Laura Poy Solano
La Jornada Newspaper
Wednesday, December 31, 2025, p. 7
The call for a “rebellion” from the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) itself, as stated by Marx Arriaga Navarro, director of Educational Materials of the agency, “seems more like a tantrum from an official who considers himself the creator of the New Mexican School (NEM), but forgets that it is the teachers who build the educational transformations,” stated leaders of the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE).
For his part, Hugo Aboites, professor-researcher at the Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM), pointed out that “it responds more to a strategy of the good cop, which would be Arriaga himself, and the bad cop, a role that the head of the SEP, Mario Delgado, would have, but in reality they are two faces within the same State.
“The call to rebellion, in essence, seems to seek to create a false alternative of teacher dissidence different from the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), but also from the coordinator. It is trying to conceive a third pole of organization of the teaching profession, which is proposed just when teachers have not stopped insisting on the right to a decent pension and on the repeal of the Issste Law of 2007,” indicated the specialist in educational issues.
Pedro Hernández Morales, general secretary of section 9 of Mexico City and member of the national leadership of the dissident teachers, said in an interview with The Day that the fact that the “director of an area of the SEP calls for a ‘rebellion’ seems to us like a tantrum from an official who does not understand that he is not the Secretary of Public Education, and is also unaware that we teachers do not bet everything on the free textbook, we defend them as a tool, but the teaching process is carried out by the teachers and the students.”
He ruled out that Arriaga Navarro’s call to create NEM defense committees to “refound” the SEP and the National Educational System could be realized, because “there is no true appropriation of the NEM from below, it remains an imposition from above, alien to the grassroots teachers and the real contexts they face.”
Last six-year term, he noted, “we found that Arriaga Navarro enjoyed protection from the National Palace, not only because he outlived three Secretaries of Education, but because he was untouchable, and now whoever echoes these calls for a supposed rebellion will be deceived into believing that from within the SEP vertical structures can be modified in decision-making, when the open and critical opinion of workers in the sector is not allowed.”
Aboites recalled that in the history of Mexico there have always been characters who consider themselves “displaced leaders and suddenly want to appear on the stage as leaders, who seek to play an important role. It is evident that this official knows how to play the game of good and evil. If he manages to harm the head of the SEP, he looks good, and if he is fired, he will be a martyr. And what is in the background is that he ensures that the NEM remains alive, unquestioned, and now, reinforced.”
