World
They didn’t get around to scrawling a red T, for “traidor” (“traitor” in Spanish), on their foreheads, but that’s about all that a mob of union members failed to do as they publicly humiliated fellow educators – including forcibly shaving their heads -- earlier this week for daring to defy a call for a national teacher strike in Mexico.
The victims, an unspecified number of teachers and administrators from Comitán, a city of just over 140,000 near the Guatemalan border, were judged to have ignored the May 15 strike call.
So a “dissident faction” of the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE) grabbed them on Tuesday, hung signs around their necks declaring them turncoats, marched them barefoot through the town and, as a crowd gathered, pulled out the razors.
If the intent was to garner support from the public, however, the ambush may have backfired. In the immediate aftermath, some observers found themselves questioning the validity of the myriad issues said to be plaguing the educational system.
More than a few government officials expressed outrage, with the nation’s human-rights ombudsman, Luis González Pérez, demanding an official investigation and the education secretary, Aurelio Nuño Mayer, vowing that the perpetrators would be duly punished.
But such public shaming is not new, the BBC reports, noting that would-be strikebreakers were similarly manhandled last year in another part of Chiapas, the state in which Comitán is the fourth-largest city.
And the union brass, while not exactly condoning the rank and file’s excesses, is apparently not stepping in to stop them, either. In fact, one union official said what happened in Comitán should “serve as a warning to others who are not opposed to [proposed] education reform[s]” that triggered the job action.
Meanwhile, as the government looks to identify and punish the ringleaders and the CNTE flexes its muscles, the teachers are left feeling evermore embattled and weighing but two options: join the strike and risk being fired for cutting class or cross the picket line and risk losing their hair, their dignity and the respect of their current (and, they hope, future) co-workers.
