The signing of a mutual support agreement between the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) and part of the National Teachers’ Coordination (CNTE) occurred exclusively in the state of Oaxaca.
Last Monday, Morena leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and a group that claimed to represent CNTE inked an accord supporting each other for the upcoming June 5 elections for governor in Oaxaca.
At the same meeting, Morena launched the candidacy of Salomón Jara for governor.
At first glance, there’s nothing unusual, or new, about a political party or a candidate seeking union support. Yet the agreement is striking a sour note within the system because Morena is a new political party but its leader and founder AMLO is an old hag in politicking. As for the CNTE, it persists in recent memory as strangling with its suffocating marches in Mexico City as well as the city of Oaxaca.
Not only that, CNTE lost a political fight against the Secretariat of Public Education that took away from it the right to hire and fire teachers since 1993 and kept it until 2015, when the right to manage education in the state of Oaxaca was returned to the state government.
From that fray the CNTE ended up in total disrepute because with its constant work stoppages the education of two million children was stalled, or even worse, lost, as the kids wasted the prime learning time a child must have and enjoy.
What is admirable now is the CNTE-AMLO alliance which is being made, first, to protect the education of children and reinstall the very corrupt CNTE union leaders as masters of the Oaxaca state education budget because, as AMLO puts it, “they are not corrupt.”
The point in their ousting from managing education is that the CNTE leaders were indeed very corrupt.
For one, Education Secretary Aurelio Nuño has regretted the CNTE-Morena or AMLO alliance for giving preference to political interests instead of children’s education.
The truth is that AMLO and Morena are using the alliance to gain the 200,000-strong voting power of the CNTE, which is alive and well in Oaxaca.
“It seems clear to me that this political party (Morena) and its leader (AMLO) prefer and place before the importance of a pact with factions representing the old system. That is to say factions that are in the position of selling teaching positions, the inheritance of those jobs, and leave the children without classes, as well as not abiding by the law by refusing evaluations.”
But Secretary Nuño is not the only plaintiff against the CNTE-Morena alliance.
At AMLO’s former political Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the intent of the “unholy alliance” is very clear: to give Morena badly needed votes which in the past went to the PRD.
Also protesting the alliance was a group of teachers headed by Isabel García, who denied that there had been a CNTE-AMLO agreement, as published by The News on Wednesday.
But the fact is that AMLO and Morena candidate for governor Salomón Jara presented a written agreement on Monday.
This latest skirmish only proves that perhaps CNTE is also divided at the seams.
But as of now, Jara will run on the platform of repudiating the administration’s education reform and giving CNTE “what belongs to them” and that is the leadership, and budget administration, of public education in the state of Oaxaca.
It may be unlikely that AMLO will comply with the promise of giving the CNTE its lost power back, but for the meantime Morena will have a couple of hundred thousand more votes on June 5, which will be a good gain for the new party but very bad news for the now floundering Party of the Democratic Revolution.
It also means that Education Secretary Nuño will be badmouthed to the hilt during the electioneering period.