Why Chilean Students Protest

Certainly, the demand for educational reforms in Chile is a major cause of student mobilizations over the last two-plus years. But reform is rarely enough in and of itself to sustain a long-term movement; there have to be other systemic and political issues that revitalize the movement. In Chile, the structural problems with the educational bureaucratic apparatus has played an important, if overlooked, part of that revitalizing force. Howso? Well, last night, Chile’s Senate voted to impeach the Minister of Education,[update: less-detailed English version here] Harald Beyer, finding him guilty for failing to act against profiteering within universities, among other charges. The vote followed the Chamber of Deputies’ recent vote to impeach Beyer. Although President Sebastián Piñera’s government insisted Beyer would remain in his post “until the end,” the end is now apparently nigh, as the impeachment means Beyer is banned from holding public office for 5 years. Additionally, whoever replaces Beyer will become the fourth Education Minister in just two years in Chile, as his previous two predecessors had resigned in the face of student protests demanding free higher education.

Given the apparent government corruption in the Ministry of Education, this type of turnover is exactly the kind of issue that can reignite student movements and give them strength both in terms of internal organization and in terms of creating broader social support for them and/or opposition to the government. Indeed, the fallout of Beyer’s policies and his lack of oversight were significant issues in recent protests that saw over 100,000 students march.

The turnover and malfeasance of the ministers of education under Piñera certainly reflect poorly on his administration, and there seems to be little doubt that, when he leaves office next year, education will be one of the key defining issues and failures of his government. Indeed, it is of little surprise that presidential candidate Michelle Bachelet has already made educational reforms a key part of her platform as she seeks the presidency for a second time. That she has done so, and that so much of Piñera’s government has been defied by his intransigence or inability to address educational reform, provides a powerful reminder of the political and social power of student movements and of the educational issues they embrace in the twenty-first century.

Mexican Teachers Push Back Against Peña Nieto

Nearly two months ago, Enrique Peña Nieto signed into law an educational reform bill that reduced the power of teachers’ unions, and then promptly arrested union leader Elba Ester Gordillo on charges of corruption. At the time, I commented that “it wouldn’t be terribly surprising to see some pushback from teachers.” It would appear that that pushback has happened.

Easter vacation was over, but there wasn’t a teacher in sight at the boarding school for indigenous children on the edge of this sunbaked southern Mexico hill town. [...]

Pena Nieto’s first major legislative victory after taking office in December was a constitutional amendment eliminating Mexico’s decades-old practice of buying and selling teaching jobs, and replacing it with a standardized national teaching test. That’s heresy to a radical splinter union of elementary and high-school teachers in Guerrero, one of the country’s poorest and worst-educated states. The teachers claim the test is a plot to fire them in mass as a step toward privatizing education, although there is little evidence the government plans that.

Reform advocates say the dissidents simply fear losing control over the state education system and the income it provides, despite the need to reform a system that eats up more of the budget and produces worse results than virtually any other in the world’s largest economies.

The 20,000-member group walked out more than a month ago, turning hundreds of thousands of children out of class. Then it launched an increasingly disruptive string of protests.

The overtly anti-labor tone of the article aside, this taps into several main issues. On the one hand, just because there is “little evidence” that the government is using the reform to move towards privatization, that does not mean such a move is rendered impossible down the road; that the teachers are mobilizing to try to ensure that doesn’t take place at some future moment is understandable. On the other hand, the system for hiring teachers as it currently operates is also open to plenty of cases of corruption and abuse. And of course, the issue of teachers’ pensions in Mexico’s poorer areas taps into broader socio-economic problems: that the benefits and pay for teachers in rural areas is much higher than other employment opportunities is a harsh reminder of the impoverished conditions and exploitation of workers that continues in Mexico’s countryside; and that that pay is used to keep a lot of families fed and supplied with goods makes the pensions issue not just a teachers’ issue, but a social issue for non-teachers as well in these areas.

Ultimately, it wouldn’t be surprising if Peña Nieto uses the strength of the federal government to crack down on the teachers. The arrest of Gordillo is already increasingly looking like an early warning shot across the bow of the teachers’ unions, making clear Peña Nieto’s efforts to curb their power. And in the face of the state police apparatus, teachers are relatively outmatched in power. And that is not automatically a good thing for, if there are real problems with education in Mexico today, eliminating the power of unions and allowing the government to unilaterally control and dictate the terms of education is equally problematic. Things could work out, but quite honestly, right now, there does not seem to be a real encouraging exit one way or the other to the political struggle between the President and the teachers.

Mexico Teachers’ Union Leader Arrested

Apparently, it won’t take so long to see at least one of the consequences of Mexico’s massive educational reform. Just one day after Enrique Peña Nieto signed into law a reform that greatly weakened the teachers union on Monday, yesterday afternoon, the government arrested teachers’ union leader Elba Ester Gordillo for the alleged embezzlement of 2 billion pesos during her 23  years as the head of the teachers’ union (English version here). The reform Peña Nieto signed already had gone after Gordillo’s authority, granting the federal government power to fire and hire teachers, rather than letting Gordillo exercise such power. Apparently, though that was not enough, as the government has now gone directly after the powerful union leader herself.

It’s tough to say what the fallout from this will be right now, but it wouldn’t be terribly surprising to see some pushback from teachers; though opponents have long accused Gordillo of corruption, she also enjoys massive support among her constituents, having been recently reelected to another 6-year term at the head of the union without a single vote against her.  The government’s swift action against a popular union leader is a bold move, and one that is not without risks. Though far from definite, it seems far more conceivable today than it did yesterday that the government and teachers could be heading towards a face-off over just how far the new educational reforms should go.

Certainly, some components of the reform will take time to develop and make their impact felt. Clearly, though, the government has wasted little time in attempting to assert its authority over the teachers’ union. How that move will play out remains to be seen.

Educational Reforms in Mexico

We’ve discussed the wave of educational reforms (or lack thereof) throughout the Americas here periodically, from Chile to Guatemala, from the Dominican Republic to Brazil. Now Mexico has also officially entered the fray, as yesterday President Enrique Peña Nieto signed a major educational overhaul into effect. Among other things, the reform weakens Mexico’s teachers unions, expands federal oversight of the educational system, and seeks to improve completion rates among middle school students. Although Peña Nieto insisted the reforms will improve Mexico’s educational system, some critics charge that the new bill will lead to increasing privatization of education in the country. There are definitely some potential negatives in the reform, but it will all depend on how the government acts and implements the reform going forward. It’s hard to argue against improving the quality of education, but the devil is always in the details; it will definitely be worth watching what the specifics of Peña Nieto’s vague platitudes about the reform will be going forward.

An Interview with Chilean Student Leader Camila Vallejo

For those interested in the causes and fights of student leader Camila Vallejo who, along with Noam Titleman, was awarded the Letelier-Moffit Human Rights Award this week, check out the interview she did with IPS a few months ago. In the interview, she outlines what students have achieved (and can achieve) in Chile, discusses which tactics she thinks can work and which don’t, and talks about what it means to be a communist in the 21st century. It would have been nice if the interview spent a bit more time on the educational reforms Chile’s students are fighting for, but that caveat aside, it’s still a fascinating and well-done interview, and well worth the time.

Chilean Student Leaders Win Human Rights Award

Speaking of student movements and protests, Chilean student leaders Camila Vallejo and Noam Titleman were awarded the International Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award from Washington DC’s Institute for Policy Studies. The two were announced winners of the award, named after the Chilean diplomat and his American aide whom the Pinochet regime killed in a car bomb in Washington DC in 1976 (a terrorist attack on US soil from a country the US supported at the time), based upon “their ideas – ideas toward true democracy and changing the system so that it works for the many, not just the few.”  In the wake of the announcement, the two student leaders sat down for an interview with Democracy Now for an interview. Though not given much time, they provided a cogent (albeit brief) discussion of the ways in which the privatization of education under Pinochet have had detrimental long-term causes and explained in part why this finally culminated in protests last year, in the process showing the struggles facing students not just in Chile but throughout the hemisphere and demonstrating how student protests and mobilizations can shape society.

On Recent Student Protests in Mexico

Students in the state of Michoacán have recently protested changes in the curriculum, leading to increasing antagonisms and the occupation of three teachers’ colleges. The protests, and the government’s responses, get at the heart of the complexity of student movements and their connections to society more broadly.

The protests started with recent announcements that students at teachers’ colleges would have to take courses in English and computer science, fields that students felt were useless for programs designed to train teachers to help rural (and often still impoverished) areas. In the protests, some students ended up intercepting delivery trucks, not permitting the drivers or the trucks that entered the campuses to leave, leading the government to crack down by sending troops to the campuses to arrest anywhere from 120 to 300 students (based on initial reports), citing the loss of “hundreds of thousands of dollars per day” as the reason to violate the autonomy of college campuses.

This last point is not a small matter, neither in Mexico nor in Latin America more generally. Historically, university campuses have been seen as autonomous from government interference, and with justifiable reasons: the autonomy of the campus means that professors and students alike have the academic freedom to think and ask questions that may unsettle politicians or other powerful sectors of society. Campus invasions have happened in the past throughout the region – in Brazil in the early years of the dictatorship or in Mexico City in 1968, for example. But the repression involved in these invasions only reinforced the importance of campus autonomy, as the invasions were explicitly tied to dictatorial regimes. That’s not to say the occupying forces are dictatorial, but the move to occupy a campus is a rare one, and one fraught with political, social, and historical implications. It will be worth seeing if this becomes the new tactic for student protests in Mexico, or if this is an isolated incident.

Another issue at play, and one that is all too often overlooked, is the heterogeneity of student voices, and the ways in which it ultimately inhibits students’ ability to have input into how education in the Americas operates. While some students are protesting, many others are opposed to the protests. Separate protests at Mexico City’s National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM, the same school that the armed troops invaded in 1968) provide a powerful reminder of this:

This month, about 100 students at Mexico City’s Autonomous University rushed the gates of their seized campus and briefly forced out striking students, who later returned with a pickup truck to bash in the gates and retake the school. The two sides are now in talks to end the standoff.

With only a dozen or so masked students holding some campuses at the school, frustration has boiled over among hundreds of locked-out students who tried to take make-up classes in improvised classrooms. The strikers were backed by some professors and university employees.

“We are now holding classes in tents, at the soccer field next to the campus, and the conditions are deplorable,” said Gustavo Martinon, 23, a media arts student at the university’s Cuautepec campus. “When it rains, the tents flood.”

“The engineering students need labs and computers, and they don’t have them. We (media arts) students need the radio station, the video facilities, and all the equipment we need.”

Like most of the other students trying to take back the campus, Martinon said he has no position on whether the strikers have a legitimate grudge. Taking over a campus and affecting thousands of students, he said, isn’t the way to air a grievance.

This isn’t surprising. Although the tendency in the US media is to portray student movements as a unified bloc, they  never are; even Chile’s student movement, which has been able to mobilize tens of thousands of students in recent months, it has not managed to have all students in Chile join, and it is one of the more successful of recent student mobilizations. Nor is it surprising that, when students find their own studies interrupted by those in other programs with different issues, they tend to be antagonistic towards the mobilization and strikes; as Erik Loomis has repeatedly pointed out (most recently with the Chicago Teachers’ Union strike), people who claim to support a movement suddenly turn against it the moment it interrupts their daily lives.

Martinon’s comments are a perfect example of that, and his failure to even consider the legitimacy of the demands shows the ways students themselves can undermine their own causes. By failing to consider whether the striking students’ demands are legitimate (and thus, worth supporting), he and thousands of others have refused to show solidarity. That matters for a number of reasons. First, by fragmenting internally, students ultimately weaken their position in the face of administration and state officials who gain the upper hand in imposing their vision and will on curriculum and campuses without necessarily listening to or heeding students’ voices or needs. Secondly, and in turn, such divisions hurt long-term student organization and defense of student interests; if one group fails to support another when they mobilize to protect their interests, why should the second group mobilize for the first group when the time comes for them to make their demands?

Additionally, Martinon’s argument that protests aren’t the appropriate way to air grievances is at best highly problematic. More often than not, protests and occupations are the best and even only way for students to make their voices collectively heard, and are usually a last resort after failure to use more “quiet” methods, such as petitions, lobbying, etc., have failed; this is the case throughout Latin America, be it in Mexico in 1968, Brazil in the 1960s, or even Chile today. Martinon himself doesn’t seem to realize that this is true; he complains about students protesting and shutting down campus because their educational experience is lacking, but then complains that everybody suffers on campus, as if these two things were unconnected, as if the university is not being run as an institution by state officials and university administrators; they see universities as a single, large organism, something students like Martinon fail to do.

And there are likely thousands of Martinons in these protests, both in Mexico City and Michoacán, whose irritation at inconveniences spurred by protests and campus shutdowns blinds them to the fact that the students are in fact all in this together, even if the immediate demands of the protesters has little to do with other colleges on campuses. Students could realize that curriculum reform, much-needed infrastructural improvements (like the engineering students’ needs for computers and labs or Martinon’s own need for a radio station and video labs) are part of the same struggle, and that protests are often the fastest way to bring attention to your causes and to see they are addressed; students in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s increasingly took to the streets to make such demands, and ultimately the military regime ended up trying to address some of those issues students raised in protests via a massive university reform in 1968; though the regime had its own reasoning and defenses for the reform, there’s little doubt student complaints had created a broad awareness of the failings of the university system, failings the regime had to address. And again, more recently, by taking to the streets and making public their complaints themselves (rather than relying on media or politicians to frame the debate), students in Chile have been able to draw massive support to their cause of educational reform, leading to very low support for President Sebastián Piñera.

These are just some of the issues at play in the recent Mexican protests, but they do provide a good example both of the challenges facing students throughout the hemisphere today, not only in terms of opposition to governmental policies or weaknesses in curricula and infrastructure on campuses, but in terms of the challenges in working as a collective with shared interests as well.

Two September 11ths

Being in Chile for September 11^th, especially this year, is moving.

On a personal note, I am conducting research for my dissertation, which investigates how political prisoners and their families rebuilt their lives in the aftermath of the political violence that began thirty-nine years ago today when a military coup overthrew the democratically-elected president Salvador Allende. It saddens me to think of the participation of my country—the United States—in that attack on democracy, especially when the memory of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001, while undoubtedly tragic in its own right, has long become a battle cry for supposedly defending freedom.

Like Ariel Dorfman in his essays “The Other 9/11” and “Epitaph for another September 11^th,” I grieve for both tragedies while finding it unsettling that Chileans fought peacefully (as Dorfman pointed out, with a few exceptions, but non-armed movements far outweighed the armed) for the return of the civil rights and democratic institutions that were ripped from them, yet the U.S. government happily championed war abroad and the destruction of civil liberties both abroad and at home.

Over the past few years, Chile has witnessed an effervescence collective struggle that fueled the protests in the 1980s that eventually led to Pinochet’s downfall in a 1988 plebiscite. This is largely seen in the student movement. Students have continuously demonstrated for affordable, equal, and quality education. They are fighting the privatized education system that Pinochet re-organized under his military rule as he began the systematic destruction of the welfare state and implementation of neoliberal economic policies.  And the police are still reactionary and violent, just as they were in the 1970s and 1980s.

In fact, as I watched the protests at the Universidad de Chile’s main building a couple of weeks ago, I could not help but think that I had stepped back in time. Students yelled from the windows of the building, which they had taken over (peacefully), and banners flew, featuring Allende’s face and slogans such as “The economy at the service of humans, not humans at the service of the economy.” A large crowd of demonstrators blocked the main thoroughfare, and they were soon sprayed with either water or tear gas. Yet I doubt the students will give up anytime soon. The memory of collective struggle is living on through them.

So this September 11^th, I have both Chile and the United States in my thoughts. With demonstrators pushing for reform in Chile and an upcoming presidential election in the U.S., I hope that both countries truly reflect on the meaning of democracy today, rather than whisk around patriotic thoughts with the wave of a flag.

Around Latin America

-The fallout of Paraguay’s suspension from Mercosur continues to create political ripples. This week, Paraguayan Defense Minister Maria Liz Garcia said the country “need[s] to prepare for war to live in peace.” In clear reference to Paraguay’s position in the War of the Triple Alliance, Garcia also blamed foreign leaders for starting wars that Paraguayans do not want and for creating “completely unequal conditions.” Meanwhile, the country has chosen April 21 of next year as the date of general elections to pick the successor to current serving president Federico Franco, who took over after Congress removed democratically-elected president Fernando Lugo from office earlier this year.

-Earlier this week, I commented on the test Ecuador was facing regarding the sanctity of political asylum. Yesterday, in a move that at reaffirms its sincerity on the issue, the Ecuadoran government said it will respect Belarussian Alexander Barankov’s request for asylum. Barankov had fled to Ecuador after providing details on the inner workings of dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s government, requesting asylum with the argument that his life would be in danger if he were returned to Belarus.

-A judge has ordered the arrest of 8 Chilean ex-officers for their role in the disappearance and presumed murder of U.S. citizen Boris Weisfeilerin 1985.

-In a move that is not surprising but depressing nonetheless, the Brazilian Supreme Court has ordered the release of Brazilian rancher Regivaldo Galvão, convicted for the murder of American nun and environmental activist Dorothy Stang, while he goes through the appeals process. The move allows the man found guilty of  ordering Stang’s murder to remain free while the course winds its way through the appeals process, a tortuous process that often lasts years. The move is unsurprising, as wealthy ranchers rarely face any real jail time (or even trials) for ordering the murders of land and environmental activists in the Northern part of Brazil.

-A battle between local religious figures and the government is brewing in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, where members of the New Jerusalem sect are refusing to let public employee teachers enter the community to teach children, leaving the state government threatening to send in the police to enforce mandatory elementary school attendance for all Mexican children.

-Former Guatemalan police chief Pedro García Arredondo was convicted and sentenced to 70 years in prison this week for crimes against humanity for his role in the kidnapping and murder of student Edgar Saenz in 1981. As the BBC article points out, Arredondo’s conviction makes him the highest-ranking police official to be convicted for crimes against humanity in Guatemala’s decades-long civil war.

-Haiti is set to tear down the country’s National Palace, the seat of governance that was irreversibly damaged in the 2010 earthquake, although the move is not without its opponents.

-Yesterday, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’s entire cabinet resigned as his administration reached its midway point even while Santos’s poll ratings continue to drop.

-A new report says Dirce Navarro de Camargo, who owns an industrial empire in Brazil, is the country’s richest woman, with an estimated wealth of $13 billion.

Around Latin America

-Student protests continue and are escalating in Chile, where dozens were injured in clashes with police. Additionally, 139 students who had occupied buildings were violently arrested Thursday. The arrests have not brought an end to the protests, however, as students occupied another building in protest in response to the original arrests, even while Santiago’s mayor has threatened to cancel the scholarships of protesters. Students have been protesting for over a year, demanding educational reforms and opposing efforts to privatize education.

-After ten days of strikes, Buenos Aires’s subway workers returned to work after getting a 23% increase in their salaries, although the workers’ union says the solution is “temporary” and their struggles for better pay and working conditions will continue.

-Work on Brazil’s controversial Belo Monte dam has again come to a halt, as a court ordered work to be stopped until indigenous communities whose lands and livelihoods will be affected by the dam have time to make their voices heard.

-Guatemala’s military forcefully removed nearly 100 landless Guatemalans and bulldozed their homes after 32 families had settled on land near a military base.

-In a major victory for human rights, Mexico’s Supreme Court has ruled that cases of military human rights violations must be tried in civil courts, and not military courts where such cases could be covered up or not fully prosecuted.

-Members of Peru’s Shining Path ambushed and killed five soldiers, Peru’s military is reporting.

-Bolivia has intensified security in a town bordering Brazil after a mob lynched two Brazilians suspected of murder in the town.

-In today’s bad environmental news, a report says jaguars in Brazil’s Atlantic forest have gone “virtually extinct.”

-Hundreds of Peruvians fell ill after a toxic spill polluted the air near the community of Santa Rosa de Cajacay.  Although the toxic spill originally took place more than three weeks ago, the Antimina company, which owns the mine, has said or done little to address the issue.