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a few of these days ago in October that the violent death of the student Beatriz Rojas Pérez, from Panotla Normal School, Tlaxcala, reopened the discussion of why in Mexico the actors of education –teachers and especially students and their schools – for a century they have not ceased to suffer repression and violence by the armed forces of the State. With the murder of Beatriz, directly or indirectly associated with the violent repression of the state forces against the students of the Benito Juárez female rural normal school, the question becomes even more imperative due to the context.
The order to attack the young students – like the orders to beat up teachers recently in Tabasco, and before in Chiapas, Nuevo León and Michoacán – comes when eight years later the repression and violent disappearance of the Ayotzinapa normalistas – like all the other deaths and repression of young people in the past – is still pending. In this context of secular impunity, the death of Beatriz Rojas represents a substantial challenge, since it shows that even though the entire force of the State is supposedly persecuting repressors today, they are not only untouchable, but the climate of persecution continues and even death against teachers and students that since 1929 took root with the use of police and the Army as part of the Mexican State.
In all those moments the use of armed and extreme force was raised by civilian governments as indispensable. That is why today, when a force is created to contain the narcoand the participation of the Army and other state forces is substantially expanded, it appears difficult not to maintain and also strengthen a growing and violent power within the State that has been particularly cruel to education.
The absence of a transformative force in education capable of guaranteeing minimum rights makes this sector increasingly vulnerable and teachers and students more vulnerable every day. Instead of expanding and strengthening the initiatives of participation and educational change, the vertical initiatives and the aggressions make us think that in the background there is no purpose and leadership capable of rescuing education. And even the abandonment in which she lives creates the doubt of whether that rescue is really wanted.
In this six-year term, the SEP first surrendered to the representation and values of Tv Azteca, and then placed itself in the hands of inexperienced people and, most seriously, without a career of interest and lifelong experience in education. In addition, the real dialogue with teachers has already been closed and the Unit of the System for the Career of Teachers and Teachers (Usicamm) is the authoritarian face of the educational reform of the previous six-year term. Normal schools (especially rural ones) and universities and higher education institutions (especially autonomous ones) were abandoned, left to languish and, moreover, precarious and therefore unable to respond to demand. of young people, of more places in education.
Authoritarianism and privilege schemes in favor of officials and an academic elite were encouraged in them; the entrance exams for students that give priority to the top
and they exclude, above all, women and the poor; continued with the scheme that marginalizes students from power and institutional attention (its initiatives barely go beyond the thick wall of the academic-official alliance in university councils), and kept Mexico as one of the Latin American countries with lowest coverage, despite its economic power.
In basic education, it abandoned the normal ones and intends to eliminate the basic axes of its orientation, allowing local governments to play with the resources for teachers’ salaries and thus provoked protests that were responded to with hostility.
The protests are always conceived as isolated, without understanding that behind them there are decades of abuse and authoritarianism, a substratum of deep annoyance, and the weight that the violence of almost a century has on the students, the exclusion of the centers of power and authoritarianism in the classroom, fueled by the long forced seclusion that the pandemic meant. Given this, the State appears as only capable of offering workshops that strengthen the vertical relationship, incomplete legal modifications or without aim, and ready to disqualify and repress. With the death of what was to be a teacher – Beatriz – and with the now infinite wait for truth and justice in Ayotzinapa, what we are experiencing today in schools and colleges is not a temporary turbulence, it is a naturalized state of tension and violence that the State dispenses against teachers and students, with inconceivable and even implacable regularity. That is why today, once again, the punctual appointment with that history of violence.
* UAM-Xochimilco
