the government has cast a dragnet for CNTE activists, arresting six and issuing arrest warrants for dozens more; another was detained, "disappeared" and is presumed to have been killed.

Mexico's democratic teachers are advancing, but they need solidarity from their fellow teachers in the United States and Canada. They need support to continue organizing for democracy and progressive pedagogical reforms. And, above all, they need North American teachers to press the Mexican government to allow dissident teachers to organize without fear of repression.

PUBLIC EDUCATION: HERITAGE OF THE REVOLUTION

The history of Mexican public schooling is based on one of the most noble legacies of the 1910-1917 Revolution: Enshrined in the Constitution is the rule that education be non-religious, obligatory and free. Successive governments have given a mix of lip service and genuine compliance to the concept.

In 1997, federal spending on education (188 billion pesos, or US $24 billion) is equivalent to 6 percent of Mexico's gross domestic product -- the highest proportion in Latin America except for Cuba. Herein lies one of the peculiar complexities of the Mexican system: The PRI, which has ruled Mexico for nearly seven decades, has been both a strong defender of public education and the strongest repressor of those who practice it.

The PRI has championed public education against private and religious education, and has brought schools into the far corners of the countryside. Illiteracy has been dramatically reduced, and the Catholic Church hierarchy has been kept at bay in its attempts to introduce religious instruction to the classrooms.

In 1921, as the nation was still stabilizing from the recently concluded Mexican Revolution, the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) was formed, headed by the renowned scholar and politician José Vasconcelos. He became one of the post-revolutionary regime's most important thinkers, arguing that the nation could only be united if it educated all of its peoples, bringing modern methods to the poorest, most backward corners of the land.

Vasconcelos, a romantic intellectual, promoted a nationalist vision of la Raza, a mestizo (mixed-race) egalitarian society that would replace the class-biased and racist prerevolutionary system. Now, decades later, the concept of la Raza has undergone a sharp evolution as many Mexicans adopt a more multicultural outlook that respects the identity and traditions of the indigenous peoples who make up a tenth of the population. But Vasconcelos' ideas were highly progressive for his day, and they helped to advance Mexican education dramatically.

Vasconcelos was the first to confront the formidable task of educating a mostly rural population that was more than 75 percent illiterate, in a country devastated by war and divided by the rule of local, self-imposed strongmen or caciques who frequently disregarded or challenged the federal government in Mexico City. Thus public education became a springboard for the centralization of power: Along with schoolbooks and legions of new teachers came, slowly but surely, the concept of an all-embracing national state that is responsible for the well-being of all its citizens.

Founded in 1943, the SNTE immediately was granted closed-shop representation of all educational workers in the nation's primary and secondary schools. The new union was part of the government's wholesale unionization of the nation's workforce, the creation of a corporatist system that would bind workers' organizations to government policy dictates; like the other unions, SNTE was formally affiliated with the PRI. Unlike many other Latin American governments that viewed labor unions with hostility, Mexico co-opted them and brought them into the ruling system.

PARTY HACKS AND "CHARROS"

In the following decades, the SNTE was a major vehicle for the PRI's penetration and domination of all aspects of national life. Its leaders were appointed by the Education Ministry, the PRI and the president, and blindly followed their dictates. At every election campaign, teachers were ordered out into the hustings to carry out PRI organizing work. From the regime's point of view, the teachers were an ideal partisan army: They were literally in every town and hamlet, and they walked in lockstep to their bosses' orders.

Gradually, however, the lockstep broke down. Teachers of a democratic bent, who took to heart the progressive, nationalistic rhetoric of the day, began to question the gap between words and deeds. In 1956, teachers from Local 9 (primary schoolteachers) in Mexico City voted into power a new, democratic leadership. They demanded better salaries and working conditions, noting that although the government's educational system was expanding rapidly, teachers' salaries were frozen and their workload was being increased. In addition, they demanded that the union be democratized and that its role as a PRI partisan machine be eliminated. The teachers began to seek political and union alliances, and joined with striking railroad, oil and telegraph workers to form a movement that seemed on the verge of threatening the survival of the corporatist union system.

Over the next four years, the government repressed, briefly recognized and repressed again the reform movement. Dozens of the dissidents were jailed for the crime of "social dissolution," and the army was called out to impose order. The reform movement was crushed. The PRI union bureaucrats -- sarcastically called charros by the reformers, after the stereotypical Mexican cowboys with broad-brimmed hats -- were back in the saddle.

In the 1970s, democratic breezes again began to blow within the SNTE. After the student protest movement was violently crushed in 1968, with more than 300 killed by army troops in Mexico City's Tlatelolco Plaza, many student activists became teachers. They gradually became active in the union. Their new activism, however, coincided with the hardening of the SNTE leadership's already hard line. In 1972, amid bickering among the SNTE bosses, Local 9 leader Carlos Jonguitud led an armed takeover of the SNTE national headquarters in Mexico City. His move was supported by then-President Luís Echeverría as part of a purge of PRI rivals who threatened his control. In the coming years, Jonguitud formed a faction called Revolutionary Vanguard. The name was quintessentially PRI-ista, using left-wing rhetoric to mask the faction's role as political enforcer for the status quo. For the next two decades, Revolutionary Vanguard held complete control over the SNTE leadership, using union thuggery that would have made Jimmy Hoffa flinch. Breaking up dissidents' meetings with clubs and guns, arrests and kidnappings was a routine tactic.

DEMOCRATIC CAUCUS IS BORN

In 1979, despite the charros' constant campaign of abuses, the dissidents formed the first reform caucus in SNTE history -- the CNTE. (Confusingly, the only difference between the two rivals' acronyms is gender, not pronunciation. In Spanish, the SNTE is pronounced "el sentay" and the CNTE is "la sentay.") After considerable debate, the reformers decided to focus their efforts on taking over the SNTE from within, rather than trying to form a separate teachers' union. They noted that Mexican labor law prohibits more than one union per workplace and that the SNTE enjoys closed-shop control of all schools, thus making it virtually impossible for the dissidents to gain legal representation for a separate union.

Among progressive labor activists, the debate over whether to seek change from within or without the official union structures continues to the present day and is highly complex, dividing ideological positions and often the reform movement itself. But for the teachers, the strategy of trying to democratize the SNTE from within quickly proved to be the correct one. After the CNTE's founding, protests spread throughout much of Mexico: Chiapas, Oaxaca, Mexico, Morelos, Puebla, Hidalgo and Guerrero states, and Mexico City. Teachers in Chiapas carried out a 22-day wildcat strike in defiance of the charro leadership, and delegations from all over the country marched to Mexico City, where 100,000 teachers rallied in the downtown Zocalo. They demanded pay raises and union democracy.

In a sign of things to come in later years, a key role was played by indigenous, bilingual teachers, who demanded an end to their separate but unequal treatment with lower pay and worse conditions than other teachers. Another central role was played by women, who accounted for about 60 percent of all teachers nationwide. They demanded an end to the frequent sexual harassment, in which male administrators and school directors demanded sex in return for processing any sort of bureaucratic request.

The teachers' cause was also spurred by the first in what was to be a long series of hapless moves by the Education Ministry to decentralize its sclerotic bureaucracy. In the early 1980s, the chaos became extreme: Paychecks for hundreds of thousands of teachers were lost and delayed for months at a time, while the government and SNTE officials blandly denied that there was any problem at all.

As the dissident movement grew, the federal government was forced to negotiate with the CNTE. In 1981, the SNTE national executive commitee -- under pressure from police chiefs at the federal Interior Ministry -- granted the CNTE positions on the local executive committees in Hidalgo, Guerrero and Mexico State. In Local 7 in Chiapas, democratic union elections resulted in a resounding victory for the reformers, and the same happened the following year in Oaxaca's Local 22.

The Chiapas and Oaxaca victories were big ones. In Mexico, unlike almost all other countries of the hemisphere, union power is real political power. Because of the tight links between unions and government, leaders of teachers' locals long had enjoyed great influence over education officialdom in their states, and often dictated personnel assignments for teachers and bureaucrats alike. Once in office in Chiapas and Oaxaca, the dissidents took advantage of this institutional clout, using it to extend the decision-making process to the grassroots. In a constant process of democratic consultation, they insisted that the teachers, not the federal and state bureaucrats, knew best how to educate the students and run the schools. When the bureaucrats resisted, the reformers often used militant tactics to enforce the grassroots decisions. For example, regional supervisors often were simply run out of town, and secretariat buildings were taken over with nonviolent sit-ins.

Susan Street, an education expert at the CIESAS-Occidente think tank in Guadalajara who has written extensively on the teachers' reform movement, described the new forms of grassroots democracy: "The (CNTE) protests did not just present demands to the state. Above all, they acted to create a new order. ... The teachers did not wait for power to be delegated to them. They forced the state to legitimate new union practices determined by the workers. Thus the teachers did not increase state power, and instead blocked certain uses and abuses of that power. ... The teachers' actions were subversive because they implicitly contained a notion of teachers as authority, an authority rooted in democratic union organization."

The government ceded ground only when it had to, and resorted to the iron fist when it didn't. "The charros made no pretense of democracy, as they do now," said Gonzalo Martínez, a CNTE leader and the present secretary-general of Mexico City's Local 9. "They often came in to our meetings with clubs and broke them up. Lots of our companions were badly hurt."

Despite the 1987 loss of Local 7 to the charros as result of internal divisions and decertification by national union authorities, reformers continued struggling. In 1989, protests again erupted nationwide. More than 500,000 teachers joined wildcat strikes in April, demanding wage increases and the ouster of Jonguitud from his behind-the-scenes role as union boss. Repeated demonstrations and sit-ins by hundreds of thousands of teachers were held in Mexico City. Finally, worried by the strikes' growing strength, the Interior Ministry and President Carlos Salinas took action, forcing Jonguitud and his aide, Refugio Araujo, to quit their roles as Revolutionary Vanguard chief and SNTE secretary-general, respectively. Elba Esther Gordillo, a longtime aide to Jonguitud and former federal congresswoman for the PRI, was named union boss in their place.

Rank-and-file teachers celebrated the downfall of the old bosses but protested the dedazo (the back-room, undemocratic appointment) of a new one. Three hundred thousand teachers filled Mexico City's central Zócalo plaza; they noted that Gordillo was believed linked to the 1981 killing of CNTE leader Misael Nuñez Acosta.

REFORMING, CO-OPTING

Under heavy grassroots pressure, Gordillo began a series of important reform steps. She abolished Revolutionary Vanguard and allowed new internal elections in Local 9. CNTE activists promptly won control of the local, in the most important victory yet for the teachers' reform movement. Local 9, with 58,000 members and a strategic location in the nation's capital, is the most influential of the SNTE's 55 locals. For the charros, Local 9 traditionally has been a springboard to power for SNTE secretary-generals; in the hands of the dissidents, Local 9 has become an important tool for the campaign to spread union democracy to other states.

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San Agustín Loxicha, Oaxaca -- The man was seemingly everywhere in this isolated mountain village, asking questions of nearly everyone. He was dressed in a sports warm-up suit and sneakers. He wrote intently in a notebook. Every now and then, he could be seen with commanders of the heavily-armed state and federal judicial police who swarmed all over town.

He seemed especially interested in the local schoolteachers. He played pick-up basketball games with them on the court in the center of town, and chatted easily with them. He called himself a "tourist."

But San Agustín Loxicha is no place for tourists. In the government's eyes, the Zapoteco Indian village of 35,000 people is the nerve center of guerrilla activity in southern Oaxaca state. In a sweeping crackdown since September, police and army troops have arrested six of the town's schoolteachers, accusing them of belonging to the People's Revolutionary Army (EPR).

Among the detainees are Agustín Luna, the town's mayor, and Gaudencio García, who was named to replace Luna as mayor when he was arrested. More than 50 other people in the town and surrounding hamlets have been imprisoned on subversion charges.

After being plied with several beers at a local restaurant by a visiting American, the man in the warm-up suit admitted that his extended stay in town had little to do with tourism. He was an agent from the National Security department of the federal Interior Ministry, he said, and investigating teachers was his business. "Bernardo Niño, at your service," he added. Asked about his investigation, Niño claimed that there was an "organic" relationship between the teachers union and guerrillas.

"There will be many more arrests," he said. "We've only taken a few, beheaded part of the subversives' organization. But we're not interested in just getting part of them. We're making connections. We're weaving the web. And when we've identified all of them, we'll act."

But Niño seemed to know little about the town's school system or other basic information that would be needed to draw such conclusions. In fact, Niño admitted that all of his information came from paid informants -- a tactic that human-rights experts say is common among security services throughout Mexico and is a key reason for the country's notoriously sloppy police investigative work. Using only paid informants, they say, virtually guarantees that police will be told only what the informants think the police want to be told. The result is a vicious circle of gossip, half-truths and political bias against left-of-center groups, the critics say.

In San Agustín Loxicha, schoolteachers deny having any links to the rebels. "We're simply the 'usual suspects' they grab whenever there's a problem," said one primary school teacher who asked not to be identified. "We are very proud of being social leaders, but our struggle is completely within the law, and always has been."

Although the teacher noted that the rebels had expressed political demands similar to those of the democratic teachers' movement and other left-of-center groups in Oaxaca, he said he worried that the main result of the rebel activity would be more police and army repression.

Niño indicated that those fears are correct. Asked whether there will be more arrests of teachers, Niño leaned over a beer-bottle-laden restaurant table and said with a grin: "Lots more."

During years of democratic control over Local 9, the national leadership tried hard to take advantage of political complexities and divisions among the rank and file. It also has used its economic clout (all members' dues go straight to the national union, not to the locals) by giving the dissident-controlled locals far less funding than is given to politically loyal ones. But CNTE activists have gradually consolidated their control over Local 9, and managed to win all 35 seats on its executive board in 1995 elections.

Gordillo's reforms did not take place in a vacuum -- they were accompanied by purges ordered by Salinas at other powerful unions, such as the oil workers, in a campaign to consolidate his personal control over the nation's union apparatus. And as elsewhere, the new changes had a divide-and-conquer effect on the teachers. In the following years, other changes have been equally divisive for the democratic teachers.

• In 1990, Gordillo invited some moderate CNTE leaders to participate on the national union's executive committee. Those who took up the offer were bitterly denounced as sell-outs by their colleagues. In the years since then, the division has solidified, leaving two entrenched camps on the democrats' side: the moderate officials, calling themselves the "Democratic Factions," who took jobs with Gordillo's leadership; and the CNTE itself, which rejects collaboration with the national leadership on the grounds that its steps toward allowing internal democracy are still insufficient. Although the CNTE has a much larger following than the Democratic Factions, divisions within the CNTE as well as the Factions' access to bureaucratic power have slowed the process of change.

• In 1992, the SNTE ended its 49-year formal affiliation with the PRI, thus becoming the first major union since the 1970s to break its umbilical cord. No longer would PRI membership dues automatically be checked off the pay stub of each union member. It was a new, pluralistic era in Mexican unionism, Gordillo claimed, as she became a high- profile spokeswoman for Salinas' policies. She became well-known for reaching out to opposition parties and the nation's intellectuals, although skeptics called her efforts just another of the regime's attempts at co-opting its critics. But after retiring as secretary-general of the SNTE in 1995, Gordillo made clear that little had really changed -- she became leader of the PRI's government-union wing. And in 1997, the SNTE is funding a lavish, multimillion-dollar program of scholarships for rural schoolchildren, co-sponsored with the farmers' wing of the PRI, the National Peasants' Confederation. Critics of the new scholarship program say it should be the government, not the union, that provides such funds -- although they scoff that the money probably does come secretly from the state anyway, given the traditional links between unions, PRI and government.

• Also in 1992, the Education Ministry started the most ambitious stage yet in its fitful, 15-year-old series of decentralization programs. In part, the process has been badly needed to correct the overcentralized nature of the ministry's bureaucracy, in which all local decisions -- even for the most remote rural areas -- were made by officials in Mexico City and then passed down to the provinces. Under the new program, almost all decisions except funding and curriculum are made at the local level. But the changes also appear intended to weaken the dissident teachers' movement. With most contract negotiations now done directly with state, rather than federal, authorities, teachers have fewer reasons to unite against the central government. In fact, the results have been a mixed bag. After the changes were implemented, the CNTE entered a several-year period of relative inactivity. But in the few locals where the democrats had power, such as Oaxaca, union leaders were able to use decentralization to win major concessions in the making of educational policy.

• In 1994, the Education Ministry introduced a 5-level merit pay program that would raise teachers' pay by as much as 300 percent. The program, known as Teacher's Career, ranks teachers according to educational attainment, supervisors' evaluations and other criteria. It was supported by national union officials but roundly denounced by the CNTE. Echoing criticisms by progressive U.S. teachers of similar proposals north of the border, CNTE leaders say that merit pay opens the doors for favoritism and clientism by supervisors and that it overly individualizes the teaching process. But this may be a losing battle, as even the most militant CNTE leaders find it hard to turn down extra money in their paychecks. For example, at a January 1997 meeting of several members of the Local 9 executive committee, one after another angrily denounced the merit-pay plan. But when a visitor remarked that, of course, no one in the room was enrolled in the merit pay plan, there was an embarrassed silence. "Well, actually I am," said one official. She said that the bonus meant an extra 30 percent in take-home pay -- $75 per week instead of $55 -- and that her family needed the money. After another embarrassed silence, other officials admitted that despite the CNTE's call to boycott the merit-pay plan, about 60 percent of Mexico's teachers now either accept the extra money or have applied for it. As a result, the CNTE is considering beating a tactical retreat and softening its opposition to the plan.

In the 1920s, when Education Minister José Vasconcelos sent thousands of teachers into remote rural regions, he was hoping to teach the indigenous peoples Spanish, not their own languages. When members of the nation's 56 indigenous groups gained education and returned to their own communities as schoolteachers, they were paid far less than mestizo teachers and were employed by the National Institute for Indigenous Affairs (INI) rather than the Education Ministry. Critics complained that if teachers generally were regarded as mere second-class professionals, bilingual teachers certainly were treated as third-class.

Since the 1970s, indigenous teachers have been a large part -- in some states, the vast majority -- of the dissident movement. Although relatively few of them have reached leadership posts in the movement, they were able to obtain clear victories: In the 1970s, for example, they won the inclusion under the Education Ministry with regular pay, greater assistance for student boarders in isolated communities and teacher training.

In the 1980s and 1990s, democratic teachers have forced the Education Ministry to expand its indigenous, bilingual programs. In Oaxaca, where democrats won control of the statewide Local 22, the expansion of union power has brought about dramatic expansion of bilingual education and the development of innovative programs that are internationally recognized as models to follow. Since 1994, the Oaxaca state indigenous education department -- wholly controlled by union officials -- has been developing textbooks in the state's 16 indigenous languages that are crafted to fit the culture of each ethnic group. Andrés Hernández, the department's director, explained that indigenous traditions form an integral part of the new pedagogy: "If you're writing a chapter teaching about animals, you have to start from the premise that animals have an intimate relationship with cultural life. For example, you shouldn't use a dog to illustrate a lesson because many ethnic groups give different meanings to dogs, sometimes negative. For the Zapotecos, you should use an ox, which has a special meaning to their culture, and for the Chinantecos you should use a turkey. These may be simple details, but they are important."

Hernández, a Zapoteco who is a primary school teacher, was named to a three-year term at his post directly by Local 22 -- as are all officials in the Oaxaca state education ministry except for the minister and top aides, who are named by the state governor. Recently, Hernández and other union officials have proposed an expansion of the indigenous program. The plan, which would include the creation of a special research institute for indigenous languages, has received provisional approval by the PRI-controlled state congress but, as of early 1997, was awaiting further legislative debate over financing and other details.

A NEW UNION DEMOCRACY

The CNTE has developed a complex system of grassroots democracy, in which CNTE and union structures overlap yet remain partially distinct. For example, the CNTE's basic organizational forms are the "struggle committee" and regional "central councils of struggle," extralegal forms of organization not recognized by union statutes. A key role is played by "brigades," teams of teachers who carry information and support to other areas.

In locals that it controls, the CNTE has not disbanded as a rank-and-file organization, and remains as a sort of dual power alongside the official union structure. The strategy results in part from a lingering suspicion of the dangers of government co-optation, and in part from the realistic calculation that if democrats lose power in the local, they will still have their parallel organization.

In these locals, democrats also have made changes in the official union structures. The three-level pyramid of elected representatives -- the local's executive committee, and sector and zone committees -- was broadened to include a fourth level or representation, the individual school committee. This has been an important means of preventing the top-down imposition of leaders by "slate." In addition, the asamblea, or meeting of all elected representatives, became the highest authority, rather than the executive committee. In the asamblea, the consulta is the rule -- delegates must take the debate on important issues back to their local areas before voting and adopting a decision.

"It is much more difficult to carry out our activities in a true democratic fashion, and in a place like Mexico City, with such a diversity of viewpoints, sometimes it's frustrating," said Concepción Baez, a member of the CNTE's national coordinating committee and a leader of Local 9. "But it's the only way to sustain our movement. It's who we are."

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MEXICO CITY -- The issue was school uniforms, and the debate was hot. Some students wanted them, some didn't, and others were too shy to say. "Go on, stand up for your opinion!" a teacher said to a girl who had erupted in giggles and sat down halfway through making a comment. "The purpose is not just to vote, but to say why you're doing it."

The girl got up again and finished her point, saying that uniforms were cheaper than the latest fashions and therefore should be mandatory. Her comment swayed the debate, which until then had been leaning away from imposing a uniform rule on all students.

At the end of the assembly, the students of the Centauro del Norte (Northern Centaur) elementary school approved the new rule, 88 to 18. It was an example of democratic pedagogy, Mexican style. The school -- founded, staffed and funded by the CNTE-led Local 9 -- is a laboratory for progressive teaching techniques. Along with a half-dozen schools in Mexico City and hundreds of others in states with CNTE locals, it uses the pedagogical techniques of Celestin Freinet, the French education theorist. Freinet argued that all aspects of schools should be run democratically and that teachers should emphasize the students' own cognitive and creative abilities rather than rote instruction.

In the early years of the democratic teachers' movement, pedagogical issues were virtually ignored, and most activists focused on the struggle for power. But in the 1990s, the CNTE has placed new emphasis on taking progressive values into the classroom as well as the union hall. In Oaxaca, for example, the union-run indigenous education department has adopted Freinet in its efforts to design new textbooks and teaching techniques.

Following Freinet's techniques, Centauro del Norte's math classes adapt the official government texts to focus on practical questions. For example: If a 30 percent discount is given on a half kilogram of chicken, what effect will that have on a working-class family's daily or weekly food budget? How many times a week will they be able to eat chicken? And how many times would an upper-income family be able to eat it? Where are the chickens raised? Who makes the profit on them? What is fair?

"We are trying to help the students form the capacity to reason independently rather than just give correct answers," said school principal Pedro Hernández. But in addition to their pedagogical experiments, the teachers are still trying to educate federal education bureaucrats about the school's legitimacy. The school, founded three years ago by Local 9, only received certification as a public school in September, after the entire school neighborhood carried out repeated sit-in protests at Education Ministry offices. But the Ministry still refuses to pay the teachers' salaries because it rejects the community's insistence on its right to choose the teachers.

The school, and a half-dozen others, is run as part of a powerful neighborhood organization, the Francisco Villa Patriotic Front, which groups more than 80,000 low-income residents of housing projects and squatter settlements. Some schools have received both recognition and full funding from the government, while others have neither. Meanwhile, the front's settlements are expanding rapidly but existing school facilities remain scarce, as the Education Ministry fails to keep up with Mexico City's rapid population growth.

Centauro del Norte teachers and community leaders say they will continue their campaign of militant civil disobedience until the schools receive full government support. "For us, education and democratic control are inseparable," said Hernández.

THE TIDE TURNS

During the early 1990s, the democratic teachers' movement hit a low ebb. The government's strategy of using limited reforms to defuse the demands for change appeared to be successful. But after several years of regrouping, the dissidents again hit stride. In 1996, protests erupted nationwide. This time, however, the anger came not mainly from Oaxaca or Mexico City, which are considered the CNTE's most radical elements, but from CNTE activists in previously less-active states.

The activists rejected a 22 percent wage increase negotiated by the national SNTE leaders, noting that teachers' wages had lost 80 percent of their purchasing power since 1981, including a 20 percent drop in the previous year alone. The CNTE demanded: 1) a 100 percent wage increase; 2) a 90-day's pay Christmas bonus; 3) 30-day's pay vacation bonus; 4) permanent status for temporary employees, and 5) rejection of proposed changes to the federal public employees' social security system, which includes health and retirement plans. Throughout the month of May, wildcat work stoppages were held nationwide; the strikes were nearly complete in Guerrero, Michoacán, Durango, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Chiapas and Oaxaca. Thousands of teachers from across the country held a sit-in in front of the Education Ministry in Mexico City. The numbers of protesting teachers grew, and they were joined by other left-of-center social movements. The government became worried, and cracked down. On May 23, police brutally attacked the teachers, leaving 45 wounded. But the beatings boomeranged, producing a wave of public support for the teachers. Feeling the political heat, President Ernesto Zedillo fired David Garay Maldonado, the capital's chief of public security.

The protests grew in the following weeks. On May 31, 150,000 teachers marched through Mexico City to the Presidential mansion at Los Pinos. The three-mile-long march was the largest teachers demonstration since 1989. The SNTE national leadership, humiliated by its loss of control over its members, bitterly opposed the CNTE protests. As Humberto Dávila, the pro-government secretary-general, said later, "We have had to confront actions that tried to weaken union autonomy. Some people want to bring about a fracture, a confrontation and a sterile dispute among the teachers, trying in that way to weaken the union. What is worrisome is that they want to satisfy external political interests that have nothing to do with the legitimate interests of education workers. We have to be very much on our guard against that."

In subsequent negotiations with authorities, the CNTE was unable to gain additional pay raises, but many state delegations won important concessions on local issues. In general, the protests were considered a great victory, serving notice that the CNTE has recovered and again is one of the nation's strongest social movements for change. In fact, although the CNTE itself eschews overt political affiliations, its members tend to be highly active politically. CNTE harbors within its ranks a wide variety of currents, the largest of which are aligned with the nation's three main progressive forces: the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD); the Zapatista rebels' political support network; and the Broad Front for the Construction of a National Liberation Movement, a coalition of grassroots groups known by its Spanish initials FAC-MLN.

As Luís Fernando Canseco, secretary-general of Local 22 in Oaxaca, said: "There is no social movement in Oaxaca that teachers have not been heavily involved in. Teachers are natural grassroots leaders, and in Oaxaca we have assumed a social commitment that goes beyond the schoolroom. We are the most powerful social force in the state."

AGAIN, THE IRON FIST

For decades, the government has often accused teachers of being trouble-makers and rebels. In the 1950s, they were accused of "social dissolution," while in the late 1990s the favored charge appears to be subversion. Since mid-1996, when a new guerrilla group, the People's Revolutionary Army (EPR), appeared in several states of central and southern Mexico, authorities have claimed that radical teachers are to blame.

In recent months, six teachers have been arrested, more than 50 have had arrest warrants issued and one, Guerrero state teacher Gregorio Alvarado, is disappeared and presumed killed after he was kidnapped off a city street by paramilitary gunmen. By repeatedly leaking police and army "intelligence" files to pro-government media outlets, the authorities have managed to tar democratic teachers wholesale with rumors and innuendo. When police and army troops carry out counterinsurgency sweeps in rural areas, they often occupy schools, interrogate students and try to get them to incriminate their teachers and parents with rebel activity. Teachers report that one of the soldiers' favorite interrogation tactics is to offer toys to the schoolchildren in exchange for "information."

The crackdown, which has been condemned by national and international human rights groups, appears to be worsening as the government proves unable to stop the growing rebel activity.

"Repression of the teachers is nothing new, but it is worse now than it has been in many years," said Germán Mendoza, coordinator of the Teacher's Commission on Human Rights (COMADH) at Local 22. "The government and security forces have absolute impunity for their abuses, and we are an easy target." Mendoza, a longtime CNTE activist, was paralyzed from the waist down when he was shot in the back by police in 1987.

NORTH AMERICAN SOLIDARITY

As the capital mobility and free-market policies enshrined in NAFTA continue eroding living standards for workers from the Yukon to the Yucatan, many U.S. and Canadian unions have begun to develop solidarity ties and joint organizing campaigns with their colleagues south of the border. The United Electrical Workers and the Teamsters, for example, are working closely with their Mexican counterparts, and the AFL-CIO is supporting a border organizing strategy. Teachers are gradually doing the same: In California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, teachers' locals have developed joint programs to work with CNTE activists on subjects as varied as bilingual education techniques, teacher exchange programs and human-rights delegations.

The most important effort to bring together the teachers of north and south is the Trinational Coalition for the Defense of Public Education, founded in 1993 by 200 teachers' union leaders from Canada, Mexico and the United States. Since then, the Coalition has held several large conferences of activists and union leaders from elementary school to the university level and has brought CNTE activists to visit U.S. schools.

The Coalition and other such efforts represent the enlightened, collective self-interest of all educators. As Mexico's teachers work to democratize their union, defend public education and protect themselves from government repression, they need our solidarity. The success or failure of their struggle will have a huge impact on the Mexican democratic union movement as a whole. From schoolrooms to border factories, the struggle for democracy in Mexico's unions continues. For all North Americans' sake, it must succeed.

An affront to Mexican teachers is an affront to us all.

Written by David Monroy
Design and layout by Charles McIntyre

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Canada:
Larry Kuehn
Director, Research and Technology
British Columbia Teachers Federation
100-550 W. 6th Ave.
Vancouver, B.C. V5Z 4P2M
tel: (604) 871-2255
fax: (604) 871-2294
email: lkuehn@bctf.bc.ca

David Eaton
c/o Wendy Dias
Former General Secretary
Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation
60 Mobile Dr.
Toronto, Ontario M4A 2P3
tel./fax: (613) 962-0520
email: eat@blvl.igs.net

Mexico:
Maria de la Luz Arriaga
Coordinator, Mexican Section
Edif. Anexo, 1 piso
Facultad de Economia
Ciudad Universitaria Mexico 20 D.F.
tel: (525) 622-2161
fax: (525) 616 -- 0814
email: mariluz@servidor.unam.mx

Alexandra Diaz
Technical Secretary, Mexican Section
Antiguo Camino a San Pedro Martir 221
Edif. B-5 depto 103 Tlalpan
Mexico, D.F.

United States:
Dan Leahy
Coordinator, Trinational Coalition
P.O. Box 602
Olympia, WA 98507
(360) 866-6000 ext. 6478
(360) 709-9450
email: sanpatricio@igc.apc.org

Ted Lewis
Mexico Program Director
Global Exchange
2017 Mission St. #303
San Francisco, CA 94110
tel: (415) 255-7296
fax: (415) 255-7498
email: tedlewis@globalexchange.org

Books:
Organizing Dissent: the State and the Democratic Teachers Movement in Mexico, by Maria Lorena Cook, Pennsylvania State University Press. (800) 326-9180, $19.95 in paperback. 359 pages. This book by Cook, a professor at New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, is a comprehensive, academic analysis of the growth of the CNTE through 1994.

Internet:
Mexican Labor News and Analysis, edited by Dan LaBotz, is a free, bi-weekly electronic newsletter on Mexican labor movements, with extensive coverage of teachers. A good activists' tool in English. Subscribe at: 103144.2651@compuserve.com This can also be viewed at the United Electrical Workers' web site: http://www.igc.apc.org/unitedelect